Apple

On Monday, Apple’s stock hit a all-time record share price of $663.23. The result was a significant event for the mega hi-tech company, but another major milestone was achieved.

The market value grew to a staggering $622 billion, which surpassed the previous $618.9 billion record held by Microsoft back in 1999.

Apple now becomes the most valuable company of all time, and is on tear rolling out millions of iPhones and iPads to a tech-starved world. At the end of 2011, Apple became the most valuable company and now is worth about 54% higher than Exxon Mobile Corp who is #2.

The meteoric rise of Apple’s stock is incredible. Back in 2004, Apple had a market capitalization value of only $10 billion. Just three years ago, Apple’s valuation was about $100 billion.

Apple’s stock had pulled back from his previous high about four months, but is on fire once again. What is fueling the recent surge appears to be the optimism of two new product launches – the iPhone 5 and a smaller and less expensive version of the successful iPad.

Does Apple’s stock price still have room to rise even further. Many stock market experts say yes. The company’s price-to-earnings ratio for the prior 12 months is 15.6. This is surprisingly lower than the overall S&P 500.

News out today that Google Inc. is releasing its very own Web browser, called Chrome. This is a long-anticipated move targeted directly at Microsoft Corp’s dominant browser, Internet Explorer. IE is used by about 75% of all Internet users.

This move by Google allows Chrome to facilitate Internet users easy access to its own market-leading search engine. Google’s lead in the lucrative Internet search market is also dominating. Their search engine processes nearly two-thirds of the Web’s queries.

Google is offering Chrome for free and will be available for downloading in more than 100 countries, but for computers running only Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Google says it is still developing versions compatible with Apple Inc.’s Mac computer and the Linux operating system.

This battle between two of hi-tech’s heavyweights – Google and Microsoft – has been going on for a while and will continue on for some time.

For the past several years, Google has been attempting to find ways of taking advantage of its search engine’s popularity,  trying to break Microsoft’s hold on how most people interact with personal computers.

To date, Google has concentrated on focusing on a bundle of computer programs, including word processing and spreadsheet applications, that Google offers as an alternate to one of Microsoft’s biggest money makers, the MS Office suite of products.

Researchers from the University of California, backed by technology titans Intel and Microsoft, said Tuesday they are embarking on a project to bring the power of supercomputers to people’s laptops and mobile devices. New research labs at UC Berkeley and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will seek to push the boundaries of personal and business computing into the next era, when computer chips will have dozens or hundreds of cores performing different tasks simultaneously.

The technology will allow PCs to “think” more like people and perform such tasks as identifying people, recognizing and responding to speech and making video games vastly more realistic.

“My favorite example is having a cell phone in your shirt pocket, kind of peeking out,” said David Patterson, who is heading up the UC Berkeley lab. “It can recognize the face of someone approaching and can kind of whisper in your ear who it is. If it’s a student you had in class three years ago, you can say, ‘Oh, hi, Bill,’ and be a social success.”

Another application could be much better voice recognition, where a laptop could record a meeting and spit out an accurate transcript. More sonically rich music could be another result.

Megan Langer, an Intel spokeswoman, cited health benefits, such as a device that could show the impact of a meal and exercise on your cardiovascular system.

“It’s really trying to address the next generation of computing and could very easily change dramatically the way we do things and what we do with computers,” said Rob Enderle, a Silicon Valley technology analyst. “From a practical standpoint, when you start talking about artificial intelligence, one of the first areas to get applied is video games. They will get more realistic, more like people.”

Microsoft and Intel are committing $10 million to each of the two campus research labs over five years. UC Berkeley has applied for another $7 million in state and UC matching funds, and an additional $8 million will come from University of Illinois.

These efforts may well fuel the continuing evolution of computing technology. Intel’s duo-core chips, now in many computers, are simply the beginning. The company’s research prototype now has 80 cores, and there is no theoretical limit to the number, said Langer. The more cores a computer has, the faster it will solve problems, say researchers.

The challenge is keeping up with “Moore’s law,” named after Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, who championed the idea of computer technology doubling performance every 18 months to two years while getting cheaper.

“The typical programmer tends to think about a problem in terms of a linear solution,” said Nathan Brockwood, a research fellow at Insight 64, a market research firm in Saratoga. “The idea of thinking about things in parallel — how you divide a task into lots of elements and make them all proceed in parallel — is something that is still alien to most programmers and even to most people who are still coming out of the universities.

“The future of the industry relies upon having more programmers that can take advantage of this new hardware architecture.”

Then computers will run cooler and use less power, enabling them to gain abilities without overheating, researchers say.

Tuesday’s announcement marks the official start of the university labs. The groundwork has been laid at Berkeley, which had a strong idea it would be selected from among 25 top-tier universities applying for the grant.

