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).

The launch of Windows 8 has led to the birth of a new computer category: the tabletop PC. Whether the idea of using what's essentially a 20-inch touchscreen tablet on a flat surface will be successful is still very much to be determined, but HP is joining Sony and Lenovo in the nascent market with the new Envy Rove 20.

The Envy Rove is notable compared to the Sony Tap 20 and Lenovo Horizon for its support of Intel's Haswell processors (which could be added to those other systems, but they currently use Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs). It provides a 1,600x900 IPS display for users to tap and swipe on, along with built-in Beats Audio technology to provide superior sound. It also includes a stand so it can function as a "normal" all-in-one PC, which might come in handy sometimes because the Rove 20 weighs roughly 12 pounds.

According to Engadget, the Rove 20 will include a 1TB hard drive and 8GB of solid-state storage when it ships in July. Unfortunately, HP hasn't yet provided an official price, though it's supposedly under $1,000.

If you don't need to schlep something like the Envy Rove 20 around the house, you might prefer one of the two new Pavilion TouchSmart all-in-ones HP has also announced. There's a choice of a 20-inch model or a 23-inch flavor, the latter of which sports full 1080p HD resolution. Both offer touchscreens, though they are arguably trickier to use than if they could lay flat like the Rove 20, and will come with your choice of AMD or Intel Haswell processor.

The Pavilion 23 TouchSmart will be available on June 5 starting at $749.99, whereas the Pavilion 20 TouchSmart will start being available from June 26, but cost only $619.99 for the base configuration.

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.

It seems that while Mr. Perlow and I were at odds, readers saw sense when it came to the voting and unanimously agreed with me that the homebrew PC is alive and well, decimating Mr. Perlow.

I'm a huge fan of building PCs. I make no apologies for being a hardcore supporter of building PCs. Want to take that away from me? You can pry the #2 Phillips from my cold, dead hands!

Want to know why I'm such a huge supporter of DIY PCs? It's because I know that it's a system that works.

I've built dozens of PCs, and each one of these has outlasted any brand-name PC I've bought, and by a comfortable amount. After the initial build and testing I get several years of happy computing out of the system before it's time to repair or upgrade something.

That's an excellent track record, and it makes me more and more determined that taking the built route is the right idea.

I can't even begin to work out how much time and money I've saved from building and using quality PCs.

I've built my desktop PC systems for almost two decades, and I will continue to do so for the foreseeable future for the following reasons:

• Price: I build quite high-end systems, and these are invariably cheaper than anything I can buy with a name-brand badge on it.
• Quality: I like to make sure that my systems are built from quality products, and I can only do this by taking charge of every component that goes into the system.
• Ease of repairs: If you built it, you can fix it. No having to wait for a technician.
• Ease of upgrading: Again, I know what went into it, so I can upgrade it, and there are no warranty issues to worry about.
• Warranty: All the parts I buy come with a warranty, usually a better one than a complete PC comes with, so I'm better covered when things do go wrong.

I look at the difference between a PC I build myself and one I buy from a big box OEM as the difference between building (or buying) a gourmet burger made with care and the best ingredients, and picking one up something thrown together from a McBurger and throwing it down my neck. Sure, they both accomplish the same thing, and sometimes you just want a quick, bulk-buy burger, but it's unlikely to be a product of quality.

Same is true of PCs. There are times when an off-the-shelf PC is the best options, both in terms of price and convenience, as long as you're aware that you've traded quality for price and convenience.

That burger's only going to be around for a few minutes, after which you'll never see it again – hopefully! – but your PC is going to be staring you in the face for months, if not years, to come.

Don't you want to make the right choice from the start, and make sure you have a quality product made from the finest possible ingredients?

The PC is, at its heart, a gestalt of components that come together to serve a purpose. The idea is that you can pick and choose the right parts for the job at hand. What OEMs have done over the years is boil down the PC into generic categories such as budget, mainstream, and high-end. These have less to do with picking the right hardware, and more to do with hitting an ever-decreasing price point.

While OEMs would love nothing more than to limit your choice of PCs to a few – think what Apple has done – this is not what a PC is to me. I like being able to pick the CPU, the motherboard, the amount and speed of RAM, the graphics capability, and storage. If we lose the ability to do this, then a PC becomes nothing more than a black box, like a DVD player or a games console. And that's not a PC.

Once we lose the ability to choose what goes into a PC, then it's no longer a PC. And that will be the end of the era of the PC.

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.

