Will Help Desks Become Extinct?

Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), views everything through the clouds.

NASA’s JPL uses 10 public or private clouds to store everything from photos of Mars for public purview to top-secret data.

Pretty soon, Soderstrom told attendees of Computerworld‘s SNW conference, data stored by large enterprises like NASA will be measured in Exabytes; one Exabyte is equal to 1.5 billion CDs or a million terabytes.

And, he noted, the only place to store Exabytes of data is on public and private clouds.

The good news is that with data in the cloud, people will be able to “work with anyone, from anywhere, with any data, using any device at any time,” he said.

And the not-so-bad news is that IT help desks, as we know them, will become a thing of the past, and IT workers in general will have to rethink how they approach application development and security.

“Now the workforce and consumers of IT are becoming mobile. Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it. If you can’t get the answer there, you ask your kids. If you can’t get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that’s the workgroup,” Soderstrom said.

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Apple Scores A Victory

A court imposed a temporary ban on the sale of Samsung Electronics’ latest computer tablet in Australia on Thursday, delivering rival Apple another legal victory in the two firms’ global patent war.

Resolution of the case could take months — unless Samsung takes the potentially risky option of an expedited hearing — which, in the fast-moving industry, could mean the new Galaxy tablet is never launched in Australia. The Galaxy is the hottest competitor to Apple’s iPad, which dominates global tablet sales.

“The ruling could further extend Apple’s dominance in the tablet market as it widens a sales ban of Samsung’s latest product,” said Lee Seung-woo, an analyst at Shinyoung Securities in Seoul.

Whilst the ruling is a blow for Samsung, the Australian market is not large. A more important legal battle starts later on Thursday, when a Californian court begins hearing Apple’s bid to ban sales of Galaxy products in the United States.

The two technology firms have been locked in an acrimonious battle in 10 countries involving smartphones and tablets since April, with the Australian dispute centering on touch-screen technology used in Samsung’s new tablet.

The Federal Court in Sydney, in granting the temporary ban, ruled Samsung had a case to answer on at least two of Apple’s patents. The ban applies on sales of Samsung’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet until the same court rules on the core patent issue.

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Lenovo Passes Dell, Becomes No. 2 PC Vendor

Lenovo surged past Dell to become the world’s second largest PC vendor at the end of the third quarter, according to research firms IDC and Gartner.

Top PC maker Hewlett-Packard also saw its worldwide PC shipments grow by 5.3 percent in the quarter, despite reports that the company may spin off its PC business.

Both research firms said growth for the quarter failed to reach earlier projections. IDC said at the end of the third quarter, worldwide PC shipments increased by 3.6 percent year-over-year, below its earlier 4.5 percent growth projection.

Gartner said PC shipments grew by 3.2 percent year-over-year, which was lower than the research firm’s original projection of 5.1 percent growth for the quarter.

Analysts have pointed to sluggish spending because of weak economic conditions as a key reason behind the slowdown in PC growth. The rise of tablets has also hurt shipments.

“For the moment, PCs have taken a backseat to a range of other devices competing for shrinking consumer and business budgets,” said IDC analyst Jay Chou in a statement.

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Will eBay Cozy Up With Facebook?

EBay Inc is attempting to strengthen its relationship with social network leader Facebook at a developer conference this week, a person familiar with the e-commerce company said on Tuesday.

EBay will also debut a new online identification service for shoppers named PayPal Access, the source added.

The company expects almost 4,000 people to attend its X.commerce conference in San Francisco on October 12, 13 and 14. The event marks the official launch of the company’s new X.commerce division, which will target e-commerce software developers.

EBay is trying to encourage outside developers to create applications for its e-commerce platforms and is making a particularly strong push in mobile commerce.

At the end of September, Katie Mitic, head of Platform and Mobile Marketing at Facebook, joined eBay’s board of directors, sparking speculation that the two companies were working on new partnerships.

Mitic is scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers at the X.commerce conference on Wednesday. Facebook Platform, which Mitic helps run, is the company’s developer unit, so any new partnership will focus on this area, the person said on condition of anonymity because the plans aren’t public yet.

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Motorola Being Dragged Into Patent Lawsuit

Intellectual Ventures has set its sights on Motorola with a new lawsuit alleging that the mobile device maker has infringed on six of their patents.

The patents cover a variety of technologies related to text messaging, docking stations and pushing software out to devices.

Intellectual Ventures, which owns 35,000 patents, said it approached Motorola in January about licensing patents, including several named in the case, according to the lawsuit. Motorola refused to license the patents, Intellectual Ventures said.

