Mashing mobile technology together with traditional PC designs has a hit-and-miss track record—cough, cough—but Monday, Corning announced that one of the more practical smartphone innovations out there is coming to touchscreen PCs, in the form of Gorilla Glass NBT. —Corning hasn’t made a concerted effort to crack the laptop arena until now. With touchscreens regularly appearing on PCs these days, Corning is trying to transfer its mobile success to the x86 crowd. get scraped, the company claims that Gorilla Glass NBT boasts both reduced scratch visibility and “better retained strength once a scratch occurs to help protect notebook displays from breakage.”
Two of the leading names in DVD and Blu-ray technology announced a joint effort to develop a next-generation standard for optical discs. Sony and Panasonic will collaborate on a new standard, and plan to produce new super discs that can hold up to 300GB of data on a single disc by 2015. The first question to ask is whether or not such technology will even be relevant in 2015. Is it even relevant today? Or, more importantly, what value or impact will it have for your business? Not too long ago, recordable optical discs were a primary means of storing and archiving data. Blank disc media is cheap, and burning data to disc is a relatively simple process that small and medium businesses can easily manage. Current Blu-ray discs can hold 25GB of data—or 50GB on a dual-layer disc. But, removable media often has trouble keeping up with the skyrocketing storage demands of newer technology. , the explosion of mobile devices, embedded technologies, wearable computers, and sensors in clothing, medical devices, and building will result in the overall amount of data expanding by 50 times by 2020.
Privacy and digital rights groups have dug in for a longer fight against massive surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency, even after the House of Representatives voted last week against an amendment to curtail the agency’s data collection. for the NSA programs in Congress. Lawmakers have introduced several bills to curb the NSA data collection, and privacy advocates may push for another amendment to a bill on the House or Senate floor, said David Segal, executive director at Demand Progress, a digital rights group. The vote last Wednesday “demonstrated that a majority of rank-and-file members agree with us, while the institutionalists—leadership, committee chairs—disagree,” he said by email. “So it could be difficult to move things through the committee process ... but there’ll be some relevant floor votes in coming months.”
In its , Concur, a developer of expense report software, has found that business travel expenses fell off dramatically at the end of 2012. The average travel and entertainment expense report fell 4.5 percent from 2011 to 2012. The decline dramatically accelerated in the last quarter of the year, when a huge 21 percent drop in T&E expenses was measured. The report notes that, “While 2012 was overall a year of tighter budgets for U.S. travelers, the sudden and extreme decline in Q4 T&E spend in particular is a bit of an outlier. The dip is likely due to a set of exogenous macro-economic events, such as the impact of Hurricane Sandy, uncertainty about the U.S. presidential election in November, and the ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations that extended into the first days of 2013.” Curiously, Concur notes that small businesses are spending considerably more on travel than their large-company counterparts. On a quarterly, per traveler basis, SMBs pay more for airfare (13.6%), lodging (21.0%), car rentals (56.7%), and even dining out (17.8%). Partly this is because small-business employees are traveling more than large ones, but also because they are often subject to higher rates. In explaining this, Concur notes that private rate agreements with hotel chains, for example, are responsible for offsetting many of the costs that large businesses pay.
devices to early beta testers. PC sales are already suffering at the hands of mobile devices, and now Dell’s Android PC-on-a-stick threatens the relevance of traditional PCs from a different angle. First, a little about Project Ophelia. The device is about the size of a large USB thumb drive. Instead of just flash-based storage, though, Project Ophelia packs a Rockchip RK3066 processor and 1GB of RAM, as well as both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity into that small space. It also has a microSD card slot to add additional storage if necessary. It runs on Google’s Android mobile OS. The device demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year ran Android 4.1 (a.k.a. “Jelly Bean”), but it seems reasonable to assume Dell will ship the device with the current version of Android before its official launch, which is expected to be the end of this year. Project Ophelia is not a revolution that will make PCs irrelevant overnight. Android is great at what it does, but much of the business world runs on the Microsoft Office productivity suite and line-of-business or custom applications developed for a Microsoft Windows environment. Project Ophelia is rumored to be a meager $100 and plugs into an HDMI or MHL port on a TV or monitor. HDMI doesn’t transmit power, so it requires a separate USB connection when using that input.
