Salesforce, the U.S. enterprise software company, this afternoon reported quarterly earnings per share of $0.10 on revenue of $893 million for the quarter ended April 30, 2013.

That's in line with analyst expectations of earnings of $0.10 per share on revenue of $887.1 million.

Numbers to know:

• Subscription and support revenues: $842 million, an increase of 29 percent over the same period a year ago
• Professional services and other revenues: $50 million, an increase of 25 percent over the same period a year ago
• Total revenue for the quarter was up 28 percent over the same period a year ago.
• Cash and equivalents totaled $3.1 billion. Interestingly, the company raised $1.15 billion through the issuance of convertible 0.25% senior notes, due in 2018.

In terms of outlook, the company projected Q2 revenue between $931 million and $936 million, an increase of 27 to 28 percent year over year. For the fiscal year 2014, it projected between $3.835 billion and $3.875 billion.

The company's stock (CRM) was immediately down five percent in after-hours trading as investors punished it for guidance that reflects slowing revenue growth, even as it revised its annual guidance upward. Exacerbating the drop may have been a run-up on the company's shares just before the closing bell.

Chief executive Marc Benioff offered little color in prepared remarks: "Salesforce.com delivered another quarter of strong growth, with constant currency revenue, deferred revenue, and operating cash flow all growing 30 percent or more year over year."

Salesforce's performance has been mostly positive over the last four years, and it beat investor expectations 11 of the last 15 quarters, with only one major miss. Historically, it has regularly posted strong growth numbers, thanks to increasing adoption of its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud offerings.

But that progress has been eroded by rising marketing and R&D costs as the company pushes into new areas of business, particularly for Marketing Cloud, which is positioned to address companies' growing interest in marketing over social media channels.

Indeed, in Q1 the company's marketing expenses rose to $466 million (from $370 million the same period a year prior) and its R&D costs rose to $132 million (from $95 million the same period a year prior).

Box announced on its blog on Thursday it has acquired Folders, an app for Apple's iOS, which will be part of a push by the cloud service to further bolster its mobile offering.

As part of the deal, the enterprise cloud storage firm has also hired Folders' developer Martin Destagnol to help integrate his product into Box's iOS app. 

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Folders currently works on iOS, allowing users to open non-native files on their iPhones and iPads. Users can manage multiple accounts — such as Google Drive and Dropbox — and copy, move, transfer, search, sort and email files very easily. With a slick user interface and a bevy of functionality, it shows that Box is keen to increase not only its feature base with the Folders buy, but also to further bolster its user aesthetic.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Box vice president of engineering Sam Schillace said there were "many factors," but it boiled down to the "amazing impact" that the products had on the overall Box user experience.

He added that Box's mission was to make enterprise software that "doesn't suck," while making its applications as user friendly, refined, and as innovative as they can be.

The company said it has 15 million people at 150,000 businesses using the enterprise service. 

The deal, announced on Thursday, marks Box's third acquisition to date. It comes just two weeks after Box said it was acquiring Crocodoc, a HTML5 document embedding service that converts Microsoft Office and PDF files to the Web standard. 

MENLO PARK, CALIF. -- The Facebook Platform celebrates its six year anniversary on Friday, and engineers for the world's largest social network offered a behind-the-scenes look at where the infrastructure is going next.

See also: Understanding Unicorn: A deep dive into Facebook's Graph Search | Facebook translates natural language interface under Graph Search

The update, held at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters, also shed light about the company's evolving B2B strategy, which got a boost with the recent acquisition of Parse.

To recall, Facebook bought Parse, a startup with a cloud-based platform of scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers, back in April.

Specifically, Parse came with tools designed for development on iOS and Android devices.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Facebook reps asserted via email at the time that "this is an acquisition – not a talent deal."

"Facebook can become this horizontal tier that brings people to those third-party applications," Purdy remarked.

For reference, the Facebook Platform was built to enable third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Social Graph, according to Doug Purdy, director of product management at the social network.

Looking toward the immediate future through at least 2014, Purdy outlined that Facebook's Platform strategy will be held up by the following four pillars: Identity (social plugins, logins, etc.), Open Graph (Timeline, News Feed, Graph Search), Ads, and App Services.

"Facebook can become this horizontal tier that brings people to those third-party applications," Purdy remarked.

The last pillar, Application Services, is where Parse comes in.

Ilya Sukhar, co-founder and former CEO of Parse, acknowledged that developing for mobile is "really hard" given the sheer amount of devices, mobile operating systems, apps, use cases, and everything else possibly related to the form factor.

