Lynch

At what age did you start thinking about sound?

Most folks rarely focus on music; it's background to other activities like talking, reading, working, exercising, and so forth. They don't really think about sound that much, as long as it's loud enough, or they can follow the dialogue, or there's enough bass, they're happy. Audiophiles are more likely to really listen, so we care about how our music or home theater sounds. The more you listen, the more you hear, and the opposite is also true.

I always liked music, but it was the sound of Jimi Hendrix's guitar feedback and distortion that … Read more

HP sidesteps Autonomy drama; Israel-Palestine makes news

Give Hewlett-Packard's management credit for keeping the company's annual shareholders meeting as uneventful as possible. Considering the soap opera drama leading up to today's event, that was no mean feat.

Earlier in the day, Autonomy founder Mike Lynch published an open letter, suggesting questions that shareholders ought to ask of management in connection with the allegations that HP made against Autonomy after paying $11.1 billion to buy the software company. In November, HP shocked Wall Street when it took an $8.8 billion accounting charge related to the acquisition. At the time, the company said that … Read more

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch resigns, headed for Apple

Adobe Systems Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch announced plans today to leave the company and is headed for Apple to become its vice president of technologies.

Adobe says it's not replacing the CTO position, and instead is assigning those responsibilities to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and SVP Bryan Lamkin.

News of the resignation came inside of a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, though not the move to Apple, which was reported earlier by CNBC.

From Adobe:

Kevin Lynch, Adobe CTO, is leaving the company effective March 22 to take a position at Apple We will … Read more

HP's Autonomy acquisition probed by U.K. regulators

Hewlett-Packard has a way of quietly announcing its dealings with Autonomy in its annual and quarterly regulatory filings.

In its quarterly report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today, the company announced that the U.K. Serious Fraud Office has launched an investigation into the alleged irregularities of HP's acquisition of Autonomy.

Here's what HP wrote in its filing:

As a result of the findings of an ongoing investigation, HP has provided information to the U.K. Serious Fraud Office, the U.S. Department of Justice and the SEC related to the accounting improprieties, disclosure failures … Read more

Barnes & Noble CEO not much into physical books anymore

Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch has a big hand in shaping the sales of books, both physical and digital. He also has a confession to make.

"I don't really read physical books that much anymore," Lynch told Bloomberg's Nicole Lapin. Lynch was dishing on what he's reading on his Nook right now, including Food & Wine and Field & Stream magazines. Fortunately for physical books, Lynch's wife is still a big fan of paper.

The migration away from physical media isn't new, but it still feels a bit strange to hear the CEO of a massive physical bookstore chain fess up about his preference for e-books. He also admitted to not being able to finish "Fifty Shades of Grey," for what that's worth.… Read more

Hewlett-Packard just whacked the wrong executive

If Meg Whitman has a clue about how to restore a one-time Silicon Valley legend, she's doing a great job of keeping the plan to herself.

Nine months after her appointment as Hewlett-Packard's CEO, the Whitman era began in earnest today with the announcement that HP would fire 27,000 employees.

Twenty seven thousand employees.

And among the casualties is one Mike Lynch, the brilliant English computer scientist who founded Autonomy, a company once described by the Financial Times as "the doyen of European software." Autonomy's software sifts through and categorizes patterns found in unstructured … Read more

How Carrier IQ was wrongly accused of keylogging

In just a handful of days, a startup company named Carrier IQ has been subjected to extraordinary public vilification, with reports accusing it of making a "rootkit keylogger" that "creeps out everyone" or is the "rootkit of all evil."

The only problem, which is always a risk when a public lynching takes place, is that Carrier IQ appears to be not guilty of the charges lodged against it.

The most serious charge against Carrier IQ, a venture capital-funded startup in Mountain View, Calif., that makes diagnostic software for carriers, has been that it records … Read more

Autonomy's wizardry: Bringing still images to virtual life

Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch took to the stage of at Techonomy 2011 and gave a glimpse of some amazing stuff that phones and tablet cameras will soon be able to do.

Autonomy, which Hewlett Packard just acquired for almost $12 billion, bills itself as a leader in "meaning based computing," a tagline that's easy to dismiss. Then Lynch brought out an iPad to demonstrate Autonomy's technology, and he wowed the audience. And this was a jaded crowd, folks.

Lynch had an assistant hold up poster-size images--an ad for a Harry Potter move, a front page of … Read more

Adobe: Expect location-linked mobile apps

LONDON--In the future, somebody walking into a hotel room or a museum will get the opportunity to install an app for that location, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch predicted.

The idea, which Lynch demonstrated at the Open Mobile Summit here to show just how feasible it is, stems from the ever-tighter links between the physical and virtual worlds we inhabit. And it shows that there's still plenty of room for mobile devices to become even more important in people's lives, as if there were any doubt.

"There's a strong future for us with this social- … Read more

Aurasma brings static objects and images to life (podcast)

Imagine aiming a smartphone or a tablet at a cereal box and, instead of seeing the static image printed on the box, you see an animated feature appear as if it's playing on the front of the box. The same technology could be used to turn a picture in a printed newspaper into a video or--if pointed toward a product--it could launch a game featuring animated characters interacting with that product.

That's the aim of a new technology being introduced by Autonomy, the London-based company best known for its enterprise software.

Aurasma, which is a core technology designed … Read more