Reddit can be a confusing place. There are thousands of subreddits, so finding the most interesting ones can be difficult. For an overview of all the Reddits out there, along with their popularity, then the aptly named SubReddit Finder is the place to go to.
SAP has broadened its partner program for companies that want to develop applications using its technology and then sell them through the SAP online store. While SAP already had programs aimed at mobile application development and its HANA Cloud service, the expanded offering brings in more technologies and also accommodates partners who want to build products that run on-premises, according to Monday’s announcement. Partners will also be able to bundle and sell runtime licenses for SAP platform software with any applications they build, “so you can join the program once and then decide on your application scope, architecture, business model and routes to market,” according to an . This approach also gives partners the ability “to act as ‘one face to the customer,’” SAP said. SAP will charge partners royalties for the platform products “as a percentage of the net revenue of your packaged application (based on license list price and considering standard discounts such as volume discounts),” according to the FAQ.
The Boy Scouts got it right: be prepared. Whether you've just purchased a new PC or you've been using the same one for years, chances are good that at some point, you're going to need help and/or information. This could be anything from needing to know the wattage of the power supply (so you'll know if a particular video-card upgrade is compatible) to needing a specific driver after reinstalling Windows. That's why I've prepared this list of handy destinations you'll want to keep bookmarked in your browser. Because when the time comes, you'll be glad to have them at your fingertips.
The takeover bout for Dell resumed on Monday, with investor Carl Icahn sounding off on the proposal from Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners to change rules governing the shareholder vote for a revised bid to take the PC maker private. Company founder Michael Dell and his buyout partner, Silver Lake, last week offered shareholders $13.75 per share for the company, an increase from the $13.65 proposed in February. As part of the revised offered, the parties proposed a change in the shareholder vote in which only “yes” or “no” votes will be counted, and non-votes or abstentions will not count. Icahn on Monday urged Dell’s board not to support the proposed shareholder vote change as it could disenfranchise voters. “The plain and simple fact is that Michael Dell and Silver Lake have underestimated the extent of stockholder opposition to the Michael Dell/Silver Lake transaction and are unwilling to pay fair value to obtain approval of their interested-party freeze-out transaction,” Icahn wrote in a statement.
Chalk this up in the "funny, but not really" category: Last week, a company working with Microsoft to combat copyright pirates asked Google to remove multiple Microsoft web pages from Google searches—for infringing Microsoft copyrights. first spotted. This wasn't a case of internal idiocy or revenge, and it's also not quite as amusing as it may appear at first glance. Instead, it highlights the harmful way copyright holders use automatically generated DMCA takedown requests to try to scrub the net of pirated content, casting a wide net that often ensnares innocent webmasters with false infringement claims. If a copyright holder feels that a particular website is ripping off its work, it can send Google a DMCA takedown request and ask for the infringing site to be removed from the search engine. If Google determines that the site does indeed stomp on the copyright holder's intellectual property rights, the site's links disappear from Google Searches. So far, so good, right?
A court ban on a research paper that analyzes flaws in a car-lock system should be overturned, according to the Dutch university that employs two of the three researchers who wrote the analysis. published a story about it over the weekend. The U.K. court issued an interim block on the research paper, while considering a permanent ban on request of car manufacturer Volkswagen, the university added. French defense group Thales also requested the ban, according to a report by the BBC. Roel Verdult and Baris Ege, of the Digital Security faculty at Radboud University, were planning to present their paper with Flavio Garcia a lecturer in Computer Science of the University of Birmingham during the USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C., in August, the Dutch university said.
