Latest Technology News

At the Microsoft E3 2012 Press Conference Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi talked about a rather amazing brand partnership, introducing Stefan Olander, Nike vice president. The Nike+ service, already made famous for its partnerships with Apple, and the ability to help track your workouts and keep you motivated to stay fit, is coming to the Xbox 360. Olander came on to show us the history of Nike+ and the goals of Nike to help empower the athlete in everyone to reach their peak of performance. A demo of footage of a title called Nike+ Kinect Training hit the jumbo screen with flashes of CGI models inter-spliced with live action human models demonstrating moves -- even flash of a screenshot showing the Nike+ app on a Windows Phone tracking a workout.

But not much else was talked about. Would Nike+ track you as you played all kinect titles? Would you know just how many calories you might have lost while shaking your money maker to the dance moves of Dance Central 3? Would you be able to know you not only saved the world with the Mutant, Magic, and Technology infused powers in Avengers: Battle For Earth? What about the workout you get from a magical onslaught you wrought upon the hoards of baddies in Fable: the Journey?

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It’s important for your PC’s security to install application updates just as soon as they become available, but if a program doesn’t check for these itself then that can be a challenge. Unless you have the time to monitor every application website yourself then you’ll probably need some third-party help, and the latest candidate is the free and portable AutoUP.

The program provides support for updating 68 applications, which isn’t in itself particularly impressive, but there are at least plenty of major names in the list: Adobe AIR/ Flash/ Reader, CCleaner, Evernote, Firefox, Foxit Reader, Chrome, KeePass, Paint.NET, VLC Media Player, and more. (The full list is here).

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Here at E3 Expo, nowhere on the general floor are any of the Sony Playstation Mobile certified devices. No one of the Sony PR team can even tell me anything. Even the head of the Playstation Digital Platforms, the team in charge of the Playstation Network Store and Playstation Plus can't answer my question: "Will games purchased on Playstation Mobile certified devices be playable on Playstation Vita or Playstation 3?"

But on the press- and developer-only second floor of the Sony E3 Booth stands this sad lonely unmanned glass covered case. It tells me NO TOUCH, but I have to take pictures. Now don't hate me if I'm wrong because I'm using deduction from display case association; from the looks of this case the Playstation Vita is considered one of the Playstation Mobile Certified devices, which would mean: If you purchase a Playstation Mobile Certified game that is a PSONE Classic or PS Mini title, it should be playable on all certifies Playstation Devices. Sony is always cagey with details, but I got two bits to bet on this one that I'm right.

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For as long as Microsoft has offered a search engine, CEO Steve Ballmer or one of his minions has talked about the goal of providing answers to real questions rather than forcing people to use keywords. The success of social search service Quora or Yahoo Answers shows how much people simply want to ask. Bing and Google handle questions much better today than ever, but often the answers come unqualified and without the depth or authority of, say, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. Apple tries with Siri on iPhone, with Wolfram Alpha behind it. But we all know that, for now, Siri sucks.

Today, Microsoft seized the answer search initiative, by incorporating Encyclopedia Britannica into Bing results. Sure Google places Wikipedia front and center, but Britannica is an undisputed, reliable authority -- well for anyone old enough to have owned a set of the books. Ask a question. "The answer provides a quick overview of the subject, a thumbnail image, and useful facts and figures making it easier than ever to get trusted content in search", Franco Salvetti, Bing principal development lead, explains. "We also pull in direct links to other trusted sources".

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Red Hat moved its hybrid cloud management software called CloudForms out of beta on Thursday, aiming to allow IT customers with considerable infrastructure to leverage it with public cloud resources to enable easy migration between the two.

The open-source software company first introduced CloudForms last May, then positioning it as an IaaS product. Since then, the company has begun contributing heavily to the OpenStack IaaS platform, and is now a platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation.

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After meeting its Kickstarter goal of $100,000, three-year old startup Infinitec has made its Android-powered Pocket TV available for pre-order for just $99. The device utilizes the relatively new "HDMI Dongle" set top box form factor used by the Roku Smart Stick, and it brings Android Ice Cream Sandwich to the television screen.

The Pocket TV is powered by a 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with 512MB of RAM, has 4 GB of internal storage and a microSD port supporting cards up to 32 GB in size. It's also equipped with a mini USB port for devices such as keyboards or webcams.

