If your company hasn’t yet embraced BYOD (bring your own device), there’s a good chance it will soon. Gartner has predicted that 90 percent of all companies will support BYOD by 2014, and recently projected that half of all companies may actually require users to participate in BYOD plans by 2017.

BYOD offers a variety of benefits for both the employee and the employer. The employee gets to use the platforms and devices she is most comfortable with and has consistency between work and home. The employer reduces its burden to purchase or maintain the equipment. Surveys show that employees work an average of 240 more hours per year under BYOD.

BYOD also introduces some concerns. Companies have to determine how to give employees access to the applications and data they need on their mobile devices, while also protecting and securing sensitive data.

Challenges of BYOD

Software used by the company—whether it’s custom applications, software specific to a given industry, or just Microsoft Office—can be installed and used on employee-owned laptop PCs, but it will require purchasing additional licenses in many cases. When it comes to tablets and smartphones, though, users are forced to find suitable alternatives that offer varying degrees of compatibility and synchronization.In order for employees to be productive using their own laptops, tablets, and smartphones, they need the right tools and the ability to access data. However, most of the software users rely on to get work done doesn’t have a mobile app equivalent, and accessing data while on the go can be complicated.

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Intel CEO Brian Krzanich admitted Thursday in his first speech in that role that the company has been weak in smartphones and tablets, but aims to improve by advancing chip and manufacturing technologies.

Intel’s main focus is to produce more power-efficient chips, as it also adds features for connectivity and security, Krzanich said during a speech at the annual shareholder meeting in Santa Clara, Calif.

“We see that we’ve been a bit slow to move in the space,” Krzanich said of the mobile market. “We’re well positioned already and the base of assets we have will allow us to grow much faster in the area.”

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Spiceworks has teamed up with Fiberlink to add mobile device management functionality to the next version of its free network and IT management software.

As the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) trend accelerates, IT departments are seeking ways to remain in control while letting employees use their own smartphones or tablets for work. Spiceworks is hoping to help by integrating Fiberlink’s MaaS360 directly into its software, which is also called Spiceworks.

There is a large interest is mobile device management; when Spiceworks asked its users if they were interested, the overwhelming verdict was to integrate the functionality, the company said in a blog post on Thursday.

The ad-funded Spiceworks software is today used by IT staff to discover what’s happening in their network, including whether employees are using applications such as Dropbox and Evernote. It also includes a help desk and a crowd-sourced knowledge base.

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The European Union is preparing to investigate the imports of mobile networking gear from China for anti-competitive practices, a move that’s likely targeted at telecommunications equipment companies Huawei Technologies and ZTE.

China has also warned the EU against any protectionist or restrictive measures.

The investigation will focus on China’s alleged dumping and subsidizing of telecommunications-related products, EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Cucht said in a statement on Wednesday. No companies were specified, but the commission had reportedly determined last year that both Huawei and ZTE received preferential financing from the Chinese government.

The European Commission, however, will first try to negotiate with Chinese authorities to reach an “amicable solution” before launching the investigation. It estimates that Chinese exports of telecommunications equipment to the EU reach a value of over €1 billion per year.

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Salesforce.com wants to simplify the way mobile users find, access and share files from its Chatter enterprise social networking (ESN) application.

A new version of the Chatter mobile application for iOS and Android tablets and smartphones adds a central container of all files stored in Salesforce.com to which users have access.

Until now, users of the Chatter mobile application had to fish around on their newsfeeds and other places to locate CRM (customer relationship management)-related files they wanted to share with colleagues or partners.

“For the first time, users of Chatter’s mobile app will have a single repository for all their Salesforce.com files,” said Michael Peachey, senior director of solutions marketing at Salesforce.com.

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It looks like Groupon is adding yet another mobile payments solution to the already crowded space that includes its own Groupon Merchants app for iPhone and Android. as well as competitors such as Square and PayPal Here.

An iPad app called Groupon POS earlier today briefly landed in the iTunes store before it disappeared. Now if you click on a link pointing to it from various media outlets you’ll only receive a message that says “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the U.S. store.”

What’s behind its removal is anyone’s guess (a horrible name, perhaps?) and Groupon hasn’t officially announced it. Before it went missing, the Groupon POS app description said it “works for a wide variety of merchants from cafes and delis, to salons, spas and florists,” reported TechCrunch, which said it looked like a more simple and generalized version of Breadcrumb, a restaurant-centered iPad payments solution Groupon acquired last year.

