Computers

Michael Dell has been taunting HP lately by claiming his company is gaining server market share at HP's expense. Looks like he's right: In HP's second quarter, sales of industry standard servers—ones with x86 Intel and AMD processors—fell 12% compared to last year's Q2. But in HP's Q2 earnings call, Meg Whitman said the server sales drop, and the market share HP lost, was due to "very aggressive competitive pricing." That's fine with Whitman, who said HP decided not to do some server deals during the quarter because they weren't profitable enough. "We stepped away from a number of deals to protect our bottom line. And it's clear that we need to take another look at the low end of our product line to better match customer needs and price points," Whitman said on the call, according to Seeking Alpha's transcript of the event. HP also walked away from some PC deals for the same reasons, Whitman told AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl in a post-earnings call interview. HP's PC revenue dropped 20% compared to last year, with sales to businesses falling 14% and sales to consumers falling 29%. Dell is taking on debt by slashing server prices, but it wouldn't risk doing this it weren't trying to go private, Whitman told AllThingsD. Dell's first quarter earnings dropped 75% compared to last year. "We’ll see if they remain as aggressive as they have been," Whitman told AllThingsD. Earlier this month, Michael Dell got ahold of preliminary figures from IDC that showed its worldwide server market share grew 2.4% in the first quarter, while HP's dropped about 4%. Dell's worldwide server shipments grew 5.7% in Q1, while HP's dropped 15.4%. HP still leads Dell in the global server market, with about 31% share compared to Dell's roughly 28% share, according to IDC's figures. Michael Dell told CRN's Steve Burke earlier this month he likes where things are headed. "HP is losing share at a staggering rate, and they are losing it to Dell,” he said. Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

Haswell is coming out early next month, and it's everywhere in the news. Among other things, motherboard makers have been tripping over themselves to show off their upcoming Haswell-ready mobos. We've heard comparatively little about the mobile incarnations of the chip, but in a briefing yesterday, Intel gave the guys at PC World a few nuggets of info about upcoming Haswell laptops.According to the site, Intel said those notebooks will bring about a whopping 50% battery life increase over current, Ivy Bridge-based systems. ...Read more...

Jacob Bijani was an early Tumblr user. He'd often design theme templates for the platform's blogs, and one in particular caught David Karp's eye. "I made a weird side-scrolling theme for my blog, which made the rounds and eventually got David to follow me,” the designer told Daily Dot in October. "We emailed a bit and I started doing some freelance work making themes for VIPs on Tumblr. A months after I graduated college in San Diego, David happened to be in town for Webby Connect. We met up for the day, he offered me a job, and I moved to New York a few weeks later.” What was the email that got those conversations started? It was a simple inquiry about an outdated job listing on Davidville, the company Karp created which produced Tumblr. Bijani sent the initial email in May 2008. "A few months later I was living in the East Village as Tumblr’s fifth employee," Bijani writes on his blog. "So much has changed since then." Now he is Tumblr's Creative Director. Here's the effortless email that lead to the job. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

Kim Dotcom, the Internet entrepreneur behind file-sharing service Megaupload and its successor, simply titled MEGA, has released a new single from his upcoming album today. Reports of a full-length studio record date back as far as January 2012, but details of the release have been pretty scarce since then. Dotcom released the first song from the album in August last year, called ‘Party Amplifier’, on SoundCloud and YouTube. In the video description for the latter, Dotcom said he loved the band Prodigy and that this had “inspired me to do this song.” Dotcom tweeted his latest effort, titled ‘Dance’, earlier today. As the name suggests, the track is clearly aimed at the dance floor and includes a number of electronic loops, beats and vocal samples. At the time of writing, the track has received almost 9,000 plays on SoundCloud and has been met with some pretty positive reviews in the comments section underneath. Dotcom first expressed his musical prowess in December 2011 with the ‘Megaupload Song’, which to date has surpassed 14 million plays on YouTube. It was also notable for featuring cameo performances by Kanye West, Alicia Keys and will.i.am. Musical endeavors aside, Dotcom is still involved in a legal dispute regarding his previous Internet company, Megaupload. The Internet entrepreneur published a white paper last month co-authored by two lawyers, Robert Amsterdam and Ira P. Rothken, criticizing the way the case was carried out by the United States government. Image Credit: Phil Walter/Getty Images

Good morning. Here's the overnight news: Google is considering outbidding Facebook for $1 billion social navigation app, Waze. Ride-sharing company Lyft has raised $60 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. It's giving people 30,000 rides per week. Pandora's first quarter earnings were reported yesterday. It beat Wall Street expectations and revenue grew to $128.5 million. Yahoo acquired another startup yesterday, cross-gaming platform PlayerScale. PlayerScale has 150 million users. Tremor Video has filed to go public. It generated more than $105 million in 2012. Here's who really created the origins of Tumblr, Tumblelogs. Yahoo's Design Chief, Tim Parsey, is leaving. Android's marketshare is a joke. Khosla Ventures hires Ben Ling, who personally invested in startups such as Square and Palantir. He was also COO of Badoo. Check out 14 people who were Tumbler's earliest employees and got to build a hyper-growth startup from scratch. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

