Between the Lines

eBay datacenter chief Dean Nelson says that with $2,000 of goods being traded every second on eBay, the company can’t afford not to have the fastest, most powerful and most efficient servers.

Once we got our Genius at the Apple store he ran their canned diagnostics on the phone, told her there was nothing wrong, and that the problem, if there was one, must be due to a bad application.

Salesforce.com will roll out its second quarter results and inevitably talk a lot about Chatter, its social enterprise effort. However, analysts are doubtful that Chatter is driving a lot of new licenses.

Dell’s acquisition of 3Par gives the company a beefier storage line-up, but the deal is likely to strain a key relationship with EMC, say analysts.

Stopping scoliosis usually requires a series of painful operations to implant rods and screws to adjust the spine. Even then, the results are often less than perfect. However, a medical team at UCSF have developed a technique using magnets that promises to do away with so many surgeries.

Pennsylvania school officials will not face criminal charges for activating a tracking feature on school-issued laptops that allowed them to spy on students, which resulted in the capture of 56,000 webcam and screenshot images. Meanwhile, the district has approved new laptop policies.

Research in Motion probably sold about 100,000 to 150,000 BlackBerry Torch devices, a sum that’s solid but a bit underwhelming compared to an Apple iPhone or latest Droid launch.

Mark Hurd may be gone, but Hewlett-Packard continues to go shopping. HP will acquire Fortify Software, which is a security and compliance company.

As the line between traditional TV programming and online video continues to blur, Google and Adobe are jumping out ahead to showcase what’s coming with Google TV

IBM will launch a new batch of Power7 servers ranging to high-end systems for analytics to models designed for mid-sized companies.

BlackBerry’s latest answer to the iPhone and Android challenge has arrived. See how the BlackBerry Torch 9800 measures up.

Multitouch support will be coming to Ubuntu and the Linux operating system could more competitive with Windows and the Mac OS. The big question is whether multitouch support will matter to potential users.

An Apple HDTV could be powerful. However, live television and set-top boxes would pose a big hurdle for Apple as it tries to be the hub of your digital living room.

Best Buy will launch an experiment Tuesday with Shopkick to integrate the mobile app into its point-of-sale system.

Dell’s $1.15 billion purchase of 3Par gives the company the assets to tackle the lucrative high-end data center storage market.

Smooth-Stonehas raised $48 million in an effort to bring ARM server chips to data centers. Can the company eliminate energy worries in the data center?

As Google and Microsoft battle each other for big wins over e-mail hosting contracts, the companies are being schooled about what customers really want.

Think all IT pros go crazy over tech tools and toys? Not Alan Norton. In fact, he may be approaching geek heresy with his take on these popular devices!

Google says the language in a bidding process for the State of California’s e-mail contract was written to favor Microsoft’s products.

IBM acquires marketing software company Unica to complement its Coremetrics and Sterling Commerce purchases.