Microsoft opens hardware acceleration spec for C++ ahead of Visual Studio 11 beta
Microsoft on Friday announced the publication of the C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (AMP) specification under the Microsoft Community Promise license. This specification lets C++ developers write programs that can compile and execute on data-parallel hardware like discrete graphics cards or the SIMD vector instruction set in a processor. It can also be thought of as hardware acceleration.
Soma Somasegar, the Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division, revealed last summer that the company was working on support for parallelism in the next version of Visual Studio.
Anonymous leaks FBI phone call; reminds of the insecurity of conference lines
Hacktivist group Anonymous has released an audio recording of a January 17 conference call which it claims includes members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the UK's Scotland Yard discussing their latest anti-hacking efforts. We've embedded the 17-minute long clip above.
The participants in the conference call talk about Anonymous, LulzSec, Antisec, CSL Security and other black hat security groups, the evidence they have against such groups, and their progress in arresting suspects.
Android Market is safer than we thought, its 'Bouncer' kicks out bad apps
Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android mobile platform, revealed on Thursday that the Android Market has secretly had a system in place named "Bouncer" to scan apps for malicious code.
"Bouncer" was running in secret for most of 2011, and Lockheimer says that the period between the first and second halves of 2011 showed a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market.
Android's People app is no Windows Phone People Hub
Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, takes a slightly different approach to social content organization and management, and includes a couple of new APIs to let application developers surface social network data.
If you've got ICS running on your phone already, you have probably already noticed the "People" application, Android's revamped contacts system that unifies different social networks and methods of communication under a single profile, allowing information to be more centrally located on a user's phone and shared out when needed.
The new meets the old: First LTE to CDMA VoIP handover complete
Qualcomm on Thursday finally came forward to announce an LTE milestone that took place at the end of December: the first voice call to be seamlessly handed over from an LTE mobile network to a WCDMA network using Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC). This is an important milestone because SRVCC lets the LTE-based VoIP/IMS packets be transferred to the legacy circuit-switched domain, unifying the old mobile networks with the new.
This has been one of the big challenges for LTE VoIP for the last four years, and the industry was exploring SRVCC alongside a technique called Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) to offer continuous voice over LTE service. With the ability to hand over connections, VoIP subscribers can roam between LTE and other wireless networks without disconnection.
Samsung and Corning team up to tackle OLED displays
Corning Incorporated and Samsung Mobile Display Company on Thursday announced they are beginning an equity joint venture in Korea that focuses on making the glass substrate for Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays.
OLEDs were a big topic at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, especially the large-panel TVs sporting the display technology. But OLED tablets were also on the menu, as Toshiba teased with a 7.7" concept tablet with a high contrast AMOLED display.
Mint launches personal finance app for Android Tablets
Mint, the elegant personal financial management app owned by financial software company Intuit has finally released a version of its application specifically for Android tablets. Mint's app has been available on Android-based smartphones for over a year, but with the growing prevalence of tablets, and Ice Cream Sandwich promising to unify Android's smartphone and tablet interfaces, the time was right for a Mint tablet app.
Because Mint is so UI-centric, the tablet app doesn't try to cram more information into the larger screen real estate, but instead provides a clearer, easier-to-navigate interface.
Microsoft opens commercial licensing for Kinect for Windows applications
Microsoft on Wednesday launched its Kinect for Windows commercial program, allowing businesses to build for-profit applications and solutions using Microsoft's popular free-space interface.
More than 300 companies are already developing their own solutions using Kinect for Windows, Microsoft said on Wednesday, including United Health Group, American Express, Mattel, Telefonica, and Toyota. So we expect to see a whole family of new Kinect applications hitting the market in the next year for health care, education, and industry.
Salesforce launches 'mobile-to-mobile' support system Desk.com
Salesforce, the gold standard of cloud-based CRM, launched on Tuesday a new customer support application called Desk.com, which gives small and medium-sized businesses a "social help desk" designed so ultraconnected, smartphone-toting employees can appropriately connect with the ultraconnected, smartphone-toting customer.
Desk.com grew out of Salesforce's 50 million dollar acquisition of Assistly just five months ago. The Assistly application was notable because it took customer relationships on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and then integrated them with "traditional" support channels such as e-mail and telephone, making social network relationships among the most important methods of communication for companies.
Symantec launches Norton Identity Safe as standalone beta app
Symantec on Tuesday launched the public beta of Norton Identity Safe, a free password management application for mobile and desktop devices. The software was originally a feature built into Norton Internet Security and Norton 360, and is now available for the first time as a standalone application.
Norton Identity Safe beta is designed to be a simple and secure way for users to store and manage their logins and passwords for all their different applications and services. With the application installed, the user only needs to remember their master password, and then they can launch any of their stored services. This login information can be synched across the users' different devices as well.
Heads up! Bluestacks App Player enters very limited beta 1
Today, the Bluestacks team put out a quick announcement that they are accepting their first round of Beta testers to have a look at the next version of App Player, the Android virtualization environment for Windows and beyond.
This round of testers will be limited to just 100 who manage to sign up and get accepted into the program.
Microsoft launches 'Office 15' preview, promises beta by Summer
Monday, Microsoft began the technical preview program of "Office 15," the next generation of Microsoft's Office ecosystem, which will include cloud services, servers, mobile and desktop clients. The big thing about Office 15 is that all these separate forms of Office will be simultaneously updated.
The Technical Preview period is when a very small group of users have access to the software in the understanding that they will not disclose any information about the early software. The beta testing period is expected to roll around some time in the summer, so somewhere in the range of four to five months from now.
Yahoo kills 10 mobile apps to focus on HTML5 future
Even though Yahoo remains one of the most popular sites on the Web after nearly seventeen years in the business, the company faces an uncertain future with nebulous branding, improper monetization, and unsteady restructuring efforts.
Yahoo has been attempting to streamline and reorganize in various ways to stay on top, but on Friday it announced it will be ending support for ten of its mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.
McAfee releases new security suite for Android, BlackBerry, x86droid
Intel may still be a rookie in the mobile space, but its security software subsidiary McAfee has got Intel's Android project covered. On Monday, the security company launched its second-generation McAfee Mobile Security suite for smartphones and tablets, which includes compatibility with Intel-based Android devices.
The $30 subscription-based application supports Google Android 2.1–4.0, BlackBerry 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, and S60 3rd and 5th Edition, as well as Symbian ^3, and provides a suite of anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-theft, tools for mobile devices.
That's a wrap: Jon Rubinstein leaves HP, Palm, webOS
According to a number of reports on Friday, the head of HP's mobile efforts, Jon Rubinstein, has left the company.
Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 as a move to advance in the smartphone business. But after a little more than one year and a just a few new mobile devices, HP killed the Palm brand, dissolved its mobile business unit, and turned webOS into an open source project.