Technology archive for 2012-02-21

Ben Parr / Ben Parr's Entrepreneurial Musings:My Column Is Heading to CNET!  —  Dear friends, colleagues and supporters,  —  I'm thrilled to announce that I'm joining CNET and CBS Interactive as a contributing columnist and commentator!  —  Ever since my departure from Mashable, I've posted my personal take on the big technology news of the day on BenParr.com.

Brendan Sasso / Hillicon Valley:Comcast launches minority-owned channels to meet regulatory commitments  —  Comcast will launch four minority-owned networks, including one led by former basketball player Magic Johnson and one proposed by rapper and producer Sean “Diddy” Combs, the company announced Tuesday.

OverTheGeicoE writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center has been examining the White House's proposed budget for Department of Homeland Security for 2013, and they point out that it doesn't include any money for additional airport body scanners for TSA. Did the recent scandal involving TSA workers targeting women for scans make the White House realize that TSA is a national embarrassment? Does the executive branch finally understand the questionable safety and effectiveness of these devices? Or does DHS just think it has enough scanners once TSA installs the 250 new scanners in this year's budget?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yet another bit of bad news to add to the pile for LightSquared -- the company announced this week that it will be cutting back on its employment numbers by 45 percent. The cost cutting move comes a day after word got out that it had defaulted on a hefty $56.25 million payment. According to reports, the Virginia-based company, which currently employs some 330 people, is apparently not looking into bankruptcy, in spite of its mounting troubles.LightSquared to cut staff by 45 percent as troubles grow originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  Reuters  | Email this | Comments

John Fontana / ZDNet:Irreparable injury result if FTC fails to police Google, group tells court  —  Summary: A privacy group replies to the Federal Trade Commission's request to dismiss a lawsuit seeking a court ruling to compel the federal agency to enforce a consent order levied against Google as part of a privacy case settlement.

Ed Bott / The Ed Bott Report Blog:Google defense cites study arguing for stronger privacy regulation  —  Summary: Recent reports suggest that Google is attempting to circumvent industry-standard privacy protections in both Safari and Internet Explorer.  Google's defense cites a study from Carnegie Mellon.

Bloomberg:Google Sued by Apple Safari-User Over Web-Browser Privacy  —  Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc. officials were sued for violating users' privacy rights on Apple Inc.'s Safari Web browser by bypassing computer settings designed to block monitoring of consumers' online activity.

Anyone have a cool million or two to invest? No? Oh well...then someone should steal my ideas.

A privacy group replies to the Federal Trade Commission's request to dismiss a lawsuit seeking a court ruling to compel the federal agency to enforce a consent order levied against Google as part...

Q4 of fiscal year 2012 was another rough one for Dell. The company fell short of expectations yet again, collecting roughly three quarters of a billion dollars in net income on revenues of $16 billion. The one bright spot was its enterprise division, which had another record quarter -- accounting for 30 percent of revenues ($4.9 billion). While there was some growth in high end systems, Dell has clearly seen the writing on the wall and plans to refocus primarily on enterprise products and services in 2013. Interestingly, despite the disappointment on Wall Street, Dell still managed to rake in almost a $1 billion more in profit this year than it did last, making 2012 both a record breaker and a let down. Check out the complete PR after the break.Continue reading Dell falls short on Q4 earnings: $16 billion in revenue, only $764 million in profitDell falls short on Q4 earnings: $16 billion in revenue, only $764 million in profit originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  Dell  | Email this | Comments

Christian Zibreg / 9to5Mac:Qualcomm just announced the chip that would be a one-stop shop for Apple's mobile needs  —  Chipmaker Qualcomm today took the wraps off a new piece of silicon—a fifth iteration of its Gobi reference platform.  It packs comprehensive support for TD-SCDMA, TD-LTE, LTE on FDD and TDD networks worldwide and embedded GPS capability.

Intuit's Q2 results look good, with beaten Wall Street expectations, and increased revenue, helped by the shift towards a cloud computing model and SMB uptake.

