• Industry giants jockey for dominance of the cloud
  Microsoft and Google are locked in an increasingly contentious struggle to unseat Amazon as the leader in the public cloud services market, seeking a larger piece of an industry that generated an estimated $40 billion in revenue last year. "The great tech wars are expanding into nearly every area of business, and cloud services are the latest battlefield. Amazon has captured the hearts and minds of developers, but Google and Microsoft are gaining ground," said Bill Coughran, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. The Wall Street Journal (2/3)      

• Intel partners with academic researchers to develop morphing CPUs
  Intel is collaborating with a group of universities to develop a class of CPU that can reconfigure to conform to specific workload demands, which researchers say would lead to major increases in performance and energy efficiency. The "MorphCore" technology enables the CPU to switch between two configurations, one designed for dominant single-thread environments and the other optimized for emerging multi-threaded workloads, such as those used in high-performance computing. eWeek (2/1)      

• Cybersecurity rules allow for pre-emptive strikes, secret review finds
  Officials say secret White House legal assessment of cybersecurity decision-making powers has determined President Barack Obama has the authority to greenlight a pre-emptive strike to protect against an impending attack. The review, which took two years to complete, determined Obama retains that power even against a target where no declaration of war exists, via rules that govern the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies. The New York Times (tiered subscription model) (2/3)      

• Enterprise markets trump consumer sectors for new tech investment
  Evidence shows technology entrepreneurs once hooked on the allure of social networking and mobile applications are increasingly turning their backs on the consumer sector and focusing instead on developing new solutions for the enterprise customer. A tally of investment capital in tech-heavy Massachusetts found that between 2011 and 2012, the amount of capital flowing to new enterprise-related projects increased 27%, while investment in consumer-focused startups decreased by 16%. The Boston Globe (tiered subscription model) (2/3)      

• BYOD raises risk of malware infection, Cisco finds
  Computer users are more likely to pick up a damaging piece of malware while browsing search engines and retail shopping sites than through the online gambling and adult content sites typically seen as repositories for malicious code. That's according to Cisco's 2013 Annual Security Report, which found online advertisements are teeming with potential threats and consumers who use their mobile devices for both personal and work-related activities face an increased risk of infection. ITProPortal.com (U.K.) (2/4)      

• Leadership tips from the Super Bowl coaches
  Jim Harbaugh and John Harbaugh aren't the "screaming field generals" once ubiquitous in football, writes Dov Seidman. Instead, the brothers represent the modern coach that listens to players, rather than yells at them, and aims not for absolute and unquestioned authority but rather for softer and more collaborative forms of power. "[O]ur world has transformed. And football provides us a great metaphor for how our leadership needs to change with it," Seidman writes. Time.com (2/1)      

Top five news stories selected by SmartBrief on ExecTech readers in the past week.

• New DNA tag gun lets cops conduct arrests at their leisure (Popular Science)

• Evolution of the C-suite to radically alter IT budgeting (CIO.com)

• Did scientists just see the beginning of a quasar? (InsideScience.org)

• How the ability to negotiate could open doors for new cloud players (InfoWorld)

• How to address the lack of global worker mobility (Business Finance)

• Results based on number of times each story was clicked by readers.

• Researchers develop self-organizing crystals
  Physicists at New York University used blue light and hydrogen peroxide to turn a microscopic cube of the mineral hematite into self-organizing crystals that exhibit two of the three qualities typically viewed as a prerequisite for life. According to researcher Paul Chaikin, the crystals in the experiment possess a metabolism and the ability to move on their own but are unable to self-replicate. "Here we show that with a simple, synthetic active system, we can reproduce some features of living systems," said co-researcher Jérémie Palacci. Wired.com (1/31)      

Today, we live a blended work-personal life. The hackers know this, and the security threats that we encounter online such as embedded Web malware while visiting popular destinations like search engines, retailers, social media sites and smartphone/tablet apps no longer threaten only the individual; they threaten our organizations by default." --John Stewart, senior vice president of global government and corporate security at Cisco, as quoted by ITProPortal.com (U.K.)