Techno-News Blog

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Aro goes through the clutter of texts, calls, and e-mails on a device to make sense out of a chaotic social network. Facebook encourages us to create a social network including everyone we know. But it only captures one slice of our social lives. Our social connections and conversations sprawl across many other forms of communication, including face-to-face chat, e-mail, phone calls, and text messages.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/26694/

By Erica Naone, Technology Review

Rockmelt is beautifully designed, but a review shows that it could get squeezed by Facebook and Google. A browser isn’t just a tool for looking at websites. It has the power to shape the experience of being online. A new browser, Rockmelt, is built to show the Web through the prism of your online contacts. Social features literally frame every page the user views, meaning that every page view is surrounded by tools that let users share it with social networks, see which friends are online, and get updates from social networks.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26703/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

After tepid reviews for the first Google TV products, Google’s hoping a flood of apps will generate excitement for the platform. The first few products featuring Google’s TV software have received lukewarm reviews, and the first downloadable apps for the platform are months away. So Google is trying to persuade Web developers to create the first wave of interactive content for the platform by making web pages and in-browser “web apps” to ignite enthusiasm for the “TV meets Web” project.

http://technologyreview.com/communications/26701/?p1=MstRcnt

By Chris Dannen, Technology Review

A new crop of mobile software startups is changing the way enterprises choose software, at the expense of big players like Microsoft. Soon after Apple launched the iPad this spring, the TaylorMade-Adidas Golf Company bought about 80 of the tablets for its marketing and sales departments. Before long, most of those employees began using a content-sharing tool called Box.net as a way to recommend and comment on articles about leadership and personal growth, even though the IT department never sanctioned the software. Says Jim Vaughn, TaylorMade’s head of sales development: “I’m not even sure how or when Box was put into the picture.” But the software is now in use among hundreds of TaylorMade employees with tablets and smart phones.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/26641/?p1=A5

By BRETT LEVY, TINA TRINH and CARRIE HALPERIN, TechBytes

There is a new way for gadgets to connect to each other. The Wi-Fi Alliance says it will start certifying new Wi-Fi Direct technology in a variety of gadgets. The technology will allow you to do things such as share photos between cameras or play a video game across devices without a nearby wireless hotspot or Internet connection. Wi-Fi Direct is expected to be in gadgets by the holidays.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/techbytes-wi-fi-direct/story?id=11969868

By Kristina Grifantini, Technology Review

I held a black-and-white square of cardboard in my hand and watched as a dragon the size of a puppy appeared on top of it and roared at me. I watched a tiny Earth orbit around a real soda can, saw virtual balls fall through a digital gap in a table, and viewed a life-sized virtual human sitting in an empty chair. What made these impressive special effects possible was a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses—specifically, the Wrap 920AR glasses from Vuzix. Whereas virtual reality shows you only a digital landscape, augmented reality (AR) mixes virtual information, like text or images, into your view of the real world in real-time.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26692/?p1=A2

by Zack Harold, Charleston Daily Mail

West Virginia schools won’t adopt new social studies textbooks this year. Instead, state Department of Education officials say the $36 million allocated for the adoption will be put to much better use. Carla Williamson, director of the state education department’s Office of Instruction, advised state board of education members earlier this month to skip this year’s scheduled social studies textbook adoption and reroute the $18 million it set aside for social studies books in 2010 and 2011. Williamson said the department should spend that money on technology in schools.

http://www.dailymail.com/News/201010250755

by Brittney Barrett , World Market Media

Global positioning satellites have gone universal, and not just in the numbers sense. Foursquare, the GPS enabled application touted as a sort of Twitter 2.0, settled on new terrain on Friday when NASA astronaut, Douglas H. Wheelock used it to check- in to space. The gesture, which establishes Wheelock as the first person to use a location based service from space, appears emblematic of the direction that GPS technology is headed: everywhere. Foursquare, which employs GPS technology in order to most efficiently allow its 4 million-plus users to “check-in” to their current location, is just one of a number of companies expanding the application of GPS technology.

http://www.worldmarketmedia.com/779/section.aspx/2587/post/gps-technology-reaches-new-heights

By Jenel Stelton-Holtmeier, MDM Technology Blog

Changes in technology can seem to happen at warp speed. As such, it may be difficult for companies to keep up with the changes or even to choose which ones to embrace. And for older generations, it may seem pointless to even try. But, taking that approach could backfire in the long run, according to Randy Breaux, vice president of marketing for Baldor Electric Company, Fort Smith, AR: “Even if I don’t understand it, I have to embrace it … or else I’m going to get left behind.”

http://www.mdm.com/technology/2010/10/26/how-to-sell-new-technology-to-hesitant-leaders/PARAMS/post/26602