Prior to the acquisition, Sukhar explained that his startup's biggest competition came from companies choosing to build apps in-house.

Sukhar asserted that Parse's SDK is designed to make things "dramatically easier" for independent third-party developers and small businesses, backing that up by citing that more than 200 million devices have installed apps built using the Parse SDK.

With Parse onboard, Facebook will be able build up its own developer ecosystem with more tools to dish out to third-party developers (and, by extension, advertisers).

Yet, Sukhar specified that Parse will actually continue to operate independently -- to some extent at least.

For instance, even though Parse already offers the option for integrating the native Facebook Login dialog, Sukhar replied that Parse won't require developers to integrate Facebook services in the future. (For example, developers could still use Twitter for login services instead of Facebook.)

Furthermore, Parse's back-end infrastructure is based on Amazon Web Services. Even though Facebook is building its own datacenters around the world (most recently Iowa), Sukhar explained it will be "business as usual," and that there aren't plans to move.

Going back to the original core focus on iOS and Android developers, Sukhar also admitted that "a majority" of the apps built with Parse tools are not built for Facebook.

Purdy followed up by reiterating that with the Parse merger, the key is making apps "cross-platform" for all people.

Therefore, the benefits to App Services, according to the Facebook Platform team, are threefold: Developers should be able to easily build cross-platform apps. Users should be able to interact with contacts on any device, and Facebook plainly gets more cross-platform apps within its ecosystem.

"We believe that applications and application experiences that focus on users are just simply better, and we knew that we couldn't build all of those experiences." admitted Purdy.

To grasp how the Facebook Platform has grown since 2007, Purdy highlighted social gaming, citing that there are approximately 250 million people playing games on Facebook every month.

He added that more than 550 million people have personalized experiences (related to Facebook) on apps and sites each month, whether it be from sharing content or logging in to a website via Facebook Connect.

Speeding up to 2011 when the Open Graph was introduced at F8, Purdy explained that the evolution to this step unleashed new possibilities for third-party developers while enabling users to share the stories they want to share on or from third-party sites.

"We believe that applications and application experiences that focus on users are just simply better, and we knew that we couldn't build all of those experiences." admitted Purdy.

Purdy said that there are now more than one billion stories from apps and sites shared each day.

But over the last year, Facebook leaders (most notably CEO Mark Zuckerberg) have been most vocal about the mobile-first movement.

In 2012 alone, Facebook pushed out iOS 6 integration, a native Facebook login dialog, and mobile install ads.

The last of which, Purdy suggested, might present the most value of anything Facebook has released for third-party developers to date.

HTC's latest flagship device has become the first HTCpro certified device in the U.S., pitching a broad range of business features to enterprise customers.

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The company has been building enterprise-level security enhancements, mobile device management (MDM) and productivity features in order to gain further traction with its business customers — likely in order to gain some share over Apple, the current main player.

The Taiwanese phone maker continues to pitch to the enterprise market with HTCpro, a mobile solution provider for companies and their employees, by ensuring that certified devices are plug-and-play business ready. 

The smartphone, released in March, can be used with an array of mobile enterprise features, pitched at chief information officers (CIOs) and security personnel alike, such as virtual private networking (VPN) functionality that allows users to work from home and connect virtually to their offices through a secure connection.

For the IT manager, the back-end mobile device management (MDM) solution allows for secure password policies and lock-out functionality. HTC partnered with a number of enterprise-focused MDM vendors, such as AirWatch and MobileIron, in order to offer service that allows secure working at home or in the office.

HTCpro executive director David Jaeger said in prepared remarks:

As the first HTCpro Certified device available in the U.S., the critically acclaimed HTC One delivers style and substance with industry-leading innovations and enterprise-ready solutions that meet today’s demanding needs for everything work and life throws at you.

It's also good news for Google, which owns and develops the Android mobile platform included in the HTC One. Though Android remains fragmented and often a headache for enterprise IT managers, Android continues to gain momentum in the enterprise space, thanks to a burgeoning bring-your-own-device (BYOD) population.

Apple's iOS 6, the latest iPhone and iPad operating system was the latest major platform to be certified as FIPS 140-2 compliant in recent weeks. Adding yet another Android device to the mix is certainly going to give governments, above all else, something to think about when procuring new devices.

At Google I/O last week, the Silicon Valley giant announced Google Cloud Datastore, a fully managed offering for storing non-relational data.

It's based on Google's App Engine High Replication Datastore, which has been around since 2011 and now processes an eye-popping 4.5 trillion transactions per month—with 99.95 percent uptime, no less.

In a blog post this morning, the company decided to celebrate by dropping App Engines HRD and Cloud Datastore prices up to 25 percent.

