Sarkozy: An unregulated Internet is not democracy, but populism
Just two days ahead of the 37th G8 Summit, world leaders met in Paris on Tuesday with private sector technology leaders for the first ever E>G8 Forum. The "explicit goal" of the forum is to gather the leading players of the digital ecosystem for plenary sessions, town hall meetings, and workshops to inform the heads of the G8 nations, and enrich their discussions at the Summit.
The overall theme of the Forum is "The Internet: Accelerating Growth," and included sessions today about the Internet's effect on economic growth, society, education, intellectual property, and culture.
Catching up to Kindle and iPad, Barnes & Noble introduces new touchscreen Nook
Barnes and Noble on Tuesday unveiled its new touchscreen Nook Simple Touch e-reader, the company's first Nook to lack a color screen and Android branding.
Yesterday, e-reader company Kobo introduced the Kobo eReader Touch Edition which is bound for Borders in the U.S. and Indigo in Canada later this month for $129.99. Today, Barnes and Noble revealed its answer to that device, with very similar specs and a price only $10 higher.
Windows Phone Mango: a luxury smartphone brand?
At an event in New York City on Tuesday, Microsoft announced the first new version of Windows Phone, version 7.5 (also known as "Mango") will be released on new devices this fall, and it will be available as a free update to all Windows Phone 7 devices at that time as well.
Even though Windows Phone Mango includes "more than 500 new features", some of which were shown off today, a major factor contributing to Mango's importance is the scale of this release.
California State University opts for $49 e-book over expensive biology textbook
Nature Publishing Group and California State University (CSU) on Tuesday announced a three-year partnership that will eliminate paper textbooks from certain classes, and replace them with interactive e-books instead.
College textbooks are some of the most expensive pieces of disposable literature around. A book that a student uses for approximately four and a half months can cost as much as $200, and every semester, students spend upwards of $1000 just on the textbooks for their classes.
Payments and the disappearing cash register: Your phone is your wallet
Betanews is taking an extended look at how mobile and wireless technology are affecting retail and the exchange of money between consumers and businesses. We'll be examining such trends as the shift to digital payment systems, near field communications (NFC), new concepts in retail cash registers, as well as Point of Sale software and retail data management and security. All of these factors will contribute to the eventual obsolescence of the old-fashioned cash till.
For more than six years, Visa has offered a contactless, NFC-based (near field communications) payment system in select North American markets. This Fall, as a part of its new Digital Wallet initiative, this contactless payment system will be available to customers across the United States.
Kobo fights Kindle and Nook with new touchscreen e-reader
E-reader company Kobo on Monday revealed a new touchscreen e-reader that will continue the company's tradition of low-cost but widely distributed e-reading alternatives to Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.
The new Kobo eReader Touch Edition sports a 6" E Ink Pearl display endowed with Neonode zForce infrared touch technology. It runs on a Freescale i.MX508 processor and has 1GB of built-in storage with a microSD slot that supports cards up to 32GB in size.
10 best apps for Galaxy Tab 10.1, Xoom, and Android Honeycomb in general
Quickoffice HD
You'd hope an app with a hefty $16.99 pricetag would have a lot of features. Fortunately, Quickoffice Pro HD has the guns to back up the expense. Essentially a cloud-based Office suite, you hook up your Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, or MobileMe accounts to QuickOffice, and then you can create, access and share Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. One of my favorite features in QuickOffice is its speech recognition, so if you aren't comfortable with typing on a tablet yet, and you don't have a bluetooth keyboard, you can dictate blocks of text.
Spectral Souls
Another expensive app at $14.76, Spectral Souls is a full-scale tactical role playing game that shines especially brightly because it's exclusive to Android. Android doesn't yet have anything quite as graphically mind-blowing as Infinity Blade on iOS, but Spectral Souls is no less impressive thanks to its sheer size. Hyperdevbox Studio says it has "hundreds of hours" of gameplay, 82 characters, and 52 different soundtracks.
As Adobe gets sued for killing FreeHand, Corel gently offers its alternatives
A group representing over 5,000 users of vector drawing software FreeHand has filed a class action lawsuit against Adobe Inc. in the California District Court for antitrust violations.
