Techno-News Blog

By Nathan Eddy, eWeek

The 21st century road warrior hardly resembles the post-apocalyptic anti-hero Mad Max, the fictional film character who roared across the dystopian Australian landscape in the 1981 George Miller thriller “The Road Warrior.” But there’s no argument that the demands placed on real-world road warriors are any less stressful than being chased by a roving band of marauders. After all, that’s your competition, so you better know where you’re headed. With today’s businesses embracing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs and the prevalence of smartphones, tablets and an ever-increasing number of applications, road warriors are more mobile than ever. When you’re on the road, chances are you’ll need to find an app to help you navigate the highways, city streets and airports of your final destination.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/iPhone-Navigation-Apps-That-Road-Warriors-Need-Right-Now-379373/?kc=rss

By Michelle Maisto, eWeek

The Samsung Galaxy S III, which uses the 4.0 version of Google’s Android operating system, or Ice Cream Sandwich, got its official rollout in London May 3 with much fanfare, and demonstrated how far the smartphone market has come. Calling, messaging, emailing, Web browsing, high-definition video, two cameras—these are all on board, of course, and should perform perfectly. However, these features are far from what Samsung had spent big bucks to show off. “At Samsung, we believe a phone should be more than smart, and that is where the Galaxy S III comes in,” said Jean-Daniel Ayme, a Paris-based Samsung vice president, introducing the device. What’s more than smart? Intuitive, proactive—a phone that jumps to the right conclusions. Understanding that important emails or calls have been missed, the S III buzzes a specific way in a user’s hand to alert him or her. It recognizes friends in photos, helping people to share and organize content, and—with its front-facing camera—it watches the user, staying alert when it knows that someone is looking at it, even if he or she hasn’t touched the display in a while.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Samsung-Galaxy-S-III-A-Look-at-the-Smartphone-That-Looks-Back-776297/?kc=rss

By: Darryl K. Taft, eWeek

The Apache Software Foundation launches TomEE 1.0, an updated version of the Apache Tomcat app server optimized for cloud environments. The Apache Software Foundation recently announced Apache TomEE v1.0, an updated edition of the popular Apache Tomcat application server suited for the cloud. Apache TomEE is the Java Enterprise Edition 6 Web Profile-Certified edition of Apache Tomcat, the most popular Java application server software, with more than 70 percent market penetration within the enterprise. A sub-project of Apache OpenEJB, TomEE adds Java Enterprise Edition features to the latest version of Apache Tomcat, v7.0.27, which was released April 5. TomEE runs without any additional memory requirements, is compatible with most Tomcat-aware/tested tools and applications.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Apache-Software-Foundation-Launches-TomEE-10-for-the-Cloud-821333/?kc=rss

By: Nathan Eddy, eWeek

Small business IT departments plan on using tablets to replace notebooks and arm an expanding workforce. More than half of small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. have an employee using a tablet computer, according to a study by market strategy specialist iGR. The survey of more than 400 businesses found 52 percent currently use a tablet like an Apple iPad or Google Android-powered device to help run their business. Approximately 47 percent of SMB respondents said that they use their tablet for both work and personal matters, with those lower on the totem pole, such as directors, managers and staff members, were more likely to use the tablet for personal matters, whereas those higher on the corporate ladder were more likely to report using their tablet for work.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Tablet-Adoption-Growing-Among-Small-Businesses-227690/?kc=rss

by the BBC

Facebook has set the share price for its upcoming initial public offering (IPO) at between $28 and $35 per share, valuing the company at between $85bn-$95bn (£52bn-£59bn). The IPO is set to be the largest ever for an internet firm, bigger than Google’s valuation of $23bn in 2004. IPOs are when companies list shares on the stock market for the first time. Facebook is set to list on the Nasdaq and would rival Amazon’s and Cisco System’s current market values. It is thought that Facebook will start promoting the share offering on Monday. Its shares are expected to start trading under the symbol “FB” on 18 May.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17946598#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

by DAVID ZAX, Technology Review

I’ve called Microsoft’s alliance with Facebook a “tech bromance”; this week’s news of Microsoft’s partnership with Barnes and Noble looks more like a marriage. It has a $300 million dowry, for one thing. First, a backgrounder, in case you missed the news: Microsoft will be making a $300 million investment in a new Barnes and Noble subsidiary, called Newco for the time being, but which is essentially made up of its Nook business. B&N will own about 82% of the subsidiary, with Microsoft holding the rest. Not only is this a marriage; it’s a marriage that came after a fight: Microsoft and B&N had formerly been engaged in a patent dispute. More details on Newco can be found on the Microsoft site.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27821/?p1=blogs