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Hidden away in the middle of the concourse walkway between South and West halls of the Los Angeles Convection center sits this little corner display booth. Most people pass it by not knowing how big it might be to the future of gaming but as soon as I see who is there I have to stop and ask questions.

Gaikai is a service that started just two years ago -- at first thought of as nothing more than phantom console level vapor it is one of the two companies to announce "Cloud Gaming"; PC gaming via virtualization. Its first demo shows off high-end games from producers / developers EA and Red Project for titles like Mass Effect 3 or The Witcher 2. Using a web page Java applet client it runs on any Windows, Mac, or even Linux machine.

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At Computex 2012, Acer quietly showed off an update to its 7 inch Android-powered Iconia A100 Tab which is expected to come out in the third quarter of the year.

The new tablet is known as the A110, features a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with 1 GB of RAM, and will run Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.

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Microsoft beefed up its Windows Azure cloud platform Thursday, announcing a host of features that take it out of a primarily Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) role and place it into the realm of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The Redmond, Wash. company appears ready to take on IaaS heavyweights like Rackspace and Amazon Web Services, as well as new entrant Oracle, who announced its own cloud offering on Wednesday.

Microsoft doesn't "catch a new trend right with the first iteration but they keep at it and eventually strike the right tone and in more cases than not, get good enough", Forrester analyst James Staten says of the company's moves. "And often good enough wins".

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Keeping track of what’s happening across even the smallest network can be a challenge. To put it mildly. Whether it’s your users misbehaving, or genuine hardware and software issues are cropping up, there’s always some problem to consider.

You don’t have to try and tackle this on your own, though. Spiceworks is a powerful free network auditing and inventory tool that will automatically scan your systems and alert you to what’s going on, and it’s suitable for everyone from regular home users through to large business networks.

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One of Broadcom's goals for 2012 is to bring to market new hardware that supports the fifth-generation of Wi-Fi networking standards, 802.11ac. At CES 2012, Broadcom debuted its first 802.11ac chips, then rolled out more designs in the following months so device manufacturers could take advantage of the faster throughput the new standard allowed.

Asus, D-Link, Huawei, and LG all have announced plans to support 802.11ac with consumer hardware, and this week, Asus and Broadcom unveiled the first consumer-facing notebook computer to feature full 802.11ac compliance, the Asus ROG G75VW gaming notebook.

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In the crowd of hungry tired worn-out journalists at the Showstoppers Tech and Gadget showcase event at the Icon LA Ultra Lounge, right next to a Hooters, across the from the Los Angeles Convention Center, Samsung, like everyone else, isn't showing off anything new. But the particular bobble they have that catches my eye is the Samsung 830 series solid-state drive, released back in October of 2011. It is a sleek little gun-metal black drive thinner than 1/5 of an inch and no weight to it whatsoever. The case is a gun metal brushed aluminum with only the silver raised logo of Samsung emblazoned on it.

This is when I strike it up with Chris Geiser, senior product management at Samsung. Geiser is passionate about the product. He lets it drop that, "Samsung is now spendings $12 billion a year on memory research". Every SDD samsung makes is 100-percent Samsung made parts, from the NAND storage memory to the controller.

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Second in a series. Two days ago, I established that iPhone's market share is heavily dependent on carrier subsidies. Now let's take a look how iPhone subsidies affect carriers and the potential impact this could have on Apple.

To Summarize, under iPhone's current subsidy structure, it is practically impossible for carriers to break-even. Even when factoring higher churn rate of other smartphones and lower cost of retaining iPhone users, Apple's device still costs carriers too much to be really profitable compared to other smartphones. Essentially, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone users subsidize iPhone owners. Carriers make more money from non-iPhone smartphone owners, while raising data and early-termination fees to offset iPhone costs.

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There are countless websites that feature hours of streaming video that you can watch whenever you have an Internet connection. But what about those times when you are not able to get online? If you are going on a trip and want to ensure that the children have something to watch on a laptop or tablet, Wondershare vDownloader is a tool that can be used to grab a load of videos in advance and load them onto the device of your choosing.

Saving videos from some websites is easy enough -- just right click a link and save the target file to your hard drive. With other sites things are a little more tricky, you may need to examine source code and determine the link needed to download a file. And then there are some sites that make it all but impossible to save a copy of a video you have come across. Whether you’re looking to make it quicker and easier to download videos, or you want to be able to save copies of those videos that are hard to get, Wondershare vDownloader is a valuable, and free, tool.

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