Latest Technology News

Tuesday, Google rolled out a small update for Google Maps for Android that adds detailed indoor maps of more than twenty different U.S. museums, including the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, 17 different Smithsonian museums, and even the National Zoo in Washington D.C.

Cedric Dupont, of the Google Maps for Mobile team on Tuesday said the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the National World War II Museum in New Orleans will all be added to Google Maps in the near future.

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Microsoft will publicly release Windows Server 2012 a month earlier than Windows 8, the company's server and tools business vice president Satya Nadella told attendees of the Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto on Tuesday. The release will be part of a broader effort to draw customers away from its competitors and on to the Windows Azure platform.

The server platform will release to manufacturing first in August, followed by general availability of the OS in September.

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It sounds like a silly question. After all, Android is more popular than ever, with new “hero” phones and tablets arriving almost every week. However, for all of the platform’s success, there’s one aspect that remains a lingering blight on Google’s otherwise shiny success story: Software piracy.

Simply put, the rampant piracy of apps on “rooted” Android devices is killing developer momentum, with many devs resorting to unpopular and often intrusive in-app advertising and other gimmicks to make up for the gap in traditional Google Play revenue. And with the Android enthusiast community seemingly obsessed with “rooting” every new device that comes to market -- thus making it easier for unscrupulous users to pirate apps and/or bypass normal app security mechanisms -- the problem only  gets worse.

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Last April, Samsung released the list of its smartphones and tablets that would receive an upgrade to Android 4.0. The list included the polarizing, is-this-phone-too-big-to-be-a-phone, Galaxy Note.

This update would normally be unremarkable, especially since Google yesterday released the AOSP version of Jelly Bean, but because the Galaxy Note is stylus-friendly, the update includes some feature upgrades to the Galaxy Note's S Pen peripheral in the form of the "Premium Suite."

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Information Technology is now a part of every day life. Every office will be networked, with data on demand. And with the push for easy access location independent records, paper files will be made redundant. But Gartner's newest IT spending forecast shows the march to digitalization slowing -- on pace to reach $3.628 trillion in 2012 and $3.786 trillion in 2013. That is only an estimated 3 percent and 4.4 percent increase compared to the the $3.523 trillion spent last year in 2011, which was 7.9 percent growth compared to 2010.

Computer Hardware in 2011 accounted for $404 billion in spending with a 7.4 percent growth. In 2012, Gartner estimates spending will reach $420 billion, only 3.4-percent growth. Gartner projects by 2013 that will go to 6.6 percent growth at $448 billion.

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It’s no secret that running regular backups should be an essential part of every PC owner’s routine. But most people don’t bother, not least because setting this up on their own system can be such a lengthy and tedious business.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Genie Timeline Professional 2012 takes a far simpler approach than most file-based backup tools, keeping configuration issues to an absolute minimum, and generally doing a great job of staying out of your way.

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Mozilla's move to a rapid release process has been controversial. The company basically switched from a "when it is done or necessary" approach to a release cycle that would see a new major version release of the browser every six weeks, regardless of new features, improvements or fixes included in that release.

Mozilla's problem: part of the browser's user base does not welcome the change with open arms, as they feel that rapid release is to interrupting, unnecessary or breaks features or extensions that users grew accustomed to.

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Word of advice to cloud service providers: Don't get caught with your hand in the cookie jar. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and the US Federal Trade Commission will soon announce a $22.5 million settlement. Google bypassed privacy settings on Apple’s Safari web browser, a practice later stopped, after being contacted by the Journal nearly six months ago.

Independent researchers found that of the top 100 websites, 22 installed the tracking code on a desktop computer, while on 23 sites code was successfully installed on the iPhone. Safari blocks such cookie tracking by default. At the time, Google claimed that the user tracking did not have any negative side-effects on its users, but that's hard to measure. Surely, advertisers benefited from the practice.

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Burnaware Technologies has released the latest generation of its disc burning packages, in the shape of BurnAware 5.0 Free, Home and Professional.

The most apparent change is a simplification to the interface. There’s no longer any need to choose between “Data CD”, “Data DVD” or “Bridge Disc” when creating a data project: now you have “Data Disc” and “Custom Disc”, and on choosing the latter you’ll now get to decide the file system (ISO, UDF or Bridge).

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Small businesses have their hands full these days in light of a down economy, tightening budgets and the steepening pace of business, but with nation-state hacks front and center in the threatscape, should you worry about those, too, or are you (and your customers) safe?

Nation-state hacks bring to mind images of large defense contractors, big government offices, and/or high profile financial institutions. After all, if a bad actor overseas stole the cutting edge design of a new nuclear reactor, it would be quite a haul for that government and its cronies -- and worth their time, money and effort to go after. But you’re a small business, too small to garner that kind of attention, right?

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Google has announced the release of Chrome 21 to the beta channel for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. And while the new build won’t revolutionise your life overnight, it does include support for a couple of new APIs, which will make for richer web experiences in the future.

The first of these, the WebRTC getuserMedia API, allows users to give web access to their camera and microphone from within the browser, no plugin required. And a few web apps already show some of the creative possibilities: Paul Neave’s “Webcam Toy” uses WebGL fragment shaders to apply real-time special effects to the video, for instance.

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The Apple iPad is the best-selling tablet by quite some margin, but with increasing competition from the likes of Google and Microsoft, its dominance could be under threat. Although the company could (and likely will) make some minor improvements to the iPad at some point -- making it thinner, boosting the camera, and finding a way to reduce its core temperature, for example -- it needs to come up with new variations if it wants to stay on top.

That means going large and producing a ‘MacPad’, which would essentially be a touchscreen, keyboard-less version of the Macbook Air (bringing it into direct competition with Microsoft Surface), or going small, and finally introducing the much rumored iPad mini.

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Google has released the latest and greatest version of its Android mobile operating system, known as Jelly Bean, or Android 4.1 into the open source channel on Monday afternoon.

An announcement from Jean-Baptiste Queru, Google's head of the Android Open Source Project, officially opened availability of the Jelly Bean binaries Monday. Generally speaking, open sourcing is the very first step in broad availability for the newest build of Android, as this is the framework phonemakers use to build their respective versions of the operating system.

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How would you like to spend $700 on the most amazing smartphone, one which truly replaces your digital camera and makes iPhone look like horse and buggy compared to your Porsche. The handset has style and finesse, and is teched-out to the nines. There is but one little problem: The software is outdated -- abandoned -- before the phone's release. The hardware is amazing but the operating system is dead on arrival.

Nokia 808 PureView is the latest smartphone to come to the United States from the Finnish manufacturer. Nokia's USA website lists the 808 PureView as "coming soon", but Amazon will sell you one right now, for $699.99. There the lone reviewer, Tor Slettnes, rates five stars, writing: "This phone is nothing short of a dream come true for any remaining Symbian fans -- all 3 of us!" There you have it. Everything that's right about the mobile shows what's wrong with Nokia.

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Everyone needs to keep their life organized and any tool that can help with this is welcome. One such piece of software is EssentialPIM, which has just been updated to version 5.0. The headline new feature: synchronization with both iOS and Android devices; a companion Android app is available for download from Google Play, while an iOS app is expected in the App Store in the near future. But this is not the only new feature in this handy PIM which bears quite a resemblance to Microsoft Outlook.

The app can be used to manage your contacts, calendars, email accounts, notes, passwords and much more. Available in Free, Portable and Pro varieties, the program has been updated to include support for multiple SMTP servers as well as the ability to configure an unlimited number of identities in the mail component.

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