hi-tech

According to new prognosis made by many analysts major tech companies will likely manage to keep up their sales and profit growth in 2011 while still economic troubles in the United States and euro zone debt issue could impact the results.

Intel Corp and other sector heavyweights are expected to keep expanding, albeit at a slower pace than in 2010. Meantime, heavy suppliers like Oracle Corp should enjoy some revival of corporate spending in the first half, while select consumer-centric companies should also do well.

A new poll conducted by Zogby International revealed that high-speed Internet is the technology that greatly impacted the society over past decade. The study that surveyed 1,950 U.S. adults says that 24% of the respondents believe high-speed Internet had the greatest impact on their lives, followed closely by Facebook at 22 percent and Google with 10 percent.

Besides, the high-speed Internet also came first at 28% as the technology people cannot live without with email following at the second place at 18%.

IBM presented its another report Next Five in Five which makes forecast for five tech innovations that will come within 5 years by 2015. The Next Five in Five report is a listing of five technology trends that can change the world in a matter of 5 years.

The company analysts expect that by 2015 mobile devices will become more personal which means that they will be more helpful for people in their everyday life.

China has topped the list of the twice-annual ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers, replacing the United States. In the latest ranking the Tianjin National Supercomputer Center's Tianhe-1A system benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), surpassing the former top achiever, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Cray XT5 Jaguar system, which clocked in at 1.75 petaflops in this round.

The number of computer tablets to be sold by the end of 2010 is now forecast to make up 11 million which is three times the estimate made by ABI Research earlier this year.

"Our forecast of 11 million media tablet shipments in 2010 is based both on the broader availability of the iPad and on the delayed introduction of competing products," says ABI Research principal analyst Jeff Orr.

A new Unisys-IDC survey of 2,820 respondents shows that American office workers are very mobile and readily use their laptops and smartphones to do their jobs at all hours of the day, at home and during time off the company clock. Office employees, and young community in particular, are very tech-ready and have high expectations about how the consumer technology should work.

"They expect their employers to provide immediate connectivity and support for the consumer technology they want to use," says Sam Gross, Unisys vice president of global IT outsourcing solutions.

Today almost everyone knows Bill Gates and his direct relation to the wide used Windows operating system and other products of Microsoft. While the times when Gates took direct part in the processes of Microsoft’s production have passed many people still believe he is the face of the Redmond company. However, according to an independent analysis and investigation of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ITworld, the state of affairs is much far from what we may think.