Yahoo! News: Technology News

Google milks animated doodle mystery on Twitter (AP)
AP - For a dozen years, Google Inc. has been occasionally swapping its everyday logo for a "doodle," a sketch celebrating holidays, inventions, artists and sporting events, and showcasing designs from contest-winning students.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:55:52 GMT

Oracle plans to give Hurd $950,000 annual salary (AP)
AP - Oracle plans to pay newly appointed President Mark Hurd a base salary of $950,000 a year. The company also says the former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO, who was ousted by that company last month, is eligible for a fiscal 2011 bonus of as much as $10 million.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:14:41 GMT

Taiwan's HTC: iPhone's `quiet' challenger (AP)
AP - East Asia is the world's electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are largely anonymous. Now HTC Corp., a Taiwanese maker of smart phones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone.
Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:29:09 GMT

Able to unplug from work while you?re on vacation? (Ben Patterson)
Ben Patterson - Fighting the urge to check your work e-mail while you’re on holiday doesn’t exactly qualify as the worst problem in the world; after all, it’s pretty nice to have a job at all in this tough economy, right? Then again, the pressure to hang onto a job seems to be driving more and more connected workers to stay plugged in even while they’re trying to tune out.
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:19:43 GMT

Mobile users still wary of being found, survey says (Ben Patterson)
Ben Patterson - Feel the need to "check in" on Foursquare or Facebook every time you saunter into a restaurant, browse the goods at your neighborhood grocery store, or cram into a rock concert? Well, if you, you’re still in the minority — and you’re also probably a guy below 40 — according to the latest research.
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:58:20 GMT

Extensis launches Portfolio Server 9.5 (Macworld.com)
Macworld.com - Extensis has announced Portfolio Server 9.5, a new version of its Digital Asset Management (DAM) software, designed to help small businesses and corporate teams quickly locate and access large collections of photos, graphics, documents, and videos.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:15:00 GMT

Craigslist urged to drop adult services worldwide (AP)
AP - Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and national nonprofit organizations said Tuesday they want Craigslist to be "a model for good policy" and officially get rid of its adult services section globally.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:09:01 GMT

Gamer suspended over name of W.Va. town: Fort Gay (AP)
AP - Microsoft Corp. and the chief rules enforcer for Xbox Live are apologizing to a small West Virginia town and a 26-year-old gamer accused of violating the online gaming service's code of conduct by publicly declaring he's from Fort Gay — a name the company considered offensive.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:06:40 GMT

Indian court upholds big tax bill against Vodafone (AP)
AP - In a landmark ruling Wednesday, an Indian court said Vodafone Group Plc is liable for an estimated $2.6 billion in taxes for its 2007 acquisition of one of India's largest mobile phone companies.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:05:54 GMT

Salesforce.com offers Chatter networking on mobile (Reuters)
Reuters - Salesforce.com will offer mobile versions of its Chatter tool for social networking inside companies from later this year as it seeks to make its software more ubiquitous and its customers more productive.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:30:20 GMT

Amazon Acquires Online Music Store Amie Street (Mashable)
Mashable - Amie Street, the online music community and store Amazon has invested in back in August 2007, has now been acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed amount. Starting with September 22 this year, all AmieStreet.com pages will be forwarded to Amazon.com.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:39:20 GMT

Morning Brief: Amazon Acquisition, Google Search Event, Samsung Fascinate On Sale (Mashable)
Mashable - Morning Brief: Amazon Acquires Music Service, Google to Unveil Search Products, Samsung Fascinate Now Available
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:22:20 GMT

Android now powers 25 percent of mobile operating systems (Appolicious)
Appolicious - Android continues to poach away market share from the iPhone and other mobile platforms, now accounting for 25 percent of mobile operating systems in North America.  That?s a 2 percent increase, month-over-month, and an 18.6 percent increase year-over-year.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:25:00 GMT

Norton Releases 2011 Security Products (PC World)
PC World - Norton on Wednesday announced its 2011 versions of its Norton Internet Security suite and Norton Antivirus software. Norton also announced a new application--Norton Power Eraser--that is designed to remove the increasingly common fake antivirus malware.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:41:00 GMT

HP Introduces Microserver for Small Businesses (PC World)
PC World - Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday announced a low-cost, entry-level server for small businesses that bundles advanced features in a small package.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:10:09 GMT

Symantec: Most Hacking Victims Blame Themselves (PC World)
PC World - Just under two-thirds of all Internet users have been hit by some sort of cybercrime, and while most of them are angry about it, a surprisingly large percentage feel guilt too, according to a survey commissioned by Symantec.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:10:09 GMT

Apple Browsing Share Tops Linux, Android Steals Share Everywhere (PC World)
PC World - More people browsed the Internet last month with a device running Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, than used Linux to do so. That's a first for Apple, according to NetMarketShare, a firm that produces metrics on the market share of browsers, operating systems and search engines.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:22:00 GMT

Nokia N8 Release Date: End of September in the Online Shop, October 1 in UK Stores (Mashable)
Mashable - Nokia has announced an official launch date and pricing for its Symbian^3 smartphone, the Nokia N8. The device will be available at the Nokia Online Shop "during the last week of September," and it will appear in UK's physical stores on October 1.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:16:48 GMT

Reuters: Top News

BP shifts U.S. oil spill blame onto contractors
LONDON (Reuters) - BP shifted much of the blame for a rig blast that led to the United States' worst-ever oil spill onto its contractors Transocean and Halliburton.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:51:02 -0400

Obama pitches road spending, tax incentives in Ohio
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will push billions of dollars in new business tax incentives and spending on big construction projects on Wednesday, as he tries to convince a balky Congress to pass measures intended to spur the economy and create jobs.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:23:30 -0400

Koran-burning plan draws worldwide condemnation
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan police went on alert on Wednesday to guard against demonstrations triggered by a U.S. church's plan to burn a copy of the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks which has drawn global condemnation.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:27:30 -0400

Special Report: The Tea Party goes to school
HANNIBAL, Missouri (Reuters) - Some Tea Partiers admit mistakes were made. Others are quick to describe the movement's recent efforts in the political arena as not quite ready for prime time.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:46:59 -0400

U.S. says not considering NATO Afghan troop request
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States does not plan to contribute to a NATO request for 2,000 troops for the Afghan war, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, even as the head of the alliance held out the possibility of U.S. participation.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:32:11 -0400

China-U.S. ties improving, Hu tells White House team
BEIJING (Reuters) - China and the United States said on Wednesday that their sometimes rocky relationship is sounder after talks in Beijing, with both putting an optimistic face on ties that have been jolted by economic and security tensions.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:28:34 -0400

Judge refuses to lift ban on government stem cell funds
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge refused on Tuesday to lift a ban on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research despite Obama administration warnings it would set back key research and cost more than a thousand jobs.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:12:12 -0400

U.S. team to discuss North Korea in Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. government team will travel to Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing next week to discuss North Korea but has no plans to visit the poor, isolated state or meet its officials, the State Department said Tuesday.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:34:47 -0400

Thai plane searched in L.A. after bomb threat
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Investigators found no evidence of a bomb aboard a Thai Airways flight on Tuesday after a written threat was discovered in a lavatory shortly before its arrival in Los Angeles, officials said.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:06:56 -0400

Pressure mounts in U.S. against Koran-burning plan
MIAMI (Reuters) - Civil and military leaders stepped up calls on Tuesday for an obscure U.S. pastor to drop his plans to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, as fears grew it would fan religious hatred.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:41:20 -0400

Wired Top Stories

Why PlayStation Move Could Give '3-D Games' a Whole New Meaning
Sony's upcoming motion controller is more than just a Wiimote clone. Thanks to its player-facing camera and its powerfully precise targeting, it offers a peek at what full-fledged augmented reality will look like.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Soy Sauce, Soap and Saccharin: Microphoto Winners Revealed
Nikon's Small World microscope photography winners are revealed today. This gallery features some of the most interesting winning images of ordinary stuff like snowflakes and banana leaves. Vote for your favorites and help choose the popular-vote winner.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Sept. 8, 1930: Scotch Tape Starts Sticking
3M begins marketing the first waterproof, transparent, pressure-sensitive tape after employee Richard Drew figures out how to coat strips of cellophane with adhesive.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Pushing Arcade Games to the Limit
Computer lab manager Don Hodges knows why Pac-Man, at level 256, suddenly turns into a hideous mess of ASCII letters and graphics.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Freakazoid Rocking Chair Gives Lounging a Floaty Feeling
The Gravity Balans from Variér Furniture is far less nefarious and cranium-cracking than it looks. We'd heard a great deal about its ergonomic benefits and decided to give it a spin in our quest to find the perfect marathon gaming/lounging chair.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Fast Family Cars for High-Performance Parents
Porsche panache comes to the carpool lane, and Mercedes Benz makes burning rubber with kids in the back seat comfy for everyone!
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Tweet of the Day: Journalist Tweets From Jail With Guard's Phone
A journalist captured in Afghanistan told the world he was still alive over the weekend by tweeting with a prison guard's cellphone. This remarkable tale about a tweet kicks off a new meme here at Gadget Lab that we're calling Tweet of the Day.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Court OKs Warrantless Cell-Site Tracking
A federal appeals court is ruling the government may obtain cell-site information mobile phone carriers retain on their customers without a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment. Cell-site location information, which carriers usually retain for about 18 months, identifies the cell tower to which the customer was connected at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:33:00 GMT

Take Better Flash Photos
Most flash photos — even those shot with your new, fancy $500 camera — look like junk. But you can create amazing images using a flash if you know a few tricks.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:45:00 GMT

Asteroid Double Whammy Near Earth Wednesday
Get out your telescopes! Two small asteroids will come within moon-distance of Earth Wednesday.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:30:00 GMT

Eerie Ukrainian Salt Mines House Convalescing Asthmatics
The Eastern European practice of speleotherapy claims salt air helps breathing issues, which leads to patients lining the halls of subterranean caves.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:16:00 GMT

ACLU Challenges Border Searches of Gadgets
An Obama administration policy allowing U.S. border officials to seize and search laptops, smartphones and other electronic devices for any reason is being challenged as unconstitutional.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:10:00 GMT

Should You Give Up Gadgets for a Day?
Clearly, some of us make bad decisions with our gadgets. But even without having to live down a mobile phone-fueled tirade of Mel Gibson proportions, many of us have sought forgiveness for our gadget-enabled sins through a ritual purge: a day without gadgets.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:00:00 GMT

Why Everything Wireless Is 2.4 GHz
You live your life at 2.4 GHz. Your router, your cordless phone, your Bluetooth earpiece, your baby monitor and your garage opener all love and live on this radio frequency, and no others. Why? The answer is in your kitchen.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:30:00 GMT

William Gibson Talks Up Twitter, Zero History
The Neuromancer author digs deep into the vertigo-inducing machinations of modern life to spin a story about militarism, marketing and "gear queers." He also calls Twitter "the most powerful novelty aggregator that has ever existed."
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:26:00 GMT

Read an Excerpt From William Gibson's New Novel, Zero History
Get a look at the sci-fi writer's latest future-present story, in which a detail-obsessed Russian translator named Milgrim, a postmodern marketing mogul known as Hubertus Bigend and a taste-making detective called Hollis Henry tussle with technology and its far-reaching tentacles.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:20:00 GMT

Sound of Justin Bieber's Data, and Other 'Hack Day' Mashups
LONDON ? Every so often, in cities across the world, a group of digital music professionals get together for a Hack Day, where they'll cobble together hardware, software and anything else they can get their hands on into innovative musical mashups. London's event took place last weekend, and it was an orgy of creativity. Here are 10 of our favorites.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:10:00 GMT

Google Lets Yahoo Users Sign In With OpenID
Google is now allowing any Yahoo user to sign in to Google using OpenID, the company announced Tuesday. Anyone with a Yahoo account can start using Google's web apps with a new one-click sign up process.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:06:00 GMT

Photo: Galactic Cannibals Discovered in Deep Space
A new survey has caught several distant galaxies ripping up their dwarfish galactic neighbors and devouring them whole.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:00:00 GMT

