Techno-News Blog

By Daily Mail Reporter

The future of the justice system lies in telephone and video conferencing rather than in outdated court buildings, a justice minister said today. Jonathan Djanogly said the justice system had failed to keep up with the rest of society in its use of technology and the Government should look into how to change this ‘sooner rather than later’.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1321924/Courts-look-technology-face-budget-cuts-Justice-Minister-warns.html

By Evan I. Schwartz, Technology Review

An economist at a digital ad agency devises a way to use Twitter and Facebook to forecast sales of everything from cars to tampons. What’s social media good for? Marketers see it as a new way to engage with consumers. Economist-turned-advertising executive Jason Harper sees an additional function: as a real-time laboratory for measuring how multi-million dollar ad campaigns are succeeding or failing to drive product sales.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/26438/?p1=Headlines

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

A trial cell-phone network in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, gets by without something every other wireless carrier needs: its own chunk of the airwaves. Instead, xG Technology, which made the network, uses base stations and handsets of its own design that steer signals through the unrestricted 900-megahertz band used by cordless phones and other short-range devices. It’s a technique called “cognitive” radio, and it has the potential to make efficient use of an increasingly limited resource: the wireless spectrum. By demonstrating the first cellular network that uses the technique, xG hopes to show that it could help wireless carriers facing growing demand but a relatively fixed supply of spectrum.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/26581/?p1=Headlines

By Christopher Mims

China may finally have a processor to power a homegrown supercomputer. At this year’s Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, Weiwu Hu, the lead architect of the “national processor” of China, revealed three new chip designs. One of them could enable China to build a homegrown supercomputer to rank in a prestigious list of the world’s fastest machines. The Loongson processor family (known in China by the name Godson), is now in its sixth generation. The latest designs consist of the one-gigahertz, eight-core Godson 3B, the more powerful 16-core, Godson 3C (with a speed that is currently unknown), and the smaller, lower-power one-gigahertz Godson 2H, intended for netbooks and other mobile devices.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26596/?p1=Headlines

By Prachi Patel, Technology Review

A new type of device could ultimately hold more data than flash memory. Researchers in the U.K. have made a new kind of nanoscale memory component that could someday be used to pack more data into gadgets. The device stores bits of information using the conductance of nanoscale transistors made from zinc oxide. The researchers published a paper about a prototype memory device fabricated on a rigid silicon substrate last week in the online version of the journal Nano Letters. They are now testing flexible memory devices in the laboratory, says Junginn Sohn, a researcher at the University of Cambridge Nanoscience Center and lead author of the Nano Letters paper.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26580/?p1=Headlines

By Erica Naone, Technology Review

A new product from Adobe, InMarket, represents the next step in the company’s battle to help software developers publish their applications as widely as possible. It could also blunt the effects of Apple’s blockade against Adobe’s flagship product, Flash. Apple has the distinction of running what’s commonly called “the” app store, but plenty of other companies offer consumers similar marketplaces. The huge numbers of apps that people download for mobile devices have cemented the role of the app store, no matter who offers it. An app store makes a device more valuable by giving people more ways to use it, and software developers have embraced this way of distributing the programs they create.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26614/?p1=Headlines

By Christopher Mims, Technology Review

The device could diagnose disease in the developing world and enable rapid drug screening. Using a $1.50 digital camera sensor, scientists at Caltech have created the simplest and cheapest lens-free microscope yet. Such a device could have many applications, including helping diagnose disease in the developing world, and enabling rapid screening of new drugs.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/26610/?p1=Headlines