In addition to Patterson, the Berkeley lab will have seven full-time faculty members and 50 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers.

“This is a once-in-a-career opportunity to recast the foundations of information technology and influence the entire IT industry for decades to come,” said Patterson, a professor of computer science and a pioneering expert in computer architecture.

Langer said ideas could start flowing out of the labs within 18 months, and actual products might take seven to 10 years. Analysts pointed out that it takes only one or two ideas to reach success.

“You put a whole lot of very smart people looking for a solution to these kinds of complex problems together,” Brockwood said. “They don’t all need to find a solution. You just need one or two to find a solution. Once they start to make those fundamental breakthroughs … everyone piles on.

“It’s a little bit like watching ants pile on your floor and scour your food. It’s not like all the ants need to find the food. But they’ll all be there.”

Article by: Mark Melnicoe – Sacramento Bee

(Photo by: J.P. Moczulski / REUTERS/Landov)

The success story of Bill Gates is nothing but spectacular. But by the very same markets that made him rich, he now wants to overhaul capitalism. The founder of Microsoft is calling for a new economics that could help change the world.

Speaking recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates praised technology and science for making the world better, but he warned that “breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them.”

Billions of people need the great inventions of the computer age, Gates says, as well as basic services. But they can’t express this need “in ways that matter to markets.” Money talks, and they don’t have any.

Gates’s cure is a “creative capitalism” that is driven by self interest and concern for others. It means asking how capitalism could work in the poorest markets.

Companies already know how to sell luxury items to rich shoppers. To become creative capitalists, they would have to figure out how to reap a profit in extremely poor markets. Sometimes the profit would be money, and sometimes it would be in the form of recognition that would attract customers and talented employees.

What could be sold? It won’t be $300 iPods or $45,000 BMWs. Rather, companies would have to listen closely to local needs and respond. That’s what a company in India called the Serum Institute did when it came up with a way to produce low-cost vaccines for babies in developing countries. Communications companies are wiring rural communities around the globe so residents can use wireless phones and computers. Designers are creating portable light sources, and solar-power is purifying water and illuminating communities that lack electricity. And Microsoft is working on a computer driven by images so it can be used by people who can’t read.

To make creative capitalism a two-way street, Gates’s foundation is funding efforts to “help businesses in the poor world reach markets in the rich world.” One example is a program to help African farmers gain access to the premium coffee market, so they can double their incomes.

Gates adds: “I hope corporations will consider dedicating a percentage of your top innovators’ time to issues that could help people left out of the global economy,” arguing that this could be more useful than donating cash.

This promising perspective recasts global poverty as a new frontier where cutting-edge thinkers can advance global innovations.

Now Gates has to keep preaching, until more people can see what he sees. He’ll have to keep calling for partnerships among business, government, and nonprofit groups. And he’ll need famous friends such as Bono, the rock star advocate, to add the gleam of celebrity to the cause.

Opening up new markets alone won’t end global poverty. But creative capitalism could compel more people to try.  Read article

NASA and Microsoft have teamed up to give people a 3D photographic look at the space shuttle Endeavour before its launch this week, in a public-private partnership that could lead to more use of digital imagery in future space-agency missions. Full article

Another day in China, another round of adulation. Today the Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) chairman is being named an honorary trustee of Peking University. No other Fortune 500 CEO gets quite the same treatment in China.

While most would count themselves lucky to talk with one of China’s top leaders, Gates will meet with four members of the Politburo on this four-day April trip. Full article

Microsoft Corp. is beset with competition from all sides, unlike any it has seen in decades, and Bill Gates, who co-founded the company 32 years ago, still intends to step away next year as planned.

But so far, Gates, Microsoft’s 51-year-old chairman, shows no sign of fading away. One year into a planned two-year transition, there are few visible cues that he is ready to leave the world’s technology stage to devote his energies principally to the $ 33 billion foundation he established seven years ago with his wife. Full article

Microsoft’s announcement that it will spend $1 billion to fix problematic Xbox 360s seemed like a step that would assuage disenchanted customers. Nearly a month later, however, some console owners are still less than pleased. Full article

Steven A. Ballmer had an epic morale problem on his hands. Microsoft Corp.’s stock had been drifting sideways for years, and Google envy was rampant on the Redmond (Wash.) campus. The chronically delayed Windows Vista was irking the Microserfs and blackening their outlook. So was the perception that their company was flabby, middle-aged, and unhip. Full article

If the U.S. Air Force is ever ordered into a real cyberwar with a foreign country or computer-savvy terrorist group, the 100-plus citizen cybersoldiers at the Air National Guard’s 262nd Information Warfare Aggressor Squadron will boast an advantage other countries can’t match: Cyberwarriors personally built the very software and hardware they’re attacking. Full article