Video: Wheelchair Phenom Nails First Double Backflip
Aaron "Wheelz" Fotheringham, an 18-year-old from Las Vegas, recently pulled off the world's first wheelchair double backflip, after several failed (and painful-looking) attempts at Camp Woodward, just east of State College, Pennsylvania.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:31:00 GMT

New iPod Touch Has a Vibrator
Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he called the iPod Touch the "iPhone without a phone." We have been calling it that for years, of course, but with each iteration the two iOS devices get closer and closer in terms of features. Now a vibrating alert has been added to the Touch.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Google TV Revealed: One Screen to Rule Them All
BERLIN - Google gave a live demonstration of Google TV at Berlin?s IFA Tuesday, and CEO Eric Schmidt promised it would be a couch potato?s dream come true. 'Once you have Google television, you?re going to be very busy, he said. 'It?s going to ruin your evening.'
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:48:00 GMT

Self-Healing Solar Cells Could Have Indefinite Lifespan
A new technique may one day lead to solar cells that bring themselves together like a molecular flash mob and repair damage they sustain during the rough business of turning light into electricity.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Army Turns to Lasers for Copter Defense
Some jerk has fired a heat-seeking missile at your Black Hawk. You've got a few options. You can try to dodge the thing, but good luck with that. You can fire off a flare in order to fool the missile into no longer following you as you maneuver. Or you can shoot off a laser from on board your bird to do the same thing. Not really a choice, is it?
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Former HP CEO Mark Hurd Lands On His Feet At Oracle

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:06:00 GMT

Taiwan Tabloid Sensation Next Media Re-Creates the News
An animation assembly line in Taiwan renders breaking stories the way they might have happened.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Sept. 7, 1948: Where the Rubber Is the Road
A mile-long stretch of Exchange Street in Akron, Ohio, is the first in the United States to be paved with a rubber-asphalt compound.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Noteworthy Note-Taking Kit Is Analog All the Way
Okay hipsters, toss that Moleskine away. The Doane Daily Arsenal Kit is the smart choice to take notes the analog way.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Doxie's Scanner Is Easy, Portable — and Cute, Too!
A portable scanner? That uploads every document it sees to the cloud effortlessly and seamlessly? You're not dreaming, you?re using a Doxie.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Star Trek 365 Book Sets Phasers on Stunning
Packed with beautiful images and behind-the-scenes details, this rich tribute to the classic '60s sci-fi show is a must-have for any Trekker. Get a first look at the book and enter to win a copy.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:00 GMT

CNET News.com

Oracle to pay Hurd $950,000 per year
Former HP CEO Mark Hurd stands to score big as co-president at Oracle. Beyond the salary, there's a potential $5 million bonus in 2011, and oodles of stock options.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:34:53 PDT

Mozilla: Now is the time for browser-based games
Firefox and other up-to-date browsers are capable of running newly complex games, Mozilla argues, launching an effort to get programmers interested.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:34:22 PDT

Are refurbished Kindles a bargain?
Amazon is selling refurbished second-generation Kindles starting at $159.99. But are they a deal?
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:31:08 PDT

Buy one-get one offered for Samsung Fascinate
Verizon Wireless is introducing this Android smartphone with a buy-one, get-one-free deal.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:15:27 PDT

Reddit co-founders reunite at Hipmunk
Hipmunk, an ambitious foray into the packed travel-search market, was founded by one of Reddit's creators and has just brought the other one on as its head of marketing.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:00:00 PDT

Microsoft sends Bing back to school
The company is launching Redu, a site aimed at drawing more people into the debate over the future of U.S. education. Among its features is a Bing map displaying educational job openings.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 05:45:00 PDT

Microsoft aims to sharpen its CRM pitch
As it gears up to start testing a new version of its product, Redmond says it's tired of letting Marc Benioff's Salesforce.com own the conversation.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:00:00 PDT

Antivirus isn't dead--it's growing up
Despite longtime diagnoses that antivirus software is doomed, security will become a service for mobile devices, experts predict.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:00:00 PDT

Mozilla fixes Firefox holes, curtails clickjacking
Along with the security fixes, Firefox 3.6.9 gets a new feature to help Web developers reduce clickjacking risks. Also: Chrome 6 gets bug fixes.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:00:36 PDT

Norton's new Power Eraser goes free
The tool for removing aggressive malware is part of Symantec's 2011 refresh to its Norton consumer security suites.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:09:40 PDT

Study: Two-thirds of Web surfers fall prey to online crime
Survey finds China, Brazil, India, and the U.S. at top of list of countries with the most cybercrime victims.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:01:00 PDT

Report: Justin Bieber is 3 percent of Twitter
A tweet by designer Dustin Curtis suggests that a Twitter employee has confirmed to him that, at any given moment, teen phenomenon Justin Bieber uses 3 percent of Twitter's infrastructure.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:17:40 PDT

Trend Micro bets on the cloud
Trend Micro revamps its consumer-protection suites by wagering heavily on cloud-based protection, creating security suites that the company claims are faster at detection and lighter on system resources.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:00:00 PDT

Zombies to fill brains at University of Baltimore
No, really. Students getting a minor in pop culture will be learning about the walking dead and how they are represented in various types of media.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:00:38 PDT

New Firefox beta offers audio API, menu tweaks
A new audio data API, default hardware acceleration, and a return of some menu options that had been missing in previous betas are the keystones to Firefox 4 beta 5.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:59:44 PDT

Woman makes teary YouTube movies, gets back ex
A woman is heartbroken after splitting with her lover. So she takes to YouTube and pours out her woes. Moved by her performances, her lover returns.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:04:44 PDT

Microelectrodes help brain signals 'speak'
Using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted atop the brain, Utah researchers are one step closer to enabling paralyzed people to speak via their thoughts.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:23:15 PDT

Court allows warrantless cell location tracking
Philadelphia appeals court rules that no search warrant is needed for police to track Americans' cell phone whereabouts but says individual judges can "sparingly" require one.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:44:11 PDT

Android app is like Foursquare meets Pirate Bay
Created as part of The Guardian's Music Hack Day, Piracy app lets users "drop" songs from their music collection in physical locations for other users to pick up later.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:18:33 PDT

Why iTunes song samples are still only 30 seconds
Apple in "active negotiations" for song samples with rights holders, but some music publishers want Apple to pay. How the negotiations fare could set the mood for negotiations over cloud music.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:17:48 PDT

InformationWeek News

Cisco Launches Virtual Machine Firewall
Security is specific to and follows each virtual machine as it moves within Cisco's Unified Computing System architecture.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 10:30:00 EDT

Ellison Threatens To End Oracle-HP Alliance
Hurd lawsuit could kill longstanding technology partnership between the two companies.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 10:01:00 EDT

Piper Jaffray: Antennagate Cost Apple 20% In Sales
According to a survey conducted by analyst firm Piper Jaffray, 20% of respondents decided not to buy the iPhone 4 due to its antenna problems.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 09:18:00 EDT

Lawsuit Challenges DHS Laptop Search Policy
Rights groups seek a change in rules that allow U.S. officials to inspect electronic devices and copy data at border crossings.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

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Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Global CIO: In Hurd's Wake, An Ugly Ending For Oracle's Charles Phillips
Larry Ellison's farewell rationale for Phillips' awkward departure just doesn't add up. And I think Mark Hurd better watch his back.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Samsung Intros Orion Dual Core ARM Mobile Processor
Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Nvidia's Tegra 2 are the primary competition for the 1GHz Cortex A9-based application processor for smartphones and tablets.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Craigslist Adult Services Asked To Close Outside U.S.
Though the site recently shuttered the adult services section of the classified ads site in the U.S., activist groups are calling for the closure of as many as 250 other Craigslist 'erotic' pages around the world.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Symantec Releases Enterprise Vault, NetBackup Deduplication Appliance
Support for Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1, SharePoint 2010 and Domino 8.5.1 headline the upgrades to Symantec's Enterprise Vault 9.0.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

1.5 Billion Mobile Broadband Subscribers Predicted By 2015
Most mobile Internet users connected via smartphones, but many use modem-enabled iPads, netbooks and laptops and operators see burgeoning revenue growth in mobile broadband services, according to ABI Research.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 07:00:00 EDT

Quantum Cryptography Breached With Lasers
Using lasers to blind quantum cryptography photon detectors, Norwegian computer scientist were able to obtain a copy of a secure key without leaving any trace of their presence.
Wed, 8 Sep 2010 07:00:00 EDT

HP Sues Mark Hurd Over Oracle Competition
The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and assurances from Hurd that HP's corporate secrets are safe.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 16:40:00 EDT

Nokia To Release N8, E7 Smartphones
The Symbian OS smartphones are seen as crucial to the Finnish mobile phone maker's competitive fortunes against Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry and Android OS handsets in the high-end device market.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 16:39:00 EDT

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Tue, 7 Sep 2010 16:39:00 EDT

Gov 2.0 Summit: FCC Offers 'Citizen Developer' Tools
As part of its open government push, the agency introduces four APIs and a website that make FCC data available as web services.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 16:35:00 EDT

Gov 2.0 Summit: Feds Launch Online Prize Platform
New website Challenge.gov will act as a locus for government-sponsored innovation challenges that award winners with prizes ranging from small change to millions.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 15:34:00 EDT

Gov 2.0 Summit: Call For National Scanning Initiative
The federal government must rethink how it approaches IT if it wants to achieve open government goals, said Public.Resource.org founder Carl Malamud, and make digitizing government data a priority.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 15:33:00 EDT

Google TV Goes Worldwide In 2011
With the U.S. launch of Google TV fast approaching, Samsung is mulling whether to jump onto the Android bandwagon.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 14:26:00 EDT

LG Makes 'Optimus' Windows Phone 7 Legit
LG has announced that it will brand its Windows Phone 7 devices "Optimus 7" and that they will ship during the fourth quarter of 2010.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:51:00 EDT

HTC To Launch Windows Mobile 7 HD3 Smartphone
The device, which will go on sale next week in Australia, will have improved power management, a dual-core 1.5-GHz ARM-based processor, and 4.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:27:00 EDT

Quest Software Supports Cassandra NoSQL Database
Popular management suite integrated with budding alternative for big-data transaction processing.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:12:00 EDT

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Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:12:00 EDT

Motorola, Ericsson Team On LTE Public Safety Network
Long-term evolution mobile broadband to speed delivery of real-time information between command centers and emergency responders in the field.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 12:56:00 EDT

Gov 2.0 Summit: Advocate Calls USASpending Data 'Useless'
Sunlight Foundation director Ellen Miller questions the federal government's commitment to transparency initiatives.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 12:48:00 EDT

Global CIO: Chevron CIO Wrings Value Out Of Existing IT
A conversation with Chevron CIO Louie Ehrlich on IT opportunity and reshaping the role of the CIO.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 12:27:00 EDT

Social Media Use By SMBs Doubles In 2010
Most small and midsize businesses now using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to promote their businesses, report positive impact.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 12:10:00 EDT

HHS Awards $17 Million For Patient-Centered Research
Health IT will support studies that determine the most effective treatments and improve the nation's health, says Department of Health and Human Services.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 11:48:00 EDT

Samsung: We'll Sell 10 Million Galaxy Tabs
Speaking in an interview, a Samsung executive said the company believes it will sell 10 million Android-powered Galaxy Tabs by this time next year.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 11:29:00 EDT

CVS Offers $99 Sylvania Netbook
The drug store chain is reaping sales from the low price point of the computer, which runs Windows CE 6.0 and has a 7-inch display.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 11:25:00 EDT

Adult Content Producers Take On BitTorrent Traders
Mass litigation lawsuits target people who allegedly pirated copyrighted movies through the peer-to-peer network.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 11:04:00 EDT

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Tue, 7 Sep 2010 11:04:00 EDT

AT&T Leads Google Ad Spenders
BP, fighting negative publicity from the gulf oil spill, dramatically upped spending on search ads to nearly $3.6 million in June, according to data obtained by Advertising Age.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 10:45:00 EDT

Craigslist Silent On Closing Adult Services Section
Classified ads site slapped a "censored" banner over the former link to the controversial area.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 10:21:00 EDT

Yahoo Partners on Connected TV
Billed as "the future of television," access to streaming movies, sports, and news is being rolled out in 40 European countries.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 10:00:00 EDT

