PC sales in China and high growth in smartphones shipments helped boost Lenovo's net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter by 90 percent year-over-year.

For the quarter ended March 31, Lenovo's net profit was $127 million, the company said on Thursday. Revenue broke records and was at $7.8 billion, growing four percent from the same period last year.

In Lenovo's home market of China, the company had an operating margin of 4.9 percent, an increase of 8 percent year-over-year. The company also saw continued profitability in its mobile devices business, which makes up 9 percent of its overall sales. At the end of the quarter, Lenovo's smartphone shipments were up 206 percent year-over-year.

Globally, PC shipments were down 13.9 percent year-over-year in the quarter, the market's steepest decline since research firm IDC began tracking the market in 1994. Lenovo itself posted flat year-over-year PC shipment growth in the period.

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Advanced Micro Devices has opened the door to embrace Google's Android operating system, but said it would continue to focus on Windows with its upcoming tablet and laptop chips.

AMD on multiple occasions has said it had no interest in putting its chips in Android tablets and would focus exclusively on Windows 8. A change of heart could open up a wider market for tablets for the company.

For now, the company's focus remains on optimizing chips for usage on Windows laptops, desktops and tablets, said Kevin Lansing, director of the notebook product line at AMD's client business unit.

In an email, however, AMD spokesman Gary Silcott said OS adoption depends on device makers.

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When Nvidia announced its graphical powerhouse, the $999 GeForce GTX Titan, in February, eyeballs widened. Fortunately Nvidia now offers the lower-performance GeForce GTX 780, which also cuts the price by a third, to $649.

Today Nvidia will begin shipping its new enthusiast cards to partners, in the form of reference designs that its hardware partners will tweak over time. These third-party versions of the GeForce GTX 780 will be available in about a month’s time, Justin Walker, program manager for Nvidia’s GeForce, said in an interview.

Nvidia

Nvidia claims that the GTX 780 will offer, on average, about 35 percent better graphics performance than the GeForce GTX 680, which Nvidia launched a year ago. (That card’s price now hovers at about $470, temporarily providing a lower-cost alternative if the GTX 780 is still too rich for your blood. You’ll have to move fast, though: The GTX 780 will officially replace the GTX 680.) Nvidia also claims that the GTX 780 outperforms the $400 AMD HD7970 graphics card by an average of about 30 to 35 percent; however, that AMD card debuted at the end of 2011. For gamers who really want to shell out, pairing two GTX 780 cards in SLI mode will improve performance by 75 percent over a single GTX 780 card, Nvidia said.

Basically, Nvidia is positioning the GTX 780 for enthusiast PC gamers who are willing to pony up for a superior rig, running at the maximum graphics settings and screen resolutions, with high levels of antialiasing. The 780 supports both DirectX 11.0 tessellation, for improved rendering of 3D objects, and Nvidia’s PhysX physics enhancements.

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Some sim games are hell-bent on putting you in the middle of realistic action scenarios. Others let you experience some of the world's most elite (or obscure) professions. Looking for science fiction or fantasy? You won't find it here.

So grab your mouse, keyboard, joystick, or driving wheel, and step into some of the most dangerous, toughest, and craziest jobs in the (virtual) world.

Seriously, train conducting? Yes, there's a sim game for that.

Microsoft will boost its Azure cloud offering in Japan, adding two domestic data centers to speed response times and improve reliability in the face of natural disasters.

The software giant said Thursday that it would add cloud-based hosting services in two regions, one near Tokyo and one in the Kansai region further south. Redundancy is a priority in earthquake-prone Japan, where the use of online services usually skyrockets after natural disasters.

"By using two sub-regions, customers will be able build configurations with domestic disaster recovery, and performance will be improved," said Yasuyuki Higuchi, President of Microsoft Japan.

Azure competes in Japan with offerings like Amazon's EC2 infrastructure and local cloud providers such as Sakura. Microsoft is a trusted name in corporate Japan but Azure has a reputation for being slower than rival offerings.

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Adobe has acquired Thumb Labs, a small mobile app agency, as part of its broader push to give its new cloud-enabled software offerings a more social flavor.

Thumb Labs, based in New York, posted a message on its website and Twitter feed on Thursday saying the firm had accepted an offer to become part of Adobe. The company said it will fulfill its existing contracts and begin its new role at the end of the month. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Adobe began a major shift last year with the launch of Creative Cloud, part of a transition from being a traditional software house to becoming a creator of cloud-based, collaborative platforms with online components. This month, the company said it was moving away from boxed software sales all together, to a subscription-based model based on the cloud service.