On May 23, Microsoft announced the Sculpt Comfort Mouse and Sculpt Mobile Mouse, both of which include buttons to help users to find their way quickly to the Start screen.

The Sculpt Comfort mouse has a touch-sensitive blue strip running along the side, which Microsoft calls the "Windows touch tab." The Sculpt Mobile Mouse features a similar Windows button.

The Sculpt Comfort model adds support for some additional gestures which Microsoft officials believe may help users better navigate Windows 8.

As described in a new post on the Microsoft Windows Experience blog: "If you swipe up on the blue strip, it cycles through all your open Windows Store apps in Windows 8. And if you swipe down, it will reveal all the open apps (on the left side of your screen) for you to select the one you want."

The Sculpt Comfort Mouse is due out in June for $39.95 (estimated retail price). The Sculpt Model model is going to be available this month for $29.95 (ERP).

The Sculpt Comfort mouse and the Sculpt Mobile mouse both work with Window 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS 10.4 and higher. Neither seems to work with Windows RT, based on the spec information provided by Microsoft.

While on the topic of improving Windows 8, Microsoft earlier this week made available for download a really nice Windows 8 training brochure. It's a multi-page, colorful PDF that includes lots of navigational tips and tricks. I wish this had been in my box with my Surface RT....

I was once an avid homebrewer. I grew up with a love of the user-serviceable PC, to be able to understand its inner workings, to be able to do my own repairs and upgrades, and also to save money. For over 20 years I built my own PCs for these very reasons. But now this no longer makes sense.

While there still exists a cottage industry for building "White Boxes" and supporting the homebrewed PC enthusiast, this industry is not a healthy one. The homebrewing and White Box industry is on the verge of extinction.

This is because PC industry is now mature, and that a combination of factors including economies of scale in PC manufacturing by the large OEMs as well as a heavy consolidation of PC component vendors that has eliminated diversity and choice for the homebrewer.

Most importantly though, an industry movement towards integrated systems — such as accelerated processing units (APUs) and System-on-a-Chip (SoCs), which reduce the overall components required to build a PC and also a shift towards notebooks and tablets as preferred computing devices — has largely made homebrewing and white boxing an unnecessary anachronism.

There are very few advantages to building your own PC or having a reseller or integrator do this for you today. Ten years ago — more realistically 15 or 20 years — there was a healthy ecosystem of diverse component vendors as well as businesses that could competitively price systems built from scratch. They could also provide significant differentiation and value add with building systems. Part of what came along with this would be personalized support.

But that ecosystem is not healthy today, the component supply chain has become heavily consolidated, and the Tier-1 vendors can provide excellent on-site tech support contracts.

If you really prefer local, personalized tech support, there's always independent consultants who specialize in this. But many have largely ceased the practice of building and reselling systems due to the resale tax burden as well as being unable to compete with system margins sold in retail, brick and mortar retail or discount clubs, and with e-commerce direct to order.

There are also tangible risks associated with building your own PCs.

First there is the risk of a local IT firm or whiteboxer being unable to support your systems by the very real possibility of them closing up shop and you being stuck with non-retail, bulk OEM PC components with limited warrantees. While this sounded ludicrous 15 or 20 years ago, that's now a very real possibility today.

The second is being able to consistently source the same components and not being able to standardize installs and drivers. While this is not necessarily as much of an issue as it was, say, 10 years ago with the advent of componentized and scripted installs, as well as superior plug-and-play (PnP) technology in today's PC operating systems, it still adds to the support burden and it adds significantly to overall level of effort and time sink.

Why? Because you are spending an inordinate amount of time and energy on system verification rather than unpacking OEM systems from boxes and turning them on, and pushing down a standardized image with all your apps on it. Time is money. Do you want your highly-paid IT staff wasting valuable time playing PC tech, or to focus their energies in support your line of business applications and infrastructure?

You should never consider building your own PC if you actually care about the dynamics of your business and require consistent support.

You aren't going to save money, your support options are not going to be better with white boxes than with an OEM certified system, because you can get a support plan from an OEM, and you can get local consultants to deal with break-fix on simple items if the machine comes out of warranty.

And in most cases, when a key component of the system dies, it's probably simpler and more cost effective to just replace it rather than repair it due to labor costs alone.

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One could argue that there are edge-case vertical industry scenarios where an end-user or a business needs a specialized graphics or PCI card, or an extreme high performance internal storage device, extremely high-speed networking, or what have you that isn't supported in an off-the-shelf PC configuration.

