Techno-News Blog

by All Things D

Mobile phones are computers you can carry in your pocket. So no surprise you spend lots of time using them to do the same thing you do on a regular computer: Watch YouTube. Here, via broadband service company Sandvine, is a breakdown of mobile Web traffic in North America. By Sandvine’s count, Google’s video site accounts for nearly a third of the data piped into your phone from wireless networks.

http://allthingsd.com/20121110/dogs-on-skateboards-on-your-phone-youtube-dominates-mobile-streaming/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Software that instantly translates spoken speech could make communicating across language barriers far easier. It could be the next best thing to learning a new language. Microsoft researchers have demonstrated software that translates spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly, while preserving the unique cadence of the speaker’s voice—a trick that could make conversation more effective and personal. The first public demonstration was made by Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, on October 25 at an event in Tianjin, China. “I’m speaking in English and you’ll hear my words in Chinese in my own voice,” Rashid told the audience.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507181/microsoft-brings-star-treks-voice-translator-to-life/

By Jon Fingas, Engadget

ARM CEO Warren East already has a tendency to be more than a bit outspoken on the future of computing, and he just escalated the war of words with an assault on the industry’s sacred cow: Moore’s Law. After some prompting by MIT Technology Review during a chat, East argued that power efficiency is “actually what matters,” whether it’s a phone or a server farm. Making ever more complex and power-hungry processors to obey Moore’s Law just limits how many chips you can fit in a given space, he said.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/09/arm-chief-tosses-moores-law-out-with-the-trash-favors-efficiency/

By QUENTIN HARDY, NY Times

Twitter has hundreds of accounts related to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is gone, but on Twitter his @name lives on. And on. The chief executive of Apple, who died in 2011, is memorialized on Twitter by about a thousand fans, parodists, traffic seekers, unrepentant haters and crypto-historians, among others. The accounts use his name as either as a title or, with many variations, as an address. The copycats include @FakeSteveJobs, @FauxSteve and @SteveJobsFalso, a collection of admitted imposters who are following in the footsteps of a parody Web site that was active from 2006 to 2011.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/on-twitter-steve-jobs-is-immortal/?partner=rss&emc=rss

by Brian Proffitt, ReadWrite

Struggling with even the most cutting-edge big-data tools, developers at Facebook have announced a new open-source tool set, Corona, designed to enable data-processing on the incredible scale required by the massive social-media network. Admittedly, there aren’t a lot of companies with big data this big, but Corona should have spill-over benefits for the entire Hadoop-using big data community. Increasing Hadoop’s overall efficiency should make big data even more accessible and faster to use, enabling big data applications to disrupt even more industries.

http://readwrite.com/2012/11/08/facebooks-new-big-data-tool-cranks-up-hadoop-and-its-open-source

By NICOLE PERLROTH, NY Times

Not long after I began writing about cybersecurity, I became a paranoid caricature of my former self. It’s hard to maintain peace of mind when hackers remind me every day, all day, just how easy it is to steal my personal data. Within weeks, I set up unique, complex passwords for every Web site, enabled two-step authentication for my e-mail accounts, and even covered up my computer’s Web camera with a piece of masking tape — a precaution that invited ridicule from friends and co-workers who suggested it was time to get my head checked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/technology/personaltech/how-to-devise-passwords-that-drive-hackers-away.html

BY Eliza Kern, GigaOM

Google has expanded the size of Google Ventures’s annual fund from $200 million to $300 million annually, which will allow the firm to expand the scope of its deals and increase its presence as a major venture capital firm since its founding in 2009.

http://gigaom.com/2012/11/08/google-expands-venture-fund-to-300-million-expects-growth-in-deals/

By STEVE LOHR and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, NY Times

Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation. So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/technology/google-casts-a-big-shadow-on-smaller-web-sites.html

