Apple’s iPad hasn’t materially affected consumer PC sales, as some have claimed, a research firm said today.

During the 2010 holiday sales season, only about 12% of iPad buyers abandoned a PC purchase to acquire the tablet, making cannibalization a minor factor, according to survey data compiled by the NPD Group.

The decline of consumer PC sales growth rates has a much simpler explanation: The huge numbers posted by PC makers in the aftermath of Microsoft’s 2009 launch of Windows 7.

More large companies are turning to collocation providers to relieve capacity constraints in their data centers, as a way to avoid the high cost of building their own new brick-and-mortar facilities, two studies suggest.

The Uptime Institute, in its first annual data center survey, reported Tuesday that more than a third of the large companies it surveyed — 36 percent — expect to run out of capacity in at least one of their data centers over the next 18 months.

Server consolidation and upgrading of power and cooling equipment are the primary ways the companies said they would boost their capacity, the survey showed. But a significant portion — 29 percent — said they plan to lease collocation space, while 20 percent will move workloads to the cloud.

LAS VEGAS — As far as EMC CEO Joe Tucci is concerned, the future of his company is the hybrid cloud and big data analytics.

Speaking to about 6,000 user customers and several reseller partners at the company’s annual user conference, Tucci said corporate data is growing at “staggering” rates, and 90% of it is unstructured – files, photos, video, email or social networking communications. Adding to that growth are the variety of data types now in use, the way data is being managed and the number of devices being used by corporate employees, including tablets and smart phones.

Tucci pointed to new open-source web application frameworks that are changing the way data is created and accessed, such as Ruby on Rails, Spring and Python.

Researchers from Queens University presented a flexible, e-ink display at the Computer Human Interaction conference that they believe could one day replace smartphones. Called the Paper Phone, the device isn’t much thicker than a few sheets of paper and uses the same type of display found on the Amazon Kindle and other popular e-readers.

Since it’s flexible, bending the device controls its actions.

“That means we can use the types of metaphors you find when reading or working with paper documents now working with computers,” said Roel Vertegaal an associate professor of computer science at Queens University. “If you want to turn the page you simply bend the top right corner and you go to the next page.”

European lobby groups have expressed alarm at a Belgian court’s ruling that Google News violates copyright rules.

In 2007, courts found that Copiepresse, which represents French and German language newspapers in Belgium, was the victim of copyright infringements by Google. Google duly removed Copiepresse content from its index and launched an appeal at a high court. Last Thursday, that court found against Google’s appeal to the distress of many lobby groups.

“The ruling sets a dangerous precedent by a restrictive interpretation of the copyright exceptions regime. Exceptions to, and limitations on, right holders’ exclusive rights are an important mechanism for balanced copyright law. This ruling sets these E.U. aims back and significantly restricts Internet users,” said European consumer rights group, BEUC.

Rhomobile will offer on Tuesday an IDE and capabilities for Windows Phone 7 and NFC (near field communications) application development in an upgrade to the company’s multiplatform framework for building smartphone and tablet applications.

Included in Rhodes 3.0 is RhoStudio, an Eclipse-based IDE offering integrated application generation, device emulation, editing, building, and debugging. With the debugger, developers can change code but not have to do a full rebuild of an application. Through version 3.0′s Windows Phone 7 support, Rhomobile claims to offer the first framework to support Microsoft’s new smartphone platform.

Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype is largely seen as a defensive move by analysts, as the company struggles to keep up with the likes of Google and Facebook on the Internet.

There is a huge battle that only continues to intensify over where users go on the Internet for their services. Companies including Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft need to attract users, and that is what a deal to acquire Skype is all about, according to Paolo Pescatore , analyst at CCS Insight.

Microsoft seems to feel it needs to fight back, and the deal looks like a largely defensive move to prevent its rivals from acquiring Skype, Pescatore said. Microsoft doesn’t really need to make the acquisition, because it has all the technical assets it needs to compete with Skype.