Techno-News Blog

By: Darryl K. Taft, eWeek

Google has acquired another 217 patents from IBM, adding to the more than 2,000 patents the search giant got from Big Blue in 2011. Google has gobbled up another mess of IBM patents, this time for a variety of things including mobile devices and browser widgets. The SEO by the Sea blog found that Google acquired more than 217 patents from IBM at the end of 2011. Bill Slawski, author of the blog that focuses on search and SEO issues, said in the last week of 2011, Google acquired 188 granted patents and 29 published pending patent applications from IBM, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) assignment database. The transaction occurred on Dec. 28.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Google-Gobbles-Up-More-IBM-Patents-Report-573136/?kc=rss

By Phil McKenna, Technology Review

Battery developer Eos Energy Storage claims to have solved key problems holding back a battery technology that could revolutionize grid energy storage. If the company is right, its zinc-air batteries will be able to store energy for half the cost of additional generation from natural gas—the method currently used to meet peak power demands. Company officials say that current prototypes demonstrate twice the energy density of lithium-ion batteries. They claim their final product will last for 30 years in grid-scale applications with a cycle life that is orders of magnitude greater than that of lead-acid batteries, making it one of the longest-lasting battery types around. CEO Michael Oster says Eos will soon complete a $10 million round of funding from several investors.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39425/?p1=A2

by David Zax, Technology Review

The poor point-and-shoot camera. People have been predicting its death for ages. As smartphone cameras get better and better, goes the logic, people see less and less reason to stick a separate camera in their pocket or bag. Recent estimates say that smartphones take 27% of all photos nowadays (up from 17% last year). And what if you just need something better than what a smartphone can provide? At that point, you’re probably a serious hobbyist, and want to opt for a digital SLR; sales of such devices rose 29% between 2009 and 2010, according to a December 2010 story in the Times. (I’ll confess that I’ve phased out my own point-and-shoot in favor of the simplicity of my iPhone camera.)

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27461/?p1=blogs

By Genevieve Bell, BBC

Of course, we have just survived 2011 without such a cataclysmic event. And the closest we got to computers achieving self-awareness was Apple’s Siri. It doesn’t promise self-awareness per se, but does promise to listen and to learn – and hopefully not systematically destroy us. It seems likely that in 2012 a computer will pass the Turing Test – which might get us closer to a digital machine with true artificial intelligence (AI). The irony is that most of us will not care.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16367039

by the BBC

Google is rolling out one of its biggest home page changes to date. The revamp strips its front page of the black bar that currently runs horizontally along its top, and replaces it with a grey logo. When clicked or highlighted, it reveals seven alternative services to the site’s search page with an option to reveal a further eight. Analysts said the move was designed to promote more of the firm’s businesses without cluttering its webpage. The new look, which was first announced last year, is only being offered to a limited number of users at the moment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16383783

By Rajini Vaidyanathan, BBC News

It’s estimated as many as 121 million Indians are logged onto the internet. It is a sizeable number, but still a relatively small proportion of the country’s 1.2 billion population. Predictions suggest the ways Indians use the internet for business and pleasure will change even further in the next year. “Soon, there’ll be more mobile phones than people in India,” jokes Ankur Agarwal, the editor of the Indian gadget blog onlygizmo.com.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16354076

by Lee Miller, Star-Ledger

Nancy Shenker, founder and CEO of the ON Switch, predicts that fewer people will invest in any one company or career. Due to continued economic uncertainty, distrust of big companies and a desire for a better work/life balance, people will increasingly opt to work several jobs at the same time as well as serially, giving rise to what she calls the “Patchwork Professional.” Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, author of upcoming book “Society 3.0: How Technology Is Reshaping Education, Work and Society,” notes that the trend toward multiple employers with many individuals working as freelancer will be propelled by the proliferation of virtual organizations enabling work from remote as well as an increasing use of contract employees. Telecommuting is up 400 percent, she notes, and by 2015 she estimates there will be 14 million freelancers.