For stored data in the Datastore, the new price will be $0.18 per gigabyte per month. That's down from $0.24.

For operations, write will cost $0.09 per 100,000 operations (down from $0.10), read will cost $0.06 (down from $0.07) and small will remain unchanged, at $0.01.

"Was there something wrong with it? And, do you need a replacement? We can get you a replacement, no problem," signaling to holler over a fellow colleague. But I declined.

"There's nothing wrong with the tablet," I said. "I suspect it's actually a problem with me."

Within the 14-day period in which Apple consumers are granted a stay of financial relief on their purchases, I returned my tablet not with a heavy heart but nonetheless with a feeling of disappointment in myself. It's not that I didn't like the iPad. The build quality was excellent, the software functionaliy was superb, and there was nothing but the highest of intent for burgeoning productivity potential.

It was that I simply didn't need one. And not just an iPad, a test case as it turns out, but any tablet for that matter.

Cue the back story. 

I fell into the Apple ecosystem. At first, anyway. But I don't think of myself as an Apple user. I am the kind of person who will use whatever tools that are necessary for the job in hand. It just so happens that I've become accustomed to the way these devices work together, just as other same-brand ecosystem devices do.

Almost two years ago I bought a MacBook Air. Still to this day, it has become a crucial, necessary, ultraportable laptop that has, granted with its occasional failings, has served me well. The battery life is acceptable, so long as certain conditions are met, but in spite of the likely unique gripes rather than hindrances, it's a fine piece of kit.

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But above all else, OS X was the driving force for change. Gone are the days where apps weren't available. That's the cloud's business now. And thanks to the App Store, many previously unavailable apps have migrated to the Mac. 

Pleased with the design and the quality, but above all else the OS X operating system that had become so simple to use yet powerful by design, I ripped out the cords on my desktop machine — that whizzed and whirred in the corner of my home office with a subtle yet constant background-fading drone — and I replaced it with a Mac mini.

It was all too easy. I looked for a catch, but there wasn't one. 

A staunch Windows user for my adolescent and early adult life, there should've been a level of discomfort and disconcertedness. But there wasn't. With fond memories of blue screens and translucent windows, I began to prefer a sense of simplicity.

The last step was my eventual move to the iPhone, albeit for a second time. The first was not the best of experiences but as a result of my confidence in the Apple ecosystem, I thought it was at least worth another try. And it was worth it. 

We can tick off the MacBook Air, the Mac mini — and all the peripherals to really go all-in — and the iPhone. (In between, I'd also bought an Apple TV, but it just makes sense when you're downloading TV and movies). The next logical step, surely, was to get an iPad.

With glee and excitement, I picked it up from the Grand Central store the following day on my way to work. I configured it, I synchronized my music, my pictures, apps and everything else. 

And then I went back to work. 

Not on my iPad, but my MacBook Air, which I take with me to work. I took my iPad home and it was sat there on my coffee table for three days until I picked it up again. It wasn't that I was avoiding it, and I wanted to use it, but I didn't have any particular reason to use it. 

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There is absolutely nothing wrong with the iPad. And, I suspect there is nothing particularly wrong or different with any other tablet. It simply doesn't fit into my lifestyle.

My iPhone is my primary email communication device, plus my music. That sticks me firmly in the "prosumer" category. But because of my job, I require a keyboard. Granted, typing on the iPad is not the most difficult thing to do in the world, but it's less natural than a keyboard. I'm automatically drawn to a keyboard.

That said, it's a fine device but I have, as part of my one-brand ecosystem, other devices that at least for me are better suited for purpose.

Even for "play" and non-work reasons, there was nothing drawing me to it that I couldn't already do on my ultra-portable iPhone, my keyboard-enabled yet still light and portable MacBook Air, or my work-personal life separating Mac mini that allows me to walk away from it at any point.

If I were a financier, a marketer, or an artist, a tablet may be perfect. But not for me. 

And you know what? That's OK. It's my problem, and not the fault of the tablet. 

While there's an obvious point: "Why did you buy it in the first place?" The simple answer is: you often don't know how something is going to fit into your lifestyle unless you try it first. 

There are, believe it or not, some business takeaways from this. After all, as a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) employee and a "prosumer," much of these apply to me as much as the wider general business population.

The key takeaways:

• Don't rush into a tablet-buying decision. As simple as it sounds, don't get caught up in the trends. If you're a CIO or IT buyer, above all else find a purpose for investing in tablets. Survey your staff, or monitor BYOD usage.
  
