After months of turmoil, HP seems to have made a sensible decision as the company announced it has reversed a previous decision to spin off the PC division.

This looks like a sound move, and new CEO Meg Whitman will probably earn some good will inside HP for this decision.

That said, paidContent is reporting that webOS is toast.

But the Guardian understands that HP is to shut down its webOS division, acquired for $1.2 billion in April 2010 when it bought Palm, and make the staff there redundant or shift them elsewhere inside the company. That could mean losses of up to 500 jobs as the business which created the short-lived HP TouchPad and smartphones is closed.

If true, this makes less sense. Cheap tablets have a future, and HP shouldn’t abandon these efforts just because they botched the initial TouchPad release.

Tom Friedman is usually very good at explaining the disruptive influence of new technology and the implications for the global economy, even if he isn’t the first (or second) to notice something.

The latest phase in the I.T. revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga — with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and “the cloud” — those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

The emergence of the cloud, explained Alan Cohen, a vice president of Nicira, a new networking company, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour.” This is speeding up everything — innovation, product cycles and competition.

The October issue of Fast Company has an article about the designer Scott Wilson, who thought of grafting the body of an iPod Nano onto colorful wristbands, turning them into watchlike devices that could wake you up and play your music. He had no money, though, to bring his concept to market, so he turned to Kickstarter, the Web-based funding platform for independent creative projects. He posted his idea on Nov. 16, 2010, reported Fast Company, and “within a month, 13,500 people from 50 countries had ponied up nearly $1 million.” Apple soon picked up the product for its stores. Said Alexis Ringwald, 28, who recently founded an education start-up, her second Silicon Valley venture: “I have many friends — they introduce themselves as ‘reformed’ Wall St. bankers and lawyers — who have abandoned conventional careers and are now launching start-ups.”

Some like Rich Kaarlgard have been describing this as the “cheap revolution” for years. Friedman is explaining the new developments in that area. We now have it all at our fingertips all the time. It’s a powerful and exciting development. Kickstarter is a great crowdsourcing example that thrives in this environment.

Friedman uses the column to contrast Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It’s a good read.

Cisco took the embarrassing step of killing the Flip camera last week. Jeff Morgan digs into the entire episode and he isn’t very impressed with how the tech behemoth handled the entire affair.

To say that Cisco misunderstands the consumer tech market would be like saying NBA players misunderstand what constitutes consent. The company decided just over a week ago to kill off the Flip video, a line of consumer camcorders that Cisco purchased for some $590 million. The key word there is kill, as in kaput – no more Flip. Cisco isn’t even going to try to sell the camcorder line to another company, and probably for good reason – there isn’t a company on the planet that would buy it. Instead, Cisco is simply throwing it away, along with 550 jobs as part of an attempt to refocus the company.

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Cisco should have known better, too. For a company that has dealt with some level of consumer tech for more than 15 years (Linksys was founded in 1995), the Flip move was remarkably dumb. I would have loved to sit in on the meeting in which Cisco offered nearly $600 million for a product that had a very obvious expiration date in the very near future. How do you look at a company that keeps buying up smaller and smaller sensors and not think, ‘Gee, do you think some one will put this in a phone one day, fellas?’ As a matter of fact, let me lay this out for the neanderthals Cisco has running its investments – if you want to buy a piece of tech today, ask yourself whether or not it’s feasible to put that feature into a phone in the near future.

I wonder how the regulators will justify letting this transaction go through. AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion, so we would be down to just three major carriers in the United States. AT&T will become the largest carrier in the US, surpassing Verizon, but now consumers will have far fewer choices.

Here’s an entertaining video from CNET on 5 doomed technologies, though some of the predictions seem a little off. Blu-ray and e-book readers are doomed? Those predictions seem to be off base.

On Blu-ray, of course streaming poses a big threat, but there’s always room for quality, and Blu-ray seems to offer the best picture quality.

On e-book readers, of course the iPad is more popular, but have you tried to read a long book on the iPad? It’s just not ideal, and given the cheap prices of e-book readers, I think many consumers will want both.

That said, the prediction on 3D TV seems like a winner . . .

Here’s a good video about financial scams, which are now going beyond the Internet to the mobile world as well. Be careful of smishing, which is a new scam where you get a text and a prompt to call. Don’t follow the link!

After years of dealing with the crappy Explorer browser, it was a relief to switch to Firefox several years ago.

Now Firefox is starting to suck as well. I routinely get a notice that says “The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded” when I hit a link ot try to go to a site, even though everything is fine. Close the box and try again (sometimes several times) and the link works fine.

Can somebody please fix this? It’s annoying as hell . . .

With smart phones and now tablet computers like the iPad, students have so much more information at their fingertips, including digital study guides that can make it easier to study, or to avoid real studying.

At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them.

Nothing is new about that. CliffsNotes guides, with their familiar yellow and black covers, have been in book bags since 1958.

What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.

“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.

All in all, this is a net plus, as access to information is always a good thing, though it can obviously be abused. The real challenge is to train younger students how to focus on a subject without distractions so real learning takes place.

BusinessWeek is reporting that the iPad is becoming a hit with the elderly, even though there aren’t hard numbers to back up the claim.

The company has sold 3.27 million iPads since its launch in April, but doesn’t break down sales figures by customer age, making it impossible to know with certainty how many seniors are buying them. Anecdotal evidence suggests it’s a hit with the elderly. Marti Weston of Arlington, Va., bought her father one for his 87th birthday in May. “This ‘book-sized’ pad has become my news and entertainment source,” her father, the Reverend Elmo Pascale, raved in a comment on Weston’s blog.

The iPad’s intuitive interface makes it appealing to senior citizens around the world, says Takahiro Miura, a researcher at the University of Tokyo: “The iPad is a good tool for the elderly because it’s very forgiving of mistakes.” Miura’s team uses computers to help train senior citizens to rejoin the workforce. “Unlike the PC, it doesn’t require prior knowledge,” he says.

This makes sense, as ease of use is a critical factor for older computer users. The device is less intimidating, and we can see the logic of seniors becoming enthralled with the device, just like younger users.

Amazon has released the new Kindle and has reduced the price, and the new versions are already sold out, though you can place an order and get on the waiting list.

This is quite a development when one considers that many were pronouncing the Kindle to be dead upon the release of the iPad. That said, for every fool who made that prediction, there were many savvy tech analysts who pointed out that the Kindle was still superior for long-form reading. That’s the phrase you’ll consistently be hearing from Jeff Bezos. The iPad is a brilliant device that just may help save the magazine and newspaper businesses, but reading a book is a much different experience. In that context, the graphics aren’t necessary, and the glossy screen needed to produce the graphics and touch-screen features is a hindrance to reading in the sun or reading for a long period of time.

Thus, the Kindle and similar devices devoted to the long-form reading market will always thrive.

It might be cool down the road the have a dual-use device, where you have the glossy screen on one side and the Kindle-type screen on the other, but for now I expect to use both devices, and it doesn’t hurt to have a free Kindle app on your iPad so you can do some reading in those cases where you have your iPad but not your Kindle.