You can expect a Groupon app for tablets to reappear because of the kind of traction Groupon is getting in mobile. In a recent earnings report the company said that 45 percent of North American transactions occurred on mobile devices, compared with only 30 percent a year earlier.

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Canonical on Wednesday announced its next moves on the way to market with a Linux-powered phone.

By the end of this month Canonical plans to equip its employees with early versions of its widely hyped “Ubuntu phone” for testing and refinement.

“We should drive as hard as we can to making it so that we can use our phones with Ubuntu Touch as our real daily phones as soon as possible,” said Rick Spencer, Canonical's vice president of Ubuntu engineering, in a Wednesday blog post. “Really eat our own dog food, so to speak.”

'User data is retained'

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SearchYourCloud, which provides a single search interface to find documents stored on a desktop or several cloud-based services, expanded on Tuesday to include Box.

Access to Box is being included in a new version of the SearchYourCloud client software that is being launched the same day for Windows, iPhone and iPad platforms. The software, from U.K.-based Simplexo, already works with DropBox, Exchange, Outlook.com and SharePoint documents.

“It’s a one-stop shop to find the document you need,” said Michael Judd, vice president of product development, in an interview.

The software works by accessing a user’s cloud storage accounts and indexing the contents. Local files on a hard disk are also indexed, providing a single interface from which to search both offline and online files.

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Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates stuck to the company line on tablets Monday, and disparaged rival Apple’s iPad for its lack of a keyboard and its inability to run Office.

In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” program, Gates, who appeared alongside his friend and fellow billionaire, Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Gates was asked about the PC sales slump and the concurrent rise of tablets.

But if viewers were hoping for some new insight into Microsoft’s strategy, they were to be disappointed, as Gates essentially parroted what others at the company have said previously.

Wikimedia Commons/World Economic Forum

“[Windows 8] takes the benefits of the tablet and benefits of the PC, and it’s able to support both of those,” said Gates, repeating the messaging Microsoft CEO Steve Baller and Tami Reller, CFO and head of marketing for the Windows division, have used numerous times.

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Windows RT tablets grabbed just 0.4 percent of the tablet market in the first quarter, a dismal result that led some tech experts to urge Microsoft to scrap the platform that's in its six-month infancy.

"I wouldn't be surprised if they do streamline and do drop [Windows RT]," said Brian Proffitt, an adjunct instructor of management at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business , in an interview. "Microsoft is going to remain heavily invested in its Surface tablet strategy, but that doesn't preclude them from making changes and cutting. Cutting Windows RT would be a smart move, unless the number of shipments suddenly improves."

Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, was more blunt: "I believe Microsoft would be much better off killing RT and going with one unified tablet OS [with Windows 8]. The need to support ARM [processors] was why Microsoft went with RT. But it never really worked that well."

IDC said last week that just 200,000 tablets running Windows RT, including Microsoft's own Surface RT, shipped in the first quarter, which was 0.4 percent of the total market of 49.2 million tablets. Windows RT tablets first started shipping late last October, although Samsung early on decided not to ship a Windows RT tablet in the U.S.

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Retailers share part of the blame for poor Windows 8 sales and the ensuing decline of PC shipments, analysts contended today.

Microsoft’s radical overhaul of Windows has been cited by some to explain plummeting PC shipments, but the very organizations whose best interest is served in selling those systems were at least partly at fault.

“Windows 8 brought a brand new UI [user interface] that had not fundamentally changed since DOS,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in a blog post Tuesday. “[So] how did big-box retail respond? The same way they have for the last 20 years.”

Moorhead was critical of big retailers—Best Buy is the largest in the U.S.—for not modifying how they sold PCs when Windows 8 landed on their stores’ shipping docks.

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Microsoft may be revealing the second generation of its Surface tablets during its developers’ conference next month, according to a printed report.

The new devices will have 7- to 9-inch screens and will rely on the same vendors that provided components for the first generation, according to DigiTimes, which attributed its story to suppliers. Microsoft is aiming at the June 26-28 Build conference in San Francisco for the launch, DigiTimes says.

The current Surface tablets (like the one shown above) nailed down 1.8% of all tablet sales in the first quarter of this year, winning the Windows 8 devices fifth place among hardware vendors, according to IDC.

That represents 900,000 units, lagging far behind the category leader Apple which sold 19.5 million iPads and iPad Minis during the same period, according to IDC’s “Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker.”