  
• On that note, BYOD should be actively encouraged first and foremost. It cuts down on IT budgets, particularly if you invest in a back-end mobile device management (MDM) solution to organize and secure those tablets. Any formal corporate tablet rollout should come second. It gives staff the flexibility to bring their own device first before IT spenders fork out precious budget for something that may not be used.
  
  
• Don't discount the PC yet. Latest market figures suggest that there is a massive consumer decline in PC shipments. But enterprise and business figures are still widely unknown. Anecdotal reports suggest that PCs are still core to desk-work productivity, which makes sense as tablets can suit one industry and not another. Also, people love using tablets for sitting on the sofa and winding down. Any decline in PC shipments in the enterprise is likely to come in the coming few years. Never underestimate the power of a physical keyboard.
  
  
• Finally, while iPads may be recognized as "the" tablet for business and enterprise customers, following successful major deployments across the banking and finance sectors — besides government, it's considered to be the most security-focused industry — but don't put all your eggs in one basket. Smaller and cheaper may be more effective and efficient, and a widescale iPad rollout may not justify the costs. Get a small test pool in order and rotate across staff to determine which device is better suited for different kinds of workers.

In a press note published by the EU executive body, the New European Industrial Strategy for Electronics will help mobilize €100 billion ($129bn) in new private investments through 2020, including €5 billion ($6.45bn) through a joint public-private partnership to support chip manufacturing.

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The logic behind the move is that the electronics sector "underpins Europe's wider industrial competitiveness [...] for other sectors, from energy to automotive to health."

EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in prepared remarks that she wants to "double" chip production to take a 20 percent slice of the global production. "I want Europe to produce more chips in Europe than the United States produces domestically," she added. "It's a realistic goal if we channel our investments properly."

The move comes just months after GlobalFoundaries chief executive Ajit Manocha told attendees at an event in San Francisco, California that on the continent.

Just recently in April, the EU sent a formal statement of antitrust charges

Intel was also fined €1.06 billion ($1.4bn) by EU authorities. The chip maker was accused of anti-competitive behavior that ultimately harmed AMD. As a result, the rival chip manufacturer suffered delays and poor sales.

Following an agreement between the U.K.'s academic network Janet and Microsoft, U.K. universities can now benefit from a private link to Microsoft's Windows Azure service.

Aimed at benefiting more than 18 million students in the U.K., the cloud-based service will allow U.K. colleges and universities to bypass the insecure, sluggish public Internet in favor of its own separate speedy and secure network.

The new arrangement connects the Janet network and Microsoft's Windows Azure datacenter in Dublin, routed through an exchange point in London, cutting out the need for data to travel over the public Internet. This opens up a number of advantages, such as using Azure's platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings.

What this means is students and academics alike can begin to take advantage of the outsourced cloud service for data crunching, storage and other cloud-based IT services over a high bandwidth connection.

The agreement between the software giant and Janet was signed at Goldsmiths, University of London, on Tuesday. 

The devil is in the details, however.

Sovereignty, data ownership concerns?

First off, there's the issue of data sovereignty, such as who owns the data and who can access it. The data is transferred to a Dublin-based datacenter, which means it falls under Irish law. The good news is that it remains under wider EU data protection laws, but simply transferring data outside the U.K. throws out yet another complicating factor to the mix over U.K. privacy laws and potentially personally identifiable research data.

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But because Azure will remain a service, therefore Microsoft as the data processor, the universities will retain hold of the ownership of the data. 

Secondly, those who have already signed research contracts with third-party sponsors may not be allowed to use the Azure service due to the conflicts between U.S. anti-terror and snooping laws and the EU-wide data and privacy laws.

Such issues relating to the U.S. Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) have been noted in the European Parliament at numerous points in the past two years. Numerous EU member states have banned Microsoft and Google outsourced IT services citing such fears, as well as major private companies, such as defense giant BAE.

Microsoft recently opened up a new datacenter in Australia, going back on its previously stated "imaginary issue" position on data sovereignty.

In expanding to the region, Microsoft admitted that data sovereignty is a "legitimate concern" for customers, but customers should nonetheless be wary knowing that as Microsoft remains a U.S.-headquartered company, it is just as subject to U.S. law in Australia as it is at home.

SoftBank plans to give the U.S. government control over Sprint's board of directors should the takeover bid for Clearwire go ahead.

First reported by The Wall Street Journal, a concession will be made to the U.S. government in light of security concerns raised over networking security. The government will be allowed to nominate one member of Sprint's board in order to oversee national security issues and ensure that the firm complies with security protocols being negotiated with federal agencies.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the publication says that the government is also hoping to be permitted the right to approve Sprint's future equipment purchases -- and wants Chinese products, such as those produced by Huawei, removed from the network of one of Sprint's affiliates, Clearwire.

