Technology archive for 2011-07-11

To some it's just a point release, but to others it's much, much more. If the leaked documentation gathered by N4BB.com is correct, the 4.1 release of BlackBerry Internet Service is coming down the pike, due abroad on September 10th and in the US October 8th. As any BB aficionado would expect it brings a suite of improvements, bumping the maximum attachment size to eight megabytes, enhancing some security measures, and adding a delicious-sounding new feature called inbox priming. With this, the first 20 messages of a newly added account will be downloaded immediately, "instantly providing users with the reassurance that their email is setup and working." Suffering a bit of additional hypertension while waiting to see if those first few missives sync correctly? Your diuretic might just be inbound.BlackBerry Internet Service 4.1 coming October 8th, priming inboxes for the greater good? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  N4BB.com  | Email this | Comments

Pratip Banerji / The Official Google Blog:The first Google eBooks-integrated e-reader: iriver Story HD  —  (Cross-posted from the Inside Google Books Blog and the Google Commerce blog)  —  Starting this coming Sunday, July 17, the iriver Story HD e-reader will be available for sale in Target stores nationwide and on Target.com.

Google appears to have generated some social networking buzz with its Google+ effort, but Wall Street analysts are already wondering about return on investment and the hit to profit margins.

Pangea Software is making all of its iOS games free to anyone who wants them for one day only -- today, from 8am to 8pm CST. Titles include Enigmo, Bugdom, Nanosaur and Cro-Mag Rally.

David A. Kaplan / Fortune:Don't call it the next tech bubble - yet  —  Signs of exuberance are everywhere: Tesla roadsters, soaring real estate, overpriced vinegar - and eye-popping valuations for pre-IPO companies like Facebook and Zynga.  So why are so many Silicon Valley denizens reluctant to use the B-word?

Companies court students with back-to-school deals.

pbahra writes "Why do some technologies cause moral panic and others don't? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen? According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation's Interaction and Experience Research, we have had moral panic over new technology for pretty well as long as we have had technology. It is one of the constants in our culture. '... moral panic is remarkably stable and it is always played out in the bodies of children and women,' she said. There was, she says, an initial pushback about electrifying homes in the U.S.: 'If you electrify homes you will make women and children and vulnerable. Predators will be able to tell if they are home because the light will be on, and you will be able to see them. So electricity is going to make women vulnerable. Oh and children will be visible too and it will be predators, who seem to be lurking everywhere, who will attack.' 'There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women's bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed,' she says" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Electronista:Apple runs AirPlay, FaceTime ads for iPhone 4's last hurrah  —  iPhone 4 AirPlay and FaceTime ads pop up  —  Apple tonight ran two new TV ads for the iPhone 4 (below), both of which focus on features that are genuinely rare on rival platforms.  “AirPlay” shows its namesake wireless audio …

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:Industry Ventures Closes $400 Million Secondary Fund, Exceeds $1B Of Capital  —  VC firm Industry Ventures has closed its Fund VI, a $400 million secondary fund focused on providing liquidity alternatives for venture capital and growth equity investments.  —  Additionally, the firm recently closed …

For many small companies, the IT staff is a single person or even a consultant brought in to handle the business's computing upkeep. Either way, the question of what your IT person knows about the inner workings of the company is well worth asking--because the IT person may know far more about your company, employees, and personal information than you ever thought possible.

Your old cell phone data can reemerge from the past to haunt you. Whether it's because sellers are lazy or naive, cast-off phones still contain troves of information about their former users. And as phones get smarter, they're ever more likely to hold bank account passwords, personal email, or private photographs that anyone with the right kind of motivation could exploit.

Heading off to school? We've rounded up must-have downloads to take along. Included are security tools to keep your PC private and malware-free. You'll also need an office suite for all those papers and spreadsheets, and maybe a writing helper to organize your thoughts. You can decorate your desktop with a pick-me-up wallpaper, or give your Windows 7 system a complete sci-fi makeover. Better yet, you can donate your PC's idle time to make the world a better place. Like you, your computer has important work to do.

