Instead of filling out requisition forms and waiting for the IT department to order peripherals, workers simply use their employee badges to buy tech gear. The company pays.

“We originally got the idea from Facebook when we were visiting their corporate offices in Silicon Valley,” says Bruce Lancaster, vice president of business products for Logitech.

Currently the company has two machines in Silicon Valley and plans to install others in its Taiwan design facility and its European headquarters in Switzerland. So far, both the IT department and employees love it, says Lancaster.

TappMob’s mobile app lets people check in at a location and notify just one person or small groups of people with a single touch of a button as opposed to publicly checking in on a service such as Foursquare. They developed the application for young people like them whose parents asked them to check in when driving. “Everytime I would drive somewhere my mom would be calling to check in but I couldn’t pick up the phone to talk while I was driving,” says Sasson, co-founder and CEO of the company. Now, with a touch of a button, she can send her mother her location on a map to let her know where she is.

The app started out as a summertime project but developed quickly into a full-blown company. Sasson and Mardjuki have received seed funding from Accretive, a private investment firm based in New York City. The amount wasn’t disclosed. On September 11, TappMob submitted its first app to the Apple App Store. The company is now developing three more mobile apps based on the idea of one-touch simplicity.

TappMob will be comprised completely of college students. Sasson is studying at Columbia University and Mardjuki is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. They met in eighth grade, while taking the Spanish placement test for The College Preparatory School in Oakland, California. Sasson lent Mardjuki a pencil for the exam.

The pair is part of a new wave of entrepreneurs under the age of 20. In May, Peter Thiel announced the members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships, giving young people a two-year stint and 0,000 grant to turn their ideas into companies. A number of those fellowship winners dropped out of college to accept the fellowship.

Sasson and Mardjuki did not receive grants from Peter Thiel and they plan to stay in school. Says Sasson, “We’re not going to drop out, our education comes first.”

Director of the National Bureau of Statistics said that foreign investment in the economy grew on average 9.5 percent per year. Last year, China as an economic power second in the world, received 125 percent of foreign investment more  than in 2001, when the country became a member of the World Trade Organization.

When the country was faced with the global financial crisis in 2008, Chinese authorities have decided to revise the model of economic development by reducing exports and putting emphasis on domestic demand and domestic sources of investment.

Experts predict that economic growth will slow from 2013, and say that they will have a gross national product growth of nine percent per year on average.

The attack occurred in March, just days before a meeting of European Union countries in which they discussed military strikes against Libya and the crisis of debt in the eurozone.

It is described as very well organized and precise focus on three or four key words related to external relations and monetary affairs commissioner, says EU Observer.

Was not disclosed whether the hackers managed to steal something, but it is suspected that it was an espionage. An investigation is launched, and experts are still trying to assess damage.

Once you are under attack by hackers, the European Union has begun to assemble a new Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).

The team will be composed of members of the existing departments in charge of computer security at the European Commission, Parliament and the Council of Europe.

Will be responsible for the prevention and combating cyber attacks on all European institutions and the share collected information with CERTs at the national level. On the test run starting in June, and in full to the facility should be the first October this year.

Expected to help better organize the defense against attacks, and enable their early detection and to facilitate damage assessment.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has stepped up protection of its electronic correspondence. Until the attack users have their e-mailboxes to access outside kanelarija, the password. Now must use a special security token, a small device that generates a secondary password.

High-powered computers let researchers create simulations that can reveal important clues as to what may happen next, including where more earthquakes are likely to happen or the potential environmental impact of radiation in the air and water that was released from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant. The magnitude-7.1 aftershock that struck Japan today at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, about 215 miles northeast of Tokyo, underscores the need to run these simulations.

The rolling blackouts in Japan after the earthquake have made it difficult for researchers to use their own supercomputers as simulations can take several days to run. “They’ve got this actual data from the earthquake that they could be putting through models to think about things like aftershocks, tsunamis, as well as some of the climatological impact related to the water or the air,” says Tim Carroll, director and global leader for high performance computing at Dell.

After the March 11 earthquake, when Japanese researchers told Dell about the power problems, Dell coordinated with university facilities, including the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center, Florida State, Lawrence Livermore National Labs and Cambridge University to donate capacity.

Currently, the Texas Advanced Computing Center has six researchers from Japan on their high performance computing system. Three of those researchers are from the University of Tokyo Earthquake Research Institute and three are from RIKEN, a large natural sciences research institute in Japan, says Colleen Ryan, a Dell spokesperson.

Those researchers have so far used 117,000 of the 500,000 compute hours donated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center, she says. That is equivalent to 406 days of running data on a single server, but the researchers have done this computation in less than two weeks. “We don’t know precisely what they are doing, but the researchers from the University of Tokyo ERI are most likely doing some research around what happened during the initial earthquake, what changed in the earth’s structure and what might happen in the future,” she says.

Supercomputers are often used for complex calculations such as climate modeling or to simulate nuclear reactions. After the initial 9.0 earthquake in Japan on March 11, Dell computers running at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab calculated where the tsunami waves actually hit.

“It correctly calculated wave height and distance of where those waves would actually hit, but it took roughly 12 hours to do the total computation, which means they got the answer right, but if we’d been able to do the computation faster it might have been useful to the people on the ground,” says Dell’s Carroll. The tsunami waves hit Japan’s coast within minutes after the earthquake.

Other areas where researchers might use high-performance computing power is for seismic analysis of nuclear reactors and other buildings, as well as how long it may take for radiation to dissipate from sea water, ground water and the atmosphere, says Dell’s Carroll.

On April 6, fisherman in Ibaraki prefecture, Japan’s fifth-largest seafood producer, stopped operations after tainted fish were found south of the location where radioactive water from a nuclear reactor at Fukushima Dai-Ichi contaminated the sea, reported Bloomberg News.