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son told U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers that the company would comply. Clearwire uses Huawei radio base stations to cope with data transfer and phone calls, but the Chinese manufacturer's products are not core to the carrier's operations. Removal and replacement of this equipment could cost the firm up to $1 billion.

The U.S. government has made its mistrust of both Huawei and ZTE equipment known. The House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee released a report last year which cautioned U.S. businesses to avoid using the firm's products, citing fears that malicious code could be built into networking equipment.

Sprint is one of several contenders vying to purchase struggling carrier Clearwire. Sprint has offered $3.40 a share -- as majority shareholder SoftBank recently lifted a bid cap of $2.97 a share -- and this is the Sprint's "best and final offer." However, satellite provider Dish Networks has also made a pass for the firm, offering $3.30 a share. The acquisition would give the companies additional subscribers and spectrum resources.

Dish has also made an offer to buy Sprint for $25.5 billion.

Sprint shareholders plan to vote on the deal in June.

Lenovo has released its financial results for the fourth fiscal quarter and full-year ending March, 2013.

The world's second largest PC maker posted full-year sales of $34 billion -- up 15 percent year-on-year -- as well as earnings of $635 million post-tax (up 34 percent year-on-year), despite "a challenging macro-economic environment and ongoing PC industry transformation."

In the fourth quarter, the Chinese PC maker recorded revenues of $7.8 billion, a four percent growth increase year-on-year. Lenovo posted gross profit of $963 million and net profit of $126.9 million, up from $66.8 million a year ago -- a 90 percent rise in quarterly profit which goes beyond analyst expectations of $108.1 million. Basic EPS equates to $1.22 per share.

Operating profit in Q4 was $169 million, up 67 percent year-on-year. Operating profit for the full fiscal year was $800 million, a 37 percent jump. As of March 31, Lenovo has net cash reserves of $3.1 billion.

For the 2012/13 fiscal year, PC shipments grew 10.2 percent year-on-year, in comparison to an overall industry decline of 8.1 percent, according to the Chinese firm. Overall, Lenovo said it shipped 52.4 million PCs worldiwide, and has now snagged global marketshare of 15.5 percent.

While many tech firms have tightened their belts in the face of economic fragility, Lenovo has spent heavily on acquisitions to try and bolster its positon in the PC market. The firm has bought firms including electronics maker CCE, Medion, and IBM's PC business in 2005. Lenovo plans to battle in order to keep its top spot in the PC business, but will also focus on smart devices including smartphones and tablets as well as enterprise hardware in the future.

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing commented:

"Not only were we the fastest growing among all major PC players, with record market share, revenue and profitability, more importantly, our smartphone and tablet businesses saw dramatic growth.

In fact, smartphone shipments were 3.7 times greater than last year globally and we are now number two in the China smartphone market. This has laid a solid foundation for the successful transformation of Lenovo into a PC Plus leader. Going forward, we will focus our investments on the fast-growing tablet, smartphone and enterprise hardware areas, while working to enhance the profitability of our core PC business."

Ireland's finance minister has blasted recent a recent Congressional report which investigated Apple finances, calling the research "flawed" and insisting that the country will not be the U.S.'s "whipping boy."

Apple CEO Tim Cook testified in front of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee this week, to explain why the firm has not brought billions in profit back to U.S. soil. Congress found that Apple created a complex web of subsidiaries worldwide in order to dodge hefty tax bills, using subsidiaries ran only by executives to declare the majority of the firm's profits in countries with low taxation rates.

The finger was pointed mainly at Ireland, which allowed Apple to obtain the "holy grail of tax avoidance."

The Senate says that due to a past deal with the Irish government, Apple has paid only two percent in tax on profits of $74 billion, far lower than the 35 percent markup imposed in the United States for fund transferred back to the iPad and iPhone maker's home soil. Apple claims it does not use "tax gimmicks" and pays roughly $6 billion into U.S. coffers, but Sen. Carl Levin believes that as the Cupertino, Calif. firm is one of the largest American firms, based on the company's profit margins, this simply means Apple is one of the country's "biggest tax avoiders."

At Tim Cook's hearing, Ireland's EU affairs minister Eamon Gilmore said that the Ireland was "not to blame" for Apple's tax tactics. Now, Irish finance minister Michael Noonan has defended the country further, saying that senators have got their figures wrong, as reported by Reuters.