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It’s been two years since Chromebooks running Google’s Chrome OS appeared on store shelves. So far, Google’s plan—to turn your Web browser into an operating system and websites into desktop-app replacements—does not appear to be catching on

But what if instead of accessing just websites, Chromebooks connected to a Windows desktop that lived in the cloud? Instead of having the Windows OS and all your apps stored locally, what if Microsoft hosted your Windows desktop on its servers, allowing you to access your personal “PC” from any device?

The idea is not so far-fetched.

Enterprises can already offer virtualized Windows desktop access to their employees. There are also a few third-party services like OnLive Desktop and CloudOn that can deliver the Windows desktop and/or Office apps to your tablets and other devices. You can even create some home-brew situations to access your Windows desktop remotely.

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About half of the world’s companies will enact BYOD (bring your own device) programs by 2017 and will no longer provide computing devices to employees, a new Gartner report predicts.

Ultimately, only 15 percent of companies will never move to a BYOD model, while 40 percent will offer a choice between BYOD and employer-provided devices, according to the report by Gartner analyst David Willis, which was announced Wednesday.

While mobile computing helps make on-the-go workers more productive, the average cost of more than $600 per employee per year for company-provided devices has been difficult for many to shoulder, Willis wrote. This along with other factors, such as increased employee satisfaction, has helped drive the BYOD movement, he added.

So far, BYOD adoption is most common in companies with between $500 million and $5 billion in revenue, but there are significant differences according to geography, said Gartner. The U.S. adoption rate is double that of Europe, but the highest rate is in India, China, and Brazil, according to the report.

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BlackBerry and Samsung have separately launched security and management software with dual-personality features for their latest Z10 and Galaxy S4 smartphones, both designed to meet the demands of a growing BYOD marketplace.

Yet, it still isn’t clear when either company will make an impact with either of their products—a software package called Knox for Samsung and Balance for BlackBerry.

Dual-personality software keeps personal and work data separate on a smartphone, allowing an IT shop to quickly delete sensitive corporate data from a worker-owned smartphone should the worker lose the device or leave the company.

The problems with both the Knox and Balance products apparently resides with delays in implementations of server-side software to give IT shops or wireless carriers the controls they need over users’ smartphones, analysts said.

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As you probably know, Evernote can be a huge asset for gathering and organizing information. For some businesses (including at least one real-estate office), it's the hub of the entire operation.

However, if you've ever tried to use the mobile Evernote app to assemble information from disparate sources, you know what a hassle it can be. To copy text, photos, links, and the like into a note, you've got to hop back and forth between those sources and Evernote, copying and pasting as you go.

EverClip ($2.99 for iPhone, $5.99 for iPad) takes much of the work out of the process by automatically aggregating each and every copied item, then letting you export those items to Evernote.

Once you run the app, it stays active in the background for 10 minutes, monitoring the iOS clipboard for any activity. From there you can hit up Safari, Mail, Photos, and any other app that lets you copy stuff.

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After Ernest von Simson’s book, The Limits of Strategy: Lessons in Leadership from the Computer Industry, was published three years ago, he watched major shifts occur at the IT companies he had focused on, notably the slide of Hewlett-Packard at the same time that stalwart IBM maintained its industry standing.

The juxtaposition of the two companies got him thinking again about innovation and led him to write an epilogue for a new edition of the book. “What makes for that [innovation] in a large and relatively traditional enterprise? Why is one innovative and why is the other one not?” von Simson said in a recent interview. “That was my initial thinking. I was also interested in filling out what happened with the ‘Star Walkers,’” he added, referring to Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, who are central to the book’s narrative.

“Once again, we focus our queries on the factors that advance or retard a firm’s ability to change with the technology and ahead of the marketplace,” he wrote in the epilogue. “Those factors are a combination of leadership, business model, R&D, and mergers and acquisitions.”

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Microsoft garnered just a "niche" in the global tablet market in the first quarter of 2013, following a period of user confusion after the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, analysts say.

According to Strategy Analytics, Windows 8- and Windows RT-based tablets garnered a combined 7.4 percent share of the global market in the period, with 3 million units shipped to retailers.

It is the first full quarter that Windows tablets have been compared with Android and iOS, Strategy Analytics said.

Apple, Android dominate

Apple's iOS tablets, including the Mini, led the way in Q1 holding nearly half of the market—48.2 percent—with 19.5 million units shipped. Android tablet shipments from a variety of manufacturers totaled 17.6 million, or 43.4 percent of the tablet market.

