Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has given his last keynote address at Macworld in San Francisco.

The company announced on Tuesday afternoon that January’s Macworld would mark its last year participating at the show, which is run by publishing company IDG. In addition, Apple said Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, will deliver the keynote, usually handled by Jobs.

Apple representative Steve Dowling declined to comment on Jobs’s health, a prominent topic of discussion this year. Jobs’s keynote addresses at Macworld have become almost legendary events, launch pads for some of the company’s most important products and strategies. His absence may once again revive rumours that Jobs is ill.

“Phil is giving the keynote because this will be Apple’s last year at the show,” Dowling said.

(Full article ‘Jobs to skip Macworld stage as Apple exits show’)

An IT manager at Intel Corp. says that the company wants to run its data centers “like an Intel factory,” a strategy that includes a plan to consolidate 133 existing IT facilities into eight data center hubs.

Intel currently has about 93,000 servers — more than one for every employee. And many of them are based on single-core processors, according to Brently Davis, manager of the company’s data center efficiency initiative.

Davis outlined Intel’s data center consolidation strategy in a short blog posting and an accompanying video in which he responded to questions asked by someone who was outside of the camera’s view. In response to some of the answers, the person asking the questions sprinkled in a couple of superlatives, such as, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

“Like most other companies these days, Intel is facing a growing demand for computing resources,” Davis wrote in his blog posting.

(Full article ‘Intel moves to consolidate 133 data centers into eight facilities’)

Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell hinted Monday that his company could be shopping for more acquisition targets and that they could be larger than the companies it has acquired to date.

Speaking in Tokyo at a news conference, Dell made the comments after giving his views on a recent run of acquisitions in the PC market, such as the purchase of Gateway Inc. by Taiwan-based Acer Inc.

“I think the pace of consolidation will increase,” he said. “It think that it favors the larger companies, particularly as the growth is skewed towards emerging countries. In the last two years, Dell has acquired five companies, two related to the consumer business, one related to software, and two related to services.

(Full article ‘Michael Dell hints at more, bigger acquisitions’)

Intel Corp. said today that a spike in the number of microprocessor units shipped helped it record an increase in its third-quarter revenue and income.

Intel reported third-quarter revenue of $10.1 billion, a 15% increase from the same period a year earlier. That performance beat Thomson Financial analysts’ estimates of $9.617 billion. The company also recorded net income of $1.9 billion, a 43% increase year over year.

The company reported earnings per share of 32 cents, matching analysts’ estimates.

Intel said that it shipped more than 2 million quad-core processors during the quarter.

Intel made a number of big announcements during the quarter, which ended Sept. 29.

(Full article ‘Intel sales rise in Q3 on record microprocessor shipments’)

ORLANDO — The question that Michael Dell, the CEO and chairman of the company that bears his name, was asked twice by a Gartner Inc. analyst was also one of the most direct sent his way. Is the PC business, Dell’s core business, “at risk?”

That’s what Gartner analyst Mark Margevicius asked during an on-stage interview with Dell Inc.’s founder at Gartner’s Symposium ITxpo 2007.

Margevicius framed his questions by sweeping in all the broad, server-based trends that are sticking pins into the desktop, including virtualization, software streaming, thin clients and other alternative architectures. “Are you fearful that the PC business for Dell … is in jeopardy?”

Not in Dell’s mind.

(Full article ‘Dell says he’ll be ready with PC alternatives’)