There may be also be legacy hardware and peripherals with software and drivers that still needs to be supported that cannot run on modern systems, but in cases like this the business should be considering migration to rid themselves of these high-risk devices that could severely impact their business if they fail.

Industries like computer graphics, engineering, and content creation have demanding requirements that may occasionally outstrip the capabilities of what many PC vendors might offer, even with their most high-end workstations. But these are extremely rare cases and more often than not there are practical workarounds, which don't require a custom build.

I've spent a good amount of time here talking about why businesses should not build PCs. But what about the consumer?

There are no advantages to doing this today. None. Zero. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. If we are talking about a typical consumer with a capital C (and not a Hobbyist, or a Gamer) someone who browses the web, engages in social networking, and uses productivity and typical multimedia applications, and plays games casually, then you should never consider building a PC.

First of all, a brand-new PC is going to come with a Windows 8 license. A white boxer or a PC hobbyist building a system from scratch will need to buy the OEM System Builder Kit, since there is no Retail license as with Windows 7, there are only Upgrade licenses for consumers.

That System Builder license of Windows 8 will run you about $95 on Amazon for the regular version and about $135.00 for the Pro version. That's going to negate a lot of the perceived cost savings of building a box right there.

Your old Windows 7 Retail license can be re-used if your old PC is discarded, but you cannot re-use the OEM copy that came with a OEM-built system without violating the Microsoft EULA. This counts for businesses as well, unless, they have volume licenses and EAs.

And yes, my Linux friends? Building a system doesn't help you either. You can buy perfectly good Linux certified systems from OEMs and virtually every OEM system out of box that runs Windows works fine with Linux anyway, and even with the cost of that OEM license built in, you'd be hard pressed to save time, money, and frustration from building your own box. I've done this, many times.

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Homebrewing isn't dead yet

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There still remains a group of people — ones who are in an extremely vocal minority — that identify themselves as PC builders.

These are prosumers and hobbyists which, for whatever reason, have had a history of building systems and are permanently fixated in a DIY worldview who can never be convinced to buy systems from OEMs due to whatever misguided or outdated ideologies about build costs or component quality they may still maintain.

But this is such a small and ever declining portion of the PC using population and is no foundation for a PC building industry to survive on.

The meat of the issue really has little to do with the desires of homebrewers. It has to do with the component manufacturers and a shift towards mobility.

Movement towards low-cost SoC-based and APU-based devices, whether they be Ultrabooks, tablets, smartphones, convergence devices and wearables shifts computational power and infrastructure from the desktop to the datacenter and Cloud and also software from a purchased or licensed to a subscription and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model.

So building PCs will make far less sense than ever before.

Many of the component vendors who make PC parts are also moving their business models towards supporting and manufacturing the above mentioned systems and away from things like graphics cards, hard drives and mainboards, which will make building PCs that much more difficult.

We're moving towards a model where PCs are no longer going to be serviceable, whether it is a notebook computer with soldered-on everything or a PC mainboard that is simply a just a glorified SoC with onboard GPU, RAM and networking. I don't see how a PC building ecosystem can continue to be viable in that way.

And if you've walked into a typical enterprise lately, the tablet, laptop and notebook population far exceeds the desktop PC population. Let's face it, nobody is homebrewing or whiteboxing notebooks. And by the way, I consider "White Box" specialty notebook builders like Sager as pure OEMs, not whiteboxers.

I think we're also seeing a distinct movement toward touchscreen devices, whether they be on High-end Ultrabooks and Convertibles like the Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch, Asus's budget VivoBook X202E or all-in-ones like HP's TouchSmart line.

While the PC market as a whole is in decline, these form factors are actually showing very clear signs of adoptance.

If the industry trends and hard numbers are of any indication, consumers value mobility just as much if not more than the enterprise does. So the PC desktop, be it OEM or home-built, is long overdue for total extinction.

Then what are we as business owners and end-users to do?

We should be refocusing on supporting and building our line of business apps, and undergoing transformation processes that shift as much of our infrastructure to the datacenter and cloud as possible, and that includes moving desktops to VDI and DaaS. That may be very hard for some folks to accept but that is the path that has been laid for our industry going forward.

Five years ago I went through the "denial" stage. And then the "anger." And then "bargaining" and "depression." I am now in full "acceptance" that building PCs for personal and business use no longer makes economic and business sense, and with the exception of certain edge and vertical scenarios, of which there is a declining few, that whiteboxing and homebrewing is dead.

Have you also gone though the PC building grief cycle? Talk back and let me know.