A major part of the Creative Cloud platform is a social layer that allows customers to share their portfolios online. Adobe acquired social platform designers Behance in December as part of its efforts to make its cloud service "the ultimate hub for creatives worldwide." Thumb Labs built the mobile app for Behance; a message posted Thumb Labs' website said, "We are looking forward to contributing to these efforts, as Behance's vibrant community becomes more deeply integrated into Adobe's tools."

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The latest victim of disruption by Internet technologies is a veteran of World War I: the missing persons search.

French police will no longer search for adults reported missing by their families unless there are signs that the person is in danger. The police have abandoned searches in progress and stopped accepting new search requests, according to an announcement on a government website Monday. The changes took effect on Friday.

Such "searches in the interests of the family" were conducted under an administrative procedure almost a century old, introduced to help families separated during the upheavals of World War I to find missing relatives, according to the French Ministry of the Interior.

Requests for the searches have fallen considerably in recent years, and are now most often used to find those behind on alimony payments, the Ministry said in a letter to police chiefs announcing the changes last month. The letter instructed them to refuse further requests, adding: "You can direct people towards social networks on the Internet, which offer interesting possibilities."

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The U.S. government is in negotiations with SoftBank for greater control over equipment purchases by Sprint Nextel and the selection of one of the Japanese company's nominee to the U.S. carrier's board, according to a news report.

Dish Network, SoftBank's rival bidder for Sprint, has meanwhile launched an advertising campaign and a website to argue that "the sale of wireless and wireline infrastructure with national strategic importance to a foreign company will weaken the security of the United States."

SoftBank has agreed to give the U.S. government the right to approve one of the directors it names to Sprint's board, who will be responsible for overseeing national security issues, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The government also wants the right to approve some of Sprint's equipment purchases and wants the removal of Chinese equipment from the network of Clearwire, a Sprint affiliate that it intends to acquire, the newspaper said.

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Ericsson may have a contender for oddest networking product if it commercializes the wireless bus windows it demonstrated at this week's CTIA Wireless trade show.

The windows would have built-in, translucent antennas connected to an internal Wi-Fi system for passenger use while on the road. In the example Ericsson showed at CTIA, the dual-band Wi-Fi antenna was just a square of barely visible red metal embedded between layers of glass.

The mobile infrastructure giant demonstrated the concept on the upper level of its booth at CTIA, above a showcase of other technologies designed for so-called heterogeneous networks with both Wi-Fi and cellular radios. On Tuesday, the company announced enhancements to its network management software that will allow carriers to do a better job shifting subscribers between the two systems for the best possible coverage.

Ericsson's solution had its origin in a problem for wireless users on buses, cars and trains. For insulation and sun protection, some windows are now being built with thin, translucent layers of aluminum sandwiched between glass. Combined with the metal that covers the rest of a vehicle, those windows essentially create a so-called Faraday cage, a box that blocks all outside radio waves, said Bryan Coley, a marketing program manager at Ericsson.

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On the same day that HP had to admit to lackluster consumer PC sales, the company is announcing a new raft of consumer notebook computers. Touchscreens will be available even on a lower-end models, a key move for HP to stay on-trend.

The flashiest models are the Envy Touchsmart 15 and 17 Notebooks. Clad in shiny cases, both models will be available with touch or non-touch displays and 6-cell batteries. Laptop multimedia has its challenges, but HP’s equipping these models with Beats Audio, four speakers, and a dual-drive subwoofer. Rock on.

HP

The Envy 15 has a 15-inch Full HD touchscreen display. CPU choices will include Intel’s new 4th-generation Core products or AMD’s latest. Memory will start at 6GB of DDR3, and hard drives will start at 750GB, 5400-rpm models. It’ll go on sale June 5^th for $529 and up.

The Envy 17 has a massive, 17.3-inch Full HD display and a full numeric keypad. It will feature Intel’s new 4th-generation Core CPUs (i5 to i7). In addition to the same memory and storage options as the Envy 15, the Envy 17 will also offer an optional DVD-RW or BluRay drive. On June 5^th, it’ll debut with a starting price of $699.

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Penguin has settled with U.S. states in an e-book price-fixing lawsuit, leaving only Apple now in the fray.

Four other publishers accused of price-fixing with Apple settled earlier with the 33 states and territories and the U.S. Department of Justice. Penguin had earlier settled in December with the DOJ in a case that is currently scheduled to go to trial in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on June 3.

