Internet tools are just starting to be applied to industrial tasks such as maintaining equipment and optimizing operations, but the wealth of data being produced by industrial systems could make this a major focus of development in the coming years.

On Tuesday, General Electric increased its bet on this proposition by introducing a cloud platform for data management and recruiting partners to help it serve industrial customers. At an event in San Francisco, GE and its partners, including Pivotal, Accenture and Amazon Web Services, laid out what they see as the opportunities and challenges.

The cutting edge of innovation in using data has shifted from the financial services sector to the consumer realm, and it's about to move again to the industrial sector, said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal.

"It's the industrial space that really has to take the usage of data to a whole new level," Maritz said. Pivotal, a PaaS (platform as a service) company formed by VMware and EMC with an investment by GE, will develop cloud-agnostic industrial offerings in conjunction with GE. Also on Tuesday, GE announced an expanded relationship with Accenture to develop technology and analytics applications, plus a partnership with Amazon Web Services, which will be able to host GE's services.

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Nvidia is to start licensing its graphics cores more widely in a bid to cash in on the need for powerful graphics in smartphones, tablets and other devices.

Nvidia will start by licensing graphics cores based on the Kepler architecture, which is used in its latest graphics cards, the company said Tuesday. Kepler cores will also be used in Nvidia's Tegra 5 mobile chip, code-named Logan, which will ship next year.

"The reality is that we've done this in the past. We licensed an earlier GPU core to Sony for the Playstation 3. And we receive more than [US]$250 million a year from Intel as a license fee for our visual computing patents," said David Shannon, Nvidia's executive vice president and general counsel, in a blog entry.

"Now, the explosion of Android devices presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate this effort," Shannon wrote.

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Microsoft is upping the stakes in the growing market for cloud-based ERP, with its Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 products now available for deployment on its Azure service.

The launch, announced Tuesday, gives customers another option for cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) services besides NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign and others. It's a bit late in coming, as Microsoft originally said availability would be toward the end of last year.

Microsoft was apparently intent on making sure the Dynamics applications ran well on Azure before scaling up the business.

"Over the past several months we've been working closely with our first 'go-live' customers and partners, as well as with the Windows Azure team, to develop guidance and tooling to ensure a great experience deploying on Azure," wrote Paul White, senior director of Dynamics, in a blog post. "That work is now complete."

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Carl Icahn has acquired a larger stake in Dell and called for a better buyout offer than the proposal of $13.65 per share from Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners.

Icahn has proposed that Dell commence a tender offer for around 1.1 billion shares at $14 per share, with a maximum value of $16 billion.

“Our proposal allows those who believe, like us, that the $13.65 price being offered in the Michael Dell/Silver Lake going private transaction significantly undervalues Dell, to continue to hold Dell shares,” wrote Icahn in an open letter to Dell.

Dell announced in February that Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake had offered $24.4 billion, or $13.65 per share, to buy out the company. Icahn, along with Southeastern Asset Management, made several counteroffers, with the most recent involving a payout of $12 a share in cash or stock to shareholders, and $5.2 billion in debt financing. Dell’s board of directors has recommended shareholders vote for the Michael Dell-Silver Lake offer.

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Google has asked the court overseeing terrorism-related surveillance programs at the National Security Agency to allow the company to publish information on the number of surveillance requests it receives.

The Internet company, in a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court , asked the court to allow it to publish the number of surveillance requests it gets from the NSA and other federal agencies and the number of users or accounts affected by those requests. The U.S. Department of Justice contends that publishing the information would be illegal.

Google’s lawyers argued the company has the right, under free speech guarantees in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to publish aggregate data about surveillance requests.

Google’s request comes in the wake of allegations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that Google and eight other Internet companies have given the NSA direct access to their servers, allowing the spy agency to read email and other Internet communications.

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The attorneys general of several states are turning up the heat on Google, concerned that the search engine giant makes it easier for criminals to sell illegal drugs online, engage in human trafficking and peddle pirated intellectual property.

At the summer meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Boston Tuesday, Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood said that he is ramping up the pressure on the Internet behemoth, to which he had earlier this month sent litigation hold letters that should compel the company to preserve emails and other possible evidence in case of a lawsuit.

