Tim Conneally

If Boxee shook up the design world by turning the standard set-top box form factor into an odd geometric shape, Google has completely eliminated the "box" from the equation, and unveiled the Nexus Q, a streaming home entertainment hub for connecting your TV to your Android devices and to Google Play for content distribution.

It features:

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At Google's I/O 2012 developer convention on Wednesday, the long-rumored Asus tablet sporting the Google Nexus brand was finally revealed. Confirming the rumor from Gizmodo Australia earlier this week, the tablet is known as Nexus 7.

As the rumors had suggested, the $199 device is going to be the first to run Android 4.1 (aka Jellybean), sport a 7-inch, 1280 x 800 display, run on a quad-core 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with 1GB of RAM and a "12 core" GeForce GPU, be Wi-Fi only, and offer a 1.3 megapixel forward-facing camera, accelerometer, and NFC chip for device-to-device communication. The total weight of the device is just 340 grams.

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Mozilla on Tuesday announced the latest update (v.14.0) to Firefox for Android is now available in Google Play for devices running Android 2.2 and up. The famous browser, now in its second year on Android, has received a significant feature upgrade this time around, and includes an all new UI and start screen, a sped up experience, and support for Adobe Flash.

Even though Mozilla's mobile Firefox has been in development for more than four years, it is still something of a baby in the Android world. Firefox 4 for Android turned out to be kind of a resource hog, kind of slow, and not entirely stable. The beta of Firefox 5 improved on some of the shortcomings of its predecessor, but clearly needed some work.

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The existence of a 7-inch Google-branded Android tablet has been rumored for a couple of months, and Asus has proudly taken credit for manufacturing the device. Still, the specifics have not be officially laid out, so we have to rely on unnamed sources and ambiguous evidence for the next few days until Google I/O begins.

Reportedly, some "training materials" uncovered by Gizmodo Australia related to a tablet known as the "Nexus 7" provide some confirmation to prior rumors of an Asus-made Google Tablet, similar to the MeMO 370T that was debuted by Asus earlier this year.

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The annual Google developer convention I/O will take place next week. Like Apple's WWDC and Microsoft's TechEd, it is the big summer event where the world is given a look at each of the respective companies' plans for the coming year.

Google is expected to announce a lot of staggering new stuff, like its own branded sub-$200 tablet and its own Cloud platform to rival Amazon Web Services.

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Hometalk, a year-old home improvement-themed social network, underwent a total redesign and re-launched on Thursday in hopes of making its content easier to access, and to keep its roughly 100,000 members stuck to the site longer.

The site is designed for homeowners to share pictures, videos, ideas, and conversations about general design and repair themes, including (but not limited to) topics like flooring, gardening, remodeling, painting, and more. This is done in very much the traditional social networking fashion, with user profiles building up networks of friends/followers, and sharing posts based heavily upon photographs. With this redesign, Hometalk has clearly taken note of Pinterest's success, and it includes a new feature called, simply, "Saving." With this feature, users can save any post or photo from other users on a "Virtual Clipboard," similar in both name and design to Pinterest's "Virtual Pinboard."

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Microsoft on Thursday released the Xbox SmartGlass Software Development Kit (SDK) to partners that have agreements to develop Xbox games and entertainment applications for the Xbox 360.

The device-agnostic SmartGlass application was first revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo earlier in June, showing how users will eventually be able to pair their tablet or smartphone with their Xbox 360 for enhanced content consumption and gaming. Now that Microsoft's Surface and Windows Phone 8 initiatives have been revealed, the SmartGlass project has begun to take clearer shape.

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Microsoft revealed its plans for the next generation of Windows Phone on Wednesday, which includes broadening hardware support, revising the user interface, and adding a couple of new features that bring Windows Phone up to speed with the Android platform.

Unfortunately, though, no current Windows Phone devices will receive an upgrade to the new operating system. Instead, they will receive the graphical overhaul of the new Start screen in a sub-update called "Windows Phone 7.8."

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At the Windows Phone Summit in San Francisco today, Microsoft provided the first look at its upcoming update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8.

Microsoft has unveiled just a few of the banner features that will be included in the next versions of Windows Phone 8. Conveniently, there are eight major parts of the company's announcement today.

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In the race to connect our smartphones and tablets to our televisions, there is still no clear winner.

Apple has Airplay wireless video streaming with Apple TV, the MHL consortium has its wired solution for connecting mobile devices to HDMI, Intel has its own Wireless Display (WiDi) technology for connecting laptops wirelessly to televisions, and the Wi-Fi Alliance has Miracast for wirelessly connecting devices to displays on existing Wi-Fi networks.

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Tuesday, legacy access software company Cybele Software launched the beta of z/Scope Anywhere version 7.0, a HTML5 and Javascript-based terminal emulator that lets any modern device securely connect to IBM S/390 Mainframe, AS/400, and Unix hosts through the browser in a conspicuously "Metro-style" interface with touch and virtual keyboard support.

Remote users connect to the z/Scope Anywhere server with any HTML5-complaint browser, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, as well as mobile and tablet browsers. Once connected, the server translates all of the interactions between the "old school" architecture and the "new school" client device. The z/Scope server software, meanwhile, can be run on Windows XP/Vista/7 and Windows Server 2003/2008 setups.

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Late in 2011, Hewlett Packard announced "Project Moonshot," an initiative to shrink data center size and energy consumption by using "hyperscale" low-power servers.

Initially, HP announced the project's low-power server design codenamed "Redstone" was based on Calxeda's ARM-based EnergyCore processors which used just 1.5 Watts of power per SoC. At the same time, ARM announced it was getting into the server business with its first ever 64-bit architecture. The excitement for ARM servers was high.

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In the world of Android-powered smartphones, Samsung is the reigning king. It sells approximately 40 percent of all the Android smartphones going to consumers today, and Forrester Research predicts proprietary Android builds (such as Samsung's TouchWiz) will actually surpass Google's Android ecosystem within three years. Of course, this fragments the market and causes trouble for developers and enterprises looking to create and deploy software for Android.

Monday, Samsung unveiled a new brand that will be applied only to Android devices that have been approved for enterprise use: SAFE, or "Samsung Approved for Enterprise." It's similar to Motorola's line of Enterprise Android devices called Motorola Business Ready, which debuted earlier this year.

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Last year, when Microsoft announced it was partnering with Nokia in Windows Phone development, it was widely expected to result in significant staff cutbacks in Nokia's research and development department. In fact, it was part of the agreement. Both Nokia and Microsoft said there would be an R&D handoff. Finland's Minister for Economic Affairs, Mauri Pekkarinen went so far as to say it would result in the biggest structural change that Finland has ever seen in the new technology sector.

Yesterday, Nokia CEO Steven Elop announced major R&D cutbacks...these 10,000 layoffs should have surprised no one.

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Western Digital has been around for decades, and is known primarily for its storage solutions. Thursday, WD unveiled a new line of home networking products that show the company's continued interest in personal media management and entertainment, a relatively small segment of their product line that currently includes the the WDTV product line and My Passport AV line.

The new My Net line includes five differently-equipped dual-band routers and an 8-port network switch which range from $79 to $350 in cost.

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