Researchers will likely run data from today’s earthquake. Says Carroll, “Each time they get real data from actual quakes, it makes the predictions better and better.”

Non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that more than 2,000 billion dollars more than estimates of the White House, reports the online edition of the Washington Post.

In calculating the president’s annual budget, the CBO concluded that Obama’s policies will cause you to be part of the national debt held by foreign investors doubled in that period, to 20,800 billion, or 87 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

A large part of the negative impact on the state budget would come from Obama’s proposal to retain tax breaks for the middle class, which expires in 2012.

While Obama has proposed raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, his tax policy as a whole will reduce revenues by more than 3,000 billion dollars in the next decade, CBO said.

The lost revenue will require more borrowing, which in turn will increase the interest on the national debt. CBO stated that the interest payments increase by more than four times by 2021. Obama’s politics, with 214 billion dollars this year, to more than $ 900 billion per year by early next decade.

On the other hand, Obama’s policies will reduce deficit spending over the next ten years, including a freeze on spending for domestic agencies in five years. However, the expenditure and tax collection will be above their historical averages by 2021., with public expenditure, which will consist of more than 24 percent of GDP and revenues at the level of 19.3 percent of GDP, CBO predicts.

Director of the Budget of the White House, Jakob Lu, a significant difference in the estimated deficit explained that “large uncertainties in economic projections and differences of opinion regarding the assessment of individual policies. “

From aviation to the government, Apple’s tablet is finding a home with workers in many different sectors. Financial services, technology and the healthcare industies are seeing the greatest adoption of the iPad for business use, according to a November 2010 report from mobile enterprise vendor Good Technology.

The report found that 36.8 percent of Good’s iPad activations among 4,000 enterprise customers had come from financial services, 11.4 percent from high tech, and 10.5 percent in healthcare.

The government accounted for 10.5 percent of iPad activations by November 2010. Use in the government continues to grow. Data collectors for the United States Department of Agriculture now carry iPads when conducting surveys in the field.

According to information from September, when it was first officially introduced, the playbook should have a 7-inch capacitive screen resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, dual-processor 1 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and two built-in camera, 3 and 5 megapixels. Tablet manufacturers BlackBerry phones will weigh about 400 grams.

In the meantime, the market appeared to HP tablet webOS-in, TouchPad, and many have noted similarities, first when it comes to user interface. A journalist from the site Laptopmag received the official comments of representatives of this company.

John Oaks from HP said that there are similarities. According to him, the government market tablets rapid cycle of innovation, but the cycle of imitation. The other side believes that it is normal that when more of them want to provide similar capabilities for a particular type of device, not necessarily have to come up with similar solutions.

How will the final device will look like, at what price and in which markets will be sold, and whether, as it says, run Android applications, you’ll learn a little more than a month.

Ericsson’s results announced Apr. 23 were in many ways worse. Revenue dropped 9% from the same quarter in 2009, to 45.1 billion Swedish kroner (.28 billion), about 3 billion kroner (8 million) short of analyst predictions. Net income fell 27%, to 1.26 billion kroner (4 million), nearly 38% (3 million) below analyst estimates. The company blamed tepid operator investment in network equipment and continued sharp price competition from rivals. Yet Ericsson shares soared 10.3% on Apr. 23, largely because its results included a near-doubling in North American sales.

Is there an illness at the heart of Nordic telecom? No question, the first quarter was a comedown from the results posted by both Nokia and Ericsson in the final quarter of 2009. But aside from that, the companies are facing quite different situations. While the reaction from investors in both cases may have been overdone, the basic direction of movement reflects diverging realities.

Nokia, whose shares have fallen 1.4% this year against a backdrop of generally rising telecom stocks, can’t seem to catch a break these days. Long the leader in mobile handsets, and still hanging on to one-third of the overall market, Nokia has been sent reeling by the success of the Apple iPhone. Sure, Nokia sold 21.5 million “converged mobile devices,” or smartphones and mobile computers, in the first quarter, up 57% from a year earlier. Apple, by comparison, sold just 8.75 million iPhones. But Apple snagged an average of 2 in product and service revenue for each iPhone, whereas Nokia’s devices sold for an average price of 7 (€155). Translation: Apple made 22% more revenue on 60% fewer units—and its profit margins were even more dominant.

Lagan is one of 30 companies pitching themselves to a group of more than 60 venture capitalists during the U.K. & Ireland Tech Tour on April 27-28. Many of the presenters are, like Lagan, later-stage companies that have already carved out successful global businesses. A surprising one-third of them are located on the Emerald Isle.

This week’s tour of the U.K. and Ireland is the 42nd such outing put on by the Geneva-based European Tech Tour Association, an independent non-profit organization that has been discovering and promoting early- and later-stage tech startups for more than a decade. It last held tours of England in 2004 and 2007, Scotland in 2001 and 2006, and the Republic of Ireland in 1999 and 2004.

What sets this tour apart from earlier trips is how many of the companies have already established themselves as world leaders in their fields, says Victor Basta, a veteran investment banker and president of the European Tech Tour Association. Basta is a former partner with London-based boutique investment firm Arma Partners, and now serves as an advisor to Magister Artis Capital, a London-based firm that provides merchant banking services for later stage companies and investors in growth industries.

The other major difference this time around is the number of Irish companies. Lagan is based in Northern Ireland, and another 10 of the startups that made the tour selection committee’s final cut are from the Republic of Ireland. That’s a disproportionately large number, considering that Ireland has a population of just 4.5 million, compared with 62 million in the U.K, says Basta. “What this shows is that multiple years of government focus on technology in Ireland, tie-ins with universities, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a local ecosystem of advisers and investors has created an ecosystem to rival [that of] Cambridge,” says Basta.