Hood is now sending a civil investigative demand, or subpoena, for records relevant to how the company’s search business may facilitate the sale of pharmaceuticals without prescriptions. He said Google had “lawyered up” after failing to respond to a number of written queries.

At the same time, Hood said, he does not want a legal battle with Google. “I don’t want to have a fight, we want to work together,” he said.

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A year ago, Google constructed a “neural network” of servers that eventually learned how to recognize cats. On Tuesday, Nvidia said that a team of Stanford researchers had used its own graphics cores to create another approximately 6.5 times more powerful, using just 16 servers.

The Stanford and Nvidia researchers showed off their work at the International Supercomputing Conference this week in Leipzig, Germany, where the list of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers was unveiled.

Neural networks attempt to re-create the brain’s structure by approximating not only the millions of neurons within it, but also how the brain itself learns. The overarching principle is to create a framework by which the network can teach itself. That process can lead in unexpected directions, such as the Google network teaching itself to identify images of a cat inside a number of YouTube videos that Google exposed it to. Japanese researchers also developed a neural network that taught a robot how to pour a glass of water.

While Google’s efforts to create a neural network most likely attracted attention because of its whimsical results, neural networks are a serious endeavor. In March, Google acquired DNNresearch for its work on layered, “deep neural networks,” which it will apply to a variety of services. Although Google did not say to what purpose it would put DNNresearch, it’s likely that its intelligence could be applied to everything from translation to Google Now, the service that Google uses to parse a user’s data and to show him or her relevant information, such as the time to leave to arrive in time for the next appointment.

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U.S. law enforcement agencies have disrupted more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and other countries with the help of controversial surveillance efforts at the U.S. National Security Agency, government officials said Tuesday.

NSA surveillance programs recently exposed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden have played a key role in disrupting terrorist activity in more than 20 countries, including 10 terrorist plots in the U.S., since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., NSA director General Keith Alexander told U.S. lawmakers.

“In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation,” Alexander told the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. “That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks to occur on 9/11.”

Officials with the NSA and the U.S. Department of Justice defended the surveillance programs during Tuesday’s hearing, saying the programs are subject of rigorous oversight by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress. Officials contradicted allegations by Snowden, who has said the few controls at the NSA are easily circumvented by NSA analysts.

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Consumers may not be buying Surface RT tablets, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft. The company will offer $199 Surface tablets for K-12 schools and higher-education institutions, according to the company.

The deal isn’t live yet, though, according to Microsoft. It will be offered on June 24. Educators will need to sign up via a form supplied by Microsoft, and then presumably buy in bulk. The announcement was originally released by Ryan Lowdermilk, Microsoft's technology evangelist, who apparently released the information early. Lowdermilk subsequently pulled the blog post announcing the deal.

"It's true," a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an email. "It’s important Microsoft does its part to help get devices into the hands of educators that help prepare today’s students with skills modern businesses demand. We will be discussing this more in greater detail on June 24, both from the ISTE [International Society for Technology in Education] showroom floor and on our Education Newsroom [at ISTE's annual conference June 23-26]. Please join us then!"

Educators interested in buying a Surface should send an email to Surfaceedu@microsoft.com, according to ZDnet, which reported the story earlier.

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AT&T kicked off their Street Charge program today, opening solar-powered public charging stations across New York’s five boroughs. The Street Charge program grew out of the aftermath Hurricane Sandy, which devastated a huge chunk of the East Coast last fall.  Many New Yorkers were left without power, and when their smartphones died, they had no way to contact loved ones.

The Street Charge stations have a variety of connectors to accommodate most smartphones, including USB, Micro USB, 30-pin, and lightning connectors. They draw power from solar panels at the base of the kiosk and store it in lithium batteries at the top, continuing to deliver power throughout the night.  Goal Zero, a leading provider of creative solar power solutions, worked with AT&T to develop the design.

Power efficient processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon have led the charge in extending battery life, but batteries still have physical limits.  For travelers especially, public charging stations will be essential for staying connected.

According to AT&T’s press release, the power is free to the public as part of an effort to “keep New Yorkers connected.”  This isn’t the first time AT&T has forged a path on behalf of smartphone users.   In NYC, they were one of the first companies to provide cellular service on subway platforms, and they also provide free WiFi at more than two dozen public parks in the region.