Samsung Fascinate Debuts This Week At Verizon Stores
Verizon Wireless and Samsung on Tuesday announced that the Fascinate variant of the Galaxy S Android line will hit Verizon stores on September 9.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 09:53:00 EDT

Global CIO: Resurrecting Mark Hurd: Larry Ellison's War With IBM
One month after resigning in disgrace from HP, Hurd joins Ellison's pursuit of IBM. Here are Hurd's top 10 challenges.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EDT

Huawei Announces Android 2.2 IDEOS Smartphone
T-Mobile is among the U.S. carriers reportedly evaluating the handset for possible introduction to the U.S. market later this year.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Nvidia Unveils GeForce 400M Processor
Built to power 3D laptops, as well as mid-level systems, the GPUs are designed with Nvidia's Fermi architecture and include the company's battery-saving Optimus technology.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

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Tue, 7 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Android Gaining On Apple iOS For Mobile Browsing
Apple's mobile operating system accounted for 56% of mobile web activity in the U.S. at the end of August, while Android increased to 25%, according to Quantcast.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Web 2.0 Expo: The Power of Platforms
In 2009, Google said the Web had won; in 2010, it's clear that the Web is only one platform among many.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 07:00:00 EDT

Microsoft Warns Of Malware Faking Virus Alerts
New scareware known as Rogue:MSIL/Zeven uses a social-engineering attack to sucker users into buying a fake antivirus program.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 06:00:00 EDT

Top 20 Android Productivity Apps
Android handsets are pouring onto the market every day and there's a deluge of Android apps competing to fills those screens. To sort through the storm surge of app choices, we've trolled through the Android Market to hauled in 20 Android apps that no business user should be without.
Tue, 7 Sep 2010 04:00:00 EDT

Hurd In, Phillips Out As Oracle President
Oracle has hired former HP CEO Mark Hurd to be its president, replacing Charles Phillips, who has resigned. Hurd will take the reins of Oracle's strategy of combining software and hardware, as it battles IBM.
Mon, 6 Sep 2010 20:51:00 EDT

HTC Android Slider Gets FCC Approval
Verizon could be bringing the new Android smartphone to the U.S., judging by photos posted on the Federal Communications Commission's web site.
Mon, 6 Sep 2010 11:10:00 EDT

Global CIO: Larry Ellison And Mark Hurd: The Job Interview
A fly on the wall overhears the final stages of Ellison's conversation with Hurd to have the former HP CEO join Oracle as President of Systems.
Mon, 6 Sep 2010 09:01:00 EDT

Server Technology Hits A Crossroads
Highlights of exclusive InformationWeek Analytics research as it appears in "Server Technology Hits a Crossroads," our report evaluating changes in the server market motivated by the push to consolidate data center systems, get power and cooling costs under control and make the most of the cloud.
Mon, 6 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Border Patrol Fails To Secure Financial System
A Department of Homeland Security report indicates that the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has failed to correct a series of "significant" security deficiencies in its financial system.
Mon, 6 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

VMware, Bluelock To Offer Beta Hybrid Cloud Operation
BlueLock's CloudConnector overlays the VMware client and makes uses the new vCloud Director to coordinate workloads between an on-premises private cloud and BlueLock's public cloud.
Mon, 6 Sep 2010 07:00:00 EDT

Twitter Mobile Use Soaring
More than three quarters of users access the microblogging site through Twitter.com, though the number of people accessing it via mobile devices has increased 62% since April.
Mon, 6 Sep 2010 07:00:00 EDT

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Mon, 6 Sep 2010 07:00:00 EDT

Apple iTunes Ping Draws Spam, Complaints
iTunes users in Apple's support forum say they're downgrading back to iTunes 9.2.1.
Sat, 4 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EDT

Google Trims Privacy Policy
Moving to improve user privacy, Google has made it easier to understand the company's privacy policies and to find its privacy tools.
Sat, 4 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

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Sat, 4 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Mobile Football Madness: Best Apps For The Gridiron
College football season is in the first quarter and the NFL season about to kickoff. Take your football experience mobile this fall by arming yourself with the best mobile apps for following your team, be it fantasy or real, and staying in the game no matter where you roam. Here's 20 of the best.
Sat, 4 Sep 2010 06:00:00 EDT

Practical Analysis: The Great Laboratory Of Departments
When there is no obvious right answer, don't shy away from experimentation.
Sat, 4 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EDT

9 Steps To Enabling Remote Access, Safely
Security goes beyond encryption, authentication, and monitoring employees. We also need to ensure privileged users aren't betraying trust. Here's how.
Sat, 4 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EDT

The most recent News from Incisive Media

Three announces Samsung Galaxy Tab price plans
Khidr Suleman, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 15:27:00 Voice and data-only packages start at £10 per month, but no pricing for the device yet Three has announced pricing plans for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, as competition between networks to launch the Android-based hybrid smartphone/tablet intensifies. The Galaxy Tab will be available on SIM-only one-month rolling voice and data contracts. A £10 per month plan will come with 100 any network minutes, 2,000 Three-to-Three minutes, 3,000 texts and a 1GB data allowance. A £15 per month tariff offers 300 any network minutes, 2,000 Three-to-Three minutes, 3,000 texts and a 1GB data limit. Customers wanting to use the device primarily for internet access can opt for monthly data only packages providing 1GB for £7.50 and 5GB for £15 per month. Data customers will be able to make calls to Three mobiles for 10p per minute, send texts for 10p each, and make calls to landlines and other networks for 25p per minute. V3.co.uk contacted Three to confirm how much customers will have to pay upfront for the tablet, but a spokesman said that the prices have yet to be confirmed. The Galaxy Tab is available for pre-order for a pricey £679.99 SIM-free from Expansys with a shipping date of 12 October, but this was not confirmed by Samsung. Samsung hopes that the Tab will challenge the iPad with its 1.2GHz processor, Android 2.2, a 7in WSVGA TFT screen, full HD (1080p) playback, internet tethering capabilities and Flash support.

MPs, Greenpeace and renewables industry join forces to save port upgrades
James Murray, BusinessGreen, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 14:47:00 Charles Kennedy tables Early Day Motion urging government to rubberstamp £60m port investment programme Former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy has secured cross party support for his campaign to save the proposed £60m offshore wind port investment programme from the government's spending review. Kennedy today tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) calling on the coalition to retain the previous government's plans to upgrade ports to help them support the installation of offshore wind farms, with Conservative MP Peter Aldous and Labour MP Alan Whitehead signed up as co-sponsors. "I have always believed very strongly in the potential of renewables to rejuvenate the UK?s economy ? particularly in old industrial areas, in which many of the ports eligible for this funding lie," said Kennedy. "The possibility of building our own home-grown industry should not be passed up." The EDM was timed to coincide with the launch of a major campaign from trade association RenewableUK, which is aiming to ensure that the £60m investment programme survives the government's spending review. The campaign is being backed by environmental lobby group Greenpeace, which is encouraging its members to write to MPs in affected areas calling on them to support the EDM. Earlier in the summer, industry insiders expressed confidence that the ports programme would be retained by the government. But the government's failure to confirm that it will make it through the spending review unscathed has stoked fears that the investment could be cut, jeopardizing plans from GE and Siemens to locate new turbine manufacturing facilities in the UK. "We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to become a world-leader in offshore wind but if we fail to capitalise on the lead we have in this sector, those jobs will be lost to rival countries already competing with us to attract offshore wind manufacturers," warned Dr Gordon Edge, director of policy at RenewableUK. "We are urging the government to make the important distinction between current spending and investment, as the infrastructure spending will ultimately deliver mass employment and business benefits at a local and regional level." RenewableUK estimates that the port investment could help to create up to 50,000 jobs across the wind energy supply chain as growing numbers of firms choose to locate manufacturing facilities in the UK. Kennedy's support for the campaign will prompt speculation that the coalition could face protests from its own backbenches if it scales back support for the wind energy industry. A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the government remained committed to developing a UK manufacturing base for the offshore wind sector, but refused to confirm whether the port upgrade investment would survive the spending review. "Funding for offshore wind ports infrastructure has not been selected for suspension or cancellation as part of the recent cost cutting exercise, but as with all public spending it is being reviewed in the context of the spending review," he said.

Scanner vendor line-up is stable, claims Midwich
Fleur Doidge, CRN, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 14:16:00 Distributor holds imaging line-up steady post-Kodak signing and looks to the future Midwich has confirmed that it will continue to sell scanners from Canon and Visioneer in the wake of signing Kodak. When asked if the distributor planned to change its vendor line-up, Jonny Francis, print and imaging business manager at Midwich, said in a statement: ?Midwich will continue to work with Canon, Kodak and Visioneer.? Xerox-branded scanners are also sold through Midwich via Visioneer. Francis said the workgroup, departmental and low-volume scanner market was tipped by InfoSource in April to grow 18 per cent a year until 2014, and the objective was to target Kodak?s leading competitors. Midwich inked the Kodak deal in mid-July. ?Document scanners are a key focus for Midwich; we are setting up a document scanner division that will sit within our print and imaging division, headed by Craig Morrison as product manager,? said Francis. ?We are seeing more workgroup, departmental and low-volume scanners sold by the IT reseller channel.? Midwich added Kodak with a view to pushing its SoHo and enterprise networked, workgroup and departmental scanners via 6,000 UK and Ireland resellers. It has already been busy signing resellers to Kodak?s incentives programme. The vendor is funding the salary of a Kodak product specialist for Mid­wich and has hired Bob Grist­ock, former Visioneer business development manager and product manager at distributor Headway, as business development manager. Neil Murphy, document im­ag­ing sales manager at Kodak, said Midwich already sells Kodak multi-function devices and digital cameras.

Dell sounds death knell for Windows XP
David Neal, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 13:58:00 PC maker to stop offering Microsoft OS on new kit from this month Dell is to stop selling hardware preloaded with Windows XP from this month. According to Microsoft guidance, OEMs will no longer be able to pre-install Windows XP on new PCs from October, meaning Dell will cease to offer the software as a standard option. "System vendors like Dell will no longer be able to ship systems with XP Professional and XP Home after 22 October 2010," said Dell in a blog post. "This means that we will stop offering XP as an option for customers starting this month in preparation for next month's deadline." However, Dell has promised to continue offering XP driver support until December 2012, and said that "qualified customers" will be able to buy Windows XP systems through its Custom Factory Integration service. Dell advised enterprise users to prepare for the demise of XP by completing their migration to Windows 7, or making the most of the downgrade rights offered by Microsoft. "Dell recognises that many corporate organisations and institutions are standardised on these operating systems, and that transitioning to a new operating system is expensive and time consuming," the firm said. "Our goal is to help drive down the total cost of ownership of our relationship products, and provide managed transitions for our customers." Although support for Windows XP service pack 2 ended in July, Microsoft has promised to continue support for firms running the old but very popular operating system with SP3 enabled until April 2014.

VARs urged to be Ethernet-ready
Sam Trendall, CRN, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 13:51:00 Data solutions are not the ?black art? they once were as companies get switched on With Ethernet technologies becoming the comms market?s largest growth area, the channel has been urged to train up or lose out as greenfield business disappears. The Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Networks Tracker from IDC reports that the Ethernet routing market grew 11 per cent in the second quarter compared to the previous year, while Ether­net switches enjoyed a 32.7 per cent sales spike. IDC?s director of enterprise communications infrastructure, Rohit Mehra, said: ?The second-quarter performance was very good, following exceptional Q1 results for the Ether­net switch market.? Carrier Opal has predicted there will be 90,000 100Mbit Ethernet customers in the UK by 2014, up from 30,000 last year. Opal expects the number of 1Gbit users to increase eightfold to 62,000 by 2014, while 10Gbit customers are anticipated to grow from 300 to 8,000. Opal?s transformation dir­ector, Andy Lockwood, said: ?There is very little genuinely new business in the [comms] market. Whenever we win a new customer, we are taking it from another carrier. There is not a lot of genuine top-line growth because of price erosion, but there is a lot of movement and change, which creates opportunity. ?Customers might have as many as seven suppliers. The opportunity for the channel is to acquire new skills and consolidate the number of suppliers customers have. The battleground is to be the winner in that consolidation.? Andy McEwan, senior manager of Ethernet point to point at Virgin Media Busi­ness, was another to forecast impressive growth. ?The traditional way of connecting networks has become more expensive,? he said. ?BT has entered the Ethernet market in the UK in the past 24 months, which has given the market some maturity.? He added that the make-up of Virgin?s traditionally voice-centric channel is changing. ?It is getting there, and I do not think data solutions are the black art they once were,? he said.

