Techno-News Blog

by Alex Wilhelm, the Next Web

In a slip of the tongue that was quickly denied by both Microsoft and the main corporate arm of Nokia, the French division of the Finnish giant appeared to state that Windows 8 tablets could be in the market as early as June of 2012. The comment itself was slightly ambiguous, but it did seem to clearly state that Nokia is going to have built functional Windows 8 tablets by next June. If the devices in question will be mere internal, research devices, or mass market slates in the hands on the general public is not clear. However what this information does accomplish is to affirm what we have been speculating over ceaselessly, in two ways: Primarily, Windows 8 is landing next year, and secondly, that Nokia will indeed be making a tablet to run it.

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/11/16/nokia-hints-at-windows-8-tablets-as-early-as-next-june/

by the Next Web

The smartphone market has significant potential in Southeast as recent reports from Nielsen and ABI Research have both concluded. The growth in ownership and interest in buying devices is summarised in the infographic below, from Malaysia Entrepreneurs, to clearly show the potential of smartphones in the region.

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/11/17/smartphones-have-huge-potential-in-southeast-asia-infographic/

by Aayush Arya, the Next Web

After having exceeded the growth rate of the PC industry for five-and-a-half years (22 consecutive quarters), Apple’s Mac platform now commands a 5.2 percent share of the worldwide PC market, according to an analysis by Needham & Co.. This is the first time in fifteen years that the Mac’s share has exceeded 5 percent, as AppleInsider points out. Apple reported record Mac sales of 4.89 million units during the recently ended September quarter, which was a growth of 24.6 percent from the year-ago quarter and much higher than the PC industry’s overall growth of 5.3 percent. Apple’s Mac market share was at 4.4 percent at the end of the September quarter in 2010.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/11/17/explosive-growth-takes-the-mac-to-over-5-global-market-share/

by Jeffrey Burt, eWeek

Fujitsu’s massive K Computer remains the world’s most powerful supercomputer, being the first system to break through the 10-petaflop (quadrillions of floating point operations per second) barrier. The latest Top500 list of the world’s fastest computers was released Nov. 14 on the opening day of the SC 11 supercomputer show here. The K Computer, which is being installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, and is powered by Fujitsu’s latest SPARC64 processors, hit a peak performance of 10.51 petaflops. That the system runs on Fujitsu chips is somewhat unusual: Intel is the top chip vendor on the Top500 list, powering 76.8 percent—or 384—of the supercomputers on the list. Second on the list is fellow x86 chip maker AMD, which powers 63 systems, or 12 percent of the servers on the list. In addition, the K Computer also bucks a growing trend using GPU accelerators from the likes of Nvidia and AMD in hybrid systems to increase computational speed and increasing energy efficiency.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Fujitsu-Cray-HP-IBM-Dominate-List-of-Top-10-Fastest-Supercomputers-695620/

by the BBC

Intel has developed an accelerator chip capable of running at speeds of one teraflop, equal to one trillion calculations per second. The firm showed off the chip, dubbed Knights Corner, on a test machine at a supercomputing conference in Seattle. Computer power on this scale is used to solve a range of problems in fields such as weather forecasting, molecular modelling and car crash simulations. The chip pits Intel against rival add-on processors from Nvidia and AMD.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15758057

by the BBC

The survey suggests internet speeds differed by up to 69% between the evening and early morning. UK broadband speeds drop by an average of 35% from their off-peak highs when most people are online in the evening, according to a report. The research, conducted by the comparison site Uswitch, was based on two million broadband speed tests. The peak surfing times between 7pm and 9pm were the slowest to be online, the report said. There were also huge regional variations between evening and early morning surfing times. The report suggested the best time to be online was between 2am and 3am.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15742055

By Fahmida Y. Rashid, eWeek

The low volume of serious malware for the iOS platform makes iOS users complacent about the kinds of security risks they are facing. But the truth is that iPhone users still face a variety of security threats. Webmail accounts can be hacked when users click on malicious links or have their identity stolen because they entered data on phishing sites from the mobile Web browser. Until recently, it was a challenge to find mobile-security applications specifically for the iPhone, iPad and the iPod Touch on the iTunes App Store. That is beginning to change with applications designed to protect iOS devices when they are lost or stolen, secure personal data, scan Websites and detect malware-infected files. Some ways to stay safe are obvious, such as turning on pass code locks and auto-lock to restrict physical access to the phone. The “erase data” function would automatically wipe the iPhone after 10 failed pass code attempts, preventing brute-force attacks.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/10-iOS-Security-Apps-to-Protect-Your-iPhone-iPad-from-Hackers-492794/?kc=rss