Here's a tidbit of interest: it took the moving of three million Galaxy S IIs before we saw a bona fide teardown. But hey -- maybe this thing's just too darn delightful to crack open for the sake of cracking it open. iFixit and ABI Research have both sliced into Sammy's best smartphone yet, discovering an Exynos dual-core apps processor, newfangled CMOS-based antenna switch, a low-power XMM6260 cellular chipset from Infineon and a single-packaged multi-band, multi-mode PA from RFMD. 'Course, knowing the surrounding technobabble is only half the fun; for the other half, dig into those source links below.Samsung Galaxy S II gets torn down, found to be just as beautiful on the inside originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  iFixit, ABI Research (1), (2)  | Email this | Comments

Nobody wants 3G tablets because nobody wants to pay for the 3G data, according to an IDG analyst.

The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, both published by Philadelphia Media Network, will sell Android tablets this year with subscriptions to both newspapers in digital form.

App prices on Apple's App Store are rebounding 14 percent in 2011 compared to an 18 percent decline in 2010 and the company's average selling price is $1.44. Of that sum, Apple's gets an average...

Dieter Bohn / This is my next:HTC lays out timeline for unlocked bootloaders on Sensation, Sensation 4G, and EVO 3D  —  HTC has updated their Facebook page yet again with an update on their new policy of providing unlocked bootloaders for Android devices: … HTC's plan for enabling the unlocked bootloaders gives …

BogenDorpher writes "In a recent study by the Governors Highway Safety Association,(Pdf) driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices, cause as much as 25% of all US car accidents. It is common knowledge that driving while distracted is not a safe thing to do, but now we have some scientific data that goes in-depth on the topic. From the article: '"Despite all that has been written about driver distraction, there is still a lot that we do not know, Much of the research is incomplete or contradictory. Clearly, more studies need to be done addressing both the scope of the problem and how to effectively address it," said GHSA Executive Director Barbara Harsha.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James B. Stewart / New York Times:Waiting for Gravity to Hit LinkedIn  —  Facebook's valuation in the private market this week was approaching $100 billion.  Twitter is in the midst of a round of private fund-raising on terms that value it at as much as $8 billion — more than double its worth a mere seven months ago.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Fortune:Apple users buying 61% more apps, paying 14% more per app  —  The appetite for cool software is increasing, and customers are willing to pay more for it  —  Estimates: Piper Jaffray.  Chart: PED  —  Apple's (AAPL) business model is increasingly dependent on the health of its App Store …

WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange will head to London's High Court on Tuesday to try to reverse an extradition order that would send him to Sweden for questioning about sexual assault allegations.

Lexmark has stepped up with a new mobile printing solution to add to the growing number of applications for the Cisco Cius tablet.

Polycom today unveiled a $10,000 room-size videoconferencing system that integrates with Microsoft's Lync collaboration tools.

Blackboard Collaborate, launched today at BBWorld, is the marriage of Elluminate and Wimba. Can it be greater than the sum of its web conferencing parts?

An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to continued improvements to start-up and first paint performance, tweaks to memory footprint and garbage collection, and the addition of a new 2D graphics backend called Azure, Firefox 8 is some 20% faster than Firefox 5 across all major metrics — and actually about equal with Chrome 14 on JavaScript and 2D rendering performance. Azure (which is new with Firefox 7) replaces Cairo, and instead of dealing with Direct2D and Quartz, it allows Firefox to deal directly with the Direct3D and OpenGL subsystems — resulting in a 20% speed boost under Windows, and probably even more under OS X." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You'd think after unveiling a duo of Android 3.1 slates along with a bare-bones model Archos would have washed its hands of tablets for at least a couple months, right? Of course not -- the French company that just won't quit has sent yet another tab through the FCC, this one dubbed the A70S2. And that's about all the outfit let slip on the subject -- at least until August 19th when the confidentiality protection covering the tablet's juiciest details expires. The company wouldn't throw us a screen size, resolution, or even a confirmation that yes, this thing might well run Android like the bulk of Archos' other tablets. So if this game of "what the heck is this?" doesn't bear fruit, let's take the opportunity to have a (one-sided) heart-to-heart with our favorite French tablet maker. Archos, isn't it about time you added an easy-to-hold, 7-incher with Android 3.1, 250GB of storage, and HDMI-out to the mix? We think it'd fit in perfectly.Archos sends the A70S2 tablet through the FCC, tells us nothing in the process originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  FCC  | Email this | Comments

