Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Microsoft Corp. are working together to offer governments national identity systems built on the .Net platform. The tech giants have been working on a code base that will allow them to offer a set of technology components for functions such as online and offline demographic and biometric data capture, regional verification and registration, and document lifecycle management.
The worldwide PC market finished 2004 on a strong note, with double-digit percentage growth for the year, according to research released Tuesday by IDC and Gartner Inc. But growth will slow in 2005 as consumers pull back from their frantic purchasing of the last few years, the companies said.
Shipments of Tablet PCs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) have been everything but encouraging and Microsoft Corp., which provides the operating system software for the devices, is partly to blame, according to a market research report released this week.
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) continues to lead the European PC market, with about two million shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in the first quarter of 2003, IDC said in its preliminary results Web conference Thursday.