Owners of Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch can now enjoy a remake of the first-ever PC game, co-written by Bill Gates himself, which came pre-installed on several IBM computers in 1981. First released late last month, XVision’s DONKEY.BAS is a terrific recreation of the PC game by the same name. Players control a race car as it advances up the screen. Donkeys repeatedly come into view, and the simple goal is to switch lanes before colliding with any curious creatures. “We did this game as a ...

Apple has edged out IBM to become the top brand of 2011, according to an annual list from marketing strategy firm Davis Brand Capital. The Cupertino-based company ousted IBM, which topped the list in 2009 and 2010. Apple was previously ranked No.12 in 2009 and No.7 in 2010. Davis evaluates the top 25 brands annually using five categories that go beyond traditional marketing functions. “The annual 2011 Davis Brand Capital 25 ranking evaluates companies’ abilities to manage and balance the five key ...

IBM and HTC are working together to make Android a more attractive platform for the enterprise market. Executives from both companies recently demoed IBM software running on HTC smartphones and tablets during IBM’s Lotusphere and Connect conference, TechWeek Europe said recently. “It’s only been really relatively recently that HTC has broken into the enterprise space,” HTC’s executive director Global Enterprise and Services David Jaegar said. “We’re driving toward that magic...

Google recently purchased 217 patents from IBM, including 28 published patents and 188 of IBM’s granted patents. The transaction was posted in the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s assignment database on Tuesday. SEO by the Sea said the patents are related to email administration, IM apps, video conferencing, presentation software and more. It remains unclear how much Google paid for the patents, but the company also purchased 1,000 patents from IBM in July of last year and another 1,023...

Early reports from three separate firms suggest that Black Friday retail sales set a new record in 2011. Online sales growth was massive according to estimates from both IBM and comScore; the former reported on Saturday that online Black Friday sales grew 24.3% over 2010 and total Black Friday spending rose 39.3% over last year. Meanwhile, comScore’s data shows that online spending this past Friday grew 26% from Black Friday 2010 to $816 million. Offline, market research firm ShopperTrak said retail foo...

HP is reportedly holding a meeting Tuesday night during which it may decide the fate of its webOS mobile platform, The Verge reported on Tuesday. The meeting will take place after the market closes and will be led by CEO Meg Whitman at 4:30 p.m. PST. According to Reuters, HP has been toying with the idea of selling the unit and possible suitors include Amazon, Intel, Oracle, Research In Motion and IBM. The potential sale will likely fetch far less than the $1.2 billion that HP paid to acquire Palm in 2010. H...

Back in July — less than a week after Google’s general counsel Kevin Walker took to the company’s blog to launch a war of words against rivals and their patent trolling — Google bought more than 1,000 patents from IBM’s portfolio. This past Tuesday, the U.S. Patent Office published records showing that the tech giant has purchased another 1,023 patents from IBM, this time covering technologies that range from “COMMUNICATIONS ON A NETWORK” to “SELF-ALIGNED DOUBLE-GATE MO...

Google’s general counsel Kent Walker apparently doesn’t see eye to eye with the rest of his company. “The tech industry has a significant problem,” Walker said earlier this week. “Software patents are kind of gumming up the works of innovation.” According to SEO by the Sea however, Google purchased 1,030 patents from IBM just two weeks before Walker made those comments. According to the report, the patents purchased cover a wide rage of IP, “from the fabrication and architecture of memor...

BGR’s Throwback Thursday segment is typically reserved for extinct tech, but this week we make an exception. On June 16th, 1911 — one hundred years ago today — Charles Ranlett Flint merged three companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Headquartered in New York City, CTR manufactured and sold scales, card-punch machines, meat slicers and a variety of other products that have long since been replaced by several generations of improved offerings. CTR changed its name to Internatio...

Apple has surpassed Google as world’s most valuable brand, according to advertising firm WPP’s “BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands” study. Apple’s brand value has ballooned 859% since 2006, and increased 84% to $153.3 billion this year. Tech companies dominate the rankings: AT&T, China Mobile, IBM, and Microsoft all have spots in the top-10 most valuable brands list, and McDonald’s is the only non-tech brand in the top-5. Google had reigned supreme for the past ...

Operating systems are big business. But just how big you ask? According to research firm Gartner, sales of server and desktop operating systems totalled nearly $30.4 billion in 2010 alone. “As the global economy recovered, worldwide operating system (OS) revenue totaled $30.4 billion in 2010, a 7.8 percent increase from 2009,” explains Gartner. “Among client OSs, Mac OS was the fastest-growing subsegment in 2010 as the unit shipments of Mac desktop/laptop devices saw strong sales, although f...

Greenpeace recently released a report titled How dirty is your data: A look at the energy choices that power cloud computing, which graded Amazon, Akamai, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo across three “green” categories: transparency, infrastructure siting, and mitigating strategy. While Greenpeace offered some praise to the Cupertino-based company for improving transparency and its efforts to move towards cleaner energy, it failed Apple in the “infrastructure ...

International Business Machines (IBM)  has agreed to a settlement in a bribery case filed by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC alleges that IBM, through its overseas subsidiaries, bribed Chinese and South Korean government officials with gifts, trips, and cash payments in exchange for government contracts from 1998 to 2009. According to the SEC’s filing, IBM used “local business partners and travel agencies as conduits for bribes or other improper payments to South Korean a...

The BBC has released an interesting analysis of the world’s supercomputing prowess based on the June 2010 TOP500 Supercomputing list. The report shows, unsurprisingly, that Linux is the king of supercomputing OS’ by an extremely large margin. Other fun facts from this months report include: the U.S. houses the most supercomputers (as well as the fastest), IBM is the largest manufacturer of supercomputing systems (HP is second), Intel is the most popular processor used in supercomputers (AMD is sec...