Tim Conneally

Mimo Monitors, the company that specializes in USB-powered mini-displays, launched its first two monitors that use capacitive touchscreens just like those used by smartphones and tablets.

Like Mimo's other products, both the Mimo Magic Touch and Magic Touch deluxe are powered by a single USB connection and are meant to give your PC additional screen real estate and an additional interface that doesn't take up much room. Unlike Mimo's other monitors, however, the Magic Touch line is styled to be more like 10.1" mobile tablets that can be used in a dock or as a hand held device.

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BlueStacks App Player, the Windows application capable of smoothly virtualizing Android apps has launched for Windows XP. The alpha version that launched in October only ran on Windows 7 machines, but the company says nearly 20 percent of Android users are also Windows XP users, so this new version is for them.

So far, BlueStacks App Player has been downloaded by 500,000 people, an impressive feat for a company that was unheard of just six months ago. With this new version, the application's reach will grow even larger.

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Network services company Infoblox on Monday released the results of a survey conducted by The Measurement Factory called the IPv6 Census, which revealed that support for IPv6 by .com, .net, and .org zones grew by 1,900 percent in one year, thanks in large part to the support by popular registrar GoDaddy.

Last February, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced that the last IPv4 addresses had been allocated, and that it would only be a matter of time before they ran out.

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The whole idea of "cutting the cord" means a household cancels its cable or satellite television subscription and relies on IP-based content delivery methods that offer greater choice of programming. The trend often doesn't focus on users actually getting rid of their televisions as well, even though it is entirely possible with technology that is available right now.

And I'm not talking about Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Amazon Video, Vudu, Ultraviolet, or any of the other pay-per-view or subscription streaming video services, even though they really could turn a mobile device into a TV replacement. I'm talking about the Hauppauge Broadway, which I spent this week testing.

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The Windows Phone "Mango" upgrade rollout continued last night as users of the the Samsung Focus 1.4 on AT&T began to receive updates. Now nearly complete, this upgrade has taken only two months to finish and includes half of all the Windows Phones across the globe.

Given Microsoft's position of simply being the software provider and licenser, and the fact that these upgrades span multiple OEMs and multiple global carriers, this upgrade has been carried out with remarkable speed.

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Today was the launch of Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the UK, bringing the first flagship Android device running Ice Cream Sandwich, the newest build of Google's mobile operating system to the British Isles.

The device is expected to launch in the United States on Verizon Wireless soon.

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Microsoft Surface, the touch interface for interactive advertisements and signage was given a massive technology overhaul and revealed at CES 2011. Instead of a huge, foot-thick table that utilized cameras to detect user touches, it shrunk down to just 4" in thickness, using "pixel sense" touch detection for 50 simultaneous points of contact.

Today, nearly a year after Surface 2.0 was revealed, Samsung's next generation Microsoft Surface device is finally up for sale.

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The ultrabook. It's a weak name for a compelling notebook design class that has been gaining popularity for a little over two years.

On Wednesday, still-in-the-PC-business Hewlett-Packard announced its contribution to the ultrabook class will be a business-focused model called the HP Folio 13.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Wednesday published its first two drafts for online privacy and tracking standards: the Tracking Preference Expression, which is a definition of the HTTP request header field "DNT" for expressing tracking on the Web; and Tracking Compliance and Scope, which defines the terminology of tracking preferences and scope in the DNT expression, and lays out ways that websites can comply with it.

These standards will let users set more universal preferences about whether or not their browsing data can be collected for tracking and advertising purposes. The W3C says this will help to re-establish trust between users and service providers in the marketplace.

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A former employee of Chinese telecommunications hardware company Huawei is taking the company to court in the UK on charges of racial discrimination. The former fiber optics specialist claims Huawei has unfairly replaced British employees with Chinese.

According to the UK Daily Mail, Judeson Peter, a Sri Lankan expatriate, was cut from his job in a massive round of layoffs in 2009, which occurred contemporaneously with a large influx of Chinese employees at Huawei's UK division.

Peter said the company's Human Resources department sent an email on April 21, 2009 which claimed that all expat employees would be safe from redundancy layoffs.

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There is no shortage of cloud file sharing and sync services today, and most of them focus on mobile accessibility: Dropbox with Dropsync, Box.net, SugarSync, YouSendIt…there are tons of options.

As a user, strong competition among service providers is a wonderful thing, so it's a great time to be a user of cloud file management systems.

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Google has made the source code and software stack for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) available for download on the Android Open-Source Project git servers. This means companies and developers who are working on their own devices based on the new version of Android can officially get to work.

"This is actually the source code for version 4.0.1 of Android, which is the specific version that will ship on the Galaxy Nexus, the first Android 4.0 device," said Android Open-Source Project software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru said on Monday. "In the source tree, you will find a device build target named 'full_maguro' that you can use to build a system image for Galaxy Nexus. Build configurations for other devices will come later."

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The folks at angel-backed startup Tout know that e-mail has still got a long future ahead of it, so they're trying to improve it by equipping individuals and small businesses with the powerful template-based messaging capabilities big enterprise would pay lots of money to get.

It's an "email-as-a-service" product not unlike Amazon Simple Email Service (SES.)

Users can access their email accounts through Tout's web interface to compose and send messages. It's not designed for informal personal communications, but instead for efficient, targeted business communications, so Tout lets users create and save templates of messages and organize them into categories (broadly analogous to campaigns.)

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The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on Monday officially opened a 30-day contest called the “The Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) Challenge: New Uses for Recycled Glass.” The CEA and EDF are looking for an environmentally friendly and financially viable way to recycle the tons of obsolete CRTs that have piled up in junkyards as the world moved on to flat panel display technology.

In the next ten years, the EDF says more than a billion pounds of old CRT televisions and monitors are expected to enter the United States recycling system alone, and the problem is that the glass used in CRTs contains lead, and that makes them unsuitable for glass-to-glass recycling and unsuitable for disposal in landfills.

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Veteran's Day is a special day of reverence for many Americans, it's the day when we pay our respects to our country's military service members for the demanding, difficult, and often painful work they have done for our country.

Today, we compiled a list of a few mobile applications that are of special interest to our armed services veterans.

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