ibm

IBM profit, revenues hold up in tough quarter

IBM's fourth quarter was better than expected on both the bottom and top lines.

IBM reported fourth quarter earnings of $5.8 billion, or $5.13 a share, on revenue of $29.3 billion, down 1 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $5.39 a share.

Wall Street was expecting IBM to report fourth quarter earnings of $5.25 a share on revenue of $29.08 billion. For 2012, IBM reported earnings of $16.6 billion, or $14.37 a share, on revenue of $104.5 billion, down 2 percent from a year ago.

Overall, IBM weathered … Read more

IBM crowned patent king for 20th year in a row

IBM has always been known for raking in more U.S. patents than any other company, but this year signals a landmark: not only is it IBM's 20th consecutive year of earning more patents than any other company, it also made a single-year record with 6,478 issued patents, according to the annual tally published today by IFI Claims Patent Services.

"We are proud of this new benchmark in technological and scientific creativity, which grows out of IBM's century-long commitment to research and development," IBM chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty said in a statement. "Most … Read more

Crave Ep. 104: Bluetooth toilet humor

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On this week's show, we check out Tailly, a wearable robotic tail that wags when you get excited. If that gets you wagging, then you'll definitely want to have a look at the Satis Bluetooth toilet that can flush with your smartphone. And in honor of winter, we look at how a snowflake is born. It's the last show of 2012, and we bid you farewell until the new year. The show returns on January 18. … Read more

IBM imagines a computer that smells your illness

For the past several years, IBM's research arm has been making predictions about emerging technologies that will change our lives over the next five years. Dubbed "5 in 5," the annual year-end list has already accurately predicted the rise of now-familiar cultural touchstones like Siri, as well as our reliance on smartphones for everything, and real-time speech translation.

This year, IBM has taken a more in-your-face approach to predicting the future of innovation, by specifically focusing on, well, the face and the five senses that make their home there (and yes, hands and everywhere else in the case of touch).… Read more

IBM research honcho: From the Pentagon to the 'toy shop' (Q&A)

Since September 11, 2001, the American security apparatus has been focused largely on stopping terrorists from striking again. But some feel a more pressing danger may be that of cyber attacks, digital hacks that disable critical infrastructure and bring society to a crawl.

As the U.S. government has tried to shape its approach to such attacks, President Obama and the secretary of defense have relied on contributions from a number of people in the Pentagon and elsewhere for ideas on how to stop bad actors, be they from national governments or small terrorist groups. Among them was Assistant Secretary … Read more

IBM pushes silicon photonics with on-chip optics

IBM has advanced the technology of silicon photonics, fabricating a microchip that has built-in components to send and receive data over optical links.

Researchers have built optical data links into chips before, but IBM's move is notable because it uses conventional chipmaking equipment geared for chips with 90-nanometer features. Today's chips use metal wires to exchange data, but optical links offer the potential of higher transfer speeds over longer distances.

The chip can include several optical components including wavelength division multiplexers that let the chip send and receive signals with multiple frequencies of light, an approach that lets … Read more

My Best Tech Gift Ever: A 133MHz IBM PC 350

Every day this week, a different CNET writer or editor is recalling a tech or geek-centric present that left a mark. Read past stories by Eric Mack, Jeff Sparkman, Jay Greene, and Dan Ackerman, and look for another installment tomorrow at midnight PT.

On a chilly autumn day in 1997, I came home from school to find that my mom had a brand-new IBM PC 350 in her office. It was an astonishing computer, especially considering our previous machine was a DOS/Windows 3.1 slowpoke that could barely run Wolfenstein 3D.

For its time, the PC 350 had it all -- a screaming Pentium 133MHz processor, a 1.6GB hard drive, 64MB of RAM, and 4MB of video memory. Though my mom bought it for the household and not for me exclusively, it was the best tech gift I ever got, as it truly turned me into a geek and gamer (and therefore the person I am today). … Read more

Cyber Monday crowned biggest Web shopping day in U.S. history

Cyber Monday this year took the trophy for the biggest online shopping day ever in the U.S.

ComScore reported that U.S. online spending on Cyber Monday 2012 reached $1.465 billion, up 17 percent from a year ago, "representing the heaviest online spending day in [U.S.] history and the second day this season (in addition to Black Friday) to surpass $1 billion in sales."

Breaking the total down, ComScore said that the top category for sales was digital content and subscriptions (up 28 percent), followed by consumer electronics (up 24 percent and "buoyed by … Read more

Titan steals No. 1 spot on Top500 supercomputer list

Predictions that Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer had become the most powerful machine in the world have turned out to be right.

The machine, powered by Nvidia graphics processors and Advanced Micro Devices computer chips, stole the No. 1 spot on the Top500's list from another U.S. machine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia.

Sequoia, which uses processors from IBM, became the top computer in June with a performance of 16.32 petaflops a second. Titan beat that showing, sending Sequoia to second place on the list, with a result of 17.59 petaflops per second. … Read more