The new Kinect for Windows sensor will include many of the technologies that Microsoft showed off in the Kinect for Xbox One product earlier this week. Microsoft is promising the Kinect for Windows sensor also will include higher fidelity, an expanded field of view, skeletal tracking and new active infrared -- all features of the Kinect for Xbox One.

There also will be a new Kinect for Windows software development kit coming. Microsoft officials said they will be discussing the new SDK and the Kinect for Windows sensor at Build 2013 in June, but aren't saying when the new SDK will be available.

The current Kinect for Windows sensor looks like the existing Kinect for Xbox sensor. But it is designed to work at closer range and to work with Windows 7/8 PCs.

In addition to making firmware adjustments in the current Windows Kinect sensor, Microsoft shortened the the USB cable and is including of a “small dongle” to improve coexistence with other USB peripherals. The first Windows version also modified the Kinect depth camera to see objects that are “as close as 50 centimeters in front of the device” without sacrificing accuracy or precision.

Bing is evolving into more than "just" a Web search engine for Microsoft. It's also gives the company a way to harness and make use of data using Microsoft's myriad machine learning and computation capabilities. And though it may be hard to see through all the "Scroggled" fog, Bing may be more important as a service than a "mere" search engine to Microsoft going forward.

This week, as part of its Xbox One reveal, Microsoft execs didn't call out Bing by name much, if at all. However, as a subsequent post on the Microsoft Offical Blog noted, it's Bing that provides the responses when users search by voice via Kinect for movies, TV shows and music. It's Bing that's parsing the natural-language-query commands, such as "Xbox, Snap Internet Explorer." Specifically, it's the Tellme voice technology, combined with social-graph information, plus Bing's search functionality.

A quick Tellme refresher: Microsoft bought Tellme Networks in 2007 for between $800 million and $1 billion.  Tellme provided both a "speech cloud service" and an interactive speech self-service platform that provided interactive voice response, or IVR. (An example of an IVR system is the system that provides an automated voice response when users check on their flight statuses.) Microsoft offloaded the IVR assets to 24/7 in 2012. But it kept the cloud-speech service, which it combined with other internal speech technologies. The cloud service part from Tellme is what is used in Windows Phone, the Bing mobile app, automotive entertainment systems and Xbox Kinect sensors.

Additionally, Bing did work with certain Microsoft Xbox partners, like Netflix and HBO to index their catalogs, alongside Xbox's own game catalog, so that users could search for "Great Gatsby" and see any movies, games, music or other content available through the Xbox. Bing provided the back-end search/recommendation service, starting with the Xbox 360. In a similar way, Bing indexed the Windows Phone app store to provide users with recommendations, in addition to the basic Web search it also provided.

Microsoft is promising the voice-search capability it provides with Xbox and Kinect will be significantly enhanced with the Xbox One. But that's not the only place where Bing is supposed to bring the bling.

Windows Blue, a k a Windows 8.1, has been rumored to include significant Bing improvements. In the leaked Blue builds so far, these search enhancements can't really be seen and tried. But Microsoft's Online Services Division, the unit that includes Bing and the remaining Microsoft Tellme team, has been working with Windows to build a search service that will work across devices, apps and the Web, according to my contacts.

On the apps front, the AppEx team inside Bing is continuing to develop more new Windows 8 apps that Microsoft is expected to roll out when Windows Blue is available this fall. This is the team that built the Weather, News, Sports, Travel and other apps that were preinstalled with Windows 8 and Windows RT. Officials with the AppEx team have said they're working on more, similar kinds of apps. Some of these new apps -- an Alarms and a Sound Recorder app, specifically -- have leaked as part of the Windows Blue leaks, but I am hearing there will be more.

The Bing team also is going to power the app-store search and recommendation engine that is part of Windows Blue, I'm told. But Bing is also providing the core search technology for Windows Blue, too, that will improve the search discoverability and relevance in Windows 8.

Instead of having to hunt within Apps, Settings, Mail and other subcategories, users will be able to just start typing and have the operating system figure out for what they're most likely to be searching, one of my contacts said. If that comes to pass, that would be a major improvement over how search currently works in Windows 8 and Windows RT. 

I've been asking around as to whether the Bing/OSD team might be doing anything to improve voice search with Windows Blue, given what they've been doing on the Xbox side of the house. I am hearing from my contacts the answer is no. The reason? Voice isn't so far a priority on PCs/tablets, so Windows Phone and Xbox/Kinect are where the voice focus is at the moment.

