Latest Technology News

In late-July 2012, Microsoft launched Outlook.com, a new consumer-oriented email service set to replace the cluttered and dated Hotmail. Its long-term mission would be to take on Google's prevalent Gmail and establish itself as a product with widespread appeal. By grandfathering-in those who used Hotmail, Microsoft announced, in early-May 2013, Outlook.com had reached 400 million users.

I delivered my review of Outlook.com two days after its launch. My impressions were positive for a product that, at the time, was still undergoing testing (the official public launch happened in late-February 2013). Still, I concluded that the service was not up to par with Gmail, because it was missing key functionality. But lots of things have changed in the meantime, which is why I decided to write this long-term review of Outlook.com, outlining the most important changes and detailing the positives and negatives of the service, now that it has reached maturity.

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The Lenovo Yoga 10 tablet looked great... until I turned it on. You see, when I did the unboxing, the build quality felt solid. Holding it my hands, I had high hopes; the integrated kickstand was intriguing. The tablet itself resembles an Apple Magic Trackpad.

While most tablets are just rectangular slabs, the integrated kickstand allows the Yoga to stand up on its own. I was particularly blown-away by just how well-made the kickstand is; it's crafted from thick aluminum. This enables the tablet to be used as a display for watching video services like Hulu Plus or Netflix. However, the overall package is a cruel joke -- beautiful on the outside but horrible on the inside.

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The increasing use of technology by customers presents many challenges for business. This means that traditional areas like finance and operations may no longer be driving change. According to a new report by research specialists Gartner, meeting the digital era, where change may be motivated by evolving customer expectations, needs a fresh approach if it's to be done successfully.

Unlike other projects which are about delivering on budget and on time, digital transformation schemes can involve taking risks in order to achieve better performance. Gartner calls this "discovery oriented project management" where it's necessary to experiment and continue to learn from projects even after their launch.

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Worldwide, Windows Phone may hold a distant third-place spot in the smartphone market, but in Europe handsets running the mobile tiled OS are closing in on Apple's iPhones through huge share gains. According to a new Kantar Worldpanel ComTech report, in five key local markets Windows Phone sales more than doubled in Q3 2013, compared to the same period from last year. Meanwhile, iPhones lost market share.

In France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain combined, Windows Phone's market share grew to 9.8 percent in Q3 2013 from 4.6 percent a year earlier. The highest market share gains happened in France (to 10.7 percent from 5.2 percent), Germany (to 8.5 percent from 2.5 percent) and Great Britain (to 11.4 percent from 4.2 percent), with Italy and Spain posting more moderate growths (to 13.7 percent from 10.8 percent and to 3.7 percent from 2.2 percent, respectively). By contrast, in the said local markets iPhone's market share decreased to 14.6 percent in Q3 2013 from 16.8 percent a year earlier.

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After the launch of its own brand tablet, the Hudl, UK supermarket Tesco is hitting the headlines for another reason. We are all used to the irksome familiarity of watching adverts on TV and online, they are hard to avoid. But the retailer is turning things on their head slightly by introducing advertisements that watch customers.

Well, that's not strictly true, but it's an interesting way of looking at what is happening. Just as the likes of Google tailor advertisements to web users, Tesco is looking to ensure that the ads its customers see are relevant. The fuel stations found at many branches of the supermarket are soon to be home to personalized ads courtesy of Amscreen.

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NetMarketShare's monthly operating system statistics always make for interesting reading and analysis. For example, a month ago they showed Windows 7's growth was outpacing that of Windows 8. That was, naturally, just a blip, but in October -- the month that Windows 8.1 launched -- Windows 7 managed to make further market share gains.

There are other interesting things about last month's share statistics. Windows 8.1 -- which NetMarketShare has included since the Preview version launched -- is up, as you'd expect, while Windows 8 drops. Combined, the two operating systems see an overall rise, but the growth is slight.

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To cloud or not to cloud? It's a question a lot of my clients are asking more often, and is undoubtedly one of the biggest trends in the IT industry right now. SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and soon to be DaaS -- all acronyms which represent offloading critical functions of some sort to the cloud or into virtualized environments. All the big cloud providers are guilty of throwing fancy numbers around to make their case. But do their trumpeted cost savings really add up?