At a parliamentary committee meeting, Noonan claimed that repeating the accusations was putting Irish jobs at risk, and that he does not want "to be the whipping boy for some misunderstanding in a hearing in the U.S. congress."

"The central point the committee proceeded to speak of was an Irish special tax rate of two percent or less. The two-percent annual rates are got by dividing the tax charged by branches in Ireland by the entire profit of the companies concerned. This is clearly wrong and misleading."

While the Senate subcommittee railed over three Irish-registered Apple subsidiaries which have no tax residency in Ireland -- one of which that has paid no tax whatsoever -- Noonan stated that Apple simply used a tax loophole present between two different tax jurisdictions. When asked whether Apple's tax planning was akin to magic, the finance minister commented:

"Maybe there was a magician, but the magician wasn't living down in Cork. Because they are not tax resident in Ireland, they are not liable to Irish tax."

Apple is simply the latest corporation to have its tax practices scrutinized by governing bodies. In the U.K., Google, Starbucks and Amazon have come under the spotlight due to the little or no capital tax the companies pay on British soil, and opposition Labor party leader Ed Miliband has accused Google in particular of going to "extraordinary lengths" to avoid paying tax.

Next month at the G8 summit, tax avoidance is likely to be a priority topic for European leaders to debate.

The electronics maker announced today in a press release that after being launched worldwide on April 27 this year, the smartphone is being sold and shipped at a rate of four units per second.

The Galaxy S4, which is now Samsung's fastest selling smartphone to date, has smashed through previous records set by the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S2, which took 50 days and five months retrospectively to reach the same figures.

The ten million sales figure is based on global channel sales rather than purely purchases by consumers. The smartphone is currently available in 110 countries, but will eventually be rolled out to 155 countries based on 327 partnerships.

Reuters analysts believe that Galaxy S4 sales will remain strong; allowing the South Korean firm to record record earnings in the current quarter. In Q1 2013, Samsung declared an operating profit of $7.9 billion based on strong smartphone sales, but expects this figure to decline due to fierce competition within the market.

According to recent Q1 Gartner figures, worldwide smartphone sales totaled 210 million units, which is up 42.9 percent quarter-on-quarter. Samsung snagged 30.8 percent of global smartphone market share, whereas rival firm Apple accounted for 18.2 percent.

In addition to white and black, the Galaxy S4 will also soon be available in blue, red, purple and brown this summer.

While she maintained much of the optimistic rhetoric during the quarterly conference call on Wednesday, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman didn’t mince words when it came to admitting HP needs to continue working harder.

Pointing towards recent news surrounding Project Moonshot and converged infrastructures, Whitman remarked these will form the “backbone of tomorrow’s cloud.”

See also: HP's Whitman reiterates 'multi-year journey' amid Q2 revenue miss

But for the moment, she described that the problem is balancing the "power of the past" with the "power of the future" for every enterprise unit from servers to storage.

According to HP's second quarter earnings report, its enterprise services (application and business services along with IT outsourcing) revenue declined by eight percent annually while the enterprise group overall was down by 10 percent.

The latter department covers networking, business critical systems, technology services, storage, and industry standard servers revenue.

In regards to these figures, HP’s chief financial officer Cathie Lesjak admitted that the quarter was “not what we expected it to be.”

But the converged infrastructures unit was a bright spot and was up 48 percent up year-over-year.

Whitman described the converged infrastructure market as "highly competitive" with many other tech stalwarts competing for share.

"For me, this all comes down to our willingness to win, and we are committed to winning," Whitman declared.

Without specifying more details nor a roadmap, Whitman noted that HP leaders are working on "revamping business models" to give its sales teams more tools and agility to adjust pricing.

Whitman hinted we'll hear more about these particular efforts later this year.

Today's buy is Thumb Labs, a New York City startup focusing on mobile app design and development. Much like the Yahoo-Tumblr merger earlier this week, Thumb Labs offers further fodder for the validity and strength of New York's startup scene.

Thumb Labs co-founders Rich Kern and Jared Verdi confirmed the news on their website on Wednesday.

The pair explained further that they have already been working closely with another recent Adobe purchase: Behance, an online social media platform for creative professionals to showcase and share their work.

It looks like Thumb Labs resources (talent and products) will be merged with the unit for collective work under Adobe's Creative Cloud software suite.

Here's more from Kern and Verdi:

Like many working in the tech industry, we have come to rely on Adobe products on a daily basis, and have closely followed their evolution throughout the years. With the announcements at Adobe MAX earlier this month, and the launch of the Creative Cloud, it is clear that this is an exciting time at the company. We are looking forward to contributing to these efforts, as Behance's vibrant community becomes more deeply integrated into Adobe's tools.

