Carly Fiorina is now a former president of HP. After six years at the helm, Fiorina left her position as Executive President and CEO of the multi-national with a 21 million dollar handshake.
The most outstanding part of her legacy is the acquisition of Compaq for 19,000 million dollars, a deal agreed to after clashing head on with Walter Hewlett, son of the company’s co-founder.
Fiorina’s ousting has given rise to speculation about the division between the profitable printer business and that of servers and computers, although HP has declared that it has no intention of making structural changes. Wall Street reacted favourably to the news and pushed up HP’s share price by 6.8% to 21.5 dollars.

HP has always been a benchmarked company so its stuttering results during the past few years have had HP watchers concerned. Fiorina´s departure closes one of HP’s most turbulent periods.

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Title: The mobile phone is open for business. Netsize Guide 2005 Edition
Source: Netsize Group
Date: 21st February 2005
Abstract: According to Netsize, 2005 will be the year of business data transmission by mobile phone. The report reviews the mobile phone situation in the world based on an analysis of 103 operators in 29 countries.
Netsize foresees that the trend towards the mobile enterprise will spur the mobile telephone market and help operators to increase their ARPU index (Average Revenue Per User).  This index has undergone a sharp fall of late because of the maturing of voice services in the more advanced countries. In Europe, eight out of ten people have a mobile phone, and indeed, there are countries like Sweden and Italy where the rate of penetration runs to over 100%.
On the other hand, the ARPU index for mobile data services, SMS, Internet surfing, added value services and business applications, is growing at an annual rate of between 10 to 20 percent thanks to improvements in the mobile phone for data transmission, its convergence with Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and the growing development of corporate software for mobile devices. For some mobile phone opertaors these services already account for 20% of their average income per user. This new business is not only an additional revenue source for operators, but it also favours software developers and services providers. These are revenues that promise to rise dramatically as technologies like WAP, GPRS, UMTS, Wi-Fi or WiMax become more popular.
According to the fourth edition of this guide, there are three business areas where the mobile phone contributes to improving business efficiency: Customer Relationship Management (CRM), banking communications in real time and air ticket issuing as the most outstanding applications; the communication between the company and its employees (B2E); and the communications between machines (M2M) in maintenance services, management of advertising billboards, direct and automatic interaction of vehicles with maintenance services as well as other services.

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The electronic vote test for the referendum on the European Constitution ended with an absolute failure in participation. Just 0.54% of almost two million voters took advantage of the invitation to use the electronic vote via the Internet. It is only fair to say that the pilot test was not legally binding and the most outstanding characteristic of the referendum was the high degree of abstention. Even so, not even one percent of voters used the electronic ballot boxes that could be found in polling stations nor did they vote on the web page that the Interior Ministry enabled (evoto.mir.es) so that those selected could exercise their vote.
Several studies show that citizens still feel rather reluctant to use the Internet voting system. Some experts agree with this distrust. For Luis Panizo, co-ordinator of the Electronic Vote Observatory (OVE in Spanish), the system developed jointly between the Administration and Indra had “serious technological problems” because the access to the application was not safe enough and the confidentiality of the voters could be compromised. Miguel Pérez Subías, the President of the Internet Users Association (AUI in Spanish) attributed the lack of participation to bureaucratic difficulties. The fact is that before voting all the participants had to get their own digital certificate by filling in all their personal data and acquiring an access password. This step could have been simplified by showing their identity cards and the electronic signature.

News in Navegante and La Vanguardia
Report by the Observatorio del Voto Electrónico
A note from Indra

With the acquisition of About.com for 410 million dollars (313.7 million euros), The New York Times Company gained access to a new segment of readers: a younger public (the About.com followers are about 37 years old, five less than the average of those from The New York Times and essentially women (65%). The About.com communities’ portal, in which Google, Yahoo! and AOL also showed interest, gets more than 22 million visits a day. The key to its success lies in the fact that it is fed by a network of 500 experts capable of offering the most widespread miscellaneous content: reviews on Shakespeare, a beginner’s course in Hinduism, the recipe for Miso soup or the basic movements in break-dance are some examples of the breadth of its content.
Its last owner, the Promedia Group, bought it in October 2000 for 690 million dollars in shares.
The operation lets The New York Times Company leap into twelfth position in the ranking of Internet presence, but above all it increases its revenues from the digital publicity market. More to the point, the purchase of About.com places the publisher in a strong position for the cost per click advertising business, a new type of publicity in which the advertiser only pays when a reader clicks on the page. This is a formula that has played out very well for Google and Overture. It seems that the Internet is finally making up for the crisis it was immersed in after the technology bubble burst.

News in The New York Times (Free registry required) and News.com
Articles in The Register, The Guardian y The Wall Street Journal (Payment service)

Content syndication has moved into the world of audio files. ‘Podcasting’ is the latest. This is the result of merging iPod (the popular Apple music player) and broadcasting, a term coined to name audio content syndication, usually in MP3 files, for later distribution in the RSS format (Really Simple Syndication) (Rich Site Summary). This format, both standard and public, was first popularised by bloggers and later adopted by digital newspapers. Thanks to RSS, an individual can receive all the content of hundreds of continuously updated websites in his own web page, without the need to be individually connected to them. Podcasting is therefore the extension of this practice to music files.
It works quite simply: the user downloads some of the existing RSS programmes and bookmarks the websites that offer podcasting services. Each time he enters or updates an audio file in the selected sites, this will automatically appear in the music player chosen by the user (iTunes, Windows Media Player or any other).
The underlying idea is quite like other simple and successful formulae such as
weblogs and PVR: the content adapts to what the user wants and not vice versa. What all of these technologies have in common is the fact that they free the reader, spectator or listener from the tedious task of finding what he is looking for among the loads of information he is not in the least interested in. It is no longer necessary to waste time entering several websites to check out the same news. Nor is it necessary to search through all the radio stations to find your favourite programme, nor change channels to see what is on TV or be at home at a certain time to watch your favourite TV series. The classical barriers to content distribution –time, space and programming– are lost to the advance of these new means of communication in which the receiver is the one who decides what, how and when.

Definition of podcasting in Wikipedia
Articles in The New York Times (Free registry required) and The Guardian