Softcore-porn-actress-turned-marketing-consultant Jodie Fisher wasn’t the only person who failed to be enamored by HP CEO Mark Hurd, who was forced to resign as a result of an investigation into his relationship with Ms. Fisher. According to Glassdoor, a site where employees can anonymously rate companies and CEOs, Hurd had the lowest employee approval rating of any major tech CEO. Only 34 percent of self-described HP employees on the site approved of his performance, and 66 percent disapproved. → Read More
Mark Angelino, formerly vice president at IBM and President at Sprint, was responsible for the adoption of Salesforce’s sales, call center and platform services in North America from May 2009 until last month.
As you can tell from the screenshot above, he left Salesforce.com in June to become Senior Vice President at another company, but he played coy and marked his new employer’s name ‘Guess Who!’.
No need to guess any longer, in case you were interested: turns out Angelino has joined HP as SVP of Global Distribution for its roughly $54 billion Enterprise Business. → Read More
Mark Angelino, formerly vice president at IBM and President at Sprint, was responsible for the adoption of Salesforce’s sales, call center and platform services in North America from May 2009 until last month.
As you can tell from the screenshot above, he left Salesforce.com in June to become Senior Vice President at another company, but he played coy and marked his new employer’s name ‘Guess Who!’.
No need to guess any longer, in case you were interested: turns out Angelino has joined HP as SVP of Global Distribution for its roughly $54 billion Enterprise Business. → Read More
As widely expected following the approval by Palm shareholders, the acquisition of the company by Hewlett-Packard for roughly $1.2 billion has today been announced closed.
The price, as previously announced, is $5.70 per share of Palm common stock, paid in cash.
Once again, HP repeats that it intends to double down on the innovative webOS platform and Palm’s line of smartphone. The company neatly points out that it has also just bought itself a bag of intellectual property. → Read More
Phoenix Technologies today announced that Hewlett-Packard has agreed to purchase the assets related to its HyperSpace, HyperCore and Phoenix Flip instant-on and client virtualization products.
The consideration for the transaction is $12 million in cash and the closing is expected to occur this month. → Read More
Hewlett-Packard has killed off its much ballyhooed Windows 7 tablet computer, says a source who’s been briefed on the matter.
The device was first unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES 2010 in January and was supposed to hit the market in mid 2010. But our source tells us that HP is not satisfied with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system and has terminated the project (something CrunchGear mentioned months ago).
HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. That would also rule out Windows 7 as an operating system. → Read More
Hewlett Packard is announcing that their new line of LaserJet printers is coming with an exciting new technology called “Smart Install”. This thrilling — nay, amazing! — technological development allows users to install only the print driver necessary to print from their computer to their Hewlett Packard laser printer. No more shall users be required to install all the other fluff that printers have historically foisted upon them. → Read More
Yesterday, Microsoft and HP announced a joint call to discuss a significant partnership. Now we know what it is. According to another announcement issued today, the two tech giants are jointly investing $250 million in a cloud computing venture.
The solution will advance existing cloud computing by speeding application implementation and will be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model. The new offering will also promise to be less complex and will lower overall costs for enterprises. It seems to basically hook Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, which went live earlier this month, into HP’s hardware. The resulting offering promises to deliver improved application performance, efficiency and interoperability. The venture is also designed to allow users to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires, which is a boon to many businesses. → Read More
Last night, during his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a prototype for a new HP Slate computer running on Windows 7. It was supposed to be an Apple-stealing moment and it was Microsoft’s moment, which is probably why Hewlett-Packard has not yet publicly mentioned that it is working on another tablet/slate computer that is running on Android. You know, Google’s mobile operating system.
HP did announce an Android-powered netbook yesterday, but that has a keyboard. A source who has seen a prototype of HP’s Android Slate says it looks just like the Windows-powered one Ballmer held last night (see image below), maybe a little smaller. “It is almost identical in every respect to the one he showed off except for the OS,” says my source. → Read More
Networking and security services provider 3Com got hit by a shareholder class action suit seeking to block the $2.7 billion merger agreement with HP that was announced last week. The core allegation: 3Com was sold off too early, for too little.
The plaintiff in this case, New York bankruptcy lawyer David Shaev, filed the action last Thursday in a Delaware Court, claiming the proposed agreement – which involves HP paying stockholders of 3Com $7.90 a share – constitutes a breach of 3Com’s fiduciary duties owed to public shareholders. He argues that 3Com’s directors should have pushed for a higher price. → Read More
I love my inbox in the morning. There’s always at least one zinger that makes me think, wow, that’s something no one will ever use! Today’s contestant is Phanfare and Hewlett Packard.