That said, Microsoft officials announced on May 23 that a new Kinect for Windows sensor is coming in 2014 and will include improved voice capabilities. So maybe that will include more Bing/OSD capabilities, too.

Our guest is Chris Haydon, Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance, and Network at Ariba, here to explain the latest conference news, and to offer insights into how Ariba will be broadening its services procurement management value, mobile push and AribaPay roll-out.

The interview is conducted Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba, an SAP company, is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Where we are now with Ariba in terms of some of the big news at LIVE?

Haydon: We have some really exciting innovation coming in the near-term to Ariba in a couple of areas. First, let's talk about Network RFQ or the Spot Buy. We think this is part of the undiscovered country, where, according to The Hackett Group, 40-plus percent of spend is not sourced.

By linking this non-sourced spend to the Ariba Network, we think we're going to be able to address a large pain-point for our buyers and our sellers. Network RFQ or Spot Buy is a near-term solution that we announced at LIVE, and we're bringing that forward over the next six months.

The next exciting innovation is at the other end of the process. That’s a solution we call AribaPay. AribaPay is what we think is a game-changing solution that delivers rich remittance and invoice information that’s only available from the Ariba Network through solution secure, global payment infrastructure.

Down market

Gardner: It seems to me, Chris, that you're going to the mid-market. You're creating some services with Spot Buy that help people in their ad-hoc, low-volume purchasing.

You're providing more services types of purchasing capabilities, maybe for those mid-market organizations or different kinds of companies like services-oriented companies. And, you're also connecting via Dell Boomi to QuickBooks, which is an important asset for how people run small businesses. Are we expanding the addressable market here?

Haydon: We are, and that’s an excellent point. We look at it two ways. We're looking to address all commerce. Things like the Spot Buy, AribaPay, services, procurement, and estimate-based services are really addressing the breadth of spend, and that applies at the upper end and the lower end.

There are important pieces that you touched on, especially with our Dell Boomi partnership and the announcement here for QuickBooks. We want to make it accessible to grow the ecosystem and to make the collaboration across the network as frictionless as possible.

With Dell Boomi announcing QuickBooks, it enables suppliers specifically with that back-end system to be able to comply with all the collaboration of business processes on the Ariba Network, and we're really only just getting started.

There is a massive ecosystem out there with QuickBooks, but when we have a look around, there are more than 120 prominent backend systems. So it's not just the SAPs, the Oracles, the JD Edwards, and Lawsons. It's the QuickBooks and the Intuits. It's the Great Plains of the world.

Think about at it as back-end agnostic. We want our customers on both the buy-side and the sell-side of their partners to make their own choices. It's really their own choice of deployment.

If they want to take an integrated business-to-business (B2B) channel, they can. If they want to come to a portal, they can. If they want to have an extract that goes into their own customized system, they can do that as well, or all of the above at the same time, and really just taking that process forward.

Gardner: How does AribaPay work? Is this a credit card, a debit card? Is this a transactional banking interface?

Brand new

Haydon: Number one, it's brand-new. First, let's talk about the problems that we had, and how we think we are going to address it. More than 40 percent of payments in corporate America are still check based. Check-based payments present their own problems, not just for the buyers, but also from the sellers. They don’t know when they're going to get paid. And when they are getting paid, how do they reconcile what they're actually getting paid for?

AribaPay is a new service. It's not a P-Card. It's leveraging a new type of electronic payment through an ACH-styled channel. It enables buyers to take 100 percent of their payments through the Ariba Network. It lets the suppliers opt in to be able to match and move from our paper-based payment channel check, to an electronic channel that is married. This is the interesting value prop for the network. That is married with their rich information.

So that’s the value. We think it's very differentiated. We're going to be leveraging a large financial institution provider who has great breadth and penetration, not just here in the United States, but globally as well, and that's via Discover Financial Services.

We announced this at LIVE this month, and I know they're as excited as we are. Discover has the wherewithal to bring the credibility and the scale to the payments channel, while Ariba has the credibility in the scale of the supply base and the commercial B2B traffic. We think that that one plus one equals three and is a game changer in electronic payment.

Gardner: Moving on to the future or vision that you're painting, what should we expect in the roadmap of the next two or three years for the Ariba Network?

Haydon: We're really excited about the Ariba Network and we have four or five themes. One piece of big news is that we're getting into and supporting supply chain and logistics processes, and adding that level of collaboration. Today, we have 10 or 11 types of collaborations that you can do on the Ariba Network, like an order, an invoice, and so on.

Over the next several releases, we're going to be more than doubling that amount of collaboration that you can do between trading partners on the network. That’s exciting, and there are things like forecasting and goods receipt notices.

