HP, Dell bidding war heats up

Dell and HP have once again traded bids as they tussle over storage outfit 3Par. On Friday morning, Dell matched HP's Thursday bid of $27 a share, and HP promptly re-upped the ante with a $30 a share bid, valuing 3Par at $2 billion, reports The Register.

Meanwhile, shares in the Fremont, California-based 3Par jumped to $32.46, a more than a 235% increase since Dell and HP began their bidding war last week.

At a press event in San Francisco, on Friday, Dell VP of enterprise storage and networking Praveen Asthana was asked why his company was so determined to buy the relatively small 3Par. "If you look at multi-tenancy cloud services, 3Par is uniquely qualified in providing that kind of storage technology right now," Asthana said. 3Par offers high-automated and virtualised enterprise storage arrays.

Researchers say tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, reveals The BBC.

Dr Fernando Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting, in Boston, that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect.

Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen fired a patent shot across the bow of several prominent technology companies on Friday, suing Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others over patent claims, writes News.com.com.

Allen's firm Interval Licensing filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the above companies, as well as AOL, eBay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples, are violating patents he received for several Internet technologies while leading Interval Research, now out of business. The case was filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington, based in Seattle.

Interval said in a press release: "The patents in the lawsuit cover fundamental Web technologies first developed at Interval Research in the 1990s, which the company believes are being infringed by major e-commerce and Web search companies." David Postman, a spokesman for Allen, said this is the first time that patents related to Interval Research's work have been litigated.

Molson Coors - parent company of beer brands including Carling, Coors and Grolsch - is using a bespoke mobile application to better manage customer maintenance requests, says Computing.co.uk.

Vodafone's field service management application for mobile devices will help the company's 170 field service engineers manage these requests faster and more effectively.

Molson Coors manages the installation and maintenance of pumps that deliver its beer in outlets across the UK.