SPDY, a Google project to try to speed up the Web, is gaining new allies interested in using it as a basis for rebuilding a fundamental Internet technolog that's remained largely unchanged since 1999.

SPDY reworks HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol by which Web browsers request Web pages and by which Web servers deliver those pages over the Internet. Every time you load a Web page, you use HTTP or its securely encrypted sibling, HTTPS. An upgrade would bring improvements to a vast number of people -- but on the flip side, making changes to something so basic and … Read more

Think 2.5-inch spinning hard disk drives are slow compared with the solid-state variety? Not always, Toshiba seems to be saying with today's announcement of drives that top 10,000rpm.

Toshiba launched four 2.5-inch HDDs, ranging up to 900GB in capacity, that boast speeds of 10,500rpm.

That's faster than the 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm 2.5-inch HDDs typically found in laptops.

The internal transfer rate for Toshiba's AL13SEB900 family of HDDs is 286 MB/s (megabytes per second), a boost of approximately 32 percent over the previous generation of drives "due to improved liner recording density," according to Toshiba.

Though slower than the fastest solid-state drives on the market, that kind of transfer rate approaches some less-expensive SSDs in speed. … Read more

Organizations around the world will collectively spend more than $3.6 trillion on IT products and services, Gartner said today.

That sounds like a healthy chunk of change, but it marks only a 3 percent increase from last year when spending totaled around $3.5 trillion. Still, Gartner's latest forecast is a bit more optimistic than the 2.5 percent rise it projected last quarter.

"While the challenges facing global economic growth persist -- the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China -- the outlook has at least stabilized," Richard Gordon, a research vice … Read more

Sales of pricey ultrabooks are up at retailers, a market research firm said, indicating that skinny laptops may be competing directly with Apple's MacBook line.

First, the bad news: the overall Windows market for notebook PC sales at retail fell by 17 percent in the first five months of the year, according to Stephen Baker, an NPD Group analyst, who published a research note Thursday.

The good news: sales of ultrabooks -- thin, light laptops that compete with the MacBook Air -- are up in the premium market segment. Those priced at more than $900 jumped 39 percent compared … Read more

Google will launch a $199 tablet this week at its developers conference co-branded with Asus, Bloomberg is reporting.

This follows a series of reports that have been trickling out for months about a 7-inch Nexus tablet being developed with Asus. The tablet is slated to debut at the Google I/O conference that starts Wednesday.

The one feature garnering the most attention is price. At $199, the Google tablet is $200 less than Apple's $399 iPad 2.

Previous reports have claimed the Nexus device will sport the Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" operating system, a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 … Read more

Parts of Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage on Thursday that led to a spread of high-profile sites clocking off the Web for the evening.

Amazon was quick to update its cloud status -- its first update at 8:50 p.m. PT -- stating the problems were due to a power outage in a Virginia data center.

At 3:26 a.m. PT Friday, the company said that the problem had been resolved and that service was again operating normally. It also advised: "Customers with impaired volumes may still need to follow the instructions above to recover … Read more

Microsoft will announce its own tablet next week at an event in Los Angeles, according to reports, taking a page from Apple's playbook.

If true, this is not the typical Microsoft business model; usually it leaves device announcements to device makers. The PC industry is the classic example of this.

And, so far, that has been the case for Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets. Companies like Acer and Asus demonstrated Windows 8 tablets and hybrids at Computex last week, for instance.

But a report at The Wrap and another at AllThingsD say Microsoft has other plans.

Microsoft reportedly … Read more

IDC has updated its tablet forecast, raising Apple's iOS share at the expense of Android, while RIM's Blackberry fades to irrelevance.

IDC now expects iOS to grab 62.5 percent of the tablet market in 2012, up from 58.2 percent in 2011. Meanwhile, Android's share will slip to 36.5 percent from 38.7 percent in 2011.

And where does that leave BlackBerry? Virtually nowhere. RIM's tablet platform fades to 1 percent of the market in 2012, down from an already-tiny 1.7 percent share in 2011.

The market researcher is not currently forecasting Windows 8 or Windows RT tablets … Read more

NEW YORK--Industry consortia are pervasive. But they often don't amount to much -- a spate of press releases, a series of progressively less energetic meetings making little progress, and the eventual fade to black. And even most successful consortia tend to be about vendors cooperating on specific standards and technologies. Important, but very limited in scope.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has been an exception. It announced in October of 2010 with a membership including more than 70 global IT leaders, representing $50 billion dollars in annual IT spend. Intel has been the organizing force and is the … Read more