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Google Drive users no longer have to worry about accessing their documents without an Internet connection—as long as they’re using Google’s Chrome browser.

Chrome now supports automatic offline syncing for Google Drive, allowing you to read and edit any document, spreadsheet or presentation even when the Internet is down. To use this feature, you must Drive’s Chrome Web App installed, and you must enable offline access in the dialog box that appears.

Chrome previously allowed offline editing for individual documents, but that meant you had to plan ahead and choose which files to sync. Now, the Drive app for Chrome syncs all files automatically.

If you edit a document while offline, those changes will appear in the online version once the Internet connection is restored.

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As we’ve become a more mobile society—working from virtually anywhere on our smartphones and tablets—we’ve also embraced various cloud storage and file sharing tools, so we can access and collaborate on our data. Younity has an entirely different approach, and it could make cloud storage obsolete.

Is that sensational hyperbole? In a word: no. But, it really depends on your data, how you use it, and who you need to share it with.

I use a variety of cloud storage services. I rely primarily on Box, but I also have accounts with Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, and others.

I appreciate that my data synced to Box is available on my MacBook Air and my Windows 8 tablet as well as my iPhone, iPad, and other devices. I frequently use it as a means of sharing files with others—uploading the data to Box, and then sending an email link to the individuals I want to share with. The fact that my data is in the cloud rather than stuck somewhere on a local drive back at the office has been a lifesaver on more than one occasion.

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Alcatel-Lucent’s first-quarter revenue inched up 0.6 percent year on year, but it reported a net loss after making a profit a year earlier.

Sales for the quarter ended March 31 totalled €3.2 billion, up 0.6 percent, but the net loss of €353 million (US$459.6 million) compared poorly with the €259 million profit during the same period last year.

CEO Michel Combes, who joined Alcatel-Lucent from Vodafone in February, said he plans to publish the results of his review of the company’s business activities by “early Summer.” The company hopes to make between €1 billion and €1.5 billion over the next 18 to 24 months by selling off some of those activities, it said earlier this year.

Alcatel-Lucent attributed the net loss to restructuring charges of €122 million and €152 million of financial loss, among other factors.

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If you're trying to run your business without spending money on Microsoft Office, you know the occasional hassles that go with being on the receiving end of Office documents.

Google hopes to minimize that hassle with the Chrome Office Viewer extension, which makes it possible to view Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slide decks right inside the Google Chrome browser. Just a click a link to any such file and presto, it opens.

The extension is compatible with both the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome. At least, it's supposed to be. On my Windows 7-based system, I couldn't install the extension, which is currently in beta. The Chrome Web Store issued me this message: "This application is not supported on this computer. Installation has been disabled."

What's more, the handful of user reviews in the store suggest that the extension definitely needs to have its beta kinks worked out. If you have better luck, either installing or using the feature, let me know in the comments.

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AT&T has reported revenue of $31.4 billion for the first quarter of 2013, down slightly from a year earlier, although net income was up slightly, with a sagging wireline business division nearly offsetting mobile and wired broadband growth.

AT&T’s revenue was down 1.5 percent from the first quarter of 2012, but those numbers don’t count the company’s sold-off advertising solutions group. When excluding revenue from advertising solutions, revenue was up 0.9 percent. Net income attributable to AT&T was $3.7 billion, up from $3.6 billion a year earlier.

The company posted earnings per share of $0.67, or $0.64 excluding one-time items, meeting analysts’ estimates.

AT&T’s mobile division posted revenue of $16.7 billion, up 3.4 percent from 2012. Mobile income was $4.7 billion, up 4 percent from a year earlier. But the company’s wireline division partly offset those numbers. Wireline revenue was $14.7 billion, down 1.8 percent, and wireline net income fell 5 percent to $1.6 billion.

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The first two developer smartphones running Mozilla's upstart Firefox OS went on sale Tuesday morning and then quickly sold out.

Manufactured and sold by Spain-based Geeksphone, the new devices were both described as “developer preview” handsets intended for app makers interested in building and testing applications for Firefox OS.

"The Firefox OS Developer Preview Geeksphone devices have development versions of Firefox OS and are unlocked so that developers can use them wherever they are in the world and they are updated regularly with the latest Firefox OS build," explained Stormy Peters, Mozilla's director of websites and developer engagement, in a Monday blog post.