The folks at Veeam contacted me after they read my assessment of Quest's product strategy (see Quest's vision for more information). They wanted the opportunity to present their targets, product...

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:Beyond the iPhone 5: The future of Apple's mobile devices  —  There have been a flurry of rumors surrounding Apple's next iPhone this week.  Some of them are reiterations of previous rumors, like a thinner and lighter iPhone, and some focus on a lower-end model that might appeal to prepaid customers.

Not a single tablet competing with the iPad has garnered enough consumer sales to even prove there is a sizable market, much less affect it.

An anonymous reader writes "A federal jury in Texas has decided against Apple in a patent infringement lawsuit and ordered it to pay $8 million to Personal Audio LLC, a patent licensing company (aka troll). The lawsuit started in 2009. Last year Apple's three fellow defendants (Sirius XM Radio, Coby Electronics and Archos) settled. Apple said the patents were invalid and not infringed. The patent holder demanded $84M and will now get about 10% of that amount. Juries in East Texas frequently rule in favor of patent holders. In the same district court Lodsys has already filed four lawsuits. In one of them it targets seven app developers and Apple has moved to intervene. The first two developers were already given a deadline: they must answer Lodsys's complaint by July 21, unless they request an extension." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Ford / Ftrain.com:Woods+  —  People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing?  You're a nerd.  Explain it immediately.  —  I know it's confusing.  But this is their competitor to Facebook basically.  Except you can list your friends.  That's the circles.  But it's easier to remember if you call them holes.

Behold the Apple 'Rumor of the Day' - iPod touch 3G incoming.

"F.E.A.R. 3," the latest installment in the action-horror series, aims higher than your typical first-person shooter game.

On this week's Tech Check podcast, CNN Tech's Brandon Griggs, John D. Sutter and Stephanie Goldberg talk about the pluses and minuses of social video chat.

Tech blogs are never short on Apple rumors.

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) - New Zealand customers at an online shopping site were happily shocked when they got expensive televisions and iPods for free Monday after a computer glitch charged them only postage and handling.

Holographic radar approach could help mitigation aviation interference seen as a downside of wind farms.

410Labs:410 Labs Closes Successful $750,000 Series A Funding Round  —  Investors include True Ventures, 500 Startups and an All-Star Cast of Area Entrepreneurs  —  Baltimore, MD (July 11, 2011)— 410 Labs, a Baltimore-based lean product studio founded by Dave Troy and Matt Koll …

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An intensifying quarrel between Samsung and Apple is triggering expectations that some of the pairs' $5 billion-plus relationship may be up for grabs.