Renewed rumors that Microsoft will publish iPad editions of some of its Office applications surfaced today, with one analyst calling the move a tough decision.

Just months after Twitter and Google failed to reach an agreement for Realtime Search, the microblogging site has inked a deal with Russian search engine firm Yandex.

First came the Dish Network. Then came Verizon and Redbox. Now, Comcast is announcing its own video subscription service in an effort to siphon business away from Netflix.

Though Dropbox is more popular with over 45 million users, with 17 million users, Microsoft’s SkyDrive is a strong competitor. SkyDrive’s most desired feature has been 25GB of free space, much larger than that of most rivals. On Monday, Microsoft revealed its desire to be the "world’s hard drive", integrating SkyDrive with Windows 8 to make it easier to access your data from any device.

Oracle has given customers running version 12.0 of its E-Business Suite software a reprieve from extended support fees, which would have kicked in this month, increasing the maintenance payments they were already making.

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Tyma, creator of Mailinator, writes about a greedy algorithm to analyze the huge amount of email Mailinator receives and finds ways to reduce its memory footprint by 90%. Quoting: 'I grabbed a few hundred megs of the Mailinator stream and ran it through several compressors. Mostly just stuff I had on hand 7z, bzip, gzip, etc. Venerable zip reduced the file by 63%. Not bad. Then I tried the LZMA/2 algorithm (7z) which got it down by 85%! Well. OK! Article is over! Everyone out! 85% is good enough. Actually — there were two problems with that result. One was that, LZMA, like many compression algorithms build their dictionary based on a fixed dataset. As it compresses it builds a dictionary of common sequences and improves and uses that dictionary to compress everything thereafter. That works great on static files — but Mailinator is not a static file. Its a big, honking, several gigabyte cache of ever changing email. If I compressed a million emails, and then some user wanted to read email #502,922 — I'd have to "seek" through the preceding half-million or so to build the dictionary in order to decompress it. That's probably not feasible.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vlad Savov / The Verge:Qualcomm's dual-core Snapdragon S4 sets new performance benchmark  —  Qualcomm's next generation of Snapdragon system-on-chip, the one built around the Krait CPU, has been put to the test by AnandTech this week and the results are nothing short of astounding.

Not everyone's smartphone has NFC, and of those that do, an even smaller subset have official Google Wallet support. It would seem Mountain View's complacency is Moneto's gain, as the outfit's recently put up for sale its $30 NFC-enabled microSD card -- enabling plebes everywhere sans contactless circuitry to sashay their way into mobile payment heaven. That card is also stuffed with 1GB of storage for your exploits and those plunking down three Hamiltons are also privy to a $10 credit thrown in. There's one caveat, however, as per its website the service currently only works on variants of the Galaxy S (including carrier permutations like the Vibrant, Fascinate and Galaxy S 4G). Support for an additional forty devices is inbound but before committing, we'd peep the latest compatibility info from the horse's mouth in the more coverage link we've included below.Continue reading Moneto's $30 Android mobile payment kit goes on sale, brings contactless payments to four SamsungsMoneto's $30 Android mobile payment kit goes on sale, brings contactless payments to four Samsungs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink Droid-Life  |  Moneto  | Email this | Comments

John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:Surprise — Proview's Ready to Talk Settlement With Apple  —  Proview, the bankrupt company embroiled in a pitched battle with Apple over the Chinese rights to the iPad trademark, says it's willing to negotiate out of court to reach a settlement.  On the eve of a hearing that would determine whether …

Brocade cited strength in storage product demand and service provider customers. On the other side of the revenue equation, Brocade said enterprise and federal government sales were soft.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion on Tuesday gave its PlayBook tablet computer the ability to handle email as easily as a BlackBerry does, with new software that eliminates a shortcoming that has throttled sales since the PlayBook launched last April.

