Business Tech

Evernote unveils small business app. A Google Apps offense?

Evernote is expanding its cloud-based clipping and documents platform to small businesses with the introduction of Evernote Business.

Announced amid the Evernote Trunk Conference in San Francisco today, Evernote Business is touted to optimize the "remember everything" app for businesses by allowing employees to create, collaborate and find documents and projects from wherever they are. The extra business-friendly add-on is that the platform should support organization-wide deployment, including the option for company-wide sharing for individual notes and notebooks. However, individual users will still have full ownership over their personal Evernote notebooks.From the management side, Evernote Business includes … Read more

In Apple v. Samsung, it's up to the jury now

Apple and Samsung both rested their cases this week in the ongoing billion-dollar patent infringement dispute, and now it's up to the jury to pick a victor.

Apple's closing arguments focused on the documents at the heart of its courtroom offensive. The company's attorney highlighted a series of internal Samsung documents, many of which showed that Samsung looked to Apple's devices for cues when designing its software icons and general features.

Samsung closed its case by painting Apple as a company that is stifling market competition not just in the U.S. but in the tech … Read more

End of an era: Kodak to sell its film business

Kodak is selling the business that made it famous.

The company revealed yesterday that it's selling its traditional print film business as part of an auction to raise cash.

The sale extends to Kodak's entire personalized imaging and document division, which includes kiosks that develop photos, photo paper and still camera film products, and even equipment that snaps souvenir photos at theme parks.

Before the digital age, Kodak held the market on consumer photography and was virtually synonymous with the word "film."

The auction is part of the company's aim to segue from consumer products … Read more

Solyndra plant may find a buyer in Seagate

Solyndra may be bankrupt, but that doesn't mean its California facility is out of commission. Disk-drive maker Seagate is making an offer for the property, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

Seagate has offered $90.3 million to buy the sprawling Solyndra solar-panel factory in Fremont, Calif., the Merc reports. That price is about 70 percent below the $300 million it cost to construct the plant, according to bankruptcy court records cited by the newspaper.

The Obama Administration, via the Energy Department, essentially underwrote the formation of Solyndra with a $535 million loan guarantee.

If Seagate's offer succeed, … Read more

PC growth slowing, and Windows 8 won't fix that soon, says IDC

The traditional PC market is in dire need of some hot new products to drive growth. Too bad that's probably not going to happen soon, according to market researcher IDC.

The worldwide PC market has basically slowed to a crawl this year, IDC says in a report released today. It expects just 0.9 percent growth this year, the second consecutive year of growth below two percent.

While citing the usual macroeconomic culprits -- slowness in Asia and mature markets -- the report said consumers are "considering spending on other products like media tablets and smartphones" while … Read more

Apple files for new patents on Thunderbolt, iSight

Apple is hitting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awfully hard.

The USPTO today published a host of patent applications Apple has filed related to technologies it has been working on. Chief among them is a technology that would allow for better networking in Thunderbolt ports. According to the patent application, the technology focuses on daisy-chaining devices with Thunderbolt and allowing data to pass through each.

According to Patently Apple, which was first to report on the new patents, Apple's mention of "Thunderbolt" indicates that the technology is already in use. Apple currently uses Thunderbolt in … Read more

Sony Mobile to move HQ to Tokyo, cut 1,000 workers

Sony Mobile is moving closer to its parent company.

The mobile phone maker announced today that in October, it'll move its headquarters from Lund, Sweden to Tokyo, Japan. And in so doing, it will reduce its global workforce by 1,000 employees, or 15 percent of its staff. Those cuts, which include consultants, should be completed by the end of March 2014.

Sony Mobile's headquarters are in Sweden because the company's former 50 percent owner, Ericsson, is based there. Earlier this year, Sony completed the acquisition of Ericsson's stake in the mobile firm, giving it total … Read more

Video shows purported iPhone 5 internals, front plate

So much for post-product-release teardowns. The iPhone 5 is being torn down piece by piece already.

Just after alleged photos of the iPhone 5's main circuit board appeared, we now have a video of not only the front plate but items as small as the "flex cable," replete with the sleep-wake button and volume switch, according to SmartPhone Medic, a smartphone repair service based in Columbia, S.C.

"We just got some new iPhone 5 parts in," the video begins. The SmartPhone Medic guy then goes to show the alleged iPhone 5's front plate … Read more

LG starts making 4-inch display maybe destined for iPhone 5

LG Display has begun to make a display that could be slated for the iPhone 5, according to a Reuters report.

"We just began mass production and we don't expect any disruption in supplies," Han Sang-beom, chief executive of LG Display, told reporters Wednesday, according to Reuters.

LGD, along with Samsung, are the two principal display suppliers for Apple's marquee products, such as the iPhone and iPad.

Other reports, however, have Sharp making the displays for the iPhone 5. And Toshiba has also been rumored as a display supplier for the iPhone 5.

It's not … Read more