Sophie Curtis

Digital music service Spotify is using employee performance management software from Salesforce.com to drive engagement within the company and make giving feedback more social.

Salesforce Rypple - the product that has emerged out of Salesforce.com's acquisition of startup Rypple in December - does away with the notion of periodic reviews. Instead, it provides a social networking milieu that allows co-workers as well as managers to give feedback and recognition for jobs well done in real time, and on an ongoing basis.

Newspaper publisher News International is using cloud-based solutions from Salesforce.com, CloudSense and Zuora to fulfil product orders, analyse customer behaviour patterns and process payments.

At the Cloudforce Social Enterprise Tour in London yesterday, Adam Griffiths, chief architect at News International, said there is nothing he wouldn't put in the cloud, as long as the processes were well designed and well architected.

Hybrid processors that include two or more types of core now account for half of the $111 billion processor market, driven by growth in smartphones and tablets, according to new research by IMS Research.

The most common type of hybrid processors combine a central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU). These processors are particularly suited to use in smartphones and tablets, which need to deliver high performance and HD graphics from within a compact form factor.

HP has launched a new zero client which uses "one-wire" technology to deliver power over Ethernet.

Developed in collaboration with technology company 3M, the HP t410 All-in-One (AiO) combines an 18.5-inch display and zero client in a single unit, and is designed for space-constrained environments such as schools, hospitals and call centres.

Notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay is urging users in the UK to circumvent a block on its services, after the British High Court ruled that the site infringes copyright "on a massive scale".

The Pirate Bay's founders said that users can set up anonymous connections using a virtual provate network (VPN). Alternatively, they can use a closed private network of computers, known as a darknet, or change their DNS settings with OpenDNS.

The growth of new mobile technologies such as augmented reality and location-based services is driving adoption of sensor devices that can detect environmental conditions such as speed, temperature and direction.

By 2016, there is expected to be around 4 billion MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) sensor devices in circulation, according to Juniper Research. The majority of these will be motion detectors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and compasses, which are increasingly being built into smartphones for use alongside new mobile applications.

Science fiction publisher Tor UK has announced it is dropping digital rights management (DRM) from all of its e-books, in a move that could set a precedent for the rest of the industry.

DRM is class of access control technologies used by copyright holders to limit the distribution of digital content. Publishers use DRM to protect their e-books from piracy, but it is unpopular among many customers because it prevents them from sharing titles between electronic devices.

Microsoft has fixed a flaw in Hotmail's password reset system that allowed hackers to take control of webmail accounts.

The vulnerability existed in Hotmail's password reset feature. Hackers were able to use a Firefox add-on called Tamper Data to intercept the outgoing HTTP request following a password reset request and modify the data, locking out the account holder and gaining access to their inbox.

Startups and small companies are stealing a march on their larger enterprise counterparts by employing analytics at the heart of their businesses, according to Amazon Web Services.

Speaking at an event in London today, Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels said that business intelligence has historically been the "secret domain of large enterprises". However, the advent of cloud computing has given small businesses access to scale-out applications like Hadoop, allowing them gain a competitive advantage.

The final three members of an 11-strong gang that scammed iTunes and Amazon out of £500,000 worth of royalty payments have been charged with fraud and money laundering by Southwark Crown Court.

Craig Anderson, Arran Jassi and Lamar Johnson all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud, after using three online music management companies to upload UK-produced urban music albums and tracks for sale on Apple iTunes and Amazon.com.

Amazon could be preparing to launch cloud services in India, after it emerged that the company has been buying up infrastructure from telecommunications provider Tata Communications in its home markets.

Speaking to Techworld at the Tata Global Media and Analyst Summit in Dubai this week, the company's chief technology officer (CTO) John Hayduk said that competition from big cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace in emerging markets is "not there yet," but is expected to ramp up over the next 12 months.

Google has launched a new initiative called GetMo, aimed at helping British businesses 'Get Mobile' by providing them with tools and resources to make their websites more mobile-friendly.

GetMo follows the launch of a similar initiative in the US, called GoMo, in November, 2011. Businesses can use the GetMoMeter tool on Google's GetMo website, to see how their own sites look and perform for customers on mobile devices, and get personalised recommendations for developing a more mobile-friendly experience.