PARIS (Reuters) - Despite giving up his stock options for missing some of last year's targets, Alcatel Chief Executive Ben Verwaayen still believes the telecoms equipment maker will one day match rivals three or four times more profitable.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court rejected on Tuesday an appeal by South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc to take up the question of whether chip designer Rambus Inc illegally sued for patent infringement.

phy_si_kal writes "The new, open source, Opa web programming language just hit version 0.9.0 'S4,' six months after its last major release. Apart from a new syntax more similar to JavaScript, the new release focuses on mongoDB integration. Opa now features something similar to object-relational mapping (ORM) except that mongoDB is a non-relational, document-oriented database and Opa a functional, non-object-oriented language. The new functionality makes the NoSQL database even easier to use, as all language-database calls are automated. The mapping of functional datastructures to documents could even be much better than current ORM approaches and solve the object-relational impedance mismatch." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Reuters) - Wireless tower operator SBA Communications Corp will buy more than 2,300 tower sites and some antenna assets from Mobilitie LLC for about $1.09 billion, as it looks to benefit from an explosion in data traffic and arm itself better against larger competitors.

BOSTON (Reuters) - LightSquared, the ailing wireless company backed by hedge fund manager Philip Falcone, said on Tuesday that it plans to cut its workforce by 45 percent in order to save cash.

BOSTON (Reuters) - LightSquared, the ailing wireless company backed by hedge fund manager Philip Falcone, said on Tuesday that it plans to cut its workforce by 45 percent in order to save cash.

Richard Brewer-Hay / eBay Ink:eBay to Acquire WHI Solutions  —  eBay Inc. has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WHI Solutions (WHI), a provider of software and digital catalog solutions for auto parts distributors and retailers. … I'm a fairly stereotypical guy for the most part... I like my beer, my sports, and my action movies.

Jolie O'Dell / VentureBeat:Huddle gets in sync with new, enterprise-grade file-syncing tools  —  Cloud collaboration startup Huddle has unveiled an intelligent file synchronization tool called Sync intended for use in large enterprises.  —  Huddle Sync, currently in private beta, is intended to let every worker …

The newly released BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 finally adds email support and other missing functionality. Here's what the new PlayBook software looks like on the screen.

For fiscal 2013, the company said that non-GAAP earnings will top the $2.13 a share mark posted in fiscal 2012.

Touchscreens can't differentiate between you, your friend or your cat. Truth is, they're actually amazingly simple pieces of technology without much in the way of brains. A new type of display shown off at the International Nanotechnology Exhibition & Conference in Tokyo last week does imbue the panels with at least enough smarts to tell people apart. Gunze Ltd pairs a special capacitive screen with electrodes, which a user touches with one hand while interacting with a game or app. The immediate use would be for table-top arcade games, which would differentiate between up to four different players based on what particular circuit they complete when touching the screen. We wouldn't be shocked if a version of the tech started showing up in multi-player video poker machines and bar games relatively soon.Gunze's new touchscreen tech knows who's touching it originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink Ubergizmo  |  Tech-On  | Email this | Comments

Zothecula writes "If you thought WikiLeaks was a disruptive idea, the transparency grenade is going to blow you away. This tiny bit of hardware hidden under the shell shaped like a classic Soviet F1 hand grenade allows you to leak information from anywhere just by pulling a pin. The device is essentially a small computer with a powerful wireless antenna and a microphone. Following 'detonation,' the grenade intercepts local network traffic and captures audio data, then makes the information immediately available online." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dell Inc reported revenue that was slightly higher than Wall Street expectations, partly due to strength in its enterprise business.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dell Inc reported revenue that was slightly higher than Wall Street expectations, partly due to strength in its enterprise business.

Intel is exploring whether it can branch out as a foundry by opening its chip manufacturing facilities to more third-party customers, the company said on Tuesday.

Barnes & Noble's new Nook Tablet is pretty similar to Amazon's Kindle Fire and you suspect that B&N took a look at the Fire's success and said to their Nook e-reader engineers, "We need a $199 Android tablet, stat!"