Down for maintenance

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Many business users rely heavily on Evernote for managing documents and other information, but the service's Achilles' heel has long been its lack of markup capabilities.

That's where Skitch comes in. Now owned by Evernote, this desktop/mobile app provides a simple but effective set of tools for annotating documents, the idea being to get your point across visually when communicating remotely.

And it just got a much-needed feature boost: Skitch for iOS (and Mac) now supports PDF annotation.

That may not sound like a big deal, but for anyone who uses Evernote to store and especially share PDFs, it's welcome news indeed. Now you can mark up PDFs with text, arrows, shapes and highlighter tools, then sync them back to your account and/or share them with co-workers.

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China Mobile, the country’s largest wireless carrier, reported weak profit growth in the first quarter as it struggled to squeeze more revenue out of existing customers.

For the quarter ended on March 31, China Mobile said its net profit reached 27.9 billion yuan (US$4.5 billion), 0.3 percent up on the same period last year.

Revenue in the quarter reached 134.7 billion yuan, up 5.7 percent year over year. China Mobile added 16 million customers during the period, bringing the total number to 726 million, it said Monday.

The carrier, however, said it continues to face unprecedented competition from rival telecom carriers. Unlike its competitors, the company has yet to offer Apple’s iPhone as part of its smartphone offerings, an untapped opportunity according to analysts.

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Microsoft has confirmed that smaller Windows 8 tablets will come to market in the near future. These will fill a gap in the Windows ecosystem and boost demand for Windows 8 by addressing key downsides to the early Surface tablets.

Windows tablet sales seemed to start off impressively, but the overall results so far are mediocre at best. Microsoft isn't sharing the numbers, but recent reports suggest that 1.5 million Surface tablets have sold, with 400,000 of them Surface Pro. The Surface Pro sold out almost instantly, but without actual sales data, it’s hard to know whether that’s impressive.

Windows 8 tablet failings

If one thing has hampered the success of Windows 8 tablets, it's price. The Surface RT is an impressive piece of hardware and a worthy tablet competitor, but it costs the same $500 as the entry-level model of the extremely popular iPad—and nearly double the price of the Amazon Kindle Fire 8.9 HD. Starting at $900, the 10.6-inch Surface Pro is astronomical for a tablet. Even though it’s really a tablet-ultrabook hybrid of sorts, it is perceived as a tablet.

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Web traffic generated by Google Chromebooks suggests that the low-priced laptops have failed to catch on with consumers, but those numbers may not tell the whole story about the laptop’s popularity.

Web traffic watcher NetMarketShare reports that during the first week of monitoring Chromebook activity on the Web, the clamshell devices barely appeared on the service’s radar.

During that period, only 0.02 percent of Web traffic came from Chromebooks. That suggests there aren’t a lot of the devices out there, and Google’s grand experiment with an always-on, always-connected laptop may be a bust.

What’s more, Chromebook’s numbers compared to a similar metric for the much-maligned Windows are an eye opener.

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Germany-based card payments startup Payleven is going to make its chip-and-PIN service available to individuals, the company said on Wednesday.

Payleven offers a similar mobile card payments service as the U.S. based Square. Up until now, Payleven’s chip-and-PIN service was only available to small merchants but as of Wednesday Payleven is offering the ability for private individuals to sign up for card payments in the U.K., the company said. Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Brazil will follow soon, it added.

Payleven’s Chip & PIN card reader device accepts European payment cards that have chips in them and require PIN numbers. Cards accepted include MasterCard, Visa, Maestro and V PAY cards. Acceptance of additional card schemes will be announced in the future, the company said on its website.

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Yahoo wants to accelerate its development of mobile products geared toward delivery of personalized content, CEO Marissa Mayer said Tuesday, as the company works to stay relevant in a world where smartphones and tablets are becoming dominant.

How Yahoo will accomplish that goal is not immediately clear—it has yet to announce any specific mobile apps or services it has in the pipeline—but it was an objective oft-repeated during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

But if the “how” is not clear, the “why” is more evident. Mobile is top of mind for all Internet firms, Google and Facebook included, and mobile will be crucial to Yahoo’s efforts to increase user engagement and expand advertising revenue.

By 2015, Yahoo expects more people to be accessing the Internet on mobile devices than on PCs. “This is a tremendous opportunity for us, and we’re working hard to take advantage of it,” Mayer said.

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