Thumb Labs will continue to fulfill "any existing obligations" over the next few weeks. Although an exact end date has not been provided, the co-founders acknowledged that Thumb Labs will halt all independent services soon.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Investors had high expectations for Workday, and it delivered.

The Pleasanton, Calif.-based company, which sells cloud-based enterprise resource planning ("ERP") software, reported first quarter 2014 losses per share of $0.15 on revenue of $91.6 million, handily beating expectations of $0.18 losses per share on revenue of $87 million.

Shares (WDAY) were up slightly in after-hours trading.

That's a total revenue increase of 61 percent over the same period a year ago. Subscription revenues were $68.4 million, an increase of 85 percent from same period a year ago.

More numbers to know for the quarter ended April 30, 2013:

• Operating loss, non-GAAP: $24.5 million (same period last year: $18.5 million)
• Operating cash flows: $17.3 million
• Free cash flows: $15.3 million
• Cash and equivalents: $805.8 million

Chief financial officer Mark Peek said he was "very pleased" with the quarter. Co-founder and co-CEO Aneel Bhusri said the company is seeing "increased customer demand" for its wares.

Workday offered Q2 guidance of revenues between $97 million and $101 million, for growth of 55 to 61 percent. It also predicted that it would end the fiscal year with revenues between $425 million and $440 million, representing growth of between 75 and 80 percent.

The company directly competes with SAP and Oracle, and has managed to gain a significant lead over them by embracing software-as-a-service delivery of its payroll, financial management and human capital management software, rather than the on-premise approach on which those more established companies built their names. Workday has spent freely on research and development in pursuit of mobility and big data opportunities.

Workday made its initial public offering in October 2012, and has racked up losses ever since, even as the value of its shares has more than doubled, from $28 to $68. The company continues to indicate to investors that it's playing for the long term, and today's results indicate that it's headed in the right direction.

JPMorgan analyst Mark Murphy wrote this week in a note to investors:

We spoke with a couple of contacts in the Workday ecosystem and walk away with consistent conviction in the company's multi-year growth opportunity. The most important feedback is that WDAY is outpacing the entire HR industry with its pace of product development. A key partner stated that he has never seen one product stay ahead of the market and with less competition for as long as Workday has. The rapid pace of development causes our contacts to believe that WDAY will eventually close the functionality gap with software mega vendors, even in Financials.

They seem to agree: last month, Lone Pine Capital significantly increased its share of ownership of Workday to 9.35 percent, making the hedge fund its fifth-largest shareholder.

On the subsequent investor's call, Bhusri said that Workday now has 450 customers and is engaged in "heavy investment in mobile technologies." He also said that the financials market "dwarfs" the business intelligence and recruiting markets, and that BI was especially hard to predict because "customers are still understanding what big data is."

Peek focused on the value of the company's escalating subscriptions over the long run. "Once we win a customer, we keep a customer for years beyond the initial subscription period," he said.

Though the company is "mindful of the challenging macroeconomic environment and the muted [estimates] on IT spending," Peek said that Workday is focused on "market expansion, continued product innovation and growth" beyond its 1,950 employees.

"We believe that continued investment in our applications will be a key driver for growth," he said.

"The world is moving to the cloud, there's no doubt about it," Bhusri added. "We're the youngest vendor with the most mature solution."

Leading up to Hewlett-Packard's second quarter earnings report after the bell on Wednesday, analysts were expecting a mixed bag.

They got one.

The tech giant reported second quarter earnings of $1.1 billion, or 55 cents per share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 87 cents per share on a revenue of $27.6 billion.

Wall Street was expecting earnings of 81 cents a share on revenue of $28.08 billion for the second quarter.

Out of the six core segments highlighted in the second quarter report, only the software group posted a positive revenue mark as the support team was up by 12 percent annually.

The rest of the software unit along with the remaining five segments all dropped in revenue on an annual basis.

CEO Meg Whitman highlighted the better-than-expected earnings per share stat in prepared remarks:

We beat the upper end of our non-GAAP diluted EPS outlook for the quarter by $0.05 per share, driven by better than expected performance in Enterprise Services and Printing, coupled with the accelerated capture of restructuring savings and improvement in our operations.

As far as the revenue miss (and the rest of the company) goes, Whitman reiterated that HP is still in the midst of a "a multi-year journey," adding that she feels good about the rest of the year. She continued that HP is "on track to deliver on our fiscal 2013 non-GAAP diluted earnings per share outlook."

For the outlook, Wall Street predicted that HP will project a weaker third quarter sequentially with sales of $27.78 billion.

