You’ve spent the summer at the cottage/in Europe/on the sailboat/playing with the kids/reading fine literature (or trash).
Whatever.
What you haven’t done is spent it pouring through your email or (and we shudder) reading IT World Canada to keep up on the latest IT news.
So on this, the first work day of September, you might be wondering what happened. To help, we’ve compiled a number of links to stories we believe were important in the last two months:
–First, was the stunning admission by Elections Ontario that temporary staff lost two data sticks with personal information on possibly as many as 2.4 million voters. Not only that, but the department didn’t admit initially that what it did after the loss was reported was give staff two MORE data sticks to keep going in their work;
–Arguably the second biggest news story was Apple Inc.’s triumph over Samsung Electronics in a California patent trial;
–Research In Motion was busy talking up the potential of its upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system and new handsets;
–Hewlett-Packard suffered a US$8.9 billion quarterly loss — and that was after it announced it will be laying off 9,000 staff;
— and Marissa Mayer was appointed new CEO of troubled Yahoo.
Links to these stories are in the lineup.
That’s not all that happened:
–Canadian Tire got a new chief technology officer in Eugene Roman, former CTO of OpenText. He vowed to have fun at the new position.
–There was lots of money tossed around: IBM said it would pay US$1.3 billion for human resources software specialist Kinexa, Salesforce bought Nova Scotia startup GoInstant for an undisclosed fee and a U.S. company bought Edmonton’s Upside Software for $22 million.
–There were lots of people about to get pink slips: 5,000 at Alcatel-Lucent, 4,000 at Motorola; 1,000 at Sony Mobile.
–Symantec CEO Enrique Salem stepped down after the company reported quarterly revenue went up only 1 per cent compared to the same period a year ago.
–Shaw Communications CEO Brad Shaw apologied after a big fire at the company’s Calgary data centre cut service to IBM customers as well as the cableco’s Internet customers.
–But perhaps the best news came from Tim Horton’s: Free Wi-Fi is coming.