Gartner

You're standing on a street corner and remember that you need to pick up a video game for your sister's birthday. On your smartphone, you search Google and tap on the "in stock nearby" link next to the blue dots that show up for some of the search results. Google then shows you which local retailers have the game in stock.

That buying omniscience, where your mobile device can tell you whether what you want is nearby, was announced Thursday by the search giant.

iPhone, Palm, Android

Hot new tablet computers are shaking up the stodgy computer industry -- possibly giving consumers reason to buy yet another PC.

Dell, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard each unveiled tablet PC models at [the] Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Each features a touch-screen that eliminates or reduces the need for a keyboard.

Apple is expected to come out with its own tablet later this month. Apple declined to comment.

Eric Migicovsky had his a-ha moment while biking along the canals of the Netherlands. The Canadian engineering student kept missing calls on the BlackBerry tucked into his pockets. So as soon as he got home, the then-22-year-old entrepreneur began work on an accessory that would help him know when he was getting a call.

Today's organizations depend and thrive on data for marketing, customer service and staff management, and like anything that is valuable, criminals have been seeking it to commit ID theft, blackmail or other crimes.

Prithwis Mukerjee, a professor of management at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in eastern India, needed a convenient and low-cost way for his students to create spreadsheets. But rather than turn to Microsoft, the granddaddy of spreadsheet software, he opted for a lesser-known maker of free, Web-based software that gives his students more flexibility than Microsoft's Excel. "Many people don't have Excel, and that becomes a big challenge," Mukerjee says.

Few enterprises today own their own buildings, vehicle fleets, or hardware like copiers. Instead they lease them and for good reasons. These include freeing capital expenditures to be used where these dollars can generate the greatest ROI. It also includes flexibility when business needs change from new opportunities or downsizing; there are no costly assets to purchase/install or unload, which takes scarce time.

Few enterprises today own their own buildings, vehicle fleets, or hardware like copiers. Instead they lease them and for good reasons. These include freeing capital expenditures to be used where these dollars can generate the greatest ROI. It also includes flexibility when business needs change from new opportunities or downsizing; there are no costly assets to purchase/install or unload, which takes scarce time.

The bad news for the mobile-device industry is that its sales in the first quarter were horrible. The good news is that smartphone sales are showing strength.

Those are some of the takeaways from a report by industry researcher Gartner released Wednesday. The report indicated that worldwide mobile-phone sales in the first quarter of this year were down 8.6 percent to 269.1 million units compared to the same quarter last year. But smartphone sales, which were 13.5 percent of all mobile-device sales, were up 12.7 percent.

Ever since veteran software entrepreneur Dave Duffield launched his new startup, Workday, a year and a half ago, people have wondered if it could become the next Salesforce.com. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's chief executive, had shaken up the customer-relationship management software world and created a company with a market cap of $8 billion with an online service that replaces expensive and complex traditional software packages. Could Duffield and Workday do the same? Just now, there's growing evidence they can.