Not backing up is like not wearing a seatbelt. You can go months or even years without a problem, then disaster strikes and you're in serious trouble. Only a few hours before writing this article, I received an email from a reader who couldn't access his hard drive, which contained files vital to his business. His letter didn't even include the word It's a simple rule: Never have only one copy of anything.
The Netherlands banking regulator has approved Amazon Web Services (AWS) for use by financial organizations, Amazon said on Monday. This clears AWS cloud services for use across all areas of Dutch financial operations including websites, mobile applications, retail banking and credit risk analysis solutions, Amazon said. With the approval, Dutch banks join other financial organizations using AWS including Bankinter in Spain, Unicedit in Italy and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Amazon noted. All levels of data storage and management on the AWS Cloud, as well as the use of technology that runs on top of AWS and is provided by third party vendors, are also included in the approval, Amazon added. Financial organizations planning to use cloud computing need to first inform banking regulator De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) and provide it with an opportunity to review a risk analysis, said DNB spokesman Remko Vellenga.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected claims of an Apple patent that figures prominently in a patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung Electronics, according to documents filed by the South Korean company in a U.S. federal court. The 21 claims of the patent were rejected by the USPTO in a "final office action," as they were anticipated by previous patents or unpatentable. Known as the "pinch-to-zoom" patent, it covers the ability to distinguish between the scrolling movement of one finger and two-fingers gestures like pinch-to-zoom on a touch-screen to activate certain functions. Apple has up to two months to respond to the USPTO decision. In after USPTO rejected multiple claims of another patent in a similar final office action, Apple said it had further options, including appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and seeking judicial review. Claim eight of the patent was involved in Apple's lawsuit against Samsung in the court, according to a filing Sunday by Samsung in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. A jury last August awarded Apple US$1.05 billion in damages, but the court has ordered a partial retrial to review the damages to be paid to the iPhone maker.
DVDs are so analog. Sure, they’re digitally encoded versions of your favorite movies and TV shows, but they’re trapped on physical platters. If you want to watch something, you have to find the disc, slide it into a DVD player—or a computer with a DVD drive—and flip your TV to the proper input. As DVD players leave the market and DVD drives disappear from PCs, it’s time to free your films from their shiny silver prisons so they’ll still be watchable in the player-free future. As a bonus, ripping your movies off the disc extends your viewing options to your phone, tablet, Roku box, game console, and more. Once you convert your movie library to digital files, you can store those files on a server and stream them anytime, from anywhere. Media companies are slowly waking up to how convenient this is and are building services like Flixster, Ultraviolet, and Vudu, which offer DVD-to-digital conversions: Pop a disc into your PC, and the service adds it to your online account—at which point you can stream it to an app or to a set-top box. Each such conversion will cost you a few bucks, however, and you won’t be able to convert some movies (owing to studio-imposed restrictions). But you can take a more hands-on approach and accomplish the same thing yourself, spending little or no money in the process.
Toshiba’s Digital Products Division announced its Satellite E series ultrathin notebooks today: The 14-inch Satellite E45T and the 15.6-inch Satellite E55t/E55Dt will feature touchscreens and will be available with either fourth-generation Intel Core processors (Haswell) or AMD A6-series (Kabini) CPUs. . “This less-expensive series will be made with aluminum [versus the Kirabook’s magnesium],” said Bae. “But they will have many of the same high-end features [as the Kirabook]. We’ve spent the last year filtering down high-end features to our lower-end platforms.” Bae said while the Satellite E series notebooks will range in price from just under $600 to less than $900, they will feature brushed-aluminum casings, backlit keyboards, two USB 3.0 ports (one with USB Sleep & Charge, for charging USB devices while the computer is asleep), one USB 2.0 port, HDMI out, a full-size gigabit Ethernet port, an SD card slot, and either 500- or 750GB mechanical hard drives that can be combined with an optional 32GB SSD cache. The 15.6-inch model will have an embedded numeric keypad. wireless display technology.