Penguin said in a statement on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement with the US state attorneys general and private class plaintiffs to pay US$75 million in consumer damages plus costs and fees to resolve all antitrust claims relating to e-book pricing. It also committed to the states to abide by the same injunctive relief as previously agreed in its settlement with the DOJ.

Apple and the five publishers were accused of working together to raise prices of e-books, in retaliation for competitor Amazon.com pricing most e-books at $9.99 beginning in late 2007. The five publishers are Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Penguin Group, HarperCollins Publishers and Simon & Schuster.

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AMD hopes to have a big second half in 2013, launching three new CPUs featuring integrated graphics that perform on par with the company’s discrete GPUs. On Thursday, AMD revealed key details of these next-generation mobile chips, code-named Temash, Kabini, and Richland.

In a briefing in advance of the announcement, AMD vice-president John Taylor explained how the new chips leverage a number of firsts in AMD’s history: The first CPU with an onboard memory controller, the first dual-core CPU, and the first CPU with an on-die GPU.

These are interesting achievements, but it's worth noting that AMD hasn’t bested Intel in the CPU market since 2006. That's the year Intel introduced the first generation of its Core microarchitecture, and pulled ahead. AMD has performed better in the discrete GPU market, frequently trading the number one spot in the graphics space with arch-rival Nvidia. And now the company is looking to that GPU effort to catch up to Intel in the mobile CPU market.

Taylor says that consumers’ desire for thin and light computers of all types—desktops as well as notebooks and tablets—favors AMD’s APU (accelerated processing unit) effort, a chip design that combines x86-compatible CPUs with AMD’s latest Radeon graphics processors. “If you want low power and long battery life,” said Taylor, “you need an APU. Combining those functions on one chip reduces cost. It reduces power consumption, and it eliminates the complexity of using the PCIe bus to communicate with a separate graphics processor.”

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HP’s consumer PC sales continue to languish, but the game’s not over yet--certainly not on the company’s new Envy Rove, a 20-inch all-in-one that can lay flat for multiplayer games. The company also announced a raft of other all-in-ones and desktops today.

The Envy Rove all-in-one’s 20-inch LED has a resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels with integrated Intel HD graphics. It’s designed to be portable, with an integrated battery rated to last up to three hours. You’ll likely be tempted to pick it up by its spring-loaded, hinged stand, which is actually designed to set the desktop at an angle or lay it flat on a surface.

HP

The Envy Rove’s 10-point capacitive touchscreen display can function as a gaming table, and it comes preloaded with games including Electronic Arts’ Monopoly, Disney Fairies, and Fingertapps Jigsaw Wars and Musical Instruments. The system will use Intel’s 4th-generation Core CPUs, code-named Haswell. The Envy Rove will be available in July, for a price yet to be announced.

HP

The other all-in-ones announced today are the 20-inch Pavilion Touchsmart 20 and the 23-inch Pavilion Touchsmart 23. These systems use a less-expensive, 5-point optical touchscreen technology and will be offered with a choice of Intel’s 4th-generation Core CPUs and AMD CPUs.

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A mechanical engineering student in Taiwan has found the messaging application called Line warns and stops users in China from sending certain politically sensitive keywords.

The application is developed by a Japanese subsidiary of NHN, a South Korean company that makes a variety of applications and offers Web-based services centered around advertising, including the popular Korean search engine Naver.

The 22-year-old student at National Tsing Hua University, who goes by the Twitter screen name of "Hiraku," said via email he started analyzing Line after he saw Twitter users in China complain about not being able to send certain phrases.

The phrases generated a warning that said the message "contains sensitive terms, please adjust and then send again."

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Twitter, in a much-needed move to keep its users safer from cyberattacks, is introducing a more secure login process.

The system, called Login Verification, gives users the option to have a verification code sent to their mobile phone every time they log in to Twitter. After a person enrolls, he or she will be able to enter a six-digit code sent via SMS each time the user signs in to twitter.com. The system is designed to provide a second check on top of a regular password to help ensure only authorized users log in.

The feature, which Twitter describes as a form of two-factor authentication, can be turned on from a user's account settings page.

The release comes after numerous hacks targeted at companies including the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Jeep and even Burger King.

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Hewlett-Packard reported a 32 percent drop in profit for its second fiscal quarter, due partly to slower sales of PCs and servers.

HP’s revenue for the quarter, ended April 30, was $27.6 billion, down 10 percent from the same period last year, the company announced Wednesday.