by the BBC

The UK plans to give the public access to academic research via the internet free of charge. The government said that Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales had agreed to advise it on how to ensure the move would promote “collaboration and engagement”. The decision will have major implications for the publishing industry. Firms currently charge access to peer-reviewed papers covered in journals. Science Minister David Willetts outlined details of the plan in an article in the Guardian newspaper ahead of a speech to the Publishers Association. He noted that the state currently spent about £5bn a year funding university studies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17921442#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

by the BBC

Samsung has unveiled its latest flagship smartphone – the Galaxy S3. The handset has a 4.8 inch (12.2cm) screen, an increase on the 4.3 inch screen of its predecessor. The device is perceived to be critical to how people view both Samsung’s brand and the Android system it runs. Analysts say the popularity of the previous Galaxy – the S2 – was a major factor in the firm overtaking Nokia to become the world’s best-selling mobile phone maker. Samsung said that the new Super Amoled (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) display was 22% larger than its predecessor, but the actual device was not much wider since it had shrunk the size of the bezel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17935684#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Called Placeme, the free app takes advantage of the smart phone’s sensors and its GPS and Wi-Fi capabilities to figure out where I go and for how long, and stores this data in a private log on my iPhone. It may sound creepy or unnecessary, but as more people carry smart phones with them everywhere, demand for this kind of persistent location tracking may grow—not just from marketers, but also from individuals who want to keep an eye on their own movements or of loved ones with medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s. At least, that’s the hope of the startup behind Placeme, Alohar Mobile, which has also released a software development kit to help coders create apps that can log your movements accurately and efficiently—without running down the battery in your smart phone.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/40303/?mod=chfeatured

by Will Knight, Technology Review

The popularity of Siri shows that a digital assistant needs more than just intelligence to succeed; it also needs tact, charm, and surprisingly, wit. Errors cause frustration and annoyance with any computer interface. The risk is amplified dramatically with one that poses as a conversational personal assistant, a fact that has undone some socially stunted virtual assistants in the past. So for Siri, being likable and occasionally kooky may be just as important as dazzling with feats of machine intelligence.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/40233/?p1=featured

by Martin LaMonica, CNet

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have launched an initiative to make its education material available online for free. Through an initiative called edX, the two storied learning institutions will develop an open-source software platform and offer some of their courses online starting this fall. Harvard and MIT will govern the not-for-profit joint venture and dedicate $30 million each in grants and institutional support. With edX, Harvard and MIT are seeking to learn about online education to enhance how they offer classes online, both to remote students and students on campus, university officials said at a press conference in Boston that was also available via Webcast.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57426004-76/new-ticket-to-harvard-and-mit-an-internet-connection/

by Duncan Jefferies, the Guardian

A disruptive technology is one that radically alters an existing market – the iPod displacing the Walkman, for example, or tablets eating into sales of PCs. In the same way, new technologies have the potential to disrupt the education system, bringing about major changes in the way pupils learn and challenging the way schools and colleges are run. “We’ve been on the brink of radical transformation in education for about 20 years now,” says Eylan Ezekiel, digital engagement consultant for ONSchool, a specialist innovation school he hopes to open in Oxford. “The question is whether there is the energy to turn some of the exciting innovations into something that has a broader impact.” The European Commission has warned that young people who can’t use digital skills in business will be at a disadvantage when applying for jobs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/innovation-nation-awards/innovation-education-technology-barriers

by kfc, Technology Review

It wasn’t so long ago that researchers were queuing up to explain Twitter’s extraordinary ability to predict the future. Indeed various researchers reported that social media can reliably predict the stock market, the results of elections and even box office revenues. But in recent months the mood has begun to change. Just a few weeks ago, we discussed new evidence indicating that this kind of social media is not so good at predicting box office revenues after all. Twitter’s predictive crown is clearly slipping.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27812/?p1=blogs

by Will Knight, Technology Reveiw

Harvard has joined with MIT to deliver courses over the Internet, for free, to anyone in the world. The new joint venture, called edx, builds upon MIT’s existing online learning platform, MITx, which already runs a handful of courses, including Circuits and Electronics, for around 120,000 students worldwide. The courses offered through edx will incorporate video lessons, online quizzes, and real-time feedback. Students will receive a certificates of mastery for their efforts. In recent years, there has been a massive groundswell in online learning—enabled by high-speed Internet connections, ubiquitous computers, and back-end technology like cloud computing. Edx is just the latest—and most prestigious—endorsement of that phenomenon. It’s interesting to see technology being used to make teaching more efficient. But platforms like edx could also help institutions such as MIT and Harvard identify and nurture the smartest students from anywhere in the world.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27814/?p1=blogs

