Good times, bad times
Who's had a hoot and who's had a howler in the channel in the last 14 days?
Good times
Kelway
Meg Whitman lived up to her reputation as one of the industry's most accessible CEOs by dropping into the offices of UK partner Kelway.
The HPE boss earlier this month held a customer Q&A session at the reseller's London base and Kelway CEO Phil Doye described it as an "excellent morning".
Securing an audience with Whitman is really the IT channel's equivalent of a schoolgirl meeting Harry Styles but a stoic Doye managed to keep a lid on his emotions.
"The Q&A was a rare opportunity for our customers to address a range of topics that are relevant to their businesses directly with Meg," he said.
Female phone users
The prayers of women everywhere have been answered with the launch of a round smartphone aimed exclusively at the fairer sex.
As our sister publication The Inquirer reports, US start-up dToor last week unveiled the Cyrcle Phone, a round flip-phone designed to spare women the indignity of holding rectangles in their delicate, spherical hands. Its vibrantly coloured clamshell design also resembles a compact mirror.
Before anyone asks: no, this is apparently not an early April Fools' joke. The Cyrcle Phone is a 100 per cent real thing that is - to make matters worse - the brainchild of two female former Microsoft employees, who plan to crowdfund it on Kickstarter this summer.
Dixons Carphone
If Dixons and Carphone Warehouse had hoped for a Hollywood ending to their $3.8bn merger, they got their wish, but not in the form they expected.
The Hemel Hempstead HQ Dixons vacated last year is apparently being used to shoot a scene from the latest Bourne film. According to the Hemel Gazette, a retake for Jason Bourne is being shot in the Maylands Avenue building, which until last year housed 1,000 Dixons staff.
Judging from their does-what-it-says-on-the-tin names, it seems Dixons Carphone and the team behind Jason Bourne share brand consultants, as well as buildings.
Bad Times
Tech billionaires
Schadenfreude - the act of crowing at other people's misfortunes - is particularly sweet when those involved are stinking rich.
In a heart-warming development, the number of billionaires has fallen for the first time in seven years, according to Forbes' new Rich List.
Top tech tycoons such as Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were not immune to the crunch as their collective wealth shrank by over $13bn. Angel-faced Facebook boy-man Mark Zuckerberg bucked the trend with an $11.2bn spike in his bank balance but the world's richest 20 people saw their collective wealth plunge by more than $70bn.
Looks like that tenth home in the Maldives'll have to wait.
Surface Hub partners
As the adverts for Guinness in the 1990s taught us, the best things come to those who wait. At least, that's what Microsoft partners are hoping after further delays to the launch of the Surface Hub, its new large-screen collaboration device.
The Surface Hub had already been postponed once but now resellers aren't expecting to get their mitts on it until April.
"We are making sure a product like this releases with the highest level of quality when it ends up in customers' hands," Microsoft's Windows and Surface lead, Ryan Asdourian, told CRN.
Well, you gotta treat ‘em mean to keep ‘em keen!
Civil liberties
The Investigatory Powers Bill was introduced to Parliament last week despite a string of damning reports and condemnation from tech firms.
Critics say the proposed legislation, known colloquially as the ‘Snoopers' Charter', will formally give UK spies Orwellian powers to monitor citizens' web browsing.
Adding to criticism doled out by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook, UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones called the draft Investigatory Powers Bill "un-British" and said it would undermine UK tech firms' advantage over US counterparts.
We would express an opinion ourselves if we weren't so worried Theresa May is monitoring what we say.