Salesforce Chatter coming to iPhones and BlackBerrys
Khidr Suleman, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 13:38:00 Enterprise social networking tool to be available on the go Salesforce.com has announced a mobile version of its Chatter platform, allowing users to collaborate with colleagues in real time using all major smartphone platforms. Chatter allows employees to create a Facebook-like profile and post status updates, comments, documents and photos, as well as follow and collaborate with team members while on the move, the on-demand software vendor said. Speaking at Salesforce's Cloudforce 2010 user event in London, Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president of product marketing, noted that mobile devices are becoming the enterprise desktop for more than 50 per cent of the workforce. He added that every piece of information inside the enterprise cloud has a Chatter feed. "[Chatter] bypasses email, which was not designed for [real-time] collaboration," Swensrud said. "Users can share insights, ideas, information and presentations in real time [on the move] to win business." Chatter Mobile will be available on iPad, iPhone and BlackBerry devices later this year. An Android version is scheduled for the first half of 2011. The app will be available as a free upgrade for Salesforce CRM and Force.com subscribers. The desktop version of Chatter was launched on 22 June and has been deployed at around 20,000 companies, according to Salesforce. It is downloadable at no charge for existing Salesforce subscribers. SAP unveiled plans last month to offer its software products on mobile platforms within nine months, using technology from recently acquired enterprise mobility firm Sybase. Bill McDermott, co-chief executive at SAP, said that it is imperative for the company to expand to the mobile platform given that data is doubling every 18 months.

BP attempts to share blame for Gulf disaster
BusinessGreen.com Staff, BusinessGreen, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 13:29:00 BP accuses Transocean of missing danger signs and Halliburton of providing a "bad cement job" BP today attempted to shift some of the blame for Gulf of Mexico oil spill on to the other companies working on the Macondo well, concluding in its internal review of the disaster that "a sequence of failures involving a number of different parties" led to the explosion that killed 11 people and resulted in the largest oil spill in US history. The 193-page accident investigation report, which was carried out by BP safety chief Mark Bly, concludes that the disaster was the result of decisions made by "multiple companies and work teams" that led to "a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures". Investors in BP initially responded positively to the company's efforts to offload some of the responsibility onto its partners - rig operator Transocean and well contractor Halliburton, which provided the cement casing for the well. BP's share price rose one per cent ahead of the release of the report this morning, and then climbed a further one per cent in the immediate wake of the report being released at midday. The report apportions some of the blame for the disaster on BP, noting that the "results of the negative pressure test were incorrectly accepted by BP and Transocean". But it is also quick to point out that equipment suppliers and contractors must take some of the responsibility for the repeated mechanical and procedural failures that proceeded the explosion. In particular, the report notes that the cement and cement slurry at the bottom of the well failed to contain hydrocarbons "as they were designed to do" resulting in the initial leak. It then claims that the Transocean rig crew " failed to recognise and act on the influx of hydrocarbons into the well" over a 40-minute period, allowing oil and gas to rise up the well. The hydrocarbons then "vented directly onto the rig", rather than being diverted overboard, and the fire prevention system on the rig failed, resulting in the fatal explosion. Crucially, the blow-out preventer, which should have activated automatically cutting off the well, then failed to engage, "probably because critical components were not working". Commenting on the report, BP's outgoing chief executive Tony Hayward said in a statement that new evidence had confirmed that BP was not solely responsible for the accident. "The investigation report provides critical new information on the causes of this terrible accident. It is evident that a series of complex events, rather than a single mistake or failure, led to the tragedy," he said. "Multiple parties, including BP, Halliburton and Transocean, were involved. To put it simply, there was a bad cement job and a failure of the shoe track barrier at the bottom of the well, which let hydrocarbons from the reservoir into the production casing. The negative pressure test was accepted when it should not have been, there were failures in well control procedures and in the blow-out preventer; and the rig?s fire and gas system did not prevent ignition." He added that it appeared "unlikely" that the well design, for which BP is directly responsible, contributed to the incident. The report features 25 safety recommendations designed to prevent a repeat of the disaster, many of which BP said would be of interest to the wider industry. Bob Dudley, who is poised to replace Hayward, said the company would learn from the mistakes revealed in the report. "We have accepted all the recommendations [contained in the report] and are examining how best to implement them across our drilling operations worldwide," he added. Trade association Oil & Gas UK said that it would be studying the report closely and would incorporate it as part of on-going work by its recently-launched Oil Spill Prevention and Response Advisory Group, which is working on its own recommendations to improve safety across the industry. BP said the report was based on information that is available to the official investigating team. It also acknowledged that its conclusions may evolve as new evidence emerges, noting that US investigators are currently examining the failed blow-out preventer and that samples of cement used by Halliburton in the well have not yet been released for testing. The report is likely to have major legal implications on a number of fronts and looks set to reignite the war of words between BP, Halliburton and Transocean over the precise share of blame for the disaster. It also risks further reputational damage for BP if its conclusions are not matched by official investigators and it is perceived to be downplaying its share of the blame for the accident. A number of US investigations are currently under way, with officials attempting to determine whether BP or its partners were "grossly negligent" - a scenario that would hugely increase BP's legal liability and could lead to criminal charges.

UK firms bombarding customers with spam
Dan Worth, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 13:29:00 Research finds 75 per cent of emails from legitimate firms are unsolicited Businesses in the UK are contributing to the deluge of junk email clogging up inboxes, according to research by Spam Ratings. The company, which rates web sites on how much spam they send, signed up to email alerts from 10,000 sites and recorded the various types of email it received over a 12-month period. Spam Ratings said that it received over 150,000 emails from the sites, almost 75 per cent of which were unsolicited. Around 40 per cent of the sites were responsible for the bulk of the spam, and three in 10 of the unwanted emails came from third-party sites, suggesting that email address data is routinely passed on. Andy Yates, co-founder of Spam Ratings, said the firm was "shocked and surprised" by the level of junk email logged during the research, and that businesses of all sizes are at fault. "We found that big brands and SMEs are guilty of sending out unwanted emails, and it's important that firms understand the risks of doing so, as it is damaging to their brand to misuse customer emails like this," he said. "The amount of emails coming from third-party web sites was particularly worrying, and led to a deluge of malicious emails promoting scams or using phishing techniques to gather user data." Yates also said that a lot of emails contravene best practice guidelines issued from key organisations like the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). "Firms aren't doing anything illegal per se by doing this, but they are causing email issues for customers by not being fair and transparent about their email policies. We intend to talk with organisations like the ICO as well as firms to address this," said Yates. The ICO told V3.co.uk it always takes issues around the Data Protection Act seriously and said firms should always ensure their customers were aware of how their data was being used. "The Data Protection Act requires that individuals are informed if their personal details are going to be passed to third parties for marketing purposes, " the ICO noted. "In the ICO's view it is good practice to offer individuals a clear opportunity to 'opt out' of such disclosures, as this allows them to have more control over the way in which their personal information is used."

UKTI flies SME tech firms into US clouds
Sam Trendall, CRN, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 13:28:00 Government body flies start-ups across the Atlantic to help boost UK's cloud computing standing Government body UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) is getting behind the rise of cloud computing by sending 20 UK SME tech firms on a trade mission to the US. The trip takes place from 13 to 17 September and participating companies will visit Boston and Silicon Valley. The aim of the trip is to "foster deal making between UK companies and US industry leaders" and help UK start-ups with "US strategy and credibility in this key market". During their stay on the east coast, the UK firms will meet local industry executives and potential partner companies. They will also learn about finance and how best to secure venture capital funding. While in California the UK tech representatives will have the chance to discuss go-to-market strategies with US counterparts. They will also get to meet some "major vendors" and network with industry executives and venture capitalists. Companies selected by UKTI include CitiHub, ISL Online, Kognitio, SMEStorage, Replify and Postcode Anywhere. Guy Mucklow, managing director of address management specialist Postcode Anywhere, said he is ?specifically interested in finding integration and resale partners.

What could we do with the power stuck in the planning system?
Louise Burry, BusinessGreen, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 13:11:00 According to the CBI, 17.5GW of power is currently stuck in the planning system - BusinessGreen.com takes a look at what you could do with all that energy

Lenovo brings financing scheme to UK
Sam Trendall, CRN, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 12:39:00 Vendor's partnership with financial services firm CIT expands into Europe with the UK the first country to benefit Systems and server vendor Lenovo is today launching a financing offering for UK channel partners. The Chinese PC maker has teamed up with finance house CIT to expand the Lenovo Financial Services (LFS) programme into Europe. The UK will be the first country where the scheme is implemented, followed by France and Germany later in the year. LFS will be introduced in more western European countries in 2011. The programme will allow Lenovo VARs to offer end users leasing and other finance options. Online tools have been designed to help simplify the process of obtaining financing. Lenovo's chief operating officer Rory Read said: ?The expansion of the LFS programme in Europe will provide us with a greater opportunity to offer financial services alternatives to our customers, globally." Ron Arrington, president of CIT Vendor Finance, added: "The expansion within Europe of LFS further demonstrates our position as a leading provider of vendor financing solutions and reinforces our commitment to the market. It reflects CIT?s ability to provide commercial financing solutions for customers of the leading technology companies around the world.?

Police search for file sharers across Europe
Andrew Charlesworth, Computing, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 12:24:00 Raids snatch computer equipment for IP addresses Police forces across Europe have conducted co-ordinated raids on business and domestic premises to collect evidence against alleged unauthorised file-sharing operations. The raids were ordered by police in Belgium, acting on behalf of copyright owners who claim their digital goods are being distributed illegally, and include action in the UK, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium, Norway, Germany and Sweden. The majority of police activity seems to have been focused in Sweden, including raids on Umeå University and PRQ, an ISP which hosts, among other entities, WikiLeaks, which recently hit the headlines over the disclosure of classified military documents concerning the war in Afghanistan. Swedish public prosecutor Frederick Ingblad told Swedish news outlet Expressen.se that the raids were to gather IP addresses of alleged file-sharing operations and had nothing to do with WikiLeaks. ?At 9:00 this morning, five policemen were here,? PRQ?s Mikael Viberg told TorrentFreak. ?They were interested in who was using two IP addresses from 2009 and onwards. We have no records of our clients but we?re handing over the email addresses for those behind the IPs. However, it?s rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable.? According to Ingblad, all equipment seized in the raids will be turned over to the Belgian authorities for further investigation. Copyright holders are increasingly using the police and courts to strong-arm ISPs into revealing the IP addresses of individuals suspected of unauthorised file sharing. Moves to have ISPs permanently disconnect repeat offenders ? so-called three-strikes rules ? have been largely rejected by law makers and were recently removed from the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement currently being hammered out among several national governments and the EU.

Talktalk defends secret web-scanning trial
Tom Royal, Computeractive, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 12:18:00 Says trial does not store user information, but cannot confirm if website URLs were stripped of personal details Internet Service Provider TalkTalk has defended secretly testing a service that ?followed? its subscribers around the web following disclosure of a letter from the Information Commissioner. In a letter sent in July but revealed this week after a Freedom of Information request, Information Commissioner Christopher Graham told the ISP he was ?concerned that the trial was undertaken without first informing those affected that it was taking place?. ?You will be aware that compliance with one of the underlying principles of data protection legislation relies on providing individuals with information about how and why their information will be used?, he added. However, TalkTalk denied that it had done anything wrong. In August it replied, stating that it was ?confident our testing of the service falls outside the scope of the Data Protection Act.? ?It is unfortunate that the media and certain individuals have, without being fully informed, viewed the network testing of the service with suspicion?, it added. When asked whether it regretted not informing its customers, Communications Director Mark Schmid told Computeractive that the company ?acknowledged that it would have been helpful to have told? the Information Commissioner?s Office. ?In terms of customers, what we?re doing is looking at websites accessed by our network?, he said. ?We weren?t looking at customers? data in any way?. In a previous statement, the company wrote that ?Our scanning engines receive no knowledge about which users visited what sites (e.g. telephone number, account number, IP address), nor do they store any data for us to cross-reference this back to our customers.? Mr Schmid said that the system was designed to inspect website addresses, or URLs, visited by its customers in order to scan them for threats, and to create a list of dangerous websites so that future visitors could be warned. He added that so far it had found 75,000 visits to dangerous sites, and that when the service launches users will have to opt-in to make use of it. Often, however, websites include personal information such as usernames in the URLs accessed by their visitors. Mr Schmid could not confirm whether or not the service was removing this information before storing the addresses. The secret testing first came to light on the 13th of July, when a TalkTalk customer posted a message titled ?I?m being monitored/watched?? on the ISP?s Members Forum. ?I've got a pretty serious privacy issue?, they wrote. ?I have two Opal Telecom IP addresses that are following my every move, they follow me to every page that I visit.?

