The usually secretive Google has an interesting and little known story to tell-- "The Story of Send," a cute cartoon revealing how its data centers process and manage Gmail messages. 

The story starts off at New York, where an email travels all the way from a PC in New York City to a smartphone in San Francisco. The email meets a variety of interesting characters (including the yeti and a vampire) before reaching that most mysterious of realms... a Google data center. 

Admittedly the animation is more than a little simplistic, portraying Google as Read more...

The W. European PC market continues to decline according to Gartner-- Q1 2012 shipments drop by -3.1% Y-o-Y and total 15.5m units, with declines hitting all market segments.

Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain are the worst hit territories. Shipments show growth in Germany (7.1%), with lower inventory levels driving growth. The French PC market shows improvement (despite a decline of -3.9%) in the professional segment, and the UK shows moderate 2.4% Y-o-Y growth.

“Consumers continue to focus their spending on alternative computing devices like smartphones and media tablets," the analyst says. The consumer segment is down by -3.8% Y-o-Y, while mobile PCs decline by -5.1% Y-o-Y.

Boston-based Eagle Investment Systems calls it the "high performance workforce."

We call it “the office of the future now.” Their company priorities shifted from employees sitting in a cube to what's happening in the virtual world. Now it's all about information flow, data, collaboration and in a dynamic, ad-hoc fashion.

Eagle sells tech software to the financial industry (and they are in the top 100 firms doing this). With about 600 employees and contractors, about a year ago they moved to a new headquarters.

That's when they changed their outlook about IT. They killed office phones. They side-railed email. Gave everybody tablets and web conferencing. They even turned the walls of their building into whiteboards for web conferencing.

In any room in the building you can actually doddle your thoughts on the wall. Then via portable Bluetooth-enabled wands and Cisco WebEx meeting, you can invite everyone in the company (anywhere ) to see and interact with your wall doodles.

According to Canalys HP takes back the lead in the WW Q1 2012 client PC market, following its getting beaten by Apple (mainly thanks iPad shipments) in Q4 2011.

One has to keep in mind Canalys counts tablet shipments in its PC shipment totals, while other industry analysts (including Gartner and IDC) do not.

The analyst says HP has a close lead on the Q1 2012 market, outshipping Apple by around 40000 units. Apple shipments for the quarter reach 15.8m, 11.8m of which being iPads. 

Canalys reports EMEA PC shipments show 19% Y-o-Y growth. Total WW Q1 2012 PC shipments reach 107m units with 21% Y-o-Y growth.  Read more...