After watching customers continually download and install one of the vendor's free, limited products from the company website, Silver Peak CEO Rick Tinsley was interested to see how they would respond to the same access to its more advanced products.

Qualys, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based security firm specializing in vulnerability assessment and management, is poised for an initial public offering (IPO) later this year.

Zach Epstein / BGR:Microsoft launches no holds barred anti-Google campaign [video]  —  “What happens when the world's largest advertising business tries to sell productivity software on the side?”  Microsoft asks users in its new Googlighting video.  “Beware the Googlighting Stranger.”

Nokia's Pulse app looks and smells familiar to anyone who's ever used Google Latitude. The difference being that the Finnish handset maker has the benefit of Navteq's $8 billion geolocation technology that it picked up back in 2008. Now the Haus of Elop is opening a Boston skunkworks that'll port the app, as well as future social software over to Android and iOS. It's part of a wider project to coax users toward Windows Phone by getting them hooked on a suite of features hoped to be "more than the sum of its parts." What do you think dear readers, will it work?Nokia's social apps coming to Android and iOS: lions expected to lie down with lambs shortly originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink Pocketnow  |  Boston Business Journal  | Email this | Comments

An anonymous reader sends this quote from an article at Txchnologist:"The spectacle of a booster rocket lifting off a launch pad atop a mass of brilliant flames and billowing smoke is an iconic image of the Space Age. Such powerful chemical rockets are needed to break the bonds of Earth's gravity and send spacecraft into orbit. But once a vehicle has progressed beyond low-earth orbit chemical rockets are not necessarily the best way to get around outer space. That's because chemical propulsion systems require such large quantities of fuel to generate high speeds, there is little room for payload. As a result rocket scientists are increasingly turning to electric rockets, which accelerate propellants out the back end using solar-powered electromagnetic fields rather than chemical reactions. The electric rockets use so much less propellant that the entire spacecraft can be much more compact, which enables them to scale down the original launch boosters." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Katherine Rushton / Telegraph:Legal claims can be served via Facebook, High Court judge rules  —  Legal claims can now be served via Facebook in Britain, after a landmark ruling in the English High Court.  —  Facebook can be used to serve legal claims in Britain, following a ruling by a High Court judge

ananyo writes "Even in death, the world's most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published (abstract). They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight, and correctly add three small sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hot on the heels of its dimensionally-average predecessor, Origin's revealed a second, 3D-capable, desktop-replacing laptop; stereoscopic gamers, rejoice. This EON17-X3D utilizes a pair of overclocked GPUs, with 3D panoramas provided by a pair of NVIDIA's 3D Vision 2 wireless glasses -- although you'll have to buy them extra. Hardware-wise, it's a similar story to the EON17-X, with a back-lit keyboard and the same-size 17.3-inch display -- the 3D function is actually a customization choice for the original model. Build options for this chunky gaming beast also include up to 32GB of quad channel memory and two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M GPUs in SLI on the priciest custom build. The basic model will set you back around $3,030, but an eye-catching paint job? That's going to cost a little extra.Continue reading Origin PC launches new 3D gaming laptop: two graphics cards for three dimensionsOrigin PC launches new 3D gaming laptop: two graphics cards for three dimensions originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  Origin PC  | Email this | Comments

Christopher S. Stewart / Wall Street Journal:Over-the-Air TV Catches Second Wind, Aided by Web  —  It's cool to have rabbit ears again.  —  Largely relegated to obscurity decades ago, old-fashioned television broadcasts—over the airwaves and not via cable or satellite—are enjoying an unexpected revival in the digital era.

Yesterday, Microsoft accused Google of bypassing an Internet Explorer's privacy policy. Today, Google declared that Microsoft's claim were FUD and the Windows giant knows darn well that...

Whether you run an eBusiness website or not, the revenue and reputation damages of an outage can be astronomical.