British wind farms deliver record output
James Murray, BusinessGreen, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 12:01:00 Around five per cent of electricity provided to National Grid on Monday came from wind farms Britain's wind farms reached record levels of output on Monday providing five per cent of all electricity to the grid over the course of the day. National Grid confirmed that 40.5GWh out of a total 809.5GWh was provided by wind farms during the 24-hour period, with output peaking at 1,860MW at 8:30pm. At its peak the wind energy sector was providing electricity equivalent to that produced by three nuclear power stations. A spokeswoman for the grid operator said that when so-called embedded wind generation from turbines that are not connected to the grid is taken into account it is estimated that on Monday around 10 per cent of the UK's electricity was delivered by wind power. "Overall about 10 per cent of total electricity demand would have been met by wind power," she said. "It is a pretty big landmark for the industry." The record will be taken as further evidence that the grid can cope with growing inputs from intermittent energy sources such as wind farms. "Matching demand with supply is changing by its very nature because of the intermittency of wind energy," said the National Grid spokeswoman. "But that does not mean it can not be done." However, the UK has a long way to go to match the performance of some of its European neighbours. For a period back in January this year, wind farms in Spain and Portugal consistently delivered 50 per cent of electricity demand for the Iberian peninsular. In related news, the expansion of one of the UK's largest onshore wind farms took a major step forward this week when French engineering giant Alstom announced it has secured an order worth over ?200m from Scottish Power Renewables to build a 217MW extension to its Whitelee wind farm in Scotland. Under the terms of deal, Alstom will install and maintain 69 ECO 100 wind turbines, each with an output of 3MW, and six ECO 74 wind turbines, each with an output of 1.67MW. The new turbines are scheduled to be fully operational by May 2012.

Mozilla boosts sound and vision in Firefox 4 beta
David Neal, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 11:53:00 Audio data can be used to create 3D images Mozilla has made enhancements to its Firefox 4 beta, promising a better sound and vision experience. The latest release includes the use of hardware acceleration to improve graphics rendering and performance, and an API for developers who want to improve the audio experience for users. Mozilla offered a teaser of the hardware acceleration in a YouTube video released earlier this month, showing an increase in frames per second from 12 to 90. "Firefox 4 Beta now takes advantage of the built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with DirectX 10 to improve graphics performance," said Mozilla in a blog post. "On supported hardware, Firefox will use Direct2D by default to speed up the display of content on graphically intensive sites, giving more power to the web. " The second enhancement aims to turn sound into something visual and interactive, enabling "the visualisation of audio data within the browser", linked in to HTML5 to create a better audio experience. "Until now, people haven't had the ability to interact with sound on the web in all the creative ways that video and images allow. Firefox 4 Beta introduces a new audio API to expose the raw audio data housed within the and elements in HTML5 to redefine how people experience sound on the web." This update exposes the data within a song or speech file to the browser, and turns it into something that can be used, exploited and made more interesting, the firm said. The API was shown off during a presentation at a Mozilla developer event by developer Dave Humphrey, who said that it could be used to turn audio files into something that could be enjoyed by deaf people, for example, or to make sound more interactive. Firefox could be used to manipulate the pitch and tone of an audio file, analyse its beats per minute, or render it as a 2D or 3D image. "It's an attempt to do something with audio that does not involve plug-ins, like Flash for example," Humphrey said. Mozilla has also added the HTTP Strict Transport Security protocol to the beta, claiming to protect against man-in-the-middle attacks by loading only sites with secure connections.

Fast Company

The Grid, Vodacom's Mobile Social Network, Goes Global
Tested only in Africa, the service will now be available in the Middle East and beyond. South Africa's telecommunications giant, Vodacom, has announced that it's popular mobile-only social network, The Grid, is expanding globally. Started in South Africa in 2008, the Grid was recently expanded to two developing nations, Tanzania and Nigeria. "The response to the product launching in Tanzania and Nigeria was very positive, and that was what supported our thinking in opening it up to the rest of the world," Vodacom Executive Phillip Boshielo tells Fast Company. But how well will the product be received in completely different markets--such as in developed countries? "We will obviously take our learnings in marketing the product forward," says Boshielo. "The Grid aims to make it easy for people to stay in touch with others and take part in the lives of their friends and acquaintances," says Boshielo. But the "global rollout" will be gradual and the product will adapt as the expansion moves forward. "We don?t want to restrict our users to only a few select countries. We want the Grid to be a truly open mobile service," but "even though the Grid is open to all countries, our focus initially will be on growing the user base to the youth in Africa and the Middle East," says Boshielo. Unlike many of the early social networks coming out of developed countries, conceived initially as online, computer-based social networks, Boshielo says the Grid, which makes sharing photos, text, and other media easily shareable on mobiles, "was developed with mobile in mind. It has a chat/IM functionality with other-world integration, but in addition users can drop ?blips? linked to their profile. ?Blips? can contain photos, video or text?which means your profile can be compared to that of a mobile blog viewable to your friends in the Grid community. In South Africa, where the Grid was launched, this functionality is integrated with location?a feature that could be rolled out internationally if the demand exists."
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:33:38 EST

Work Smart 2: Staying Organized After Being on the Road
[video_twistage 1] Welcome to another edition of Work Smart with Gina Trapani. This week, Daniel Beck, a technical writer for WebFaction in Philadelphia, PA, asks for advice on how to get and stay organized after traveling. Syncing desktop computers with a laptop and other devices can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Along with offering Daniel my tips, I called on David Allen, author of Getting Things Done--my favorite productivity book of all time--to offer his solutions as well. Here is the Popplet mind map used in today's episode: To print this mind map, click here (PDF file). Special thanks to David Allen, and to Popplet for the mind map. You can download Popplet for the iPad.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:56:12 EST

Airport "Naked" Body Scanners Get Privacy Upgrade to Anonymize Your Naughty Bits
Airport security scanners that literally see through your clothes are contentious. Because ... well, think about shadowy TSA guys peeping at your bits. Hence some firms are now tweaking them to anonymize your "x-rays" to protect your decency.The issues surrounding through-clothes airport security imagers are complex, and the matter has got stickier in the wake of several stories about abuse of the data by the TSA and its operatives. Many people don't like the idea on all sorts of grounds, even while some safeguards have already been implemented (on some systems) to automatically cover intimate regions in the image with a digital "figleaf."Now L-3 and Rapiscan's machines, often used by the TSA, are implementing a software upgrade that takes the raw data from the scanner and displays it as a generic human-formed figure on the monitor of the TSA agent. As such when you stand in front of the viewing system, your own body parts aren't subject to ogling. The software merely highlights regions of "interest" on the body where its pattern recognition code has calculated you may be hiding something--ready for a more traditional pat-down.L-3's already tested the system at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, and presented its new software for consideration by the TSA. The agency for its part noted "TSA continues to explore additional privacy protections for imaging technology" via spokesman Greg Soule, and remarked that "testing is currently underway."It's easy to argue that anything that's a positive score for privacy is a good thing, as long as it meets two important requirements: The protections put in place shouldn't compromise security, and they must actually work to protect individuals' sense of decency. This last piece is all the more tricky when you see optical tricks like this one, worked out by a young Mormon to trick his mind into thinking photos of bikini clad women (morally acceptable to his faith) are actually naked (unacceptable images).To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:30:33 EST

iFive: HP vs Oracle, ACLU vs DHS, Asteroid Flyby, Xbox Apologizes to Fort Gay, Google Live Search Hint
While you slept, Justin Bieber's fans supposedly used 3% of Twitter's server infrastructure. Twitter did not confirm the claim, it was an overheard utterance from "a guy who works at Twitter" that was picked up by dozens of news outlets after being posted on--where else?--Twitter.1. Mark Hurd gets ousted from HP, then takes a job at Oracle, raising competitive concerns for his former board members. Now this HP versus Oracle business is getting messy: In a snappy press release, Oracle quotes its CEO Larry Ellison: "Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner" he begins, citing the obvious as the two have conducted multi-million-dollar business for years. But then: "By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees." This is a classic tactic--push things up a notch by involving a greater population in the dispute. And there's more: "The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace." See what Oracle did there? It planted the notion of a failed board in HP shareholder's minds, alleging that if Oracle and HP's relationship suffers--potentially hurting HP's bottom line, and thus shareholder income--it's all their fault. Touché. It also opens the door for Hurd to go on an acquisition spree for Oracle, mopping up players that will make it more competitive against HP. 2. Under what some see as draconian rules that sweep aside the notion of civil liberties, the TSA has been empowered for a couple of years to seize and deep-search your laptop if you cross into the U.S. They need no warrant, and in some cases they've taken weeks to return the hardware--without ever filing charges. Now the ACLU has decided to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security claiming personal data on computers means warrantless searching constitutes unreasonable search and seizure, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Go ACLU! But also ... good luck with that. The DHS is already the U.S.'s third largest bureaucracy, and it's huge funding pool will pay for some mean lawyers.3. NASA's warned that two large asteroids will pass by the Earth today, at a distance closer than the Moon. Is this worrying? No--50,000 to 100,000 miles away is still pretty far, unless you're talking about astronomical-style distances, in which case it's really freaking close indeed. You know that enormous, impact crater in Arizona? It was made by a ball of rock just a few tens of meters across. Like these are. 2010RX30 will zip above the North Pacific followed by a nearish pass over the Antarctic by 2010RF12. Luckily there's no third to split the difference and hit the ground or ocean--think "tsunamis," big ones. Not that there's much we could do if such a third rock did exist: Scientists only found these two on Sunday. Hey Congress? Grant more money to NASA, please?4. Online morals are a tricky subject ... but Microsoft, and more specifically Xbox Live, has just had to embarrassingly apologize to one poor 26-year-old gamer from West Virginia. In the spirit of keeping Xbox Live "clean" they suspended him because he violated the terms and conditions. How? By declaring he's from a place called Fort Gay. Which he is, like about 800 other folk. Xbox Live's chief "enforcement officer" Stephen Toulouse noted that they slip up rarely, and keeping up with slang is tricky. We hesitate to point out to him how long "gay" has been acceptable, nor how long Fort Gay has been called Fort Gay.5. Visit Google today to hunt for more news and you'll see something mysterious--the logo is grayscale, only colorizing when you type letters into the search box. It's not a tribute to Pleasantville (remember that movie?), it's more of a hint that later today Google will be announcing Live Search, a system that shows you updating search hits as you type in your query, like it's trying to predict what you're ultimately searching for. The new doodle is a follow-on to yesterday's, apparently, meaning we were wrong with our prediction. Hey ho. We should've used Google to predict the future. The press conference starts at 9:30 am pacific.To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:40:49 EST