By Jon Fingas, engadget

We’re so used to constant flux in smartphone market share that it’s a surprise when things don’t move. Yet that’s what we’re facing today. ComScore found that the US smartphone field in September was virtually unchanged from where it was in August, even down to smaller players like Symbian and Windows Phone. Accordingly, Android still ruled the roost at 52.5 percent, while 34.3 percent were iPhone adopters. It’s difficult to say whether or not the iPhone 5 had a tangible impact — while Apple had banner sales in the last several days of September, we don’t know to what extent that was offset by people holding off from buying an iPhone 4S.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/02/comscore-us-smartphone-share-leveled-off-in-september/

By Derrick Harris, GigaOM

In just a few years, big data has turned from a buzzword and concept best left for large web companies into a force that drives much of our digital lives. Here are five technological trends that will change how data is processed and consumed going forward.

http://gigaom.com/data/5-trends-that-are-changing-how-we-do-big-data/

by DREW OLANOFF, Tech Crunch

As you know, the devastation of Hurricane Sandy has hit millions. Many turned to Twitter to discuss what they were going through. Today, the company shared some interesting facts and numbers having to do with Hurricane-related activity on the site. What does this tell you? Twitter was a fine replacement for cell phones and landlines that weren’t working. The interesting thing about these numbers is that the company dug deep down to see exactly what people were talking about. The context is what matters here, not the numbers.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/02/twitter-releases-numbers-related-to-hurricane-sandy-more-than-20m-tweets-sent-between-october-27th-and-november-1st/

by MG Siegler, TechCrunch

First and foremost, the iPad mini is a winner. No question in my mind that it’s one of the best devices Apple has ever made. No, it doesn’t have a retina display — but the more I talk to people about this and show it off, the less of an issue this seems to actually be for most people. And yes, we all know that retina display will eventually come. Maybe a year from now, maybe two years from now — it’s impossible to know. But if you’re at all on the fence about the iPad mini and you can afford it, I highly recommend making the jump. It’s fantastic. If you already have an iPad and question why you would want the iPad mini as well, the situation is clearly more complicated. For me, personally, I want both. I’m already using them for different purposes.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/02/should-you-buy-an-ipad-mini/

By Rani Molla, GigaOm

Three major American email providers are competing for popularity outside the U.S. We take a look at how they are faring in the rest of the world. Although Gmail is the world’s leading web email service measured by the number of unique visitors worldwide, it doesn’t dominate any one region of the world. Data from ComScore shows Gmail and Yahoo Mail to be competing over similar markets, including North America and Asia Pacific. Yahoo, for now, is in the lead in those regions. Hotmail, boasts a more unique market with a significant lead in Latin America, Europe and Middle East-Africa. We graphed Yahoo, Google and Hotmail’s top-five markets — in terms of the percentage of online users in each country who use the service — to show how each stacks up in their respective regions.

http://gigaom.com/2012/11/02/where-in-the-world-is-your-email-provider/

by David Talbot, Technology Review

Glenn Gould, who died in 1982, was right that technology would transform the experience of music—just not in ways he could have foreseen. Technology does allow musicians to set down their idea of a perfect rendering, as Gould wanted. But as David Byrne, frontman for the 1970s and 1980s band Talking Heads, observes in his book How Music Works, technology is now making it possible for essentially anybody to make music and distribute it anywhere. Through this democratizing transformation, the value of a recording actually could be diminishing. Technology may in fact be making music a more, not less, social experience: it brings us back together to hear it played live.

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/429661/breaking-down-walls-of-sound/

By Phil Muncaster, Technology Review

A little known Chinese e-reader vendor, Onyx International, leapt into the tech spotlight earlier this month when it showed off a prototype Android smartphone device with an e-ink display. Soon the Web was buzzing with cheers and jeers and many as-yet-unanswered questions about the phone, and whether Onyx can overcome e-ink’s inherent limitations to meet smartphone users’ increasingly high expectations. Onyx International is a four-year-old tech firm hailing from Guanzhou in southern China’s tech manufacturing heartland near Shenzhen and the border with Hong Kong.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506636/e-ink-largely-limited-to-e-readers-appears-in-a-chinese-smartphone/

