Business Tech

The online retail trade in both the U.S. and Western Europe is in store for double-digit growth over the next five years, according to Forrester Research.

The U.S. online retail business is likely to grow 10 percent a year compounded annually, reaching $249 billion by 2014, according to the report "US Online Retail Forecast, 2009 To 2014," released Monday. Online firms in Western Europe, meanwhile, are eyeing an 11 percent annual gain over the next five years, hitting 114 billion euros ($155.7 billion) by 2014, according to a second Forrester report out Monday, "Western … Read more

The World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees development of Hypertext Markup Language and several other standards related to the Web, has a new leader who wants to streamline some of the group's standardization efforts and beef up its ties with outside programmers.

Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology officer until late January and a former executive at IBM and Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, was named W3C's new chief executive officer on Sunday. In his new position, Jaffe will work with W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, who first proposed the idea of the Web more than 20 years ago.

"… Read more

Best Buy is showing a MacBook Pro page with an Intel Core i7 chip logo. Is Best Buy trying to tell us something?

Though undoubtedly a mistake, Best Buy may be telegraphing Apple products to come. The Web page is here as of 6:30 p.m. PST on Sunday.

Apple aficionados have been waiting patiently for Apple to update its MacBook Pro line with Intel's latest and greatest Core i series of processors, including the mobile Core i5 and i7, which were rolled out at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

The mobile i5 and i7 chips are … Read more

As the Apple iPad and its A4 chip get ready to ship on April 3, the competition is not standing still--and, by all appearances, there's plenty of it.

As reported back in January, the A4's central processing unit, or CPU, design, as it stands now, is thought to be based primarily on technology from U.K.-based ARM. Linley Gwennap, who is the president and principal analyst of The Linley Group, believes the A4 uses a fairly common ARM CPU designed by Intrinsity and manufactured by Samsung.

Where Apple, instead, may have chosen to enhance the A4's … Read more

Intel Executive Vice President David "Dadi" Perlmutter said at an investor conference this week that laptop graphics performance is not that important, while offering a backhanded compliment to rival Advanced Micro Devices' technology. He also addressed the competition from ARM chip suppliers in the phone market.

Perlmutter, one of the highest ranking Intel executives, was speaking at the 2010 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. His comments were streamed on Intel's Web site.

Responding to a question about whether graphics technology is becoming more important, Perlmutter said, "When people think about graphics, they think about 3D war games and more realism. I'm not going to dismiss this, but (this market) attracts a relatively small amount of people." Making comments a few minutes later, he said: "I think what a significant portion of consumers really want is media." He added that more time is spent watching and editing video on laptops and that gaming was less of a factor.

Perlmutter continued, "I don't think who has better graphics makes a huge difference...the functionality beyond graphics is what's important," he said, adding that integrating more functions into the main processor and battery life is more important.

While discounting the paramount importance of graphics, he paid a compliment to Advanced Micro Devices' integrated graphics technology. "And to be fair, in the past few years, other than this year, AMD with ATI had a better integrated graphics solution than Intel," he said. Integrated graphics is a low-end graphics function that's typically built into the chipset, which accompanies the CPU. Integrated graphics is used widely in laptops because it offers good-enough performance and, more importantly, is very cheap.

ARM and the tablet Responding to another question, he also addressed the tablet market, best represented by Apple's iPad, and competing ARM processor suppliers, represented by companies such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Nvidia. "This is a very tough answer to give. (Everyone) is anxious to see if (tablet suppliers) develop a new usage model around the tablet," he said,… Read more

A bug in Thursday's update to the development build of Google Chrome renders it incompatible with Gmail offline. Users who've had Gmail and Chrome configured for offline use will find that Chrome crashes as soon as you log in to Gmail. The problem affects all development versions of the browser.

Right now there are only two ways around the bug. You can disable offline mode in Chrome by going to Options/Under the Hood and clearing out the Gmail-related entries under ''Change Gears settings''. This will delete all offline data from Gmail that you've saved on your … Read more

The biggest news in the tech world this week could be read first on court dockets.

Apple is suing phone maker HTC and has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission, alleging that the Taiwanese company is infringing 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone. The patents that Apple alleges HTC is infringing are related to the iPhone's graphical user interface and the iPhone's underlying hardware and software design.

The company is asking for a permanent injunction, which would prevent HTC from importing and selling infringing devices in the United States. Apple also said it … Read more

Unhappy with their lot, six of seven second-tier browsers have petitioned regulators for increased prominence on the screen that gives Windows users in the European Union a choice of browsers besides Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The browser makers on Thursday sent a petition to Neelie Kroes, a European Commission vice president, and other regulators who have been dealing with the browser-choice technology that Microsoft has begun distributing to millions in Europe as part of an antitrust case against the software company. The top five browsers dominate the market, but more obscure browser makers hope the EU antitrust action will grant … Read more

The first version of the BlackBerry Storm was widely panned for its shortcomings, but the Storm 2 has its own set of flaws, based on my extended use of the phone.

The updated Storm was announced back in October of last year so the phone has been out there for a while. And long enough for me to realize that it has a couple of fairly serious issues--at least the particular phone that I use does.

Let me be clear, I am a longtime user of both the original Storm and now the Storm 2. And I actually had fewer complaints about the original, frequently criticized Storm than the relatively well-received Storm 2.

Buttons: What's my beef? The most persistent problem is with the four buttons at the base of the screen (see photo). Simply put, sometimes the buttons don't work. This can be an annoying problem because these buttons must be used constantly.

As one example, the buttons used to make and end a call often don't work. Only after poking repeatedly on a precise location on the button (or tapping on the main screen, then tapping the button) can I make or end a call.

Again, that's only one of the more pesky problems but there are more examples of other buttons not working. And, in my experience, the problem is only fixed temporarily by rebooting the phone. That is not an acceptable solution for me since… Read more