I won’t go into the specifics of every single transaction, but think about of doubling the amount of collaboration that you can do and the visibility in that. The ability to apply your own business rules and logic to those collaborations is massive.

The second thing we're doing on the network is adding a new spend category, which we call services invoicing. This is estimate-based spend and this is another up market, down market, broad approach, in which there are a whole heap of services.

This is more of an estimate-based style spend where you don’t necessarily know the full cost of an item until you finish it. Whether you're drilling an oil well or constructing a building, there are variations there. So we're adding that capability into the network.

User interface

Another area is what we call Network 2.0, and this is extending and changing not just the user interface, but extending and adding more intrinsic core capabilities to the network. Ariba has a number of network assets and we think it's important to have a single network platform globally. It's the commerce internet, the network.

So our Network 2.0 program is a phase delivery of extending the core capabilities of the Ariba network over the next couple of years in terms of order status, results, requests in terms of goods receipt notices, advanced shipping notices, more invoice capability, and just growing that out globally.

Last but not least is just more and more supply collaboration, focusing on the ability for suppliers to more easily respond, comply, and manage their profiles on the Ariba Network.

Gardner: The Ariba applications themselves, what should we expect there?

Haydon: We have a whole raft of capability coming across that whole application suite. We can break that into two or three areas. In our sourcing, contract management, supplier information management, and supply performance management suite, we're doing functionality enhancements on one of the exciting pieces.

In the spend visibility area, we're going to be leveraging the SAP In-Memory technology HANA. What we are doing there is early for us, but there are some very exciting, encouraging results in terms of the speed and the performance we've heard about from SAP. Running our own technology on that and seeing the results is exciting for us and will be exciting for our customers.

As we move more into our procurement suite, we're introducing a new look and feel, a consumer like look and feel, to our catalog and our search engine. The more Amazon-style search touches more users than anyone else. As you can imagine, that’s how they need to requisition tools. So making that a friendly UI and taking that UI or user experience through to the other products is fantastic.

One of the other most exciting areas for us is services procurement, a very large investment for us. Services procurement is our application to be able to support temporary or contingent labor, statement of work or consulting labor, print, marketing and also light industrial. This really is one of the underpinning differences for Ariba, and this is where we're bringing it together.

We're not just building applications any more. We're building network-centric applications or network-aware applications. It means that when we're launching our new services procurement solution, not only are we are going to have a brand-new, refreshed, modern user interface, which is very important.

Differential insights

We're going to be able to leverage the power of the Ariba Network to provide differential insights, into standard day-to-day services procurement on-boarding. That will be looking at average labor rates in the area for the type of service that you're buying and using the network intelligence to give you advice, to give you instruction, to help you manage exceptions on the network.

Gardner: What’s really interesting to me is all of your vision so tightly aligns with the mega trends of today, from cloud to mobile to big data. Tell me little bit about the potential.

Haydon: Absolutely. When we think about the networked economy, the networked apps, the network-centric apps, the network itself, one should be able to connect any demand generating or receiving system. We touched on that with Dell Boomi, but it's seamless integration across the piece. We want to be comprehensive, which is adding more collaboration.

Critical mass

The interesting thing about this collaboration, is it starts driving at some levels a critical mass of data. The trend is that the network is intelligent. It's actually able to piece together not just the transaction itself, but who you are. We're quite excited, because this is the massive differentiator of the network. You talked about apps. We have not just the transactional data, but we have the master data, and we can also take other sources of information.

That could be weather, location, stock reports, SEC filings, Dun and Bradstreet writings, whatever you like, to intersect.

So this data plus knowledge gives you information. With SAP, it's a very exciting technology. SAP InfoNet, Supplier InfoNet, is able to leverage network data. Today, it has over 160 feeds. It's smart, meaning it's smart intelligence. It can automatically take those feeds and contextualize.

And that's the real thing we're trying to do -- knowing who the user is, knowing the business process they are trying to execute, and also knowing what they are trying to achieve. And it's bringing that information to the point of demand to help them make actionable, intelligent, and sometimes predictive decisions.

Where we would like to go is, heaven forbid there is another tsunami, but let's just work through that use case. You get a news alert there is tsunami in Japan again, terrible event. What if you knew that, and what if 80 percent of your core, raw material inputs came from there? Just that alert of that to notify you to saying you've got to know that you might well have a supply problem. What are you going to do?

And by the way, here are three or four other suppliers who can supply this material to you, and they're available on the network. What is that worth? Immeasurable.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Ariba.