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The source code for the Carberp banking Trojan program is being offered for sale on the underground market at a very affordable price, which could result in additional Carberp-based financial malware being developed in the future, according to researchers from Russian cybercrime investigations firm Group-IB.

A person believed to be a member of the Carberp gang announced on an underground forum that he’s willing to sell the source code for the Trojan program and its additional components for US$5,000, Andrey Komarov, Group-IB’s head of international projects, said Tuesday via email.

That’s a very low price, considering that earlier this year the Carberp gang was offering the builder application that can be used to generate customized copies of the Trojan program for $40,000. Compiled-to-order variants of the malware were also being offered on a monthly subscription-based model with prices ranging between $2000 and $10,000 depending on the number of additional modules included.

Komarov estimates that the source code itself would normally be worth between $50,000 and $70,000.

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Hewlett-Packard has shuffled the management of its PC division as it tries to sharpen its focus on growth markets.

HP

HP said that top executive Todd Bradley will step down from his role as executive vice president of the Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) group to become executive vice president of Strategic Growth Initiatives, where his first order of business will be “enhancing HP’s business in China.”

Bradley will be replaced by Dion Weisler, who is currently the senior vice president for HP’s PPS division in Asia Pacific and Japan. Weisler previously worked at Lenovo as vice president and chief operating officer of the company’s Product and Mobile Internet Digital Home Groups.

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Acer has announced that a new version of its C7 Chromebook will be available at Walmart stores and online at Walmart.com for $199. The refreshed model includes a 16GB SSD.

The model C710-2856 Chromebook has an 11.6-inch LED-backlit LCD panel with native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. It's powered by a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor and 2GB of DDR3 memory. Apart from swapping a 320GB mechanical hard drive for an SSD, this computer's specifications are the same as the earlier $199 Chromebook that Acer announced in November 2012.

Acer

“The expansion of our Acer C7 Chromebook line to Walmart is a clear indication of its growing popularity for anyone who wants a new or second mobile PC for web-based computing,” said Sumit Agnihotry, vice president of product marketing, Acer America. “The new configuration with a speedy and responsive SSD at only $199 is an especially notable value.”

Acer is positioning the Chromebook as an inexpensive secondary laptop for families and professionals who want to use cloud-based services and social networks and shop online, and for students preparing to go back to school in the fall.

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Europe’s top law-making body is working to bring its websites into line with the cookie-tracking laws it enforces on other entities.

Legally, the European Commission and the other European Union institutions, such as the Parliament, are not bound by the same data protection rules that apply to commercial companies.

Under the ePrivacy Directive, which was updated in 2009, Web companies must obtain “explicit consent” from Internet users before installing cookies on a computer to remember log­in details and other preferences relating to a particular website.

The only exception from the consent rule is if cookies are “strictly necessary” for a service explicitly requested by the user, for example, when a user clicks the “add to basket” button to buy goods from a website or asks it to remember language preferences.

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The Canadian privacy commissioner and 36 other data protection authorities on Tuesday raised privacy concerns about Google Glass in an open letter to CEO Larry Page.

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s privacy commissioner, signed the letter. Co-signers include Europe’s privacy watchdog the Article 29 Working Party and as well as the privacy commissioners of New Zealand and Australia and their counterparts in Mexico, Israel, and Switzerland, among others.

“We are writing to you as data protection authorities to raise questions from a privacy perspective about the development of Google Glass,” the authorities wrote.

One of their main concerns with Google Glass is that people can use the frames to film and record others, the letter said.

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As a password manager, Keeper has the basics covered. It captures login info and passwords for you as you browse the Web, securely stores them in a neatly organized vault that's easy to access, and generates passwords for you on the fly.

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The Swedish Nacka District Court has ruled that Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg may be extradited to Denmark to face hacking charges, the court confirmed Tuesday.

The green light to extradite Svartholm Warg was given Monday, said Josefin Holmgren, a law clerk at the Nacka District Court. The extradition approval is not final yet though. Svartholm Warg can appeal the decision within a week, Holmgren said.

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Google's Chromebook laptop will be carried by more than 6600 stores around the world, as the company signs on more retailers.

Starting Monday, Walmart is offering an Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive, in about 2800 stores across the U.S. for $199, while from this weekend, Staples will offer Chromebooks from Acer, Hewlett-Packard and Samsung Electronics in its over 1500 stores in the country.