Commuting is tough. Working out of your car all day is tougher. From traveling salesmen to offsite service professionals to couriers, millions of people worldwide spend their nine-to-five hours behind the wheel. And they need to stay in touch—online, dialed in, and powered up—all day. That’s not easy to do when you’re constantly on the move. Allow us to show you how to remain a useful member of the information age even when your workdays can take you on trips of dozens or hundreds of miles. Power Few cell phones and far fewer laptops will get you through an entire day of serious work without being plugged in and recharged at some point along the way. Fortunately, your car is a mobile electricity generator. How best to get power out of your vehicle and into the gadgets that need it? Use your car’s battery to charge your smartphone or tablet with a simple adapter like this one. Many of today’s automobiles feature USB ports, which are fine for recharging your phone. But if you want to charge your notebook (or even most tablets) you’ll need something with more juice. Here are two options that give you a standard A/C adapter via your 12-volt cigarette lighter socket. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Like the tablet market, Google Glass may currently be viewed as a consumer product but it will soon be seen on the faces of IT and mobile employees. read more

Back in December we reported on Pixplit, which we noted was like an Instagram for social photo collages, adding that it’s a lot more fun than you might think. Since then, Pixplit has landed on Android, and this week both versions of the app have received a bit of a makeover. Just to recap, Pixplit allows you to choose a split-frame layout, fill one of the slots with a photograph, add an optional filter and publish it to the ‘Playground’ section of the app. Here, your Pixplit followers can add photos to other parts of the layout to make the picture complete, so to speak. It is actually a lot of fun and you can end up with something that looks a little bit like this – we wonder what Darwin would have to say about it. Pixplit 2.0 Besides the usual bug fixes and performance tweaks, Pixplit 2.0 brings a handful of updates. Now, you can create private splits and instant-message (in private too, obviously) with friends and other chosen contacts. Previously, everything was done in the open. Now, you can take things behind closed doors, and the new private feature doesn’t enable sharing across the social sphere.     As such, there’s a brand new inbox through which all your private chats are siloed. Also, Pixplit now lets users ‘go solo’, creating and completing their own split – so they no longer have to collaborate. Simply click ‘New Split’, your chosen frame layout and you’re good to go.     Additionally, the capture and edit screens have been redesigned to create more room for the split and clear access to filters and borders. Pixplit is available to download for free now, on Android and iOS, and is localized for 15 different languages. ? Pixplit – Android | iOS Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service

My, how quickly the tables can turn in the fickle world of consumer technology. When Microsoft’s designers and engineers took to the drawing board to dream up Windows 8, the 9.7-inch iPad was the 800-pound gorilla of the tablet market, gobbling an insane amount of market share and laughing at Android’s attempts to break Apple’s stranglehold on slates. The future, it seemed, lay in big screens. Then the Kindle Fire, the Nook tablet, and Google’s Nexus 7 appeared. Consumers fell in love with smaller, cheaper tablets overnight, and on October 23, 2012, Apple capitulated to popular demand and released an iPad mini of its own. Three days later, Microsoft released Windows 8 to the public. With a design optimized for 10-inch-plus displays, it was already behind the times. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Billed as an “anti to-do list” application, today sees the launch of Mentor for iOS, which aims to become your platform of choice for keeping track of what you want to do (as opposed to what you have to do). It wants to achieve that by using what the Factory Berlin startup behind the app says is the same “failproof mechanic” that makes us meet our deadlines and be on time at work: social context. Mentor basically aims to help people achieve whatever they choose to achieve, whether that means adopting a healthier diet, reading more books, exercising more often or picking up a new language. The service harnesses social context for personal goals by creating a community of people that ‘mentor’ one another. While users keep track of their various activities and share their progress, others can engage and make sure they reach their goals. A team of six has been building the Mentor app, which is similar to the services offered by US-based rivals like Lift and Everest, since January 2012 and gathered over a thousand testers from 22 countries to date. During the three-month beta phase, Mentor says its community created over 600 different activities, which were accomplished over 5,000 times and ‘applauded’ with more than 30,000 likes and 5,000 comments. The iOS app is today making its formal debut in the App Store, backed by a six-figure seed funding round from investors such as Felix Petersen (Plazes, Amen), Matthias Spiess (Spreadshirt), JMES Investments and others. Is it an app you can see yourself using? Why (not)? ? Mentor for iOS Image credit: Thinkstock