You may also be interested in:

• Ariba and Discover to transform B2B payments with cloud-based AribaPay
• Ariba, Dell Boomi to unveil collaboration enhancements for networked economy at Ariba LIVE conference
• The Networked Economy Newly Forges Innovation Forces for Collaboration in Business and Commerce, Says Author Zach Tumin
• Collboration-Enhanced Procurement and AP Automation Maximize Productivity and Profit Gains in Networked Economy, Says Ariba's Drew Hofler
• Ariba Network Helps Cox Enterprises Manage Procurement Across Six Different ERP Systems
• Ariba CMO Tim Minahan on how networked economy benefits spring from improved business commerce and cloud processes
• Ariba Dynamic Discounting Gives Companies New Visibility into Cash Flow to Improve the Buying Process

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 terms of setting developers free, Cockcroft said the company does a number of things. "[Netflix] makes our Wi-Fi faster and faster," he said. "It gets developers going and it gets us out of their way." Cockcroft called it a "positive cycle."

He said it is key to treat developers like adults.

Speaking at the Glue Conference outside Boulder, Colo., Cockcroft, addressing the crowd from behind a pair of Google glasses, said focusing on cost reduction only slows developers down. And slow developers mean companies relying on cloud native applications - such as Netflix - won't be able to keep pace with competitors.

"That will put you into a death spiral," he said.

Cloud native applications (i.e. Google, Amazon) are those running entirely in the cloud, which for Netflix means "there is no datacenter." The company's entire technology infrastructure was moved to Amazon Web Services late last year.

Cockcroft focused on Netflix's video streaming business, which runs entirely in the cloud.

In this native cloud application model, he said, developers can become the bottleneck as companies attempt to construct a highly agile and highly available service from short-lived and often broken components. Companies must be aware of this pitfall and avoid it.

To help developers thrive, Cockcroft said it is also important to decentralize and automate operations activities, and to integrate DevOps into business organizations  - what he called Biz DevOps.

To do all this requires re-orgs - both to become cloud native and to integrate DevOps.

Later in the day, Cockcroft led a four-hour workshop on Netflix's Open Source Architecture and posted the tutorial online. (Cloud architecture tutorial: Constructing cloud architecture the Netflix way).

In addition, he challenged Glue Conference attendees to take part in the company's Netflix Cloud Prize, a contest looking for the best open source contributions to the NetflixOSS platform. The prize, to be distributed over a number of winners, is $100,000.

Part of this week, I am out of my box at a developer-focused conference where identity is only one topic.

Mark Zuckerberg suddenly appeared in Warsaw on Wednesday on what the Facebook founder and CEO said was a spontaneous one-day holiday. But the meaning of the word "spontaneous" would need to be stretched to explain his late afternoon meeting with the Polish minister for administrative affairs and digitisation, Michal Boni.

Officially, Zuckerberg and Boni talked about the significance of the IT industry in Poland and the position of Polish programmers in the world market. According to the social media mogul, Poland is the second-most important recruiting grounds for programmers, "ahead of China although still behind India". Boni added that the growing Polish IT market was now worth approximately €7bn annually — 2.2 percent of the country's GDP.

The two are also likely to have discussed one subject likely to be on both their minds for different reasons: the EC's proposed reforms of Europe's privacy rules.

The issue of privacy did crop up in conversation between the minister and Facebook founder. Boni said that privacy remained important for Poles, and working out how to create conditions that allowed businesses to successfully combine innovation with privacy would remain an issue in the years ahead.

And, while Zuckerberg told journalists that data protection was a key issue and people should always know how their data was being used, the company has found itself on the wrong end of Europe's privacy watchdogs on several occasions.

As a result, Wednesday's meeting stirred some criticism among local industry watchers, and not just for its small-scale and hasty nature.

On the same day as Zuckerberg's visit, experts attended a conference on web security and the limits of advertising in the online age in the same city. "We are getting two separate worlds. Experts can talk all they want, while businessmen and politicians meet elsewhere," Polish technology blog Dziennik Internautow lamented.

I met with Nokia here at CTIA 2013 and while there are no new hardware announcements, there was a major HERE Maps update, I did get a chance to try out the Lumia 925 and use the 928 to take photos during the show.

With the 928 and 925, we will have a high end Lumia WP8 devices on three of the four major US wireless carriers and it appears that Nokia is on the right track.

Nokia has always excelled at optics so I am very pleased to see them so actively promoting their optic technology in commercials and online videos.