HP settled on a third quarter earnings guidance range of 84 to 87 cents per share.

For fiscal 2013, HP kept its previous earnings guidance range of $3.50 to $3.60 per share.

Check back for more on HP's second quarter after today's conference call with analysts and investors at 2PM PT/5PM ET.

Screenshot via HP Investor Relations

After a long string of high profile attacks on accounts held by government and news agencies, Twitter is finally stepping up its game.

The microblogging business is adding the option for two-factor authentication. It's quite similar to the models employed by Google and Facebook.

Twitter users can simply access their security settings to find the new feature and opt-in to require a verification code to be sent via SMS each time they sign in.

Jim O'Leary from Twitter's product security team acknowledged in a blog post on Wednesday that "even with this new security option turned on, it’s still important for you to use a strong password and follow the rest of our advice for keeping your account secure."

Nevertheless, it's a worthy (and arguably necessary) improvement for the social network.

Some of the more recent and widely-reported attacks have hit targets ranging from The White House to the Associated Press to more than 250,000 users at large earlier this year.

At the end of April, the San Francisco-based private company penned a memo to news media outlets warning that such cyber attacks would continue.

In regards to the media, Twitter added at the time that most of the security breaches appeared to be "spear phishing attacks" targeting corporate email. 

For a closer look at Twitter's new security feature, check out the promo clip below:

Image via The Official Twitter Blog

Even with Google I/O over, the Internet giant continues to update a number of its products with minor tweaks and enhancements this week.

For the business set, some of the more notable upgrades have to do with Drive and Analytics.

The Android version of Drive, in particular, is being updated with improvements for making it easier to create and access documents while on-the-go.

This includes being able to "scan" documents by snapping photos of them, which are then automatically saved as PDF files.

Google software engineer Denis Teplyashin suggested in a blog post on Wednesday this could also come in handy for keeping track of business cards. Despite apps such as Bump on the market, there has yet to be a suitable replacement for calling cards.

Android users can also adjust fonts in spreadsheets and print directly from the app through any cloud ready-printer.

As for Analytics, Google is adding new templates targeted towards retail and marketing professionals looking to keep better track of goals regarding sales and in-store visits.

Google Analytics product manager Stefan F. Schnabl explained further in a separate blog post that these updates are meant to make it easier to measure customer behavior and evaluate business performance:

For example, if purchases are your key objective, Ecommerce tracking allows you to measure sales performance. Yet sales are just one possible goal—there are many other important interactions that may be valuable to your business, such as media plays, social connections, newsletter sign-ups, a minimum purchase value, or the amount of time spent on a screen. Using Goals, you can measure these types of engagement activities and track how these interactions help you to meet your larger business objectives.

More details about setting up and using the new Goals templates are available on the Google Analytics blog now.

Screenshots via Google

The virtual desktop is on its way to being spruced up as Nvidia sharpens its focus on the enterprise.

See also: Citrix launches mobility blitz, revamps its product line | Dell unveils new virtual desktop portfolio catering to mobile workers

The visual computing technology company is getting into the action at Citrix Synergy in Anaheim this week with the announcement that its Grid vGPU appliance now supports integration for Citrix's XenDesktop 7 application delivery platform.

Nvidia reps boasted this brings the performance, stabilitity and compatibility of hardware-accelerated graphics to virtual desktop environments.

With such high-definition graphics and capabilities on tap, some of the more obvious uses cases and verticals make this combination suitable for digital content creation, engineering, architecture, and other visual intellectual property applications.

Nvidia also suggested connecting with manufacturing clients and supply chain partners as well as healthcare archiving.

While an exact date hasn't been revealed, Nvidia promised general availability will happen later this year.

Image via Nvidia

See also: SAP, EMPEA intro analytics tool for investment advice in emerging markets

At the heart of the upgrades is new BLU acceleration technology being pumped out from IBM's Research and Development labs.

Some of the new features include analytics access without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling and processing high-performance data analysis in parallel across different processors.

By adding its DB2 database software to SmartCloud, IBM boasted that both corporate and government customers could see up to 25 times faster reporting and analytics.

Additionally, IBM is opening up the SmartCloud for SAP's HANA in-memory database.

This means support for a physical SAP HANA Appliance on IBM SmartCloud for SAP's business management apps, hosted on the SmartCloud Enterprise+ cloud environment.

A virtual SAP HANA appliance is also available for SmartCloud Enterprise, but it is still in test mode.

Both the physical and virtual SAP HANA appliances for IBM SmartCloud are being sold through "bring your own license" subscriptions. Licenses can also be bought from IBM Global Business Services.