Data collection, monitoring, storage, and mining are simply part of our online lives. If you connect to a site, it is going to collect some information about you. If nothing else it will collect the session information (IP address, time on site, pages read etc.), but will not use that for anything more than understanding traffic. Other sites will collect and maintain more information than that and in extreme cases you will get much more collected than that. However, no one seems to know what use this data is being put to and if there is any benefit to the collection at all.

Yesterday at the HP Discover event a new concept device was shown off called the Machine. The Machine is an interesting concept that uses a number of existing technologies to deal with the massive influx of data from all of the connected devices we have now and will have in the future. To accomplish this HP envisions a devices that is unlike any of the traditional server offerings on the market today.

Hewlett-Packard introduced a cost-effective tablet HP 7 Plus which is intended for the lower segment of the market. HP 7 Plus will not provide users with an extremely impressive performance, but it will be quite sufficient for simple tasks such as surfing the Internet, browsing e-mail and runing basic applications.

HP has announced plans to re-enter the market of mobile phones and tablets. As things stand now, there are two models, both designed for the Indian market.

HP decided to further increase the total number of employees laid off by the end of 2014. According to the plan in September, the plan was the release of 29,000 people, and earlier in May they announced the release of 27,000 people.

HP in the final quarter of this fiscal year achieved revenues of 29.1 billion dollars. This result is a billion dollars better when compared to analysts' expectations.

HP in collaboration with Taiwanese manufacturers of electronic components cooperate on the development of smartphones, according to DigiTimes. Stories of HP's return to production pf smartphones are circulating for some time, and plans were also indicted by company's director Meg Whitman in an interview with Fox Business Network in September last year.

According to Digitimes, HP in collaboration with U.S. chain store Wallmart intends to issue 7 inch tablet, which should be in stores before the start of the new school year, and will be sold at a price of only $99.

Although we have not written about Apple in a while there is some news about them that just begs to be talked about and to have some of the myths about it cleared up. In today’s news there were quite a few articles about Apple coming back to the US to make products. Most of this was fluff, but it did contain some truth in it. Apple will invest $100 Million in an unnamed east coast manufacturing plant with the first installments of this investment to start in 2013. What most of the articles missed is that compared to what they dump into China and South America this is nothing.

Hewlett Packard in its fiscal fourth quarter financial report included the costs in the amount of 8.8 billion dollars due to serious accounting irregularities in its subsidiary Autonomy. With this HP admitted that they bought Autonomy based on dodgy data and false accounting reports in which the data was hidden. Overall, HP in its fourth quarter had a loss of 6.9 billion dollars, while revenues were $30 billion, which is 7% lower than a year before. Throughout fiscal 2012 HP has reported a loss of $12.7 billion on revenue of $ 120.4 billion.