By David Talbot, Technology Review

Thanks to inefficient power amplifiers, smartphones have short battery lives and cellular base stations waste much of the energy they consume. A more-efficient amplifier technology may be emerging to slash much of this waste. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals. The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you’ve noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that’s why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506491/efficiency-breakthrough-promises-smartphones-that-use-half-the-power/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

The Internet was designed to facilitate the sending back and forth of small bits of information. But that’s not how people use the Internet today. A new method of networking could simplify things and make video downloads happen much more quickly. A growing number of researchers think it’s time to rewire the Internet. A fundamentally new approach could better serve the streaming video, nonstop connectivity, and sizable downloads that users have come to expect, these experts say. The problem is simple: the Internet was designed to send small packets of data back and forth in a conversational style, says Glenn Edens, who heads networking research at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). “Where we are today, the Internet is mostly used for the distribution of content like video, pictures, and e-mails,” says Edens, who is leading an effort at PARC to design and test an alternative way of operating the Internet known as content-centric networking—a project that is attracting increasing support from other researchers and companies.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506581/a-rewired-internet-would-speed-up-content-delivery/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

As the popularity of tablet computing grows, the most successful tablets are likely to shape the way people access information and digital content. Google’s new Nexus tablets and smartphone put it in even closer competition with Apple and Amazon within this landscape. Google unveiled a 10-inch Android tablet, a new version of its seven-inch tablet, and a new smartphone on Monday.

On Monday, Google unveiled a 10-inch touch screen tablet built by Samsung called the Nexus 10, priced at $399 or $499, depending on storage capacity. The new tablet follows on the heels of the seven-inch Nexus 7, which Google built with Asus and rolled out over the summer. The Nexus 10 will be available through the Google Play store starting November 13. The announcement comes just a week after Apple said it will start selling the iPad Mini, a compact version of the iPad with a 7.9-inch touch-screen and starting price of $329. The standard iPad’s screen measures 9.7 inches at the diagonal, and the latest model of that version starts at $499 (see “Live Updates from Apple’s ‘iPad Mini’ Event”).

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506566/google-goes-large-with-a-new-android-tablet/

By Simson L. Garfinkel, Technology Review

It’s possible—though not always foolproof—to get embarrassing things taken down. Voluntary data-labeling standards could make it even easier. People shouldn’t necessarily be haunted forever by indiscretions or harassment that can warp their reputations. It might seem that the Internet doesn’t lose track of anything that has been published online. The alleged permanence of tweets, blogs, snapshots, and instant messages worries many privacy activists and policymakers such as Viviane Reding, justice commissioner of the European Union and vice president of the European Commission. She has proposed that Europe adopt a “right to be forgotten”—a proposal that is now working its way through the EU legal process and could be law within two years.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506521/how-to-delete-regrettable-posts-from-the-internet/

By Todd R. Weiss, eWeek

Carbon nanotubes, the next big thing when it comes to making faster computer chips, are beginning to leave the realm of fantasy and are starting to approach the possibility of commercial production, according to IBM researchers. Carbon nanotubes are beginning to head out of the laboratory and into the edges of reality, according to a team of IBM researchers who have been hard at work creating carbon nanotubes that will be the basis for the next generation of computer chips. The latest breakthrough as scientists continue to refine the handling and construction of the carbon nanotubes is that 10,000 of the tiny structures have been manipulated to fit and operate on a single chip using standard semiconductor processes, according to IBM. This is reportedly the first time that such an accomplishment has been possible.

http://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-researchers-making-carbon-nanotube-production-a-reality/

By Todd R. Weiss, eWeek

Google launches its new Nexus 4 smartphone along with Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, all running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and featuring a myriad of new features. Google launched its long-awaited new Nexus 4 smartphone and new Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets on Oct. 29, despite the cancellation of its originally-scheduled New York City announcement party due to the approach of the powerful Hurricane Sandy that brought heavy rain and gale force winds to the East Coast. Instead of what was to be a fun gala on a New York City pier, Google debuted its new hardware in a post on the Official Google Blog.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/google-unveils-new-nexus-4-smarthphone-nexus-7-nexus-10-tablets/