Rachel Metz, Technology Review

I wear glasses, so I hate putting another pair on over my specs to watch a 3-D flick. The idea of glasses-free 3-D technology is somewhat more appealing, but I’ve seen a few different iterations of it over the years and it always falls flat. So I was curious but skeptical when MasterImage 3D, whose 3-D offerings include digital 3-D projectors for movie theaters, asked me to check out its take on it. It has built its technology into an Android-running Qualcomm tablet that it first showed off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and it hopes to include the technology in smart phones starting late this year and tablets early next year. Matt Liszt, MasterImage’s vice president of marketing, predicts it will add $10 to $15 to the cost of a smart phone, and about $30 to the cost of a tablet.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27816/?p1=blogs

By: Brian T. Horowitz, eWeek

As the American Telemedicine Association conference (ATA 2012) kicks off in San Jose, Calif., American Well Systems and Consult A Doctor are both taking remote care mobile. American Well has unveiled a mobile app as part of version 6.0 of its Online Care cloud-based platform, and Consult A Doctor is demonstrating a new iPhone app at the conference. American Well’s Online Care 6.0 platform, introduced April 30, allows doctors to make house calls using the Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The app currently supports voice-based consultations and will offer two-way video by later this summer. The company will add an Android version later this year as well. Doctors can use the mobile application to monitor online waiting rooms as well as send and receive secure messages, American Well reported.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Health-Care-IT/American-Well-Consult-A-Doctor-Unveil-iPhone-Telehealth-Apps-857754/

By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

Japanese electronics giant Sharp announced recently that it has begun producing high-resolution liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) featuring metal-oxide transistor arrays. Metal oxides are expected to help bring down the price of high-resolution LCDs, which are similar in sharpness to the retina displays found in the latest iPad and iPhone, and may also cut the cost of making organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, a newer type of screen that is richly colored and energy-efficient, but which remains expensive to produce at large sizes. Sharp has said that it will use indium gallium zinc oxide arrays to make LCDs for tablets, notebooks, and monitors. Some industry watchers have speculated that the company would provide metal-oxide displays for the next iPad, but the production specifications that Sharp has announced so far don’t match any Apple products.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/40285/?p1=MstRcnt

by Jessica Leber, Technology Review

Mobile devices outsold PCs last year for the first time, and top smart-phone apps need little more than a year to win the kind of audience it used to take technologies decades to reach. What are the limits of mobile computing? Mobile computing is advancing much faster than other technologies did in their early years. To reach an audience of 50 million people, radio took 38 years, television 13 years, the Internet four years, Facebook three and a half years. Instagram took 1.3 years. That helps explain why Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly negotiated the deal privately over the course of a weekend. The message was that these are do-or-die times, and only visionary founders with total control—and millions to spend—will be swift enough to keep up.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40318/?p1=BI

By Prachi Patel, Technology Review

Head-up displays, which project visual data onto the windshield and the driver’s view of the road, are debuting in a growing number of car models. But more vibrant, compact, and efficient displays being developed by Microvision, a company based in Redmond, Washington, could help the technology become much more common. Japan’s Pioneer Corporation plans to release its first head-up display product based on Microvision’s novel display technology this year. Major carmakers in Detroit are also planning to integrate the technology into their vehicles by 2016, says Lance Evans, a director of business development at the company. Microvision’s image projector relies on semiconductor lasers and a microscopic mirror.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/40311/?p1=A2

by kfc, Technology Review

Electrons are pretty good at processing information but not so good at carrying it over long distances. Photons, on the other hand, do a grand job of shuttling data round the planet but are not so handy when it comes to processing it. As a result, transistors are electronic and communication cables are optical. And the world is burdened with a significant amount of power hungry infrastructure for converting electronic information into the optical variety and vice versa. So it’s no surprise that there is significant interest in developing an optical transistor that could make the electronic variety obsolete.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27808/?p1=blogs

by Nicholas Carr, Technology Review

It sounds straightforward. And if it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant’s book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape. It springs not from Silicon Valley but from Harvard University. The Digital Public Library of America—the DPLA—has big goals, big names, and big contributors. And yet for all the project’s strengths, its success is far from assured. Like Google before it, the DPLA is learning that the major problem with constructing a universal library nowadays has little to do with technology. It’s the thorny tangle of legal, commercial, and political issues that surrounds the publishing business. Internet or not, the world may still not be ready for the library of utopia.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/40210/?p1=featured