Apple supplier Pegatron is facing criticism from a watchdog group for poor working conditions at its factories in China. The Taiwanese electronics maker came under fire for allegedly violating Chinese labor laws with the publication Monday of a new from New York-based China Labor Watch that documents conditions at the factories. The alleged violations include unfairly deducting or failing to pay wages, providing insufficient worker training, and making overtime work mandatory, among others. The report also questioned Apple's efforts to cap the work week at its supplier factories to 60 hours. China Labor Watch's investigation found that the hours ranged from 66 to 69 hours at the facilities, and that Pegatron was allegedly falsifying worker attendance to keep the reported hours down.
With no practical alternative, a small tech group has launched a campaign to rally consumers against the use of passwords for logging into websites and services. The Petition Against Passwords, is the brainchild of think-tank TechFreedom and rivals Clef and LaunchKey, which sell password-less technology. The group quickly gathered several hundred signees. The idea is to put aside the technology debate in finding a password replacement and use the power of the people against the widely used method for logging into websites. "If we can combine all the voices of the people who in the past have been silent about their issues with passwords and bring them together and be like, 'Hey, this is an issue that we need to be talking about,' then as a group, we can enact a lot more change than we would be able to individually," said Jesse Pollak, co-founder of startup Clef.
Armed with a $900 million argument, an analyst has raised the Office-on-iPad banner, saying that the flop of gives Microsoft a chance to make billions in lemonade from its lemon. " 'Protecting' Windows RT by keeping Office off of Apple's iPad and Android tablets isn't working," said J.P. Gownder, a principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, in a recent . "It's instead creating risk for Office as users find other ways of getting things done." Gownder tied Microsoft's recent . "The biggest asset Windows RT has is actually based on an app that Microsoft hasn't released—," Gownder wrote, referring to the operating system that powers the Surface RT. Windows RT bundles Office Home & Student 2013 RT, which includes touch-based versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word that run in a special "desktop" mode.
The disclosures about the National Security Agency's by Edward Snowden, the former information-technology contractor who's now wanted by the U.S. government for treason, is hitting the U.S. high-tech industry hard as it tries to explain its involvement in the NSA data-collection program. Last week, a gaggle of 22 large U.S. high-tech firms—including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo which have acknowledged in some form, if not exactly as Snowden and some press reports have described it—begged to be freed from the secrecy about it in their pleading, public letter to President Obama, NSA director Keith Alexander, and a dozen members of Congress. The July 18 A letter from America's high-tech powerhouses, which was also signed by almost three dozen nonprofit and trade organizations as well as six venture-capital firms, begged for "greater transparency around national security-related requests by the US government to Internet, telephone, and web-based service providers" in terms of how much information the government demands on high-tech customers and subscriber accounts and how. The letter begged for the U.S. government to make the amount of requests the government makes related to national security for individual customer information public.
Cybercrime and espionage could be costing the world between $70 billion and $400 billion a year from a total global economy of $70 trillion, a new estimate by the has calculated. In the context of the U.S. economy, the damage caused by it is possibly equivalent to 500,000 jobs displaced but in truth the McAfee-sponsored study admits that even coming up with these numbers is prone to be defeated by a raft of imponderables. What the researchers were determined to do was calculate the negative effects using something more substantial than the unsatisfactory surveys often used by the CSIS said. The first context is, what do other negatives cost economies? In the U.S., for instance, car crashes cost somewhere between $99 billion and $168 billion a year, depending on which official estimate and year is used. Similarly, illegal drug trafficking is a $600 billion global industry.
Hover Zoom is one of the best and most useful browser plugins in existence...provided you use the Chrome browser, as it is not available for anything else. It allows you to move your mouse over a small picture and instantly magnify it, without clicking or opening anything.
