Est-ce vraiment une surprise ? En ces temps moroses, le marché français des tablettes conserve la forme. Selon le cabinet d’études GfK, il devrait s’écouler dans l’Hexagone en 2013 6 millions d’ardoises tactiles, soit une forte progression de 65% par rapport à l’année dernière (3,6 millions).

Pourquoi ce fort attrait cette année ? Les prix pratiqués semblent être le principal argument.

Nvidia is banking on new computing devices to replace "cheap" PCs and Android to drive that disruption, according to comments from the chipmaker's chief executive on Thursday.

"A great tablet is clearly better than a cheap PC," said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the company's fiscal first quarter conference call.

Salesforce.com and European venture capital firms have announced a 5 million € Innovation Challenge, a competition for European start-ups building enterprise cloud apps on the Salesforce platform.

Eligible start-ups will be invited to present their ideas to professional investors at a series of Innovation Challenge pitch events throughout Europe, hosted by Salesforce.com from September to November 2013.

IBM today unveiled MessageSight, a 2U appliance that would serve as a cornerstone to Big Blue's "Internet of things" vision: The hardware is a big data orchestrator, and according to IBM, it's capable of handling up to 13 million incoming messages per second flowing in from up to 1 million different sensors installed in anything -- automobiles, medical equipment, home appliances, mobile devices -- such that the data can be transformed into useful information.

Chat apps now more popular than SMS worldwide. A handful of popular chat applications have already found a way to outpace SMS, according to new data.

Research firm Informa announced today that six of the most popular mobile chat applications, including WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple's iMessage, and KakaoTalk, averaged nearly 19 billion messages sent and received worldwide each day in 2012. The company estimates that 17.6 billion SMS messages were sent each day, as well.

The debate about the bring-your-own-device movement (BYOD) has quieted down, mostly because, it seems, while IT has been over in the corner arguing the pros and cons, employees have been streaming into office with their shiny new toys and using them to get work done.

Enterprises and individual developers alike are heavily leveraging API-based access to data and services, especially for mobile and cloud apps. And they're getting an increasing palette of technologies to choose from for managing all those API processes. "A lot of our customers are exposing their services through APIs," says Apigee spokesman Bala Kasiviswanathan.

Geeksphone begins selling two phones, the Keon and Peak, starting Tuesday. These lower-budget models are geared for programmers building Web apps for Mozilla's open-source OS.

 
The opening screen of Firefox OS running on a Geeksphone Keon.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Amazon.com is continuing the global expansion of its Appstore by announcing that developers can submit their apps for sale in another 200 countries around the world.

The latest batch of countries include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa, South Korea, the company said on Wednesday. The apps that developers submit and the Appstore for Android itself will become available to consumers in those countries in the "coming months", according to Amazon.

Dropbox, whose cloud storage and file-sharing application has been adopted by millions of consumers, will add single sign-on (SSO), its latest feature for businesses as it seeks to penetrate the workplace market.

The company announced on Wednesday that its product will let IT departments tie it to their identity authentication systems. That way, IT departments will be able to include Dropbox in the set of applications that end-users log on to automatically when they sign in once with their main credentials.