Motorola, which is the subject of several other patent lawsuits, declined to comment on the dispute.

The suit names a number of Motorola products as infringing, including the Atrix, Photon 4G, Milestone, Triumph and Brute i680.

Though Intellectual Ventures said it first approached Motorola in January, records at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show that all but one of the patents were transferred to the company in July and September.

It’s up to patent holders to file documents showing transfer of ownership with the patent office, so the discrepancy of timing probably means only that the company was slow in doing its paperwork, said David Mixon, a patent attorney with Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP.

While patent lawsuits have become commonplace in the mobile industry, this one has a unique twist. Google, which recently announced plans to acquire Motorola, is an investor in Intellectual Ventures, patent expert Florian Mueller noted in a blog post Thursday.

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WebOS Lives

HP is aiming to keep WebOS alive by putting it on printers.

The firm has discontinued its WebOS devices such as the Touchpad tablet and Pre 3 smartphone but WebOS will appear on new products, according to Pocketlint. The operating system (OS) will come on the Designjet line of HP printers.

An HP spokesperson said, “HP is currently investigating using WebOS on its Designjet range of professional printers.”

It’s likely that the OS will come on consumer printers at some point in the future, too. The following statement also hints that it could appear on products other than printers.

“HP is 100 [per cent] committed to producing print solutions that meet our customer needs and we will continue to drive innovation to ensure our products and solutions meet market demand. We built our printing franchise based on being OS agnostic – we have been and will continue to be agnostic to meet our various customer needs. As webOS plans develop we will continue to evaluate how and if we incorporate it into our future products.”

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HP’s PC Division Decision This Month

HP will decide on the future of its PC business this month, according to a statement from its newly installed CEO.

While it was under the Apotheker captaincy the firm announced rather shocking plans to dump the PC business. Okay, it didn’t explicitly say that, rather it said that it would consider selling it or spinning it off, which apparently meant something else to HP than it did to normal people.

According to Bloomberg, new HP CEO Meg Whitman sprinkled a little more colour into the HP PC business tapestry, and in a conference call said that the firm is almost ready to say what its plans are.

It’s likely that shareholders and the board are still reeling from the suggestion, but the extra time will give HP room to decide on what it wants to do with the still profitable, but boring hardware arm.

While it was under Leo Apotheker’s rule the firm had given itself the deadline of the end of the year for a decision, but presumably sick of people asking her, “what are we going to do with the PC business?”, Whitman has bought the decision forward.

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Sprint Finally Gets The iPhone

Sprint Nextel confirmed that it will offer the next version of Apple Inc’s iPhone, ending months of speculation about whether it would become the third U.S. carrier to sell the popular device.

But the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider would not say whether its iPhone would come with a flat-fee service for unlimited data use – an offering analysts see as Sprint’s only hope for making its iPhone more competitive than rivals.

While selling the device should help Sprint keep subscribers from fleeing to other operators, some analysts worried whether the costs would outweigh the benefits because Apple phones come at a steep premium to other devices.

This is a huge gamble for Sprint and people are justifiably worried that they won’t be able to make any money doing it. It’s not a company that’s in great financial shape right now,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King.

Analysts questioned how Sprint will be able to find the money to pay a premium to Apple on top of its obligations to pay back billions of dollars in debt and its plan to spend about $5 billion on an network upgrade in coming years.

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Will Oracle Buy HP?

Word on the street is that Oracle has threatened to buy its sworn enemy HP. According to the Times of India, HP directors are terrified that their falling shares would make the company vulnerable to a bid from Oracle. Apparently this was the reason for the sudden sacking of Leo Apotheker.

Oracle has considered informally whether to approach Hewlett-Packard, but it’s unlikely to make a bid any time soon. But to make sure HP has hired Goldman Sachs to help it prepare for any possible moves by activist investors, one person said.

If Oracle were to make a hostile takeover it would be with the sole aim of getting rid of a lot of people who have hacked Larry Ellison off. It might even result in Mark Hurd returning to the company.

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Will The FTC Block The Google?

The FTC has asked Google for more information about its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Google is buying the outfit as a defence against Apple and Microsoft patent law suits, however in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Motorola said it received a request for “additional information and documentary material” from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

According to Reuters, Motorola said Google also received a similar request and repeated its expectation the deal would close by the end of 2011 or early 2012. Writing in his bog, Google Senior Vice President Dennis Woodside said the DOJ’s “second request” was “pretty routine” and there was nothing to see here, move on please. Google usually gets a note from the FTC even if it buys lunch for a client. A similar one appeared when it bought ITA Software.

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