Frank Moss, director of the Media Lab, and a former entrepreneur and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) executive, said the new building is designed to foster interdisciplinary cooperation by having floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding every lab. That makes work in each lab visible from primary-colored stairways that cross the building’s soaring atria.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Big companies are increasingly hiring Xerox Corp. (XRX), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and others to provide “managed print services,” a variety of outsourcing in which the vendor takes control of the customer’s production of office documents, typically owning the machines, advising on how to use them, and taking a per-page charge.

The office-machine makers promise to cut document costs by as much as 30 percent by reducing the numbers of printers and copiers installed on office floors and desktops, replacing them with multifunction printer-copier-scanner-fax machines.

World-wide managed print services will amount to $20.3 billion this year, up 47 percent from last year, according to Photizo Group, a Lexington, Ky., market researcher. The segment looks increasingly attractive to manufacturers in a year when shipments of printers, copiers and multifunction devices are down 7 percent to $49.8 billion.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

IBM said it will build an 80 million New Zealand dollar (US$57 million) data center in Auckland, New Zealand, that will be completed in 2010.

The company disclosed that it has just completed building a data center that is twice as big in Songdo International City, Incheon, South Korea. It declined to disclose its spending on the Korean facility.

In a related development, IBM said it is opening an 80-person research laboratory in Hong Kong to develop collaboration technology for cloud-computing applications based on IBM’s Lotus software. That lab will be an arm of IBM’s 5,000-person China Development Laboratory, its largest software lab.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

While many police forces are boosting video monitoring, video-surveillance experts believe Chicago has gone further than any other U.S. city in merging computer and video technology to police the streets. The networked system is also unusual because of its scope and the integration of nonpolice cameras.

The city links the 1,500 cameras that police have placed in trouble spots with thousands more–police won’t say how many–that have been installed by other government agencies and the private sector in city buses, businesses, public schools, subway stations, housing projects and elsewhere.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Litl LLC, a small Boston company, says its eponymous Litl device is the future of personal computing. Litl is a Web computer with a full keyboard and an operating system designed for people who use online software like Google Docs and store their photos on Flickr or Shutterfly.

On its screen, a viewer sees 12 business-card-sized Web pages. Clicking on the desired page expands it to full screen, and the user can read the page, buy shoes or build a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have icons, files or menus of its own.

The device can also be flipped up into an A-frame so the screen is visible to show photos, videos or text-news feeds that can be seen from across a room.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The sale to Dassault, which makes software for computer-aided design and product management, removes one of the last vestiges of IBM’s once vast applications-software business. The two companies will retain a formal alliance in which the French company will recommend IBM services and infrastructure software.

Separately, IBM’s board expanded its stock buyback program, authorizing the spending of another $5 billion. It currently has $4.2 billion remaining from previous repurchase programs. The buyback announcement sparked a rally in IBM stock, which rose $1.06 to $121.17 in midday New York Stock Exchange trading.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The 53-year-old IBM (IBM) veteran, a senior vice president and a close confidant of IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano, was arrested last week and accused of leaking sensitive data as part of an insider-trading ring that prosecutors say is the biggest in a generation.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) is now almost alone in the market for mainframes: high-end computers that run everything from Amtrak’s reservation system to benefits payments for the Social Security Administration. Market-researcher IDC estimated that in 2008 mainframes accounted for 9.9 percent of the world-wide $53 billion server market.

Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein, estimates that IBM’s direct revenue from sales of its System Z mainframes was about $3.5 billion, or less than 4 percent, of its $103.6 billion in2008 revenue.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A service, Blog2Print, from New York custom-book maker SharedBook, prints blogs into books and says that demand has been been growing 50 percent every month, although from a small base.

“When we launched, people would say, ‘Who would want to print their blog?’” said Caroline Vanderlip, chief executive of SharedBook. But while demand was slow when the service was first introduced, she said after Google (GOOG) featured Blog2Print in a communication called “Blogger Buzz,” some 5,000 people clicked the link in 24 hours. It also works with other blog services such as TypePad and WordPress.

“It’s the modern equivalent of writing a journal in a black, bound book,” she said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Instead, they are rolling out virtual desktops–a set-up consisting of a screen, keyboard and small connector box that ties into a powerful server in the computer room that has all the software, storage and processing capabilities that each desktop user needs.

Maryland Auto Insurance Fund, an insurance company in Annapolis, Md., says it plans to replace at least two-thirds of its 600 user desktops within 18 months with virtual PCs.

Cindy Warkentin, the company’s chief information officer, estimates that the move will save costs by allowing the company to replace fewer PCs every year.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Mom may have told you not to say anything if you can’t say something nice. A lawyer who represents companies in human-relations cases said you better not say anything nice either–at least not on LinkedIn or other social-networking sites.

Shay Hable, an attorney in the Atlanta office of Bryan Cave, said she has been telling corporate clients to remind employees they shouldn’t give laid-off colleagues a plug in these online venues, because it might come back to haunt the company.

One of the first things many laid-off workers have been doing during this recession is to update their profiles on LinkedIn, a widely used San Francisco-based social network that promotes professional relationship building. One of its features is “Get recommended” where the workers can click an online button and “Have colleagues, clients, teachers, and partners speak up for you.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A slapstick Web video describing “Information Overload Syndrome,” or IOS, is aimed at getting viewers to think of Xerox (XRX) as a company that can help them manage and direct information rather than simply print or copy paperwork.

It looks like part of a trend of high-tech marketers pitching their products as cures for imaginary diseases. Microsoft recently invented “Search Overload Syndrome” — a problem that can be cured by using its new Bing search engine instead of Google (GOOG). It is spending around $100 million on the ad campaign.

Xerox is going cheap with its Web campaign. The company was once ubiquitous on television with Brother Dominic, the monk, making copies of illuminated manuscripts. Last year, Sports Illustrated rated its 1977 ad the third best Super Bowl spot of all time.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

E Ink, of Cambridge, Mass., would once have been a sure-fire candidate for an initial public offering. Its sales more than doubled to $18 million in the first quarter on the strength of rising sales of products like Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle and Sony’s (SNE) Reader, which use E Ink technology. But today IPOs are scanty, and venture capitalists increasingly look to the mergers-and-acquisitions market as their best exit.

E Ink president Russ Wilcox said after the sale announcement that it was easier for Prime View International, its Taipei-based acquirer, to raise money by going public there and in London than it would have been for E Ink to go public in the U.S. “This is an innovative way to get access to the public markets and grow the company at a very fast speed,” he said.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

For the last three years, Mr. Gantz has been commissioned by storage provider EMC (EMC) to count the number of bits created each year. And each year he reports that IDC previously underestimated the explosion of information.

This is good for EMC, but it’s probably not so good for the CIOs of the world. They’re the ones who have to find room in their shrunken budgets to buy the disk arrays to store all this stuff that’s being created by employees, customers and their devices. IDC says budgets for servers and storage are shrinking by 6 percent this year.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Literally, in fact, by taking pictures of their crimes on devices like cellphones and even posting them on the Web, thus proving their guilt. Apparently, you can incriminate yourself doing illegal things quite legally.

Money quote: “As a criminal defense attorney, it’s very difficult when a client proclaims his innocence, but incriminates himself by taking photos of the stolen items,” said William Korman.

Case closed.