You'll have to make it to the end of this piece to find out what I think about that personally. Because in all honesty, it depends. Too many business owners I work with make the same cost comparison blunders over and over again. Most of them are so blindly focused on raw face value costs -- the "easy ones" -- that they lose focus on the bigger picture, namely their TCO (total cost of ownership).

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Sometimes there is revolution in evolution. That's my surprising reaction to iPad Air, which Apple started selling on November 1. This is simply the best tablet I have ever used. Period. The fruit-logo company wisely chose to resist reinventing the wheel and build a vehicle around four instead.

For people who complain -- and there are many -- that Apple's newest 9.7-inch tab shows waning innovation, let me correct the record. You are oh-so wrong. iPad Air is an amazingly refined piece of art -- like a sculpture chiseled to perfection. iPad 3 and 4 are unpolished bricks by comparison. More importantly, anyone looking for a tablet to largely, or completely, replace a Windows PC or Mac, Air is it.

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The latest Edward Snowden bombshell that the National Security Agency has been hacking foreign Google and Yahoo data centers is particularly disturbing. Plenty has been written about it so I normally wouldn’t comment except that the general press has, I think, too shallow an understanding of the technology involved. The hack is even more insidious than they know.

The superficial story is in the NSA slide (above) that you’ve probably seen already. The major point being that somehow the NSA -- probably through the GCHQ in Britain -- is grabbing virtually all Google non-spider web traffic from the Google Front End Servers, because that’s where the SSL encryption is decoded.

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Android has long been blamed for its fragmentation issues, with many pundits pointing out to the low adoption levels of the latest distributions as the main culprit. While this problem has yet to be resolved due to the nature of the operating system, it is much improved today as the Jelly Bean branch is now powering most Android smartphones and tablets.

Based on the number of devices accessing Google Play in the seven days ending November 1, Jelly Bean's market share in the Android realm is now at a dominating 52.1 percent. Combined, its three iterations have a higher distribution level than Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread put together, which is a first for the green droid landscape.

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This week Google put an end to all the speculation and finally launched not only the Nexus 5 but also the new version of Android -- KitKat. There were no great surprises as there had been so many leaks prior to launch that we knew pretty much everything there was to know, but it was good have the rumors confirmed. Expect a full review in the very near future. The Nexus 5 comes with KitKat preinstalled, but it will also be available as an upgrade for a number of other handsets. As it this wasn't quite enough for Google, the company also donated 17,000 Nexus 7s to communities affected by Hurricane Sandy.

After the recent announcement, the iPad Air went on sale, and Logitech was ready with a series of cases.

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When it comes to reading, I use a Kindle PaperWhite. I hate paper books with a passion -- they take up space and are obsolete. The Kindle is wonderful because it allows me to easily bookmark pages, look up definitions, and scan the book for certain words with the x-ray feature. An Amazon Prime membership enhances the Kindle experience by letting the user "borrow" a book from among 350,000 choices.

Today, Amazon announces Kindle First , a new program that gets unreleased books into the hands of readers before the official release date. This is not just a few days either, it can be up to a month early. This will give Kindle owners extreme bragging-rights in the book-club community. I can already picture pretentious people sitting in Starbucks saying  "oh, that book is so last month".

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PhrozenSoft’s VirusTotal Uploader has been updated to version 3.0, and there’s plenty of useful new functionality to explore.

You no longer have to launch the program as an administrator, for instance. You’ll still be able to upload most files to VirusTotal, get a verdict on whether they’re malware, and if you do run into any limitations then the program can be elevated at any time.

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 Mozilla has followed on from the recent release of Firefox 25.0 FINAL with the update of its two pre-release channels to Firefox 26.0 Beta 1 and Firefox Aurora 27.0a2 respectively.

Like version 25, version 26 has little in the way of visible new features other than that all plug-ins now default to "click to play" mode. Version 27 has no brand new features either, although some features -- notably optimized Windows 8 support -- remain exclusive to this build.

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Resplendence Software’s PC crash analysis tool WhoCrashed has been updated to version 5.0.

The big news in this release is that the program now runs properly on Windows 8.1. If your new system has a blue-screen crash, run the program, click Analyze and it’ll try to identify the cause for you. The crash report includes new hardware information, including system manufacturer and motherboard name.

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