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According to Canalys latest research Apple became the leading worldwide client PC vendor in the last quarter of 2011. Nearly 17% of the total 120 million client PCs  shipped globally during this period were shipped by Apple. If to exclude pads from the statistics, the client PC market declined 0.4%, when including desktops, netbooks, notebooks, and pads however, it grew 16%. If we exclude Apple, the other top five PC vendors are HP, Lenovo, Dell and Acer. Only Lenovo managed to increase its market share by two points, while Acer, Dell and HP all lost market share. HP was stormed by Apple and now takes second place. At the moment HP is producing enterprise-focused products, such as the Slate 2 and must focus its efforts on creating intuitive user experience that is far less resource intensive. Lenovo successfully invested outside of the core market and thanks to that is going straight after HP. They acquired Medion in Germany and as a result doubled their market share in Western Europe. The other decisive step was decision to use Android for enterprise. Dell is in fourth place and is followed by Acer. Acer’s shipments are continuing to decline but the presentation of S5 Ultrabook gives good perspectives to drive innovations and to renew interest in notebooks. The pressure on notebook and netbook segments will increase when Apple’s annual iPad refresh will be realized. PC vendors’ market share over the world including pads grew, but excluding them it declined. As a result all the PC vendors should be quick to launch pads to keep their leadership on the PC market.
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You've probably heard Twitter's announcement concerning a redesign aimed at making the site more customizable and ergonomic. Not long ago, we learned that the new design is going to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks, and affects Twitter.com, mobile Twitter apps and TweetDeck. These changes set to show up immediately on versions of mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android.
"We've simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new," Twitter announced in a blog post. "What we're announcing today is just the beginning. We now have a framework in place that we will quickly build and iterate upon to help users connect with whatever is meaningful to them."
Such things like a new section called “Stories,” will be added to users' accounts in the near future, where users should be directed to interesting content.
"To me, these changes add more “social” to Twitter's social networking tool, making them more Facebook-like," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group.” "It will kind of put Twitter into a bit of a new space, transforming it from a tool that people use to make quick informative/snarky comments to more of a home for their informative/snarky comments."
Stay tuned and will update you as soon as more information comes to light!
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In recently revealed Microsoft documentation for its upcoming Windows Store, it was unveiled that the company will be able to throw a "kill switch" to disable an application from users' Windows 8 devices.
This simple command can deactivate or delete an application, and both Apple and Google can flip such a switch for the distributed applications.
Microsoft made it clear that it can pull the kill switch at its discretion.
"In cases where your security is at risk, or where we're required to do so for legal reasons, you may not be able to run apps or access content that you previously acquired or purchased a license for," said the company in the Windows Store terms.
"In cases where we remove a paid application from your Windows 8 Beta device not at your direction, we may refund to you the amount you paid for the license."
Microsoft has also mentioned that together with the application, it may also scrub data created by the application from a device.
"If the Windows Store, an app, or any content is changed or discontinued, your data could be deleted or you may not be able to retrieve data you have stored."
"Here, in the app approval process, Microsoft is walking the fine line to provide more openness, speed and predictability than Apple, and more control and supervision than Google," said Al Hilwa of IDC this week.
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Just a few days ago, Facebook stated that it has hired the team at Gowalla, a mobile location service in Austin, Texas, but the service is set to get shut down by the beginning of the next year.
Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond stated that "A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we're excited to announce that we'll be making the journey to California to join Facebook!"
Facebook confirmed that the co-founders and other members of the “Gowalla team are moving to FB in January to join its design and engineering teams,” despite the fact that Facebook is not taking on the Gowalla service or technology. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"The Gowalla Passport has become a record of all the places we've visited, the people we were with, the photos we took, and the stories we told," Williams added. "We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data,) and your photos as well," but FB is not going to acquire Gowalla's user data.
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At the beginning of December (2011,) a research firm, IDC, claimed that Windows 8 is going to be "largely irrelevant" to traditional PC users, as the company faces a tough sell with the new OS, trying to "offer the best of both worlds," with a single operating system suitable for both desktops and tablets.
"Windows 8 will be largely irrelevant to the users of traditional PCs, and we expect effectively no upgrade activity from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in that form factor," said IDC.
In a recent interview, Al Gillen, an IDC Research Vice President, explained his dour Windows 8-on-the-desktop forecast.
"Customers will be asking “What value does Windows 8 bring to my desktop and laptop?” “The only real benefit I can see is that it provides access to the Windows app store," he added.” "Windows 2000 Pro required developers to upgrade their applications, but they didn't do it. So Microsoft was forced to release Windows XP, with better application compatibility. Then Vista came along, and ditto, it was short on application compatibility. Windows 7 improved (application compatibility) because Microsoft had to."
One of the main reasons he predicted that the system will not get more than minor traction on desktops until 2013, is that he expects the same application issues to plague W8, in major part, as that edition's "Metro" UI features a tile-style look and feel.
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In order to achieve closer integration with third-party apps, Citrix has launched a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) for three of its collaborative services, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining.
Though the company did offer a couple of APIs for GoToMeeting (but only for select corporate customers,) the open APIs for GoToWebinar and GoToTraining are new.
Interesting to note, the company currently manages nearly 400 million minutes of audio conferences each month, and hosts 125 million sessions with its collaborative products. The main benefits of exposing some of the APIs for these products is the possibility for other software firms to tie their own products in with Citrix's, all the while, decreasing the amount of manual record-keeping on the part of their customers.
Citrix Vice President, Bernardo de Albergaria stated that at the very beginning they had not built their products to be open, “but we've seen more and more SaaS service providers wanting to integrate with our products."
Citrix has already set up a portal where "any developer can register and get access to the APIs," he added. The portal contains documentation for working with the APIs, as well as different forums where developers can easily discuss their implementations.
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