http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2012/01/post_149.html

By VICKI GOUGH, Chatham Daily News

John McGregor Secondary School in Chatham is wired for the 21st century. The school has gone completely wireless, said Ryan Swayze, the school’s computer site administrator. “We’re encouraging all our students to bring in their technology,” he said. Laptop computers, tablets, mobile devices are all welcome in the classroom to assist student learning. Swayze is especially proud of another recent accomplishment at McGregor. “We are one of only three schools in Ontario to have our own mobile application,” Swayze said. The computer science teacher started the project by demonstrating a few Android app’s and then thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to produce an app for the school. “I just tried to give them a real world experience of what we’re doing in class and how it would apply to stuff they’re doing with their mobile phones and technology these days,” Swayze said.

http://www.chathamdailynews.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3422278

By RENÉE C. LEE, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

The shabby building, sandwiched between overgrown shrubbery and trees from neighboring properties, is hard to spot, but that hasn’t kept people in need of a good typewriter repairman from finding the Universal Typewriter Shop. Inside, proprietor Edward Smith, 75, tinkers with an IBM Selectric III. Half of its keys are sticking. It’s an easy fix, he says, looking down through his eyeglasses. “This machine has been sitting somewhere,” Smith said. “Some people would put a little oil here and there, but that’s not my way. I go out of my way to do the best job.” That might explain his longevity in a waning industry diminished by the popularity of computers. Despite modern technology, Smith still has a steady stream of customers – some old, some new – who cherish their typewriters.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Typewriter-repairman-keeps-busy-in-high-tech-age-2436269.php

By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle Fire tablets in the holiday quarter, and it seems consumers who received them for Christmas are pleased with the slate, which was upgraded with some navigation improvements. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said half of the 8,529 Fire reviews he surveyed gave the tablet 5 out of 5 stars, compared with 48 percent of those polled who gave the tablet a 5-star review on Dec. 13 and 47 percent who gave the tablet a 5-star review on Dec. 8. Moreover, 69 percent of those reviews comprise 4- and 5-star ratings. For perspective, Munster counted 70 percent of reviews as 4- or 5-star for the first Apple iPad in 2010.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Amazon-Kindle-Fire-Making-Christmas-Consumers-Merry-Munster-650460/?kc=rss

By: Nathan Eddy, eWeek

Electronics manufacturer Sony announced its 9.4-inch Tablet S is getting a $100 price cut, lowering the price of the 16GB model to $400 and the 32GB model to $500. Sony had previously issued a $50 price cut on Dec. 15 in an apparent attempt to spur holiday sales as the tablet market becomes increasingly competitive. Toshiba, BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion and Lenovo have also slashed prices on their tablets as they struggle to compete with Apple’s market-dominating iPad tablets.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Sony-Tablet-S-Sees-100-Price-Cut-146094/?kc=rss

By: Nathan Eddy, eWeek

Apple’s Senior Vice president of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive, born in England, has been honored by Queen Elizabeth II as a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) for “services to design and enterprise.” Ive, the winner of numerous awards including World’s Smartest Designer by Forbes magazine and the National Design award, holds about 400 design patents and has helped design the iPod, iPhone and MacBook Air.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Apple/Apple-iPhone-iPod-Designer-Ive-Knighted-846232/?kc=rss

By Brian Bergstein, Technology Review

We’ve been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. It is creating a layer of intelligence that anyone can mine in Web searches and that content creators can use to hone their services. This is happening more readily because sharing our opinions and photos and status updates online isn’t just a stand-alone application anymore—it’s now an activity embedded into other things.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/39398/?p1=A3

by David Zax, Technology Review

It may be stretching the point a little to call it, as Wired’s Cade Metz does, the “world’s fastest nonexistent supercomputer.” Amazon’s supercomputer–it built one recently atop its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)–exists alright, although it is virtual. Most salient, though, is the fact that Amazon promises to bring supercomputing power to, if not the masses, then at least to anyone with a big question a decently-sized grant. Amazon has been building virtual supercomputers on its cloud for a while now, entering the ranks of the top 500 fastest in 2010. Recently, though, Amazon’s offering climbed to become the 42nd fastest in the world. Amazon has become a major player in cloud services since 2006, when its CTO Werner Vogels decided to start selling the spare capacity of Amazon’s servers.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27453/?p1=blogs

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

Thanks to email management startup Tout, I just got access to an analytics dashboard that includes an array of deftly visualized statistics covering my use of email in 2011. And you can too, right here. If you’re wondering what you’ll get in exchange for giving Tout access to every email you sent and received in the past year, here’s a sample dashboard, so you can get a feel for the results. (They promise they don’t read or store any of it.)

