IBM

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Sears names IBM veteran its CEO

Sears Holdings Corp. named IBM veteran Lou D’Ambrosio CEO and president, effective Thursday.

D’Ambrosio succeeds W. Bruce Johnson, who has served as interim CEO and president since January 2008. Get the full story »

U. of C. to get some of Watson’s ‘Jeopardy!’ prize

IBM supercomputer Watson takes on "Jeopardy!" champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. (IBM photo)

IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, may have trounced the last hope for humanity when it beat two “Jeopardy!” champions in a three-night contest this week, but it has also extended a philanthropic helping hand to mere mortals.

IBM is allocating $500,000 of Watson’s $1 million winnings to World Community Grid, a project where volunteer PCs users make up a “virtual supercomputer” that helps scientists with research projects. The grid harnesses the spare computational power of 1.7 million PCs from 535,000 volunteers in 80 countries, putting this combined capability to work on complicated problems. Get the full story »

Argonne upgrades to super supercomputer

Argonne National Laboratory will be using a new IBM supercomputer that can run 10 quadrillion calculations per second. Yes, quadrillion.

By way of comparison, IBM said that if every man, woman and child in the U.S. performed one calculation each second, they would need almost one year to run as many calculations as the new “Mira” computer can do in one second. Get the full story »

Cyber Monday online sales surge 20%

Online sales on Cyber Monday surged nearly 20 percent from last year, according to findings from an analytics group released Tuesday.

“Cyber Monday came in as the biggest shopping day of the year so far,” said John Squire, chief strategy officer of Coremetrics, a unit of IBM Corp.
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IBM rides market upswing to hit all-time high

IBM shares hit an all-time high Monday, with the stock riding a slight market upswing. It rose as high as $139.88 before closing at $139.66, up 81 cents for the day. The previous high was $139.19, reached during the dot-com boom on July 13, 1999. Get the full story »

IBM to help small businesses compete for contracts

Tech giant IBM said Tuesday it will set up a website at supplier-connection.net early next year with a single, standard application for small companies to bid on contracts at AT&T Inc., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., Pfizer Inc. and UPS Inc. That means small businesses won’t have to invest the time and money in preparing multiple bids.

Sears hires top marketing exec David Friedman

Sears Holdings Corp. hired Razorfish executive David Friedman to take the retailer’s top marketing post, replacing Richard Gerstein, who resigned in May.

Friedman, 46, begins his job as senior vice president and president of Sears’ marketing business unit on Sept. 13.

He was most recently president of the Americas at Razorfish in Chicago, a digital marketing company, where he was head of the firm’s retail and consumer goods practice. Before that, Friedman spent 10 years with Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting, as an associate partner working with retail and consumer products companies. Get the full story »

EU launches 2 antitrust probes against IBM

European Union competition regulators launched two antitrust probes Monday against International Business Machines Corp., suspecting it of abusing its dominant position on the mainframe computer market.

One investigation followed complaints by emulator software vendors T3 and Turbo Hercules against IBM’s practices and focuses on the U.S. computer giant’s alleged tying of mainframe hardware to its mainframe operating system. Get the full story »