By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Reveiw

Researchers have made a major step toward a holographic videoconferencing system that would let people communicate with one another almost as if they were in the same room. They have developed a full-color, 3-D display that refreshes every two seconds, and they’ve used it to send live images of a researcher in California to collaborators in Arizona. In the coming years, the researchers hope to develop a system that refreshes at standard video rates and can compete with other 3-D displays. “Holography makes for the best 3-D displays because it’s closest to how we see our surroundings,” says Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the University of Arizona.

http://technologyreview.com/computing/26667/?p1=MstRcnt

By Kate Greene, Technology Review

Anyone who’s ridden in a taxi knows that cab drivers know their way around a city better than the average driver. They seem to have super-secret side-street maneuvers that shave minutes off a trip by avoiding traffic, lights, and other problems. Now researchers from Microsoft are mining cabbies’ knowledge to create faster driving paths for online maps.

http://technologyreview.com/computing/26686/?p1=MstRcnt&a=f

By LJ Rich, BBC Click

With a global economy and flights that can take you all over the world in hours, why is it that we still struggle with a language barrier that technology is finding hard to break down? Turn on a TV in a Tokyo hotel room and you will get, if you do not speak the language, a jumble of incomprehensible symbols.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9137401.stm

By Helen Briggs, BBC News

Parents have been warned to watch out for signs of excessive texting in their children, amid concerns it poses a new health risk. Teenagers sending 120 text messages a day are more likely to drink, smoke and have sex, claims a US doctor. Scott Frank told a US conference that extreme texting and use of social media is linked to higher levels of risky behaviour. A UK expert said internet addicts are at risk of other bad habits.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11720546

by the BBC

The threat of computer attacks is on a par with international terrorism and major accidents. Nick Harvey has emphasised the cyber threat facing the UK, saying it is “a matter of time” before terrorists use it as a method of attack. In a speech in London, the armed forces minister warned that, in the wrong hands, a laptop could be as effective a weapon as a cruise missile. He also set out how the government planned to use cyberspace to help the military fight the wars of the future.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11715177

The creator of the world’s first laptop has been given a lifetime achievement award by the Duke of Edinburgh. Bill Moggridge has been named the winner of the 2010 Prince Philip Designers Prize. He was chosen from a list of famous nominees, including fashion designer Dame Viviene Westwood and the creator of the London 2012 Aquatics Centre. The jury said Mr Moggridge had been central to how design helped people understand and use technology.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11722255

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

RockMelt, a brand spanking new, Google Chrome-based web browser backed by some Netscape-era heavyweights, is studded with appealing gew-gaws for interacting with your favorite social networks and websites. Basically, it’s an attempt to solve the one problem that even HTML5 couldn’t rid us of: No matter how good a web service is, it remains trapped in a tab in your browser.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25994/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

The Web isn’t kind to new search engines. Several newcomers, including Cuil, SearchWikia, and Searchme, have all debuted and disappeared in short order in recent years. A new challenger, Blekko, which launched today, hopes to avoid their fate by finessing its results in Wikipedia-like fashion. It’s a method intended to block the low-quality pages that pollute the results of more established competitors, says Rich Skrenta, a cofounder of the company, which has raised $24 million in funding since 2007. “Various bad actors have created the bulk of URLs on the Web today,” Skrenta says. As examples, he sites spam blogs and companies like Demand Media, which pay people small fees to write content designed mainly to rank high in search results.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26659/

By Erica Naone, Technology Review

Google wants to make the Web faster. As well as optimizing its own sites and services to run at blazing speed, the company has been helping to streamline the rest of the Web, too. Now Google has released free software that could make many sites load twice as fast. The software, called mod_pagespeed, can be installed and configured on Apache Web servers, the most commonly used software for running websites.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26678/?a=f

By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Google Chrome rose to 8.47 percent market share through October as the upstart Web browser took small bits of share from leader Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome had reached the cusp of 8 percent share through September before easily vaulting over the barrier in the just-completed month, according to new data from market researcher Net Applications.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Google-Chrome-Nears-85-Nibbles-at-Firefox-IE-366301/?kc=rss

By Erica Naone, Technology Review

Search engines look for clues about the importance of a document or piece of information for a given set of keywords. Often this means relying on what other pages link to–this is how Google’s famous PageRank algorithm works. Researchers have now developed subtler ways of measuring the influence and importance of documents and pages on the Web and in archives, by using the text stored in those documents. This approach doesn’t rely on people adding pointers such as links and citations, and it could lead to better real-time search engines as well as recommendation systems that automatically gather information on a certain topic.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26656/?p1=MstRcnt

by Sharif Sakr, the BBC

New technology allows businesses to cut the costs of powering their computers – and in the process make civilisation a little greener. Video report.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11616780