According to the New York Times -- "A major record label, the Universal Music Group, said on Friday that it had entered into a strategic alliance to sell a music-oriented cellphone service. The phones will include features that make it easier to download snippets of songs, and, eventually entire songs, according to the Universal Music Group's strategic partner, Single Touch Interactive, which works with companies to develop and package branded phone service. Universal Music, a unit of Vivendi Universal, becomes the latest to get into the affinity phone business, joining the likes of ESPN and Walt Disney in trying to carve out a niche of customers by selling phones that focus on providing specific content. The companies buy mobile minutes wholesale from a major national carrier, like Sprint or Cingular, and then resell that as prepaid time to their own customers. In the case of Universal Music, the company will not be operating the service, but plans to provide content to Single Touch, and to share in the revenue from minutes sold."
Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....