As the dust settles after SoftBank's $21.6 billion acquisition of Sprint, losing bidder Dish Network may be just getting started at stirring up the U.S. mobile industry. The satellite TV and Internet provider its own deal to become the third-biggest mobile operator in the U.S. But led by an aggressive chairman and facing a lackluster satellite TV industry, Dish still has incentives to break into mobile and may do it through a new type of partnership or network, analysts say. Mobile services and apps are growing a lot faster than TV or relatively slow, expensive satellite Internet. That's partly why Dish has amassed two chunks of land-based mobile spectrum and may be trying to scoop up more. Spectrum is the lifeblood of mobile, and Dish seems intent on becoming a player one way or another. "If they don't have some form of a wireless play, then it's very hard for them to survive longer term," said Chetan Sharma, founder of Chetan Sharma Consulting. That's because consumers are increasingly watching video online rather than over broadcast, cable or satellite TV. In fact, the U.S. consumer satellite industry may soon shrink, with Dish possibly acquiring DirecTV, analysts say.
Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems. "Our goal is to make PHP run really, really quickly," said Joel Pobar, a Facebook engineering manager. Facebook has been using the virtual machine, called the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), across all of its servers since earlier this year. Pobar discussed the at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) being held this week in Portland, Oregon. HHVM is not Facebook's first foray into customizing PHP for faster use. PHP is an , meaning that the source code is executed by the processor directly. Generally speaking, programs written in interpreted languages such as PHP tend not to run as quickly as languages, such as C or C++, that have been compiled beforehand into machine language byte code. Facebook has remained loyal to PHP because it is widely understood by many of the Web programmers who work for the company.
. Newer doesn’t always equal better, but IE 11 has some power under the hood that business users will benefit from. To some extent, a browser is a browser. They all render and display content from the Web. However, since IE 8 Microsoft has invested significant effort and resources to push the envelope and expand the browser's capabilities. In a world where business is increasingly done online and in the cloud, it makes sense to have a browser that can deliver rich content and interactivity. . Microsoft has tweaked performance, improved support for emerging Web standards, and expanded the ability to deliver an immersive experience from within the browser. In IE 11, JavaScript runs 50 percent faster than in Chrome. It has improved support for HTML 5 features like drag and drop that will allow cloud-based tools like Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Office Web Apps to work more intuitively. IE 11 also supports WebGL for delivering smooth, 3D graphics over the Web.
This year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference is still a couple of months away, but the vendor has already provided an ample sneak peek into what’s in store for attendees of the show. The OpenWorld 2013 , and while Oracle is keeping a lid on specific news announcements slated for OpenWorld, a careful combing-through of the show’s hundreds of planned sessions can produce some good guesses about what will be on offer. Here’s a look. of version 12c of its flagship database. The release’s most-hyped feature is multitenancy, which allows many “pluggable” databases to reside inside a single host database, providing simplified management and upkeep. Database 12c will be featured in a number of OpenWorld sessions aimed at developers and administrators, but the most significant database news may come from the keynote stage. On a recent earnings call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on an upcoming version of the database that incorporates in-memory computing. Further details have been scarce and indications are that Ellison’s announcement took people inside Oracle itself by surprise.
Tech earnings this week highlighted the importance of mobile communications to IT, as companies including Apple, Samsung, Facebook, AT&T and Texas Instruments reported mixed results for the quarter ending in June. Apple and Samsung earnings underscored competition in the mobile market. Reporting Tuesday, year over year to $35.3 billion, while profit declined 22 percent to $6.9 billion. The lack of a new hit product, competition from Android-based devices and sagging sales overseas, particularly in China, hampered earnings for the quarter. Apple sales in China declined 4 percent year over year. The overseas results indicated a problem other IT companies face. “The continued recession in Europe and slowing growth in China will offset improvements in the US, Japan, and some emerging markets,” according to Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels, in a recent forecast for IT sales this year.
