Latest Technology News

Tableau Software has launched a SaaS version of its Tableau Server business analytics product. The software allows users to explore and share corporate data in a reliable and secure way without the need for specialist support.

"Tableau Online will allow people to get their analytics up and running in minutes and add users in a few clicks," says Chris Stolte, Chief Development Officer and co-founder of Tableau Software. "It's completely scalable and secure and requires no infrastructure. It's the fastest way to get everyone in your company using powerful analytics to make better decisions today".

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As if moving to shiny new headquarters in Austin, Texas, wasn’t enough to keep the firm busy, Spanning Cloud Apps has just added a raft of features to Spanning Backup for Google Apps, its enterprise-class data protection solution.

The Spanning Backup Summer ’13 Release adds functions designed to help large organizations protect, manage and repair their Google Apps data, handle large user bases, and comply with complex regulatory and policy requirements.

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Microsoft slipped one under the radar for everyone who relies on its Azure service for Windows virtual machines. In a move that even took me off guard, Microsoft has reversed a longstanding policy of not allowing any form of RDS (Remote Desktop Services) on Windows Azure.

Previous policies strictly enforced remote desktop access on Azure only for the purposes of "administration and maintenance." As of July 1, this stumbling block for many Azure early adopters is finally gone, with a few caveats which I'll point out shortly.

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The Halo game franchise is wildly popular, having generated well over a billion dollars. There have been Halo licensed toys, clothing, and Mountain Dew soft-drinks. Heck, even the great Steven Spielberg is producing a Halo TV series. While the initial version of the game was released as an Xbox exclusive, there have been ports for Windows and Mac OS X. However, Halo is still viewed as largely synonymous with Microsoft and Xbox by the gaming world.

While Microsoft has had massive gaming success with both Xbox and Windows, one of its platforms is lacking in the gaming department -- Windows Phone 8. And so, Microsoft has turned to its successful franchise to boost the gaming credibility of the mobile platform. Today, Microsoft releases Halo Spartan Assault and it is a game changer -- Android and iPhone are officially on notice.

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I have never had a single thing against Windows Phone, nor iOS for that matter, but I embraced the Android ecosystem early on, with much invested in apps. Alright, "much" may be a stretch -- I can not imagine it is more than $50 total, but paid software still means money spent, and I am not known as Mr. Big-Spender.

For the past month I have been taking the Windows Phone challenge -- my Nexus is put aside, SIM card removed and currently residing within the confines of a Nokia Lumia 928.

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According to YouGov's latest Tablet Tracker report there are more women owning tablets than men in the UK. The study says that in May, 52 percent of the country's touchscreen computers were in female hands, an increase of nine percent compared with the same time last year.

Over the same period, the share of tablets owned by men fell from 57 percent to 48 percent. There’s no equivalent report for female tablet ownership in the US, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it following a similar trend. Tablets are ideal for women.

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On Thursday, South Korean tech giant LG announced that its upcoming Android smartphone flagship will not feature the company's well-known Optimus branding, but is instead set to receive the "G2" name.

According to LG, the new G branding will be used in all of its future "premium phones", with existing devices to retain their current monikers. Similarly, the maker's 4:3 handsets (from the Optimus Vu series) will be renamed as "Vu". Why? Well, this is done in order for new flagships to kick off with a clean slate, and, therefore, establish an undiluted brand going forward.

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Mark Surich was looking for a lawyer with Croatian connections to help with a family matter back in the old country. He Googled some candidate lawyers and in one search came up with this federal indictment. It makes very interesting reading and shows one way H-1B visa fraud can be conducted.

The lawyer under indictment is Marijan Cvjeticanin. Please understand that this is just an indictment, not a conviction. I’m not saying this guy is guilty of anything. My point here is to describe the crime of which he is accused, which I find very interesting. He could be innocent for all I know, but the crime, itself, is I think fairly common and worth understanding.

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After receiving constant criticism for betting its future on Windows Phone, instead of adopting Google's widely-popular Android, Finnish maker Nokia posts record Lumia sales, proving to naysayers that choosing Microsoft's smartphone operating system was not a bad call after all.

Nokia's latest financial results show that the company sold 7.4 million Lumias in Q2 2013. This translates to an 85 percent increase over the 4 million units which the Finnish maker moved in Q2 2012, and is 32 percent higher compared to the numbers -- 5.6 million -- posted by the company in the previous quarter.

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Hot on the heels of its Google Maps for iOS update, Google has unveiled Google Chrome for iOS 28, its alternative web browser for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users. The new build contains a number of notable new features, plus rolls out full-screen support for iPad users, something that has been available to iPhone users for quite some time.

The first major new feature is better interoperability with other Google apps. By tapping Settings > Google Apps in Chrome itself, users can instruct the browser to pipe relevant links through to other installed Google apps such as YouTube, Google Drive and Google Maps rather than using the browser itself.

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Following rival maker Samsung, HTC continues the smartphone flagship miniaturizing trend by unveiling a smaller iteration of the company's popular One. The new handset, simply called One mini, offers appealing hardware specifications in a package that targets a wider market audience.

The One mini packs a 4.3-inch Super LCD 3 panel with a resolution of 720 by 1280 (341 pixels per inch density). The device is powered by a 1.4 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, backed by an Adreno 305 graphics card, 1 GB of RAM and a non-removable 1,800 mAh battery. The smartphone ships with 16 GB of internal storage and no microSD card slot (therefore, users will be limited to the out-of-the-box capacity).

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If you’ve chosen your media player wisely then capturing a single frame from a video is usually very easy. In VLC Media Player, for instance, selecting Video > Take Snapshot -- or just pressing Shift+S -- will save a JPG of the current frame to your Pictures folder.

If you’d like to save multiple frames, though, perhaps as a way to summarize the content of a video, then your life becomes a little more difficult. Some players can still help (check out VLC Media Player’s command line options for one method), but for real simplicity you might prefer DVDVideoSoft’s Free Video to JPEG Converter.

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We're used to sharing information via social networking in our personal lives, but in the business world the impact of this has so far proved limited. Enterprise software supplier Deltek hopes to change this with the launch of Kona Business, a premium version of its cloud-based social collaboration and productivity tool.

A cross between a calendar, social network and project management tool, Kona Business brings together all of the interactions between people working on a project, allowing them to get things done more effectively and more quickly, and as it's in the cloud it can be rolled out easily via browsers or through Android and iOS apps.

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I love Bing. There aren’t many products (Xbox) that I’ll admit to being a fanboy of but Bing is getting pretty close to that status for me. I’m an oddity because most people don’t use Bing at all; either because they’ve used it and didn’t get the results they wanted, or based on word of mouth about it being so terrible. I don’t know where you fall, but I would bet most of you reading this don’t use or even like Bing. That’s unfortunate because you’re missing out.

Yes, Bing is good. But why do so many people hate it? Why do so many googlers refuse to even give it a try? Why do those who actually do give it a try, enter one search query, fail to get the results they want, and go back to Google, never giving Bing a second chance?

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The first time we heard the name of Microsoft’s forthcoming next gen console was when the company announced it at the reveal back in May. Part of the reason for keeping it so successfully under wraps was that Microsoft didn’t register any domain names in advance.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, XboxOne.com and XboxOne.net were already taken. Unfortunately for the owner of those domains -- an individual living in the UK who had owned both since 2011 -- Microsoft wanted them.

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