itwbennett writes "The slow rollout of Google+ has led some to wonder whether Google was trying to create demand through scarcity, but it might just be that the company learned its lesson from the privacy fiasco that was the launch of Google Buzz. 'I think it is very smart of Google to restrict Plus to a "limited field trial" — they aren't even calling it a beta. Google made a misstep with the roll out of Buzz. They've already avoided that mistake with Plus with this limited release. And because it's so exclusive, tech savvy individuals are fighting to get in — just the type of folks that you want as beta testers,' said Sean Sullivan, an F-Secure security adviser. Of course, fixing bugs doesn't necessarily mean that Google will have privacy issues buttoned up. 'Google Plus is clearly designed to give people better control over their privacy with respect to their family, co-workers and friends, [but] there are other types of privacy that it simply can't provide,' says Peter Eckersley, a senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'Nobody has succeeded in building a social network that can offer those kinds of privacy protections yet.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And this, friends, is how you make the leap into the mainstream. Bigfoot Networks has been toiling away in an effort to get its gaming-optimized networking guts into just about everything -- there's also a VisionTek GPU with Killer innards, and a trifecta of mainboard makers announced that they too would be joining the bustling integration party earlier in the year. Now, however, the outfit's really got something to hang its hat on: a handshake with Dell's Alienware unit. The Killer Wireless-N 1103 networking adapter will now be listed as an option for the Alienware M18x, M17x, M14x and M11x, promising data rates as high as 450Mbps as well as its Advanced Stream Detect to intelligently classify and prioritize network traffic. Mum's the word on how much the upgrade will be, but based on prior reviews, we'd say the premium will be well worth it for the hardcore among us.Continue reading Alienware adds jitter-killing Killer Wireless-N technology to M18x, M17x, M14x and M11xAlienware adds jitter-killing Killer Wireless-N technology to M18x, M17x, M14x and M11x originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  Alienware, Bigfoot Networks  | Email this | Comments

Your favorite no-touch backup company's coming back around again, this time with yet another HDD to tempt your paranoia. Clickfree's newest backup solution is the C6 Easy Imaging, capable of holding backups for as many PCs as necessary (provided there's enough space). It'll work seamlessly with Windows 7, Vista and XP, and it'll get all the juice it needs from a spare USB port. As with the outfit's prior products, this one's also designed for those who aren't exactly "hip" with technical lingo, which means that power users will likely be flustered with the inability to really control too much of what's happening just as soon as this thing's plugged in. That said, the drive does allow users to categorize which files they want backed up, and it'll enable users to restore only personal files should the need arise. The full spiel is hosted up after the break, and you can catch the portable version right now in the US and Canada for $140 (500GB) / $180 (1TB), while the desktop model goes for $150 (1TB) / $180 (2TB).Continue reading Clickfree trots out C6 Easy Imaging backup hard drives, takes 'em to 2TBClickfree trots out C6 Easy Imaging backup hard drives, takes 'em to 2TB originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Charles Arthur / Guardian:Smartphones head to ‘tipping point’  —  Android trumps iPhone and RIM as new data shows the point where half of UK users have smartphones is about a year away  —  Android is now the top smartphone OS in eight key countries having edged past Nokia's Symbian in Spain, according …

You don't need to spend money to keep a Windows computer running in top form. Here's how to fix, clean and maintain Windows using programs you can download now for free.

With Microsoft ignoring iOS and Android, the market for mobile office software is left to small vendors like QuickOffice.

Laura Keeley / Washington Post:Boston venture capitalists don't want to let another big one get away  —  Mark Zuckerberg was the big one that got away.  —  Boston venture capitalists declined to fund the founder of Facebook, the world's most popular social-networking service, when he wanted to expand his start-up in 2004.

Watson may have Jeopardy! and the medical realm under lock, but retail / service industries? Not yet, but soon. Very soon. According to a new piece in Hemispheres Magazine, IBM's now looking to shop the supercomputer's world-class vocal recognition technologies to outfits in retail and customer service, with those enterprises in particular drooling at the thought of having a sophisticated machine recognizing human speech. In theory, at least, basic questions could potentially be answered entirely by Watson, but that's honestly not a future we're too fond of. There's also the possibility of using analytical data that Watson collects in order to better position deals, service and other tech support centers based on what kinds of requests come in the most. So, eager to speak with a kindhearted, potentially confused robot? Or will that flustered, potentially sympathetic Earthling still suffice?Calling for tech support? IBM's Watson might be on the other end originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 07:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink Extreme Tech  |  Hemispheres Magazine  | Email this | Comments

NOTE: I started this post on a day that I had absolutely no sleep whatever. Literally.  Which means that its the product of a temporarily feverish mind. Even with that, I'm standing by what I'm...

It's not every day I sit down, start writing, and rage about the generation I do my best to represent on a vast scale. Today was that day.