Bitdefender has released a Windows application designed to help users secure sensitive Web-browsing sessions, especially when they shop or bank online. The application is called Safepay and a free version is available to home users. The application provides users with what Bitdefender calls a “hardened” Web browser that runs inside an environment protected by several technologies designed to prevent man-in-the-browser, phishing, packet sniffing and other types of attacks. It can be installed on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 8, 7 and Vista and on 32-bit versions of Windows XP. When run, Safepay will open a “secure desktop”—a secondary work environment that is separate from the regular desktop—and will launch a custom browser created by Bitdefender.
Dell has started shipping its thumb-size PC called Project Ophelia to beta testers and is preparing to ship the final product in the coming months. Ophelia looks much like a USB stick and it can turn any screen or display with an HDMI port into a PC, gaming machine, or streaming media player. The thumb PC runs on the Android OS and once it is plugged into an HDMI port, users can run applications, play games, watch streaming movies or access files stored in the cloud. The final product will ship during the next fiscal quarter, which runs from August through October, a Dell spokesman said in an email. The device has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity options. Priced at about $100, Dell hopes Ophelia will be an inexpensive alternative to PCs, whose shipments are falling with the growing adoption of tablets and smartphones. With more data now being stored in the cloud, Dell hopes the idea of a keychain PC will catch on, especially for those who do most of their computing on the Web.
The U.S. will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor responsible for leaking documents revealing classified government surveillance programs, according to a recent letter from attorney general Eric Holder. The charges Snowden faces in the U.S. do not carry the death penalty, and the U.S. will not seek the death penalty even if Snowden were charged with additional death penalty-eligible crimes, Holder said in the letter, which was sent to Russian minister of justice Vladimirovich Konovalov and obtained by CBS News. The letter was dated July 23. The U.S. attorney general’s office declined to comment immediately. Snowden is currently thought to be residing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. Last week he in Russia in an effort to avoid prosecution by the U.S. government, which has indicted Snowden on charges related to the leaks.
In his latest video, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts addresses whether or not it is a good idea for a website to use a ccTLD (country code top level domain) as a novelty domain. The video was a response to the question: As memorable .COM domains become more expensive, more developers...
Last week, Google killed the Google+ Local mobile app for iOS, saying that all the same content was available in Google Maps for iOS. Today, the company announced the relaunch of the Zagat site and mobile app for Android and iPhone. All the Zagat content is now free and there’s no...
Bing has added new pop-up alerts that are triggered when people search for terms considered to be related to child porn, according to the BBC, in reaction to the UK’s prime minister attacking Google, Bing & Yahoo over not doing enough to stop child pornography. But Google has reportedly...
I recently conducted a series of interviews with four successful and respected local search experts. The interviews focused on the all-important client-agency relationship and examined four key stages, from winning new customers to retention of long-term clients. The objective of the interviews was...
Link building is a staple of most SEO campaigns. Some methods are scalable and automated, while others are similar to old-school public relations. One thing most can agree on is that methods always need to adapt to keep up with opportunity and algorithm changes. Building Links With Content Google...
I recently got introduced to the Director of Marketing at a very prominent travel company with an equally impressive SEM budget. The director wrote me an email stating that he was “very interested” in talking and wanted me to come to his office right away with an audit of his campaigns,...
Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, was disconnected from life support on July 27. During routine cancer treatment, he unexpectedly slipped into a coma earlier in the week from which he did not recover. I had the honor of knowing Ilya personally. In addition...
After months of planning, today Microsoft announced the launch of Bing Ads in Australia and New Zealand. In a joint partnership with Mi9, joint venture between Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co. The addition of Bing Ads gives Mi9 its first foray into search advertising. Steve Geelan, National...
In a post today, Google announced it is updating the way AdWords quality scores are reported. The changes will roll-out globally over the next few days. The updates are designed to “tie your 1-10 numeric Quality Score more closely to its three key sub factors – expected clickthrough...