by Prachi Patel, Technology Review

The approach could boost U.S. lithium production—just as demand is set to soar with increased electric-vehicle usage. As portable electronics get more popular and the market for electric vehicles takes off, demand for lithium—a critical element in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries—could soar. Yet just two countries, Chile and Australia, dominate global lithium production. California startup Simbol Materials thinks it can increase domestic production of lithium by extracting the element, along with manganese and zinc, from the brine used by geothermal plants.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/39143/?p1=A1

by eMarketer

Hispanic mobile users are nearly 17 percentage points more likely to use mobile web than whites. While whites make up the lion’s share of US mobile phone and mobile internet users, a new eMarketer forecast estimates Hispanic, Asian and black mobile users in the US access the mobile internet more often than their white counterparts, and that they will continue to outpace whites in mobile internet adoption through 2015. eMarketer estimates that about two-thirds of US mobile users will be white at the end of this year, decreasing to 64.1% to 2015 as black, Asian and Hispanic consumers inch upward in mobile adoption.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008694&ecid=a6506033675d47f881651943c21c5ed4

By Will Knight, Technology Review

Silicon Valley darling Dropbox is launching several efforts to grow its business—a deceptively simple cloud storage service—beyond early adopters and techies. It’s doing so in the face of increasing competition from giants such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Dropbox’s position is both enviable and daunting. The company has seen its user base rocket from 25 million to 45 million since April, and it recently secured $250 million in funding from several venture capital funds, giving the company an estimated value of $4 billion.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38995/?mod=chthumb

By Jim Giles, Technology Review

Thousands of people every day use the link-shortening service Bitly to tame unwieldy Web links to share on Twitter and other social media sites. Few realize that they’re simultaneously helping the New York company peer into the Web’s future. Bitly analyzes the pages pointed to by the 80 million short links it generates every day to predict changes in the public’s attitude toward people and companies. Now Bitly is set to get access to a slew of new data that could make its Web crystal ball even better at forecasting the future. Bitly has reached a data-sharing agreement with VeriSign, based in Dulles, Virginia. VeriSign acts as a kind of telephone directory for the Internet. Any address typed into a browser is sent to servers at VeriSign or one of a handful of other organizations, which help turn that URL into a numerical address that a computer can use to find the Web page it needs.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39121/?p1=MstRcnt

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Even as the processing power and download speeds of mobile devices surge, one component still lags behind: the screen. LCD panels use significantly more power than any other component of a phone or tablet because of their need to pump out bright light to form an image. The only practical alternative is e-ink, the technology used in the Amazon Kindle; it consumes orders of magnitude less power but sacrifices color and the ability to change images fast enough for video playback or smooth game play. Now, after years of waiting, alternative technology that promises the best of both approaches is finally edging closer to commercialization. During a recent visit to mobile chipmaker Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego, Technology Review tried out a full-color, 5.7-inch Android tablet with a display that offers rich colors under bright light, close to those of an LCD and not unlike the pages of a magazine.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39135/?p1=A4

by David Zax, Technology Review

Best Buy has plans to sell a Toshiba “ultrabook”—an ultrathin, Intel-based laptop—for just $799. We don’t know exactly when it’ll be coming out—”sometime soon,” per Best Buy’s product page—but the news is noteworthy because it represents a new low price point for ultrabooks. The “Portégé Z835,” as it’s called, has one of Intel’s fancy new “Sandy Bridge” processors (a 1.4GHz Core i3-2367M processor, if we’re going to be precise). It’s got a 13.3″ LED-backlit TFT high-definition widescreen display, a 128GB Serial ATA solid state drive, a built-in webcam and mic, a mutliformat media reader, one USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports, and much more. The whole thing weighs 2.5 pounds and is just over a half-inch thick. Expect to see an ultrabook battle around this price point in the coming year; we can expect to see a ThinkPad ultrabook from Lenovo around this price in 2012, says The Verge. HP and Dell ultrabooks are also expected in early 2012.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27339/?p1=blogs

by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

You may think the Web is doing all right as it is, but Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of animation studio DreamWorks, thinks it’s too text-centric. Katzenberg told attendees here at the Techonomy conference in Tucson today that he has technology that will change that. “Text is a learned process, but what we do [at Dreamworks] is intuitive and instinctual, and you do it from the moment you are born,” he said. “We’re trying to see if we can move many of these things we can do today in text but moving up to video and audio, do it with sight and sound.” Katzenberg said that push will start next year, when DreamWorks will start to spin out its latest 3-D animation technology into the world of the social Web.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27338/?p1=blogs

by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Bret Hartman’s life changed after he got hacked in March this year—and so did the perception of America’s vulnerability to cyberattacks in the minds of many experts. As chief technology officer of computer security company RSA, Hartman was used to working with companies that learned the hard way that they were unprepared for a cyberattack. But in March, RSA become such a victim. Hartman learned that attackers had infiltrated the company’s network to steal data that could be used to in turn attack clients relying on RSA security software. There are unconfirmed reports that defense companies Lockheed Martin and L-3 Communications were attacked as a result. Hartman told me at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona, yesterday that RSA—and the customers that rely on it—got off lightly. “As a result, it was a pretty positive thing,” he said, explaining that investigating the attack on RSA has taught him that cyberwar and espionage is a more serious threat than anyone realized. He’s come to conclude that the attackers are currently on top.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27342/?p1=blogs