Google Changes the Channel (With Its Voice?)
We've been following Google TV very closely, and not just because Google is one of our Most Innovative Companies. Google TV is one of the riskier attempts to connect the living room we've ever seen--rather than adding a simple set-top box that plays back videos and music (like Apple TV or Boxee), Google TV isna transparent upgrade to your existing system--a supplement, not a replacement. Your cable TV will still look like your cable TV, but with a Google search bar for added utility. Of course, it offers video from sources like Netflix, but it's still an unusual product.That Google TV would be launching in the U.S. this year was pretty much a foregone conclusion. It'll be packaged into some Sony TVs and Blu-ray decks, as well as made available in its own set-top box from Logitech. But at his keynote speech at this year's IFA technology conference in Berlin, Google CEO Eric Schmidt dropped a few more tantalizing hints about Google TV.First, he confirmed that Google TV would be launching worldwide in 2011, in what the Wall Street Journal calls a "move to expand its reach outside its core U.S. market." Google will also launch "support for applications" on the platform during that year. It's not specified what that means--we could be looking at an app store, or a set of pre-approved apps from content providers like the one offered by Boxee or Roku (Pandora, MLB, Hulu, that kind of thing--but nothing from independent developers). Interestingly, Schmidt also confirmed that Google TV will support voice control. Google is one of the unsung pioneers of voice control--its implementation in Android is fantastic. Just imagine changing channels with your voice.It's still not a sure thing that Google TV will be a hit, but these announcements certainly bode well, especially the app repository, in whatever form it ends up. Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:46:32 EST

The BlackBerry Billboard
Tech companies file patents for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they're already discarded ideas that the company would rather other companies not use. Sometimes they're for a potentially valuable concept. Sometimes they're for crazy or impractical ideas that will never see the light of day. And then there's this odd little filing from RIM, the company behind BlackBerry smartphones. RIM filed for a patent for this "adaptive roadside billboard system and related methods." Essentially, the patent is for a smart billboard that measures the speed of passersby and adjusts its content accordingly--but the only adjustment mentioned specifically is length.Recklessly speed by one of these billboards at 95 miles per hour, and you'll see a particularly brusque message--something like "Buy BlackBerry!". But if you're stuck in a traffic jam in front of said billboard, you'd get lots more information. Maybe you'd see a full spec sheet and pricing details for the new BlackBerry Torch, or a more detailed comparison with a competing handset.RIM doesn't lay out one essential way to measure the speed of passing cars, mentioning several possible options. The most obvious, in terms of compatibility with RIM's core business, is the use of a smartphone's GPS. But it's not clear how much more effective that would be than a more traditional light sensor. Also of note is that the billboard itself won't necessarily just be for RIM products. The sample artwork depicts a restaurant, which suggests that if RIM were to actually go ahead and create this billboard tech, it would license it out to other companies. But even if it's just an idea a RIM engineer thought up, it was one that RIM thought best to own outright--even if it never achieves a BlackBerry-like ripeness.Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:51:38 EST

Massive International BitTorrent Raid: Where Will We Download Mad Men Now?
Piracy and the policing thereof is a messy business, often without clear answers. Today marked a huge crackdown on top-level pirates, with several of the largest and most popular BitTorrent sites either down or offering only spotty access. It's hard to say exactly what happened, but here's what we know so far.TorrentFreak reports that police in 14 countries across Europe launched a coordinated raid that may have been in the works for two years. Sweden, arguably the most pirate-friendly western nation, was hit in seven separate locations, including the PRQ headquarters in Solna. PRQ is perhaps best known for hosting WikiLeaks, leading observers to suspect WikiLeaks (which has angered several governments) was the main target.In an email, PRQ said that five policemen (and a locksmith!) came to PRQ's headquarters, but were not allowed to enter the premises until PRQ's legal representative arrived:"The raid was about the usual file-sharing crackdown, which they have each year, so not directed directly against PRQ or it?s customers. They (the police) just wanted to know who or whom had used two different IPs during a couple of dates in 2009. Since we did not have this information (no logging) there was no information and/or hardware for them to seize. The police did not enter the datacenter, only the office, so no servers or network have been touched by them. No information given or hardware removed."PRQ later stated that the company did hand over the emails behind those IP addresses, but that "it's rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable." The company denied that the raid had anything to do with WikiLeaks, which was confirmed by Swedish prosecutor Frederick Ingblad in an interview with Swedish news outlet Expressen.se. Ingblad and his Swedish forces spearheaded the effort on request from Belgium.Other targets hit included locations in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, the U.K., and Hungary, with one notable target in the Czech Republic--a student dorm at Czech Technical University informally known as "Silicon Hill." The police effort was far smarter than usual. Typically, raids are directed at individual sites like Oink, the British invite-only music-sharing site that was shut down a few years ago. That's the equivalent of yanking out a plant but leaving the root--new sites will invariably pop up, often with the exact same content as before. This time, the raids were directed at what's known as the Warez Scene, or simply The Scene. The Scene is a loose network of pirates with no clear leader, structure, or headquarters that's responsible for much of the pirated music, TV shows, movies, and software that millions of users download. The Scene is especially renowned for its ability to crack any protected software--which is often much more valuable than music or video. Releases from The Scene are prized among pirates for their quality and rarity--if you find an album online months before its official release, or an expensive bit of software that comes with a pirated serial code, chances are it originated in The Scene.So far, the raid seems to have been aimed mostly at securing information on particular IP addresses relating to The Scene, though Ars Technica reports that at least four people have also been detained.The raids have had an adverse effect on some of the most popular and extensive BitTorrent sites. The Pirate Bay and BTJunkie have both been down for most of the day, mostly returning nothing but an error message. The Pirate Bay has been shut down before and always seems to spring back to life, but it's been out for an unusually long time today. Mediafire and Waffles.fm, among others, are also down. (A new favorite on The Scene, KickassTorrents, is still up and running.)One interesting outlier is What.cd, the invite-only music site that took over from Oink. What.cd is down, sporting a cryptic message stating, "Theseus did it or something." Theseus was the founder of Athens, known as the great unifier, but how that might relate to a torrent site remains unclear. I've been told by insiders that What.cd was not a victim of the raid, but is instead down while the site administrators repair a routine (and unrelated) database corruption. As smart as the raid was, it is unlikely to have any real, lasting effect on BitTorrent piracy. The BitTorrent world is a many-headed hydra. As soon as one head is cut off, another grows in its place. But it will certainly make it trickier for users to download pirated episodes of Mad Men for a while.Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:06:55 EST

Government's Idea of Innovation? A Crowdsourcing Website
Today the Obama administration formally launched Challenge.gov, a tool that enables government agencies to solicit ideas from the public to solve issues plaguing the country. Announced by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra at the Gov 2.0 conference, Challenge.gov is essentially a digital age-version of JFK's "ask not" plea--with cash prizes. Unveiling a crowdsourcing initiative at a summit created to demonstrate the most advanced marriages of technology and government? Yawn.Sure, it's great to see the public sector harnessing the potential of its citizenry. And this same model worked for the X Prize, which help spur the development of a low-cost, reusable spacecraft with a $10 million incentive. And Challenge.gov is offering similar rewards: $10 million from the Department of Energy for a 100 mile-per-gallon vehicle; $15 million for a replacement for the common light bulb; and $1.65 million for an aircraft that can fly 200 miles using 1 gallon of gas per occupant. "This is a fundamental shift in power," Kundra told his audience. "This engages the American people as co-creators in solving some of the toughest problems this country faces." But we've seen these "innovations" before. IdeaScale, for example, lets the public submit and vote on ideas for anything from state budgets to health care and priorities. The Princeton-developed All Our Ideas helps organizations collect and rank ideas more effectively. Innocentive offers cash prizes to problem solvers. Any number of these platforms already exist, and the idea of crowdsourcing has been around for years. (Remember: Netflix launched its $1 million challenge, which sought improvements to its movie recommendation technology, as early as 2006.) So why should we applaud the government for creating this "new" site? Kundra is the country's first ever Chief Information Officer. He's part of a young, social-media savvy administration. Many observers expected this meant the government would start keeping pace with the private sector. Instead, we got a sleek, expensive Web site with $1.3 trillion in fact-checking problems (USASpending.gov) and now an X Prize clone. Ask not what your government can do for originality online, because we haven't seen it yet.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:28:15 EST

Soda Giant Sets Out to Save the World's Water
Fresh water is one of the most abused resources in the world. Hundreds of millions of people lack access to the stuff, even in urban areas. The problem isn't helped by our reliance on soda and junk food that require large amounts of water for production. Food and drink giant PepsiCo claims in a new report that it is doing its part for water stewardship. But is this just the latest version of greenwashing--bluewashing?PepsiCo has certainly set some ambitious goals. It wants to improve water use efficiency by 20% per unit of production by 2015, while providing access to safe drinking water to three million people in developing countries by the same year. The company aims to do most of this by establishing public-private partnerships. And PepsiCo already made strides in improving its water use. The company is on track to provide clean drinking water to a million people in drought-heavy areas by 2011--via public-private programs that construct rainwater harvesting systems, improve public sanitation, and establish water health centers in countries such as Brazil, China, Ghana, and India. PepsiCo also claims that its India manufacturing team has cut water usage by 45% since 2005, saving 3 billion liters of water. And in one Frito Lay facility in Casa Grande, Arizona, a water filtration and purification system recycles 80% of all water used in production.But there is still plenty of work to be done. As Food and Water Watch explained in a recent statement, "PepsiCo has faced extensive and well-deserved criticism around the world for depleting groundwater resources, undertaking unsustainable inter-basin water transfers and polluting water sources, all of which leave these local communities and ecosystems suffering from increased water scarcity and degraded water quality" Earlier this year, the junk food giant was accused of depleting local groundwater near one of its India plants. And how can a company that shills bottled water to millions of people who do have access to clean tap water claim that it practices good water stewardship?PepsiCo's water stewardship report at least indicates that the company knows there is a problem, and that it is taking steps to become part of the solution. But we'll know the company is really getting serious when it takes a more critical look at its Aquafina brand. Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:24:59 EST

HP Sues Former CEO for Joining Oracle
While a tenth of America's work force struggled to find employment, Mark Hurd, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard who was caught fudging expense accounts and accused of harassing a 1980s Playboy bunny, found a job as director and co-president of Oracle. Now, after giving Hurd a severance package in the $50 million range, his former employer is slapping him with a lawsuit. HP filed its complaint Wednesday in California Superior Court, accusing Hurd of breach of contract. The tech-giant argues that since Hurd was intimately involved in HP's business plans, the very fact that he's working with Oracle -- a strong rival in the computer server and storage market -- might harm HP. And that would be a violation of his employment contract, according to the claim: "Despite being paid millions of dollars in cash, stock and stock options in exchange for Hurd?s agreements to protect HP?s trade secrets and confidential information during his employment and following his departure, Hurd has put HP?s most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril. Hurd accepted positions with Oracle Corp., a competitor of HP, yesterday as its President and as a member of its Board of Directors. In his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP?s trade secrets and confidential information to others." Hurd has yet to respond to the allegations. But Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent criticism of HP can't have helped matters. "The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago," Ellison told The New York Times. "That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn't come back and saved them. HP had a long list of failed CEOs until they hired Mark who has spent the last five years doing a brilliant job reviving HP to its former greatness."No word yet on what Ellison thinks of the "idiots" who filed this lawsuit.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:30:04 EST

Is Your Boss a Certified Brasshole? Take the BRASS Quiz
Frequent readers of this blog know that one of the most successful tools, or if you prefer, PR gimmicks, we did for The No Asshole Rule was an online quiz called the ARSE, the Asshole Rating Self-Exam. This is a 24 item quiz to determine if you are a certified asshole. Approximately 250,000 people have completed it so far, and I still have people come up to (or email me) and say things like "I scored a 2, I am very good" or "I got a 9, I am borderline, watch out." The items on ARSE appeared in a book, but the name was added by Guy Kawasaki and he recruited the wonderful folks at Electric Pulp to develop an online version. In the spirit of the ARSE--and once again with some great coaching from Guy--I have developed the BRASS, the Boss Reality Assessment Survey System (I know it is dumb spelled out, in fact if you have a better idea, let me know... one suggestion that I kind of liked was "Bob's Roughly Accurate Superior Survey"). The 20 items on the BRASS draw on major themes from Good Boss, Bad Boss, which are used to rate your boss on items including: Is so pushy and overbearing that it drives us nuts Lacks confidence in his or her ability to lead others Doesn't have our backs, won't go to bat for us, and doesn't protect us from the idiocy that rains down from on high Leaves me feeling drained and de-energized after even a short conversation. Is a chronic credit hog.The higher the score, the worse your boss. If your boss is really bad, if he or she scores "true" on 15 or more items like these, then you have the misfortune of working for a certified brasshole. And if your boss scores below five, my advice is that you better treat him or her right, because one like that is hard to find! Reprinted from Work Matters Robert I. Sutton, PhD is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. His latest book is Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best...and Survive the Worst. His previous book is The New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. Follow him at twitter.com/work_matters.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:09:36 EST