Their camera technology has always set them apart and it looks like they are doing all that they can with the Windows Phone platform they decided to run with. Beyond the hardware, Nokia offers applications that let you do something with the photos after they are captured.

In my experiences, very few "normal" smartphone users do much with their photos after they capture and share them. Nokia offers several applications to help you differentiate and make your photo experience unique with even more coming on the 925 and the Smart Camera app that brings many of the current utilities together.

When I saw the Nokia Lumia 925 launch event in London, I thought it looked like a decent device with the 928 likely being a better device and no real reason to get a 925 over the current 920. Now that I have held the device, I think the people who wrote that it may be the best WP8 device just might be correct. The aluminum frame feels great in your hand with the smooth polycarbonate back panel offering a nice contrast. I like the way the buttons are prominent and easy to find and press.

With the additional lens and latest camera software it is also the best Lumia for capturing content. I was down on the lack of wireless charging, but the back plate option is a good solution and gives you the ability to add a splash of color if you want. I may be buying a Lumia 925 for T-Mobile when it launches, but it's tough to give up my HTC One now that I have accessories connected to it that make my life more complete.

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.

The school year hasn't ended in many places yet, but computer manufacturers have already started prepping new systems for the next school year. For instance, HP has just previewed its back-to-school refresh of its laptop lineup, including new Envy and Pavilion notebooks.

Pricing for many of these new portables is pretty aggressive, with the new Pavilion 11 TouchSmart starting at just $399. That price includes an 11.6-inch touchscreen with 1,366x768 resolution and an AMD processor. The Pavilion 14 TouchSmart Sleekbook offers similar resolution on a 14-inch screen starting at $479.99. Both new Pavilions will be available on June 26.

HP has also updated its pricier Envy line, with the Envy TouchSmart 14 Ultrabook even getting an ultra-high-resolution display option. The 3,200x1,600 screen rivals those of the Google Chromebook Pixel and Apple's MacBook Retina display lineup, though we don't know pricing for that version yet. The base price is $699, though that only gets you a 1,366x768 14-inch display.

There's also the Envy TouchSmart 15, which isn't an Ultrabook but does boost the base resolution of the 15.6-inch display to full 1080p HD. Likewise for the Envy 17, which will also feature Intel's forthcoming Haswell processors and Nvidia discrete graphics. The Envy TouchSmart starts at $529, while the Envy 17 will be priced from $699; both will be available starting on June 5.

[Via HP, Engadget]

This week in particular has been a bad one for the two companies. First came Vodafone's financial results, released on Tuesday. The results saw the country's second biggest mobile operator – with around one-quarter of the market – announce lacklustre figures. Full-year revenue across the company was down 4.2 percent, with recession-hit Spain and Italy helping to keep it low. In total, Vodafone has had to write down 7.7bn in the two countries for the year ended 31 March 2013.

Vodafone's revenue from services in Spain dropped 11.5 percent over the year. According to new figures from the Spanish telecoms regulator CMT, the operator lost 81,000 customers in March alone as consumers shifted away from the traditional operators and instead signed up with mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs).

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Meanwhile, as telecoms analyst Benedict Evans pointed out, its SMS volume has halved over the past two years – a trend seen across the mobile industry, thanks in part to the rise in popularity of OTT messaging services such as BlackBerry's BBM, Apple's iMessage and WhatsApp.

The figures from CMT also painted a worrying picture for Movistar, the country's biggest mobile operator. It lost 87,000 subscribers in March and now pulls in around 35 percent market share. In fact, during the first quarter of the year, Movistar lost around 700,000 subscribers and revenue for the same period fell 16.4 percent year on year to €3.26bn.

The company, however, is making moves to address the issue. This week, it began cutting prices on many of its smartphones by between 15 percent and 30 percent. The Samsung Galaxy S4, for example, now costs €639, compared to a previous price of €755.

According to Reuters, Movistar owner Telefonica abandoned handset subsidies last year. While this had a positive impact on the company's bottom line, it made phones more expensive for new customers. In a country where unemployment sits at 27 percent and not everyone is rolling in cash, that now looks like a poor move.

Meanwhile, Movistar's cheaper rivals will also shortly be able to differentiate themselves through the launch of LTE networks. Both Orange and Yoigo, the third and fourth largest mobile operators in Spain, have plans to launch high-speed 4G services this summer.

Yoigo has even said current 3G customers will be able to upgrade to 4G at no extra cost. Movistar and Vodafone are yet to confirm their 4G plans.

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.