Staples will also sell the products online. The laptop running the Chrome OS is an attempt by Google to attract users to cloud computing, but it has as yet to make a significant impact in the market.

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Yahoo has received between 12,000 to 13,000 requests for user data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. between Dec. 1 and May 31 this year, the company said Monday.

The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell wrote in a blog post.

The company did not disclose how many of the requests for customer data were under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of a controversy after reports surfaced that the government was collecting data from a large number of users under the Act, including call metadata from telephone customers of Verizon.

“Like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue,” the executives wrote.

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Lean storage techniques will keep a lid on storage investments over the next few years, though the world’s enterprises still are on track to buy 138 exabytes of storage system capacity in 2017, IDC said.

Annual sales of storage capacity will grow by more than 30 percent every year between 2013 and 2017, according to a forecast the research company announced on Monday. But that growth will be slower than the steep pace recorded a few years ago because organizations have adopted ways of using storage more efficiently, including cloud storage services, IDC analyst Natalya Yezhkova said.

Data deduplication, data compression, thin provisioning and storage virtualization all will help enterprises limit their purchases of new storage capacity, Yezhkova said. Those techniques can reduce the amount of space consumed by a given bit of information or help companies allocate new storage as needed instead of overbuying.

IDC estimates more than 102 exabytes of external and 36 exabytes of internal storage system capacity will be sold in 2017, up from just 20 exabytes of external and 8 exabytes of internal capacity in 2012. External storage sits outside of servers, while internal goes inside them.

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Jive Software is making a mobile push with new and enhanced mobile applications that have an emphasis on helping users of the enterprise social networking (ESN) suite create, not just view, content from their tablets and smartphones.

Responding to a significant increase in mobile usage of its product, Jive has developed its first native iPad application, enhanced its existing iPhone application and upgraded its iOS software development kit.

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AMD plans to sample its first ARM-based processors for servers early next year, alongside paired CPUs and integrated graphics cores in an attempt to oust Intel's Xeon from its dominance in the server market.

Specifically, AMD's ARM core will be code-named "Seattle," and will ship in volume during the second half of 2014, AMD executives said. In 2014, AMD will also ship "Berlin," a core available in both a CPU form factor as well as an APU, which integrates the processor with an integrated graphics coprocessor. Finally, there's the "Warsaw," which will compete with in high-performance computing (HPC) applications with the Xeon.

Seattle is of interest to both AMD and to other industry watchers because it represents one of the more interesting opportunities for AMD to regain share in the server market. Last year, AMD said last year that it had agreed to license ARM 64-bit technology, and would combine it with its Freedom Fabric, the name given to its high-speed networking technology it acquired via SeaMicro.

Intel sells more than 80 percent of all microprocessors by unit volume, but in servers it's a virtual dictatorship; during the fourth quarter of 2012, Mercury Research estimated that Intel sold about 95.7 percent of all server microprocessors sold. To compete, AMD needs something different, and it's hoping ARM represents that edge.

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The Open Data Center Alliance, a customer group that shares tips about cloud deployments and tries to nudge vendors into supplying the products they want, has added big data to the list of IT topics it covers.

The alliance was set up in 2010 to provide a collective voice for enterprise customers, who use their buying power to try to influence the data center products vendors sell, with an emphasis on interoperability and open standards.

The alliance defines technology requirements and usage models for various aspects of cloud computing, such as identity management and data security. Its members agree to follow those usage models, giving vendors a greater incentive to provide the products and capabilities they ask for.

The ODCA has more than 300 members, including big firms like BMW, JP Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin and Capgemini. It’s holding its annual Forecast event in San Francisco this week, where it announced the completion of three new usage models, for software defined networking, scale-out storage, and information as a service, or basically big data analysis.

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NewsGator has upgraded its Social Sites enterprise social networking (ESN) add-on for SharePoint to make the software better able to tailor the content, notifications and capabilities it displays for each user.

The overall goal is to make it easier for Social Sites users to stay engaged with work tasks, information and colleagues.

ESN software, which adapts social media features for workplace use, is seen to fail when employees view it as yet another separate “inbox” that they need to check. When this happens, the ESN system becomes a deserted island.

