Latest Technology News

The value of a remote access tool is difficult to appreciate until you try one for the first time. Using the right software, it is possible to sit at home and work with your computer in the office as if you sat in front of it. This can be achieved with desktop software such as LogMeIn, but there is also a version available for iOS in the form of LogMeIn Ignition. It may sound adventurous to consider accessing your desktop PC or Mac from your iPhone or iPad, but that is precisely what the app enables you to do.

All you need to do to get started is to install the desktop software on your computer and the app on your iOS device. You can then create a LogMeIn account which you can then use to control which computers are able to gain remote access. For the purposes of security, no computer will be granted access without the correct password, and IP address filtering can be used to increase protection further. An on-screen message is displayed on your Mac or PC whenever a remote session is started so you can terminate any unauthorised sessions that may be started.

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Today, Google rolled out the first platform preview of the Android 3.0 software development kit, giving the public its first look at Android for tablets and its "holographic" user interface.

This is easily the most dramatic design shift Android has yet experienced, but all of the operating system's key features have been retained.

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It's taken quite some time, and no less than 10 Release Candidate builds, but all the preparations are about to pay off -- the final release of OpenOffice.org 3.3 officially released today, and it's packed with handy new features that, taken together, make the suite significantly more comfortable to use.

All the major apps now come with a new Find toolbar, for example, allowing you to quickly search a document's text. Charts may be enhanced with drawing objects. In a click or two you can insert anything from lines, rectangles or text for simple captions, say, up to cubes, symbols, blocks, even flowcharts. The Calc spreadsheet now supports 1,048,576 rows, up from 65,536.

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Piriform Software has released a brand new version of its popular cleaning tool for Windows. CCleaner Network Edition is aimed at corporations wishing to use CCleaner's capabilities across an entire network. It's designed to be managed from a single central location, allowing IT managers to set up one cleaning profile that's implemented consistently across all workstations running CCleaner. Prices start from $250 for 10 computers, although Piriform is currently offering a 20 percent discount during the program's launch period.

Hot on the heels of the Network Edition's release, Piriform has also updated the standalone edition of CCleaner, which is free for personal and non-commercial use. CCleaner 3.03 adds support for three minor browsers -- including Chrome Plus -- alongside its existing support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

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Apple is as much about its looks as its substance, which begs the question: why that drab, grey start-up screen with the darker grey Apple logo superimposed over it? Hardly inspiring stuff when you boot your Mac first thing in the morning.

Thankfully, there's a free tool out there that can help you transform this dull and uninspiring backdrop into something more colorful and personal. BootXChanger runs on Intel Macs sporting Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later, and is simplicity itself to use.

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LightSquared, the company building the first hybrid LTE/Mobile Satellite network in the U.S. announced Wednesday that it can now vend its services as either dual-mode satellite/cellular or just as cellular, according to the demands of its wholesale partners.

This announcement is significant because LightSquared is building a wholesale network that will end up being sold to consumers under more familiar networks' brand names.

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Facebook has unveiled a new advertising option for its partners that would allow companies to pull user's statuses and use them in ads on the service. Called Sponsored Stories, stauses of a user mentioning a company would be able to be used by a company in ads to that user's friends.

Users would not be able to opt-out of being used in these ads. Facebook said that check-ins to business and places are lost in our ever-moving news feeds, and companies have no way of taking advantage of the marketing potential these statuses could have. Thus, Sponsored Stories would essentially turn any status mentioning a brand into a potential ad.

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In August and, again, in October, I asked if Apple would be the US PC market share leader if iPad counted in the numbers. It's a compelling question because of iPad's sudden sales success and analyst firms' strange classifications. For example, IDC counts iPad as a media tablet but slates running Windows as PCs. Today, Canalys released numbers counting iPad as a PC, which propels Apple to the No. 3 spot globally. Canalys' data is for fourth calendar quarter 2010.

My question for you: Should iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab really count as PCs? Canalys counts both and other tablets. Please answer in comments.

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Wednesday, Web retailer Amazon launched its Kindle Singles line of literature designed specifically for consumption on e-readers. The works, priced between $1.00 and $3.00, include original works of prose, essays and theses, and the the first TEDBooks.

Last October, Amazon introduced Kindle Singles as a format ideally suited for the reading habits of e-reader users. They are longer than a magazine article and shorter than a novel (around 20,000 words or 60 pages,) and specifically tailored to deliver well-developed content in a very direct manner, sort of like Reader's Digest condensed literature.

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So, you thought Apple's 10 billion application downloads was a big number? Gartner says mobile users will download 17.7 billion applications from mobile app stores this year, a 117 percent year-over-year increase. Get this: 185 billion mobile apps downloaded from app stores by 2014. You believe that? I sure as hell don't. The mobile market is yet too volatile to forecast anything, but these analysts keep trying and keep changing their predictions every couple of months. Surely the "psychic reader" down the street could do no worse and charge much less money doing so.

I nitpick because, despite mobile apps early gains, the browser may yet prove to be the better way to consume mobile applications than specialized ones downloaded from app stores. Search as a utility looks to be the killer app for mobile devices, in part because of how differently people use cell phones than, say, PCs. The person who might spend hours in front of a PC, spends seconds or minutes at a time on a smartphone (though many more interactions). Phone behavior is more contextual and personal, where utility, such as finding the nearest Starbucks or playing Angry Birds while waiting for the bus, matters more.

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On Tuesday, a shocking report about the condition of the U.S. education system made headlines in the biggest news outlets. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that this generation of school children has a painfully low percentage of scientific proficiency. Approximately two-thirds of children in the fourth grade in 2009 lacked science proficiency, and that number reached almost 80% among high school seniors.

The U.S., it appears, has been sorely neglecting science education.

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More aptly stated: 5 things every other tablet vendor but Apple needs to succeed.

Seemingly everyone who owns or can outsource a manufacturing facility is releasing a tablet this year, and many of them were announced during Consumer Electronics Show 2011. To date, about 85 tablets are in the queue. Most of them will fail. The contenders will compete with one another to lessen the numbers long before any one poses competitive threat to market leader iPad. To match, or even outsell iPad, manufacturers need at least five things, presented here in no order of importance. This list focuses strictly on logistics and purposely omits usability and design, which are separate topics for a future analysis.

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Celebrating the company's 50th anniversary, Plantronics on Wednesday unveiled the latest product in its line of wireless headsets for office scenarios, the Voyager Pro UC v2.

Utilizing capacitive touch sensors, the Voyager Pro UC and its new software suite can intelligently interact with softphones and mobile devices based simply upon the user's physical contact with the headset.

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In a move that signals the company's keenness to take full advantage of the increasing popularity of the Mac format, Microsoft has announced the availability of 30-day trial versions of Office for Mac 2011. The trial version of the office suite is for the Home & Business edition, which means that it includes Outlook and gives users the opportunity to try out all of the components of Office.

The release of a trial version of the office suite is likely to please PC users who have recently made the move to OS X, as it enables them to work with familiar software. It also enables Mac users who have previously avoided Microsoft software to take the suite for a test drive without having to part with any cash.

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What do application developers really care about? That's the question IDC seeks to answer with a new report released today based on a survey of 2,235 application developers conducted between January 10-12. "The survey reveals how new entrants to the tablet market are changing application development priorities and how businesses large and small are accelerating their efforts to build a mobile application strategy to deal with an explosion in apps, mobile devices, operating systems, and capabilities," according to the report.

The clincher: "Google has nearly caught up to Apple in smartphone popularity and is closing the gap in tablets." Read that sentence a second time and let the implications sink in and think about what it ultimately means for all the seemingly endless rah rahs for Apple's iOS.

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