IBM launched its free Watson Trend mobile application, an implementation of its system of cognitive computing Watson that aims to understand what are the trendy gifts for the holiday season. At least for now it’s only available for iOS, perhaps an experiment that is part of the collaboration with Apple in various uses of Watson, and therefore can be downloaded from the Apple Store.
Western Digital Corporation has announced it has reached an agreement to buy the flash memory maker SanDisk Corporation. Western Digital will pay $86.50 for each SanDisk share of which $85.10 in cash and the rest in shares for a total of about $19 billion. SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra will join Western Digital’s board of directors.
After the rumors in recent days came the official confirmation of the agreement that will allow Dell to buy EMC, also known as EMC Corporation or EMC². There was talk of huge figures, around $50 billion, but this prediction has been largely superseded because Dell will pay a total of $67 billion. The payment will be of $33.15 for each EMC share of which 24.05 in cash and the rest in stock tracking, which are equity offerings linked to the evolution of the shares of VMware, a subsidiary of EMC that remains independent. This is the biggest acquisition in the technology world.
This week IBM announced the birth of a new business unit based on its cognitive computing system Watson. It’s called IBM Cognitive Business Solutions and intends to leverage this intelligence artificial to provide business consulting. The term cognitive business represents according to the company an application in this field of Watson, which becomes a kind of digital assistant that can provide suggestions based on the analysis of massive amounts of data.
IBM announced a leap forward in the realization of carbon nanotubes circuits. It’s one of the most promising technologies in electronics but so far many problems in its practical application prevented its practical use. IBM now claims to have discovered a way to use it to create transistors to replace the current silicon-based ones.