In a move that reminds me of this painful memory, the two have paired to create an iPhone app that lets people print photos on their iPhone to networked HP printers via the Phanfare Photon app. “Phanfare Updates Popular iPhone App to Enable Home Printing to HP Printers,” says the press release.
Not to pick on Phanfare, which is a great photo site. And while I’ve been hard on HP lately, I’m not one to complain about people printing too much stuff (see Hey, You Condescending Jerk, No One Prints Emails Anyway).
But there’s a reason why no one else has licensed HP’s iPrint software yet. It’s because it’s something no one wants to use. → Read More
Convergence. That’s the word that comes to mind when I watch the fancy demonstration of the HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart web printer. We’ve all seen the all-in-one PC design, a la the iMac, but how often do we see a printer and a computer in one package? HP is bundling a teeny little touch-interface computer with their latest set of printers, allowing you to access stuff from the Internet without using your PC at all! Some of the examples don’t seem particularly useful: I don’t think I’m likely to go to my printer when I want to buy movie tickets, for example, but letting kids print out their own coloring books seems like a pretty good idea to me. And printing Google Maps will be helpful for those Luddite friends of mine who don’t have GPS units. → Read More
Kodak: We’re the cheapest cost-per-page photo printers on the market! Look, here’s a whole bunch of independent research proving it! Nya-nya! Hewlett-Packard: NUH-UH! You’re a big fat liar, Kodak! We’re the cheapest cost-per-page. Kodak: Pfffft! Hewlett-Packard: Stop it! I’m telling! Hey CrunchGear! Kodak is being mean!! CrunchGear: What? Huh? Don’t make me stop this car! Full disclosure: Hewlett Packard’s PR team asked us to compare the HP C6380 against the Kodak ESP 7 with the intent of showing HP’s superior quality, in addition to evaluating the cost-per-page comparison. No gifts or money were given to me. I didn’t get to keep the printers, only the photos I printed out. → Read More
Hewlett Packard isn’t doing so well like ever other consumer electronic company. Profit and sales are down, blah, blah, blah. You know the drill. Anyway, instead of laying off the 20,000 people like the financials indicate, the company is issuing company wide pay cuts starting at the top. → Read More
Hewlett Packard announced their iPrint Photo applicaiton for the iPhone and iPod Touch, “the first application available on the Apple App store to print photos directly from an iPhone or iPod”. It’s a free download from the app store, so what are you waiting for? → Read More
Online holiday sales deflated 3 percent this year. ComScore estimates that holiday sales in the U.S. totaled $25.5 billion between November 1 and December 23, the last day orders could be delivered in time for Christmas. The comparable total in 2007 was $26.3 billion.
Sales were struggling to keep up with last year’s totals all holiday season. In the end, they fell short. (Hitwise comes to the same conclusion). → Read More
Hewlett Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced the Cloud Computing Test Bed this morning. Executives from the three companies are holding a 9 am PST conference call to discuss the new venture. Participating are Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President, Research, HP and Director, HP Labs; Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research; and Andrew Chien, Vice President, Corporate Technology Group, Intel and Director, Intel Research. The product is a distributed computing platform for third party research and application building. My live call notes are below. Notes, in chronological order: …waiting for call to begin Prith Banerjee from HP began the call and introduced Andrew Chien and Prabhakar Raghavan. Summarizing the key news: HP, Intel and Yahoo are partnering with governments and academic institutions to create an open source cloud computing test bed with six distributed centers. Global, distributed, Internet scale platform. The main goal is to remove financial and logistical barriers for people to develop cloud computing application. Partners include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. → Read More
The mystery announcement we mentioned yesterday was just released – Yahoo, Hewlett Packard and Intel are jointly announcing a new cloud computing research initiative called the Cloud Computing Test Bed. Users will be able to build and launch new applications on the platform. It’s being described as “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before.” Other partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (which is distinct from the MDA, I believe, which is unfortunate), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany: The test bed will initially consist of six “centers of excellence” at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo!. Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational and made accessible to researchers worldwide through a selection process later this year. The test bed will leverage Yahoo!’s technical leadership in open source projects by running Apache Hadoop — an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation — and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, the parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research. “The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed furthers our commitment to the global, collaborative research community that is advancing the new sciences of the Internet,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.” Researchers at HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services. HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of Everything as a Service. With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and → Read More
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