ibm

IBM cons patent office about email feature then backs down

13 March 2017 by Steve Blum
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Sounds good to me.

If you’ve ever set your email account to send out an I’m on vacation and you’re not auto-response, you might have just dodged a bullet. The U.S. patent office granted IBM a patent on an “out-of-office electronic mail messaging system” that is indistinguishable from the vacation auto-responder that’s been baked into every email platform on the planet for the past 20 years.

But in a gesture of corporate magnanimity – after being roundly and justifiably ripped by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the trade press – IBM has released the patent into the public domain.… More

Blackberry finds hope for the future in its first major technology licensing partnership

21 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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Sometimes you get the best stuff at the very end.

Blackberry unveiled a new tablet device this week, called the Secutablet. With a price north of $2,000, it’s intended for a limited market but it does show that the company finally has a plausible long term survival strategy. It’s a change of direction for Blackberry, one that executives have talked about for the past three years. Instead of making devices and operating systems, they are focusing on their core competency – security – and leveraging the brand identity that goes along with it.… More

RIP STB

6 January 2010 by Steve Blum
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The set top box is on the run, harried away by television manufacturers. Toshiba sounded the hunting horn this morning, unveiling its Cell TV product line. Don’t be fooled by the name, it’s a classic case of branding in a vacuum. It has nothing to do with mobile phones. It’s a computer morphed into a set top box and wrapped with a big screen TV. The set top box is the TV.

Toshiba Cell TV
 Spot the set top boxToshiba calls the chip that powers it the Cell TV Broadband Engine, which was developed in a joint venture with Sony and IBM.… More