The Curious Case of USASpending.gov's Missing $1.3 Trillion
The Obama administration is committed to transparency, at least in theory. To track the mountains of cash we're spending on contracts, wars, programs, initiatives, and stimulus packages, the government launched USASpending.gov, a tool designed to help the public understand where our tax dollars are heading. And where is all that federal spending going? Not to USAspending.gov, where an estimated $1.3 trillion worth of data is missing or wrong. If only there were a website for tracking cash missing from the cash-tracking site....Oh! According to Ellen Miller, director of D.C.-based watchdog the Sunlight Foundation, the federal spending database is missing more dollars than the U.S. deficit. Speaking at the Gov 2.0 Summit this morning, Miller told audience members that after analyzing more than 10 million rows of data to other sources, Sunlight discovered that "broken reporting" accounted for $1,361,672,559,288 of missing spending in 2009, showing that USASpending.gov is anything but reliable or complete. "It's pretty impressive -- looking," said Miller. "Unfortunately, its data is almost useless." In its analysis, Miller's team compared data from USASpending.gov to data from several agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget, the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, and the General Services Administration. Sunlight discovered many discrepancies--for instance, the USDA's $9 billion in grants for school lunches were not reported; some $340 million in grants for firefighters were misreported by the Department of Homeland Security. Sunlight also found issues with misreported "obligations," money the government has committed to a recipient (and thus can't be spent elsewhere), though they may have not yet cut the check. Last year, there was a 30% increase in incompletely reported obligations. All in all, of the $2.6 trillion of government spending in 2009, 50% was incorrectly accounted for on USASpending.gov. "Things just don't add up," explained Miller. "[The] drive for data transparency has stalled." To combat these widespread issues, Sunlight today launched ClearSpending, a site that analyzes how well government agencies are reporting their spending data on USASpending.gov--a fact-checker for the fact-checkers. ClearSpending will offer the public a system to assess federal spending in key areas: over reporting, under reporting, non-reporting, and late or incomplete filings. If the Sunlight's new program works, it will shed new light on spending and bring improved transparency to the government, which normally just wastes millions on tools that are more "style than substance," as Miller phrased it. [youtube GSCZHBNrIGg]
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:17:35 EST

Retro Car Goes From Canada to Mexico on a Single Tank
Energy efficiency has only recently become a popular concern among vehicle owners, but some people have been thinking about it for a long, long time. Craig Henderson and Bill Green designed the Avion, a fuel-efficient sports car, in 1984. Two years later, the vehicle set the Guinness World Record for fuel economy, getting an average of 103.7 mpg all the way from the Mexico border to the British Columbia, Canada, border. Now Henderson has revived the Avion for another jaunt from Canada to Mexico.The latest iteration of the vehicle is just 1500 pounds and features an aluminum monocoque frame, a carbon fiber, kevlar and fiberglass body, and Goodyear "Fuel Max" tires. After receiving a sponsorship deal from Goodyear, Henderson decided to go from border to border once again--this time, on a single tank of gas. Jalopnik reports that Henderson began his latest journey on August 29th. He stopped only to go to the bathroom, grab food, and catch a night's rest. The result: Henderson burned only 12.4 gallons on his journey to the Mexican border for a fuel economy of 119.1 mpg, breaking his own Guinness World Record from 1986. (He drove at a pretty constant 55 mph.)Henderson is gearing up for limited commercial production of the Avion. If our fascination with fuel economy is any indication, he won't have any trouble selling it. Below, check out a video about the Avion from 1982.[youtube umDk0_01nmY] Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:36:54 EST

8 of the Most Toxic Energy Projects on the Planet
BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico served as a wake-up call for many of us who never before paid attention to the destructive energy projects happening all around the world. But while Deepwater Horizon may have attracted the lion's share of media attention this past Spring and Summer, there are a number of other toxic projects still going on. Below, we look at some of the worst.Alberta Tar SandsAlberta, Canada is home to the second biggest recoverable oil reserve in the world: the infamous Athabasca tar sands. But the massive deposit of heavy crude oil (aka bitumen) is under a staggering 54,000 square miles of boreal forest and peat bogs, which are slowly being destroyed by the open pit mining used to recover Alberta's oil. These open pit mining projects also deposit toxic mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and lead into the Athabasca river system, creating "masses of toxic soup." Suncor Energy, Syncrude Canada, Shell Canada, Marathon Oil, and Chevron are all pursuing projects in the Athabasca sands. Three Gorges Dam China's Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric dam in the Yangtze river, is world's largest electricity-generating plant. Completed in 2006, the dam has already produced 348.4 TWh of electricity since its inception. But the Dam has its drawbacks--construction displaced 1.2 million people (not the only Chinese water project to displace huge populations), increased the risk of landslides in the area, and made nearby Shanghai significantly more vulnerable to flooding.Africa's Biofuel Land GrabA new kind of colonialism is quietly taking over Africa as European companies snatch up land to grow biofuels. Major projects are located in countries including Mozambique (over 183,000 hectares allocated for jatropha), Benin (400,000 hectares of wetlands to be converted to oil palm crops), Sierra Leone (Swiss company Addax Bioenergy purchased 26,000 hectares for sugarcane), and Ghana (over 800,000 hectares purchased by international biofuel companies). They're a boon to European nations that want the clean fuel, but these projects also increase soil degradation, trigger the loss of arable land for food, increase food prices, and cause water depletion for local communities.Sidoarjo Mud FlowAs the result of a now defunct energy project, the largest mud volcano in the world spews out 1 million cubic feet of mud every day, and is expected to continue expelling mud for the next 30 years. The volcano, located in East Java, Indonesia, was triggered by the blowout of a natural gas well drilled by PT Lapindo Brantas. The mud flow is partially controlled by levees, but flooding still affects local towns and highways.Pascua DamA proposed dam project in Chilean Patagonia would flood over 15,000 acres of local wilderness and mar the landscape with 1,500 miles of power lines. The $4 billion HidroAysén project, which will consist of five giant dams that bump up Chile's power supply by 20%, could also cause downstream soil to lose fertility and destroy local plant and animal species.Pavillion, Wyoming's Natural Gas WellsThis small town disaster is an example of what happens when gas drilling sites go unregulated. Natural gas drilling sites in the Pavillion, Wyoming, area have leeched oil compounds, methane and 2-butoxyethanol phosphate (a fire retardant and plasticizer) into local drinking wells. Residents have even been told to use extensive ventilation when showering so that they can avoid explosions from all the nasty chemicals in their water.Greenland Gas DrillingThe Deepwater Horizon disaster hasn't stopped oil companies from pursuing other dangerous deepwater drilling projects. Case in point: Cairn Energy's recent discovery of gas off Greenland's west coast. In a statement, Cairn's CEO touted his "belief in the exploration potential" of the area--but neglected to mention that deepwater drilling in Arctic waters is high-risk because of the remoteness of the drilling sites (the Coast Guard won't be able to send in supplies on the quick like in the Gulf of Mexico, for example). Appalachian Mountaintop Removal MiningThe Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States are often subject to mountaintop removal mining, a coal mining technique that slices off soil, wildlife, plants and anything else sitting on top of coal seams. Once the coal has been mined, the top of the mountain is restored. Among the nasty environmental impacts: the destruction of ecosystems, species loss, deforestation, and decreased aquatic biodiversity. Mountaintop removal mining also exposes local residents to airborne toxins. [Photos by International Rivers (Three Gorges); Flickr/The Sierra Club (mountaintop removal)]
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:32:16 EST

MIT Scientists Create Self-Repairing Solar Cells that Double Efficiency
Solar power is inefficient. Whenever those plains of panels are laid out, the sunlight they convert into stored energy also degrades their effectiveness. With each day the panels spend smoldering under the sun, they become more unreliable in harvesting the rays. For many new systems, designed for lower cost and flexibility, degradation is a huge issue: In just 60 hours, efficiency can sometimes plummet as much as 90%. To fix that problem, researchers from MIT turned to some excellent harvesters of sunlight for inspiration: plants. Chemical engineering professor Michael Strano recently had a eureka-moment while reading about plant biology. "I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism,? he told MITNews. To mimic this process, his team began work on a set of self-repairing molecules, called phospholipids, that can turn sunlight into energy, and reassemble even after being broken down. By adding or removing a solution, the phospholipids create a structural support that responds to light and can realign the system once electrons are "knocked loose" by the particles of light. With a grant from the MIT Energy Initiative, Strano built and tested a prototype of the synthetic molecules, discovering the system to be 40% efficient--about double the efficiency of the most advanced solar cells currently available. In one 14-hour trial, the cells were repeatedly assembled and disassembled, with no efficiency lost.Strano also said the new "photovoltaic" technology could one day near 100% efficiency, and in the meantime, his team is working toward increasing the amount of electricity the cells can produce. ?We?re basically imitating tricks that nature has discovered over millions of years,? Strano explained.[Photos by Patrick Gillooly]
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:42:31 EST

Samsung Just Revealed Apple's Next iPhone Super-Chip
Samsung just pulled the veil from its dual-core Orion low-power chip, based on ARM Cortex A9 designs. It's powerful, impressive. It may also be the secret behind Apple's next iPad/iPhone CPU.Apple's decision to supply its own ARM-based CPU chip for the iPad was novel, even while it was not necessarily surprising given Apple's preceding acquisition of ARM-expert companies. With hindsight, it was a masterstroke (and as we've noted, Apple's since hinged huge percentages of its income on that little sliver of silicon, plopping it in the iPhone 4, iPod Touch, and Apple TV): It's powerful, creates economies of scale in all sorts of ways, and places control of a vital element of its hardware in Apple's own hands.But the chip is actually made by Samsung since Apple has no chip foundries of its own, and the design--while based on ARM references--was definitely informed by Samsung's own expertise. That's not to say the A4 isn't a smart piece of custom design all by itself, however.Now Samsung's revealed Orion: It's based on ARM's Cortex A9 reference design, sporting dual cores each running at 1GHz, and it's powerful enough to handle full HD 1080p video encoding and decoding at 30 frames a second. It's unquestionably a model for the next generation of low power-consuming CPUs inside smartphones and slate PCs--the 1080p part is a clear sign of that since it'll also boost the ability of these devices to take full-resolution HD video with their increasingly powerful cameras. Those twin cores will also enable truly powerful 3-D graphics rendering powers, ready to take smartphone/tablet gaming to a point where it can almost compete with (entry level) desktop PCs. Are you listening, Blizzard? It's also got integrated GPS, and on-chip HDMI 1.3a circuitry.But knowing that the A4 is an ARM Cortex A8 model, based on super-customized Samsung designs, we can use it as a touchstone for the Apple A5 chip--the chip that's surely in-bound in next-year's iPad, iPhone and so on. Because Apple is certainly busy finalizing the chip right now, so it's ready in time. It's unlikely to be as closely-matched as the A5 and Samsung S5 because Apple has had a whole year to build on the A4's foundation, including incorporating more expertise from its acquired talent. Plus the A5 (or A8? A9?) will be optimized specifically to meet Apple's own stringent requirements for its next-gen devices, which at this point are secret to Apple itself. Given the arrival of the A4-sporting Apple TV and the impressive graphics of Epic Games' Epic Citadel demo running on the iPhone 4, no doubt the next Apple chip will have developers falling over themselves with excitement at the apps that'll be enabled.To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:37:08 EST