by CHRISTOPHER MIMS, Technology Review

HTML5 is coming on strong as a standard, accelerated by the speed of change of hardware devices. By 2013 we will reach a point where 90% of smartphones and tablets will sport HTML5 capable browsers. Al Hilwa notes, however, that Flash for desktop PCs is going to stick around a while yet. We don’t expect 90% of desktop browsers to be capable of HTML5 until 2015 so the differentiation that Flash provides in high-end graphics and video protection continues and Adobe will continue to invest in it. So what’s next? How about web apps versus native apps. As lucrative as Apple’s app store has been—and as potentially lucrative as other app stores, like Amazon’s, may become—in this space there is already a fusion between native code and open standards, so-called hybrid apps. Whether fragmentation will push more developers to HTML5, where they can code once and, with little fanfare, see their work delivered to every one of an increasing panoply of devices, remains to be seen.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27328/?p1=blogs

by DAVID ZAX, Technology Review

Barnes & Noble joins the tablet wars in earnest today, with the Nook Tablet, a $249 offering that, like the Kindle Fire, is largely intended for consuming media like e-books and movies. The device, which you can pre-order now, will be available on November 18th, in time to do battle with its Amazon-spawned foe, which ships three days prior. When the device launched Monday at an event in New York, B&N CEO made sure to take a dig at the Kindle Fire, calling it “deficient for a media tablet,” and promising that “content will render better on Nook,” according to CNN. Naturally, you’ll be wanting to know how the Nook measures up against its rivals–not just the Kindle Fire, but also the Apple iPad.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27322/

by CHRISTOPHER MIMS, Technology Review

As the Google Chromebook, MacBook Air and a host of other laptops that incorporate solid state drives amply demonstrated, replacing hard drives with the same kind of flash memory present in thumb drives and memory cards can radically reduce the time it takes a computer to boot up. Now researchers at a trio of NSF-supported Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers have demonstrated the tantalizing possibility of an even faster kind of solid-state memory. Ferroelectric materials can already be found in everything with an RFID chip — which includes the kind of smart cards common in Europe, more advanced subway card systems like those in DC and Boston, and those easy pay key fobs you can use at the gas station. In these applications they work well, but they had yet to be incorporated into honest-to-goodness silicon computer chips until the most recent discovery.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27333/?p1=blogs

by Matthew Shaer, Christian Science Monitor

According to a new report, Duqu, a computer worm first detected late last month, may be using a hole in the Windows operating system to spread from machine to machine. Over at Symantec, Vikram Thakur identifies the Duqu installer file as a simple Word document, which, once downloaded, allows the Duqu worm to wiggle its way deep into your hard drive. “The installer file is a Microsoft Word document (.doc) that exploits a previously unknown kernel vulnerability that allows code execution,” Thakur wrote yesterday on the Symantec site. “We contacted Microsoft regarding the vulnerability and they’re working diligently towards issuing a patch and advisory. When the file is opened, malicious code executes and installs the main Duqu binaries.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2011/1103/Duqu-worm-looms-as-next-big-cyber-threat

by Sue Marquette Poremba, IT Business Edge

There are so many positives to having a borderless society, but it also means that cybercriminals can easily commit crimes anywhere they please. We see the stories telling us that malware is being generated in, say, Russia that is meant to target a computer network in the United States. A young hacker can sit at his computer in London and plan attacks on countries he may not even recognize on a map. So, maybe the news from the Cyber Atlantic 2011 event was a long time coming or maybe it is a result of a world growing smaller. Cyber Atlantic 2011, held last week, was the first joint cyber security exercise between the EU and the U.S. The idea was to battle a simulated cyber attack on security agencies and the energy infrastructure. According to PC World.

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/poremba/cyber-atlantic-2011-shows-cyber-security-has-no-borders/?cs=49012

By JENNA WORTHAM, NY Times

Smartphone ownership in the United States is on the rise. But a survey by Nielsen suggest that it is happening among some age groups faster than others. Nielsen’s third-quarter survey of mobile phone users found that 43 percent of them have upgraded to a smartphone. For mobile users below the age of 44, the smartphone is speeding toward mass adoption. “This is a wake-up call for potential advertisers waiting for a tipping point for mobile media or for smartphones to reach the majority,” said Don Kellogg, director of telecom research and insights at Nielsen. “We’re already there with certain segments – 62 percent of those ages 25 to 34 already have smartphones. That’s critical mass.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/most-young-americans-now-own-smartphones-survey-says/