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27451/?p1=blogs

By eWEEK

The severity, volume, and even the sophistication of cyber attacks is increasing, with very expensive and sometimes devastating results. Millions of records are lost or stolen, identities at risk and systems down for hours or days, just to name a few. Fortunately, there are ways to keep your systems up – and services to keep your security measures as far ahead of the bad guys as possible. VeriSign’s cloud-based DDoS protection services provides the infrastructure that runs the DOT COM and DOT NET top-level domains – which are probably the TLDs that your organizations’ web sites operate under. And in the decade-plus that Verisign has been charged with keeping those TLDs and all the domains that rely on them up and running, they haven’t suffered a single DDoS outage.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Features/Cyber-Security-Trends-and-Challenges-for-2012/?kc=rss

By: Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek

The rumor mill for Apple’s iPad 3 seems to be gearing up, with a new DigiTimes report that the company will adopt IGZO (indium gallium zinc oxide) flat panels for the next-generation tablet. “Starting with the new iPads, Apple will utilize IGZO panels from Sharp in order to upgrade the display resolution of the new tablets to full HD level,” wrote the publication Dec. 30, quoting unnamed sources in Apple’s supply chain. “To enter the supply chain of iPads, Sharp has switched some of its capacity for large-size panels to the production of small-size panels for smartphones and tablet PCs.” Whether that report turns out to be correct—if the iPad has proven anything over the past two years, it’s that any prerelease rumors should be taken with a veritable dump-truck’s worth of salt—rumors about the iPad have certainly picked up in recent weeks.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Apple-iPad-3-RumorMill-Gearing-Up-710241/?kc=rss

By: Fahmida Y. Rashid, eWeek

Cyber-criminals have been busy in the days after Christmas, targeting users with new gadgets and computers with phishing and malware campaigns. Malware infections spiked 25 percent on the day after Christmas, according to data released by SpywareRemove.com, a site that tracks malware infections by visits to its site. There was a small jump, about 4 percent, between Dec. 24 and Dec. 25, and a 25 percent spike between Dec. 25 and Dec. 26, according to the site. “The bad guys know there is fresh blood out there and they do their best to infect and destroy,” said Alvin Estevez, editor of SpywareRemove.com and CEO of Enigma Software, suggesting that many of the infected machines were new systems users had received for the holidays.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Latest-Phishing-Scams-Target-Users-of-New-Christmas-Gadgets-593160/?kc=rss

by David Zax, Technology Review

Rumors of an Apple-branded television set — as opposed to the set-top box the company already makes — are no stranger to this blog. But the rumors have taken on a fever pitch of late, with the Wall Street Journal and Digitimes adding details to the mix. The latter claims that we might even see 32-inch and 37-inch iTVs as soon as this summer. Before Steve Jobs died, he told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he had “finally cracked” the problem of television. To quote from Isaacson’s book: “‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he [Jobs] told me [Isaacson]. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine.'”

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27445/?p1=blogs

by KFC, Technology Review

In July, physicists created a “hole in time” using the temporal equivalent of an invisibility cloak.Invisibility cloaks are the result of physicists’ newfound ability to distort electromagnetic fields in extreme ways. The idea is steer light around a volume of space so that anything inside this region is essentially invisible. The effect has generated huge interest. The first invisibility cloaks worked only at microwave frequencies but in only a few years, physicists have found ways to create cloaks that work for visible light, for sound and for ocean waves. They’ve even designed illusion cloaks that can make one object look like another. Today, Moti Fridman and buddies, at Cornell University in Ithaca, go a step further. These guys have designed and built a cloak that hides events in time.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27428/?p1=blogs

By Stephen Cass, Technology Review

Computing has becoming increasingly polarized, with many hardware and software efforts focused on either small mobile devices or vast data centers. 2011 saw the personal computer continue to be marginalized. Although PCs are still the workhorse computing device in homes and offices, the most exciting innovations over the last 12 months were centered on very small-scale computing, very large-scale computing, and networked combinations of the two.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39405/?p1=A2