Techno-News Blog

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Ever wished you could take an object in a museum home with you instead of settling for some photos? The design software company Autodesk will release free software next week that could turn those snapshots into your own personal replica from a 3-D printer. Called Photofly, the software extracts a detailed 3-D model from a collection of overlapping photos. “We can automatically generate a 3-D mesh at extreme detail from a set of photos—we’re talking the kind of density captured by a laser scanner,” says Brian Mathews, who leads a group at the company known as Autodesk Labs. Unlike a laser scanner, though, the equipment needed to capture the 3-D rendering doesn’t cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. An overlapping set of around 40 photos is enough to capture a person’s head and shoulders in detailed 3-D, he says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37631/?p1=MstRcnt&a=f

By Kristina Grifantini, Technology Review

Google announced an app and a number of partnerships that could help it become a key gatekeeper in mobile electronic payments—a space that many expect to boom over the next few years. Google Wallet, announced today at an event in New York, is a app that lets users tap their smart-phone in stores to pay for purchases using near-field communication (NFC) technology—but only after they’ve entered their credit or debit card details. A related product called Google Offers will let users send coupons to their virtual wallets, via a Google search, for instance, or an advertising billboard using NFC.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/37636/?p1=A2&a=f

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

Google’s Chromebook is nothing new. So-called “thin clients” have been tried many times before, and they’ve never really worked. But there’s an important reason why Google’s entirely Internet-dependent, browser-only laptop will succeed where other thin clients failed, and it has nothing to do with Google itself. At least not yet. Yesterday I used the rise of mammals to explain how a company like Apple could spend two-thirds of its existence as a niche player before finally coming to dominate a brand new category. That might make it sound like I believe Apple will dominate the future, as well, but I doubt it. To understand why, we have to look much deeper into the history of life on earth.

http://technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26815/?p1=blogs

By NICK BILTON, New York Times

The artwork that goes into today’s videogames can be museum-worthy. Many game scenes look completely photorealistic, created with crisp high-end graphics; others are highly stylized cartoon-like visuals. Some games even contain scenes that are beautifully painted by hand. To showcase these beautiful works, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the Entertainment Software Association set up an art show and contest called Into the Pixel, which hopes to highlight some of the best artwork created for video games.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/the-art-of-the-videogame/

By NICK BILTON, New York Times

After days of speculation on technology blogs, Twitter officially announced Wednesday that it had agreed to acquire TweetDeck, a service that organizes Twitter feeds to make them more useful. According to people who had been briefed on the deal who were not authorized to speak publicly, Twitter agreed to pay about $40 million. TweetDeck is currently available as a free download for desktop computers, the iPhone, Google’s Android devices and the Google Chrome Web browser. The TweetDeck software will likely be rebranded to look more like Twitter’s other free applications — as Twitter has done with other software acquisitions — but the company said the software would remain available as a free separate download.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/twitter-officially-acquires-tweetdeck-software/

By NICK BILTON, New York Times

The Mac Defender software is designed to look authentic and asks users for their credit card information. For years Apple Mac users have boasted about the lack of malware on their computers. In comparison, Microsoft Windows owners have regularly felt the brunt of viruses and malware that can easily debilitate an entire computer system in minutes. Now Apple is in that camp too after a barrage of malware began infiltrating computers over the past few days.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/apple-operating-system-targeted-by-malware/