The company is battling to turn itself around after some strategic missteps, but it’s doing so against the headwinds of a shrinking PC market and lackluster economy.

Revenue from HP's massive PC division fell 20 percent in the quarter, led by a steep drop in laptop sales. Its printer division held more or less steady, with sales down 1 percent, HP said.

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Seeing a “404 error” or the Twitter “Fail Whale” can really kill a good online buzz. Those kinds of service outages, though, occur on the Internet on a daily basis, as the latest numbers from Outage Analyzer illustrate.

Over the last five months, there have been 1413 full outages worldwide, or about nine a day, and nearly 8000 partial outages, or 53 a day, according to figures from the free Internet service tracker. A full outage results when a web service is unavailable; a partial outage happens when only some of a service’s users are affected.

The numbers are down from previous reporting periods, says Ben Grubin, director of product marketing for Compuware APM, which operates Outage Analyzer. But if you’re knocked off line for an hour or more, that trend isn’t likely to offer much comfort to you.

While full-service outages get the most attention, a partial-service outage is more likely to occur and affect a limited number of individual web and mobile transactions while leaving others completely untouched, Outage Analyzer explained in its report.

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Saving a destination in Google Maps makes it easier to navigate to and also lessens the chance for error when entering or trying to remember an address.

Nick Barber

Destinations can be starred from a mobile device running Google Maps or from the Web. After searching for an address or location, click on the pin for the destination and switch on the star icon. Starred destinations will be synched across all Google accounts and devices. Starred destinations are easier to find and will type ahead on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Maps. Starring locations is a good idea for local errands and for vacations and business trips to other states and countries.

When traveling to a place with unreliable mobile data reception or expensive data rates, it’s also a good idea to save an offline version of Google Maps. Once in the application on a mobile device, press the options button and select “make available offline.” Pan and zoom the map until the area to be downloaded is highlighted. Click “done” and the map will be downloaded to the mobile device and be able to be used when mobile data isn’t available.

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Google is launching a new fund through which it will make later-stage investments in technology companies, a Google executive said Wednesday.

The fund, to be called Google Capital, will be announced this summer but has already made three investments to date, said Mike Pearson, a general partner at Google Capital, at the Red Herring 2013 conference in Monterey, California.

Google already operates a fund, called Google Ventures, through which it invests in startups working in areas like mobile computing, gaming, big data and life sciences. Google Ventures has funded more than 150 companies to date, including Nest and DocuSign.

While Google Ventures tends to make early-stage investments in companies, the new investment arm, Google Capital, will be aimed at the “growth equity side of the market,” Pearson said during a panel at the conference.

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The U.S. government should bar foreign companies that repeatedly steal or use stolen U.S. intellectual property from selling their products in the country, a new report recommended.

About $300 billion worth of intellectual property is stolen from the U.S. every year, with 50 to 80 percent of the theft coming from China, according to the report, released Wednesday by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, a bipartisan group of former government officials and business representatives.

The U.S. government needs to take a series of strong measures to protect U.S. IP because current measures are ineffective, commission members said. The U.S. needs to make it much more costly for nations to encourage IP theft and for companies to engage in it, said Jon Huntsman, co-chairman of the commission and former U.S. ambassador to China and Republican presidential candidate.

Chinese industrial polices focused on acquiring science and technology “encourage IP theft,” Huntsman said during a press conference.

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By now, it’s become a tired old tech industry bromide: CIOs need to be business-savvy.

But while that sentiment remains true, technology trends, generational shifts in the workforce and changing demands from end users are forcing CIOs to go further and fundamentally rethink their roles, according to members of a panel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan CIO Symposium on Wednesday.

Rather than make broad decisions about a company’s technology strategies and purchases, CIOs should act as “brokers,” thinking of themselves as middlemen between users and the services they want or even create, said Michael Golz, senior vice president and CIO for SAP’s Americas division.

Golz described SAP’s internal “app gallery” which contains mobile applications developed by employees. SAP checks the applications’ security, tracks and measures their adoption and makes some of the most popular ones part of the official company roster. An employee-built application for single sign-on was among those that made the cut, Golz said.

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Apple, that darling of the tech world, has been in the news this week, not because of any new hardware it's releasing, but because of the way it's been handling its foreign earnings.

Dragged before the U.S. Senate, CEO Tim Cook was excoriated over allegations that the company is using an Irish subsidiary to avoid billions in taxes. Cook has denied the charges, saying, "We pay all the taxes we owe—every single dollar."

