Channel Insider Staff

Confidence in the economy among small-business owners tumbled in August, as the National Federation of Independent businesses monthly Small Business Optimism Index dropped a whopping 1.8 points, settling at a disturbingly low 88.1. The Index has now been in decline for a full six months. Unlike previous months, August s decline comes in the immediate […]

IT executives are struggling to protect corporate data and intellectual property as more employees use their personal devices to check work email, read documents and log in to enterprise systems, according to a recent study. Of the 750 IT professionals who took part in the Dell KACE-sponsored survey, 87 percent of the respondents said their […]

ANAHEIM, Calif. Microsoft has released a new toolkit for developers to take advantage of the cloud capabilities of Windows Azure from Windows 8 Metro style applications. The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 is designed to make it easier for developers to create a Windows Metro style application that can harness the power of Windows […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a few moments during his company s financial analyst meeting to put a brave face on its smartphone efforts.  It was under a year ago that we launched the first Windows Phone, he told an audience of media and analysts gathered to hear Microsoft executives run down the company s […]

Research In Motion reported revenues of $4.2 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, a 15 percent decline from the $4.9 billion it earned during the previous quarter. The company shipped some 10.6 million BlackBerry smartphones and around 200,000 BlackBerry-branded PlayBook tablets during that period. RIM s aging BlackBerry portfolio continued to drag on […]

ANAHEIM, Calif. Microsoft announced a series of moves meant to advance developer opportunities and productivity, including a developer preview of Visual Studio 2011, a preview of Windows Server 8 and the company s Team Foundation Server (TFS) delivered as a service on the Windows Azure cloud. In a Sept. 14 keynote at the Microsoft BUILD […]

Microsoft’ s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Financial Analyst Meeting 2011 offered executives the chance to tout what they termed the company’s momentum over the past year. Xbox Kinect, Office 365 and other offerings were all cited as drivers of that momentum. However, executives also emphasized the relative newness of the latest generation of products, as if to suggest […]

Virtualization market king VMware on Sept. 14 upgraded its Workstation software package to version 8 by adding no fewer than 50 new features. Workstation, designed for x86 and x86 64-bit servers or PCs, enables users to set up multiple virtual machines on a single physical box. User then can deploy one or more of these […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Sept. 13 revealed Flight Search, which lets users search for airline flights and fares right from Google. Google Flight Search is the first fruit of Google’s integration of ITA Software, the flight data provider it purchased in April after a protracted antitrust investigation by the Justice Department. The service will compete with popular […]

Cisco Systems, which for years owned more than 50 percent of the Internet networking gear market but has lost some 10 percent of that market share in the last few years, never had to position itself as aggressive in the marketplace because it was usually in a comfortable first-place position. Today, the company still is […]

Apple may sell as many as 4.6 million Macs in the third quarter of 2011 thanks to "pent-up demand" for the new MacBook Air and MacBook Minis, as well as the Mac OS X "Lion," which all launched in July, according to new report by Piper Jaffray. Apple could break Mac sales record for the […]

Now the Guinness Book of World Records is judging performance in the central processing unit business. Advanced Micro Devices, which apparently needs all the publicity it can generate, announced Sept. 13 that it has achieved the Guinness World Record for the "Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor," by overclocking the upcoming octa-core AMD FX Bulldozer-based […]