Adobe almost acquired FreeHand in 1994 when it acquired Aldus, but the Federal Trade Commission put a decade-long moratorium on the acquisition. Like clockwork, when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, it acquired FreeHand, because Macromedia had absorbed FreeHand's then-owner Altsys.
BlackBerry Partners Fund invests in Sharks, Zombies, and iOS analytics
Canadian mobile gaming company Fuse Powered Inc., who has released such iOS-based games as Dawn of the Dead, Jaws, and Swarm Killer, announced on Thursday that it had received $2 million in seed funding from the BlackBerry Partners Fund and NFQ Ventures.
The BlackBerry Partners Fund was created three years ago to address the rapid growth of mobile computing, and to invest capital, resources and expertise in "exceptional entrepreneurs around the world who are shaping the future of the mobile eco-system."
E-books now more popular than books, says Amazon
In three and a half years, Amazon's Kindle has grown from a single dedicated e-reader to a full-blown e-book platform available on nearly every popular operating system. Today, Amazon announced that Kindle-format e-books have finally begun to outsell traditional paper-bound books.
Since April 1, 2011, Amazon has been selling 105 Kindle books for every 100 print books it sells. It's only a small lead, but just one year ago, Amazon was only selling 60 Kindle books to every 100 paper books, so sales growth has been extremely rapid.
An honest appraisal of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1
If you don't read Betanews often, or don't really get a feel for my personality through my writing, allow me to give you a brief introduction that is also something of a disclosure of bias.
My name is Tim Conneally, I happen to own a television, computer monitor, and Android smartphone made by Samsung, and like 5,000 other lucky slobs, I got a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 simply by being present at Google I/O 2011.
Verizon announces Motorola Droid X2: Dual-core, but not 4G
Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless on Wednesday unveiled the Motorola Droid X2, the latest flagship Android smartphone under the "Droid" brand and follow up to last year's Droid X.
In most respects, the Droid X (shown above on the left), and the Droid X2 are identical. Their size, weight, RAM and onboard memory, camera, and launch price are exactly the same. However, the Droid X2 has received a moderate improvement in certain important areas.
Microsoft: IE9 security warnings cut malware threat 95%
Since 2008, Microsoft has included a reputation-based anti-phishing and anti-malware tool in Internet Explorer called SmartScreen Filter. In IE9, the latest version of Microsoft's browser, SmartScreen got a bump in functionality and began to check the reputation of applications as well. Today, the IE9 security team released some interesting data culled from all of SmartScreen's app reputation queries.
According to the team, 1 in 14 programs that are downloaded are later determined to be malware, and in most cases, the malicious software was installed as a result of good old fashioned social engineering.
Sony offers virtual goods as payback for PlayStation Network outage: a worthy refund?
To compensate for the 24-day long outage of the Playstation Network that occurred as a result of a major security compromise, Sony Computer Entertainment is offering PSN users a "welcome back" package of free content.
SCEA is calling it a "customer appreciation program" that is available to all registered PSN users in the US and Canada. For 30 days after the PlayStation Store is restored, users can download and keep two games for either the PS3 or PSP, including: Dead Nation, inFAMOUS, LittleBigPlanet, Super Stardust HD, and Wipeout HD + Fury (PS3) or LittleBigPlanet PSP, ModNation Racers, Pursuit Force, or Killzone Liberation (PSP).
VMware unveils Web app management service for Google apps, Salesforce, more
VMware on Tuesday unveiled Horizon App Manager, an IT solution for provisioning and managing public and private cloud-based services.
At TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, Microsoft put a great deal of emphasis on the accelerating adoption of cloud-based SaaS solutions among corporations who want the ability to deliver and run applications on the widest array of hardware possible. VMware's Horizon App Manager looks to tackle the control, visibility, and compliance aspect of these services.
Tim's Bio
Tim Conneally was born into dumpster tech. His father was an ARPANET research pioneer and equipped his kids with discarded tech gear, second-hand musical instruments, and government issue foreign language instruction tapes. After years of building Frankenstein computers from rubbish and playing raucous music in clubs across the country (and briefly on MTV) Tim grew into an adult with deep, twisted roots and an eye on the future. He most passionately covers mobile technology, user interfaces and applications, the science and policy of the wireless world, and watching different technologies shrink and converge.
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