And Cook is right. In simplified terms, Apple is a huge, multinational corporation, and it earns plenty of its money overseas. When you sell a product in Europe and leave the money you received for it in Europe, different rules apply, and the country in which the sales took place essentially gets first crack at the cash. As a U.S. company, you often don't have to pay tax until you repatriate the earnings by bringing them back to the homeland. The Senate would greatly prefer this not to be the case, though: Apple has $102 billion sitting in foreign accounts that would amount to over $35 billion in taxes if the earnings were repatriated. In comparison the company has only about $43 billion in its U.S. coffers.

Apple isn't playing ball, and it doesn't have to. The law provides for offshore earnings to be treated this way, and Cook explained that it's his duty to Apple shareholders to keep the tax bill down as much as is (legally) possible. Meanwhile, he noted that Apple is America's largest taxpayer. (Cook's endgame is ultimately to work a deal so that Apple gets a break on those taxes should the earnings eventually be repatriated.)

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Last year the U.S. was the least riskiest place in the world to open a data center, according to a study released this week.

The rankings, which were released by Cushman & Wakefield, Hurleypalmerflatt and Source8, were made after measuring risks related to physical, economic and social issues in the countries. The U.S. was followed by the U.K., Sweden and Germany, while Indonesia, India and Brazil were at the bottom of the list. The study ranked 30 countries.

The issues considered for the study are usually taken into account by companies when establishing data centers. The risk index included weighted ranking of energy, bandwidth, ease of doing business, tax, labor, political stability, sustainability, natural disasters, education, energy security, GDP per capita, inflation and water resources.

The U.S. remained at the top despite natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, which knocked out power supplies and left many data centers offline on the East Coast for weeks in October. The U.S. rated 29th out of 30 countries on natural disasters and ranked last on corporate taxes, but the establishment of data centers continued to grow as mobile device shipments increased and companies increasingly deployed public and private clouds.

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Improvements to Nvidia’s virtualization technology are aimed at turning graphics processors into a more important resource in data centers and could speed deployment of virtual desktops and delivery of data over the cloud.

The graphics company Tuesday announced improvements to its VGX technology, which virtualizes the GPU and makes it a resource that can be shared with CPUs and memory in servers. Hardware and software improvements to VGX will allow a graphics board to deliver multiple virtual desktops. Previously, VGX could deliver only one virtual machine per graphics board.

Nvidia

Virtualization enables efficient use of server resources in a distributed computing environment and GPUs could help cut electric bills through fast delivery of virtual desktops. GPUs are considered faster than CPUs in some cases and are used in some of the world’s fastest computers for complex calculations, as well as by Web browsers for faster graphics rendering. Virtualizing graphics processors could enable servers to deliver games over the cloud and make high-performance resources available to remote users.

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Citrix Systems is making its cloud-based storage service ShareFile more Microsoft-friendly with SharePoint integration and the ability to store data on Azure.

Services for storing and sharing content in the cloud started in the consumer sector, but more enterprises are now adopting rather than blocking them. Citrix saw this trend coming and acquired ShareFile back in October 2011; it announced the latest round of updates Wednesday at the Synergy user conference.

Two of the updates are related to where and how ShareFile stores data. The service lets enterprises choose between storing user data in their own data centers; in data centers managed by Citrix; or using existing file storage systems, according to Bill Carovano, senior director of product management for Citrix's ShareFile products.

Using existing systems is made possible via what Citrix calls StorageZone Connectors. The company has supported traditional network shares, but is now adding integration with SharePoint, according to Carovano. With the ShareFile app users can, for example, find a file on their iPad in the SharePoint document library, open it up, make changes and then check it back in again.

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FreeSpace 2 and other space combat classics kept the genre alive, albeit on the back burner, for years Then indie game studio Born Ready Games came along and decided to create a modern space combat simulator: Strike Suit Zero ($20).

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Western Digital's HGST subsidiary today announced what it is calling the industry's densest mobile hard-disk drive, with capacities of up to 1.5TB in a 9.5mm (.37-in.) high form factor.

The 2.5-inch-wide disk drive contains three platters—a first for the company in that form factor and an achievement in shock resistance.

Currently, the highest capacity for slimmer 7.5mm and 5mm height mobile drives are 500GB.

The new Travelstar 5K1500 is being targeted at a variety of market segments, including notebooks, external hard drives, gaming consoles and all-in-one desktop PCs.

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