Thus, NewsGator and other ESN vendors consider it a priority to make sure their software is threaded into the business applications and processes that employees use daily.

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Sprint Nextel sued Clearwire and Dish Network on Monday in a bid to block Dish from taking over Clearwire, Sprint’s majority-owned network partner.

Dish and Sprint have been in a bidding war over Clearwire, which Sprint also plans to buy, and last week Clearwire’s board recommended shareholders accept Dish’s offer. But in a complaint filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery on Monday, Sprint said Dish’s proposal violates its rights and those of other strategic investors. In its suit, Sprint wants to prevent the deal from being consummated and seeks unspecified damages.

Sprint co-founded Clearwire along with several strategic partners in 2008 to build out a WiMax network to carry its first 4G service. It still owns a majority of Clearwire’s stock and is seeking to buy out the rest of the company in order to build a strong LTE network to take on its larger rivals. Because of Clearwire’s massive spectrum holdings, the fate of that company is expected to play a key role in the complicated takeover battleamong Dish, SoftBank and Sprint. A lawsuit over Dish’s Clearwire bid had been widely expected.

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Microsoft said Monday that it is eliminating the ability to link accounts within Outlook.com, replacing them with aliases instead.

Currently, Outlook users can link their account with others from within Outlook.com. Outlook allows users to not only read email from within the Outlook.com context, but also send emails as if they were in those other domains.

Now, according to Microsoft, those Microsoft accounts will be unlinked, and made inaccessible to Outlook.com. In the near term, Microsoft will begin unlinking those previously linked accounts. Instead, Microsoft has proposed an alternative: using Outlook.com aliases instead.

What’s the difference between an alias and a dedicated email address? An alias can provide anonymity for users, without being tied to an actual account. Let’s say that one owned the email address foo@outlook.com. Using the alias feature that Microsoft pushed to the public in 2011, one could set up IamJoeSmithZ@outlook.com, hand that email out to the public, and receive email sent to that address. As an alias, IamJoeSmithZ@outlook.com wouldn’t require a dedicated password; if that address was set up as a second, linked account, it would.

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Much of Rambus’ past is associated with lawsuits, but the company is moving forward with dispute settlements.

After years of litigation, Rambus and STMicroelectronics said Monday they had signed an agreement that settled all their legal disputes. The agreement came just a few days after Rambus settled a 13-year-old legal dispute with SK Hynix.

Monday’s comprehensive agreement will settle outstanding claims and expand existing licenses, STMicroelectronics and Rambus said in separate statements.

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Many attempts have been made over the last 46 years to rewrite Amdahl’s law, a theory that focuses on performance relative to parallel and serial computing. One scientist hopes to prove that Amdahl’s law can be surpassed, and that it doesn’t apply in certain parallel computing models.

A presentation titled “Breaking the Law” at the International Supercomputing Conference this week in Leipzig, Germany, will show how “pitfalls of Amdahl’s law can be avoided in specific situations,” according to a blog entry that provides a teaser on the presentation.

The presentation will “challenge Amdahl’s generalized law by exposing it to a new class of experiments in parallel computing,” wrote Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Jülich, Germany, in the blog entry. Lippert will lead the presentation.

What is Amdahl's law?

Amdahl’s law, established in 1967 by noted computer scientist Gene Amdahl when he was with IBM, provides an understanding on scaling, limitations and economics of parallel computing based on certain models. The theory states that computational tasks can be decomposed into portions that are parallel, which helps execute tasks and solve problems quicker. However, the speed of task execution is limited by tasks—in the case of computers it could be serial tasks—that cannot be parallelized.

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Many eyes in the tech world will fall on Oracle later this week, when the vendor’s fourth-quarter results are set for release. This is typically the biggest reporting period for Oracle each year in terms of revenue, but a number of questions loom beyond its top-line performance.

Here’s a look at some of the topics Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and other executives may discuss or be asked to address during Thursday’s conference call on the results.

New software purchases versus maintenance

Oracle has consistently made sure to highlight its strong software maintenance revenue, which existing customers pay each year for support and updates. Maintenance fees carry extremely high profit margins for Oracle and other software vendors.

But another key metric to watch is new software license revenue. Growth in this area says customers are broadening their investments in Oracle software, whether by adding licenses for their existing implementation or trying out newer products.

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