There was bad news and good news in Hewlett-Packard’s fiscal third-quarter earnings report. The bad was that the IT giant posted earnings that were down 29 percent from a year ago, mostly due to the costs of thousands of employee layoffs and payments on several expensive past acquisitions.
The good was that HP’s streak of 11 straight quarters of declining revenue was snapped with a small but important 1 percent increase, thanks to improving sales of new-generation laptop PCs. This suggests that the investments HP has been making to compete with Apple and other manufacturers are paying off.
Cyber-attackers have targeted both sides of the Syrian civil war, with a new malware campaign that, while not particularly sophisticated, has grown to compromise more than 10,000 systems. Kaspersky Labs analyzed more than 100 files used by the group and discovered that most of the actual malware tools uploaded to victims’ computers appear to be common programs found in underground forums.
Eighty percent of enterprises are forming new partnerships with emerging groups, such as citizen developers, to close the skills gap for application development, according to a recent global study from IBM.
The study–conducted by the IBM Center for Applied Insights and is based on survey findings of more than 1,400 IT and business decision-makers in 15 industries across five continents–found that 40 percent of organizations still report a moderate-to-major skills gap across mobile, cloud, social and analytics technologies.
Microsoft continues to narrow the functionality gap between the mobile versions of its note-taking app. Android tablet users can now leverage many of the same inking capabilities that the OneNote app offers Surface Pro 3 owners. OneNote, once part of Microsoft’s Office suite, is now the company’s free, cloud-enabled note-taking app.