What Special Nokia Phone Is Riling Up Analysts and Why?
Nokia's been stumbling badly recently. Despite leading the cell phone world for decades, the giant seemed to have messed up planning for the smartphone future. Now some analysts think its future is brighter and have bumped up their Nokia predictions. Both Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch now think the company is on the up, and have revised their advice on Nokia's stock. ML's Andrew Griffen noted he thinks Nokia's earnings have "now troughed" (they're now on the upswing) and MS's Patrick Sandaert explained his new thinking is driven by "strong order intake from operators at a lower discount than feared." Both analysts pointed the finger at Nokia's recent and upcoming smartphones as a major cause of their optimism since a successful smartphone on the market could reverse the worrying downwards trend in the average price of Nokia's phones over the last several years combined with falling share of the smartphone market. Together these were taken as a strong indicator of a company with a future that was fast petering out. Though Nokia's low-end cell phone sales still keep the company atop the overall global phone market, the Finnish company was caught snoozing by the iPhone-driven touchscreen smartphone revolution. It was slow to stir in the intervening years, and more recently Android has emerged as a huge challenger to Nokia. Combined, Apple and Google seemed to have sewn up the smartphone game just as it was emerged that the future of all cell phones was to become smart. Nokia's own efforts weren't overly well received, and lacked some of the tech and pizazz that its competition has. It caused serious financial guys to worry about the company's future, despite its huge income and large expenditure on research. We won't even mention the odd, desperate-seeming, entry into the netbook game. The new excitement is being driven by the N8, Nokia's 12-megapixel camera-toting answer to the influential iPhone and the Android army. Despite some initial nervousness about the N8 online, centering on its supposedly poor performance and OS, the mood has now changed. Unlike Nokia's other phones, which frequently exhibit a lack of the sort of panache that we've come to associate with the market thanks to Apple, the N8 even looks like the premium device it's intended to be. It's due soon, and Morgan Stanley even pips its projected sales at 10,000 units a week in the U.K. alone. Nokia's N8 success is still contingent on the device arriving at a post-carrier-subsidy price that matches or beats the iPhone or top-end Androids, and having a UI (Symbian 3) that instantly pleases the browsing consumer who's trying out cell phones in-store. To keep up with this news follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:40:45 EST

Causes of Child Deaths Hiding in Plain Sight
New Save the Children and UNICEF Reports reveal how financial mismanagement and environmental insensitivity led to the deaths of four million children. Had the international community been more careful about seemingly unrelated topics as financial planning and climate change, four million dead children would be alive today, according to new simultaneously released reports from Save the Children and UNICEF. Public health insiders know that everything--from policy to architecture to urban planning to education and employment--affects your health, but the new reports declare it outright. A Professor by the name of Geoffrey Rose, a pioneer in the study of the social determinants of health, is the one who, in the 1950s, pulled all the sociological and medical facts together to reveal that "upstream" factors greatly impact "downstream" health factors--upstream being policy decisions, media content, educational planning, and transportation design and downstream being individual and population health consequences. Poor urban planning leads to fewer exercise options and less walkable streets. A policy choice about the location of a new park or community center can influence crime and safety levels and thus life expectancy in certain neighborhoods.Those are just a few examples, but when we consider such linkages on a larger scale, say in the case of the world's millions of poor children, we begin to deal with the very in-your-face reality that nothing occurs in isolation. There's a reason why entire public health programs revolve around sociology and policy and education, such as Harvard's Society, Human Development and Health Master's Degree (full disclosure: I am a graduate of this program) or Columbia's Sociomedical Sciences. With researchers innovating up a storm as to what causes what and how decisions in Washington D.C. affect the health of children in Nepal, we ought to listen, respond, and do our part to save those kids."High food prices in 2008 and 2009 and falling real household incomes have reduced consumer purchasing power; poor consumers have less money to spend on food," the UNICEF report noted. "Now a child born in sub-Saharan Africa faces an under-five mortality rate that is 1.9 times higher than in South Asia, 6.3 times higher than in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 24 times higher than in the industrialised nations."In light of the above, UNICEF and Save the Children, just days before the next UN Millennium Development Goals Summit, have announced that their resources will now be focused on grassroots, on-the-ground community health clinics and services and female health workers; less resources will be invested in modern, state-of-the-art hospitals and more will be invested in basic, life-saving drugs, clinics, and personnel.  [Photos by Jenara Nerenberg]
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:21:11 EST

silicon.com : News

Apple buys music streaming site Lala
Apple has bought streaming music service Lala for an undisclosed amount. A spokesman for Apple confirmed the acquisition to silicon.com sister site CNET News.com on Sunday.
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:27:02 GMT

The Weekly Round-Up: 03.12.09
Yes, it's almost here again. Christmas. The time of year when you express your great love for your nearest and dearest through the gift of two-for-one bubble bath and novelty slippers.
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:19:02 GMT

Desktop virtualisation held back by industry hype
Excessive industry hype has left CIOs reluctant to embrace desktop virtualisation. According to a new survey, half of private sector CIOs believe the technology is promising more than it can deliver.
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:00:02 GMT

Happy Christmas for retailers as UK shoppers shell out £5bn
Monday is set to be the biggest-spending day of the year with UK consumers shelling out £350m. According to retail association IMRG, UK shoppers will spend an expected £5bn this month - a year-on-year increase of 14 per cent.
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:59:01 GMT

Whitehall's G-Cloud gets clearer
More details of the G-Cloud - the proposed government-wide cloud computing platform - have emerged. The G-Cloud will feature the hinted-at app store, according to Martin Bellamy, the director of the office of chief information officer at the Cabinet Office, and will make use of both public and private datacentres.
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:47:01 GMT

Photos: 48 core chip that will help make machines as smart as humans
Intel debuted and demonstrated its Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) processor on Wednesday. The processor has 48 cores - 24 dualcore "tiles" - connected with a high-speed mesh network. Intel wants the experimental chip, at least 100 of which it'll distribute to researchers in 2010, to lead to new attempts to tackle multicore system and software design. Ultimately, Intel believes its aggressive multicore approach will be the way computers get enough power for tasks such as vision and speech comparable to what humans have.
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:16:01 GMT

Weekend Gadget Watch: Nokia N900
Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below. What is it: Touchscreen smartphone with Qwerty keyboard
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Photos: The top Christmas apps for the Apple iPhone
Feeling festive? Then you need silicon.com's seasonal guide to the best Christmas apps for Apple's iPhone. First up is the Solar System app, a cosmic take on the advent calendar that lets you journey to the earth's neighbouring planets.
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:15:01 GMT

Green light for UK IT skills school to arrive next year
The opening of a National Skills Academy for IT in the UK has moved a step closer, after the government announced it has approved the business plan submitted by sector skills body e-skills UK. In October 2008 the government gave the green light to a tech academy on account of IT's "critical" role in growing the national economy, and because of strong and growing demand for tech workers - more than 140,000 new IT recruits are required by the industry every year, according to e-skills UK.
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:18:01 GMT

IT gender pay gap getting worse
The IT gender pay gap is getting worse, according to results from the 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey. More than a third (35 per cent) of female IT workers responding to this year's survey said they were on the bottom rung of the tech pay ladder, earning less than £25k, compared to just under a third of women (32 per cent) last year. And only 14 per cent of male IT workers are in the lowest pay bracket this year, down from 20 per cent in 2008.
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:35:02 GMT

Facebook, Google, eBay urge Mandelson to abandon copyright plan
Web heavyweights have hit out against the Digital Economy Bill, claiming clauses in the legislation could put the UK's digital future at risk. In an open letter to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Peter Mandelson, published yesterday, representatives of eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! call on the government to abandon "measures which risk stifling innovation and damaging the government's vision for a Digital Britain".
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:00:02 GMT

Shared services - how to get it right in your business
With so many businesses looking to cut costs, shared services have become a popular option. Stuart Roberts offers advice on making them deliver. I think everyone agrees that since mid-2008 the economic situation has been somewhat difficult, with all the cutting of costs and jobs.
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:00:00 GMT

SAP delays support price hike for customers
SAP has delayed price rises for its customers following a slip in the timing of a user benchmarking scheme. Earlier this year SAP users ordered the software company to meet a new set of key performance indicators in order to justify support price rises proposed last year.
Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:50:02 GMT

ID cards: Seven years of missed deadlines and U-turns
Picture the scene: the year is 2016 and ID cards have been embraced by the British public, with most UK citizens now carrying their very own card. This increasingly unlikely scenario is how the government initially envisaged the ID card scheme would turn out way back in 2006.
Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:47:02 GMT

Android phones, Firefox history, Google Wave and datacentres galore
This month saw California's Hacker Dojo host the Random Hacks of Kindness event, which brought independent coders together with developers from Google, Microsoft, Nasa, Yahoo! and other organisations to work on projects to help with disaster relief. See more photos from the hackathon here.
Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:10:01 GMT

2010: The year your desktop goes virtual?
Server virtualisation is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the corporate IT infrastructure - and now industry experts are predicting that it won't be long until corporate desktops follow suit. Desktop virtualisation refers to the running of a PC's operating system within a central datacentre. Users have a screen and terminal (or thin client) on their desk, which connects to the operating system running on the server via the local network. To the user, the experience is similar to the operating system running on their physical machine but in reality the processes are run and the data is stored in a central location.
Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:28:01 GMT

Outsourcing: UK carbon control plan needs a rethink
Encouraging businesses to go green is good but the government must better incorporate outsourcing in its carbon control scheme, says the NOA's Mark Kobayashi-Hillary Much is being said about the UK government's upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme but it remains unclear how much of this talk is translating into action and what impact the scheme will have on the outsourcing and offshoring industries.
Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:12:01 GMT

Anti-ageism legislation isn't working, say IT pros
Anti-ageism legislation isn't working and the IT industry continues to discriminate against older techies. That's the verdict of the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey. The majority (51 per cent) of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the IT industry discriminates against older workers, compared with less than a fifth (18 per cent) who held the opposite view.
Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Leaked report reveals billions in budget cuts for public sector IT
Shared services delivered through the cloud will help the public sector shave billions from its annual IT spend, according to a leaked Whitehall report. The leaked draft document, Government ICT Strategy: New world, new challenges, new opportunities, sets out priorities for public sector IT chiefs through to 2020.
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:34:01 GMT

Mini laptops, codebreaking, Wikipedia and why there's no 'British Google'
November's top stories on silicon.com tackled some big questions: does my business need an office? Can I work solely on a netbook? Will the UK ever create a Google, Microsoft or Oracle of its very own? November also dealt with the perennial question of will the UK's ID cards programme ever run to plan?
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:50:01 GMT

Your top HR tech priorities for next year revealed
Working out your budgets and trying to figure out the tech priorities for your HR department in 2010? Nick Heath has a few suggestions for HR directors as to where to invest that cash on technology to get the most benefits for your team and the rest of the business. Consider standardising your systemsTake a look at what you do in the HR department and the chances are a number of companies are doing exactly the same thing: processes like payroll and benefits administration or training and recruitment will need to be carried out at any large organisation. As a result, adopting standardised systems for common processes is worth considering for enterprises that are relying on expensive, bespoke IT systems.
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:35:01 GMT

Recession fuels fears of UK jobs being sent offshore
With recession leading businesses to cut IT costs as much as they can, tech workers are increasingly feeling the impact of offshoring, results from the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey show. Almost half (47.5 per cent) of respondents said their organisation has probably offshored IT jobs - up from more than a third (36 per cent) who thought that was the case last year.
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:58:01 GMT

Peter Cochrane's Blog: Can I become faster and smarter?
Compiled on the M6 driving to Liverpool and dispatched to silicon.com a couple of weeks later via a free wi-fi connection in my hotel. I just cannot work any faster or smarter - I seem to have exhausted every degree of freedom, every element of efficiency improvement I can muster.
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:40:02 GMT

The Weekly Round-Up: 27.11.09
We've all made embarrassing mobile phone blunders as part of our busy modern lives. We've all done something with a mobile that has led to fingers pointed in mirth and mockery: a few years ago the Round-Up even had one of those Bluetooth headsets that make you look like a minicab driver (although the cash from all those unexpected fares came in handy at Christmas).
Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:59:01 GMT

Photos: When hackers get together to do the world a favour
The Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California, is a community of hackers who have come together to work on projects, collaborate, and share expertise in technology and entrepreneurship. The Dojo, which opened in July, offers classes and a place to share ideas. Earlier this month the Dojo hosted the Random Hacks of Kindness event, which brought together thinkers and coders to try to solve real-world problems related to disaster relief.
Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:12:02 GMT