Apple and Accenture have started a new partnership. Accenture will create a dedicated iOS practice within Accenture Digital Studios in select locations around the world with experts from Apple including visual and experience designers, programmers, data architects and scientists, and hardware and software designers.

I have to admit to a little bit of self-interest in this story, as someone I love has Type 1 diabetes (it used to be called Juvenile Diabetes). The Juvenile Diabetes Reseach Foundation (JDRF) and IBM have commenced a new collaboration to apply machine learning in order to identify the factors leading to the onset to this autoimmune disease.

You've probably seen the Watson commercials, where what looks like a sentient box interacts with celebrities like Bob Dylan, Carrie Fisher, and Serena Williams; or doctors; or a young cancer survivor. Maybe you caught the IBM artificial intelligence technology's appearance in H&R Block's Super Bowl commercial starring Jon Hamm. "It is one of the most powerful tools our species has created. It helps doctors fight disease," Hamm says. "It can predict global weather patterns. It improves education for children everywhere. And now we unleash it on your taxes."

As someone who recalls buying a 4MB CF card for a Pocket PC for about $400, the plummeting cost of storage continues to amaze me. This week, IBM revealed that its has shoved 201 gigabits per square inch on prototype sputtered magnetic tape. The company squeezed about 330TB into a package that fits into the palm of your hand.

IBM continues to try and reinvent itself. Having lost the PC war and selling its PC and server business, and with the reputation of its services arm suffering some massive issues such as being embroiled in Sweden's massive data leak and issues like #censusfail locally, the company is focussing on building credibility in the security business. A new patent that uses the physical structure of circuit boards to protect cryptographic keys is another step in that direction.

Mainframes might seem like the grey-beards of the IT business, with a less than bleeding edge rep compared to modern cloud-based systems. But IBM's new Z Series systems could shift that perception. They have the ability to handle 12 billion encrypted transactions per day using a new encryption engine that makes it possible to pervasively encrypt data associated with any application, cloud service or database all the time.

AI is probably the most interesting field of tech that is emerging. Now that computing power is almost limitless (subject to budget) with access to massive amounts of compute through cloud services, there are all sorts of interesting applications possible. So, naturally, AI and whatever flavour of sports-ball you are into is a candidate for the AI treatment. IBM is putting Watson on the court at Wimbledon, to find the best matches.

It's taken a couple of years but Lenovo is planning to release a retro-styled ThinkPad that brings back the style of the 1990s with 21st century computing power. If it's really like the ThinkPads of old, it will be a very robust computer with the best keyboard on the market and be able to withstand some heavy duty action - those computers were built to last.

IBM Cloud Identity Connect is a new Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) that provides access to thousands of popular cloud apps with single sign-on (SSO) to their cloud or on-premise applications. The new service will be available on June 15th from the IBM Cloud Marketplace. There's a free one-year subscription for up to five applications, for customers of IBM Cloud applications like IBM Verse and IBM Connections Cloud, as well as partner offerings like Box from IBM. IBM Cloud Identity Connect is also available as a standalone 30-day free trial.

IBM, Samsung and GLOBALFOUNDRIES have come together to create an all new processor that packs 30 million transistors into a wafer the size of a fingernail. The developers say the resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. And power savings could see batteries in smartphones and other mobile products could last two to three times longer than today.

IBM Australia's workforce has been cut from 6,463 to 5,489 people - a loss of almost 1000 jobs - following a 68 per cent fall in profit.

In the coming years we will see AI used in more ways and in applications we can scarcely imagine. This is a space IBM has been very active in, particularly through their Watson project. With people using more devices and the expected explosion in end-points with the IoT, they've applied their Watson tech to the challenge of endpoint management.

Remember the #censusfail incident last year when millions of Australians were unable to fill out the mandatory Census online because the website was slammed by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack? It appears the ABS was overconfident about the website's ability to fend of a DDoS attack.

IBM and Nextgen have been blaming each other for the failure of Census 2016. Based on today's Senate Economics References Committee hearing into #CensusFail, it appears both companies were at fault to some extent. Nextgen may have incorrectly implemented geoblocking aimed at mitigating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks while IBM acknowledged it should have a real test of its router's resilience to failure. But Alastair MacGibbon, the Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security, has laid the blame predominantly on IBM for failing to handle relatively small DDoS attacks that shouldn't have brought down the Census website.

IBM has been thrown under the bus ever since #CensusFail happened back in August. Big Blue was the IT contractor that was hired to run the Census website, which went down for nearly two days after being hit by repeated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. IBM's upstream provider for the Census, Nextgen, has since came out and accused IBM of refusing DDoS protection when it offered. IBM has admitted that it did indeed reject Nextgen's DDoS protection solution, and here's why.

This year's Census was nothing short of a spectacular debacle after the website where Australians were to fill out the survey went down for nearly two days. Last night, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) chief David Kalisch fronted the Senate Estimates in parliament to answer questions about the incident. We found out that the ABS will have to spend around $30 million to fix the damage. He also admitted that the ABS made a number of poor judgement calls for Census 2016. Here's what he had to say along with a recap of what has happened since the Census outage occurred two months ago.

2016 will be remembered as the year technology giant IBM hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. They’ve been blamed, almost completely, by the ABS for what’s now known as #censusfail. IBM has recently sacked a couple of staff over the incident but I think there’s more to it.

In the wake of the Census debacle that happened this week, there's been a lot of finger-pointing as to who was to blame. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has put the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and IBM, the company hosting and managing the Census website, on notice, expressing his disappointment over Tuesday's website meltdown. Well, he's going to be even more disappointed today as the Census website went down again last night. It's looking more likely that IBM will be shouldering the majority of the blame for the Census disaster. Read on to find out more.

The Australian Signals Directorate has confirmed that no data was compromised amidst the Census debacle of the past couple of days.