Tim Conneally

Cloud-based asset management platform Panorama9 officially launched support for Linux and Mac OS machines on Wednesday, broadly increasing the amount of hardware covered in the still very young IT management dashboard.

Panorama9, a new player in the enterprise services space, provides IT asset and network management as a non-contract, subscription-based service beginning at $1.50 per user per month. The company claims it can be set up and deployed in as little as five minutes.

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California-based camera company GoPro announced on Wednesday the third generation of its popular ruggedized, wearable video camera, the HD Hero3, and a whole lineup of new hardware for the 2012 holiday season.

GoPro's cameras up until now have been rather boxy, and with the Hero2's accessory to add Wi-Fi connectivity, the little cameras became bulky things indeed. This new generation of cameras, however, is half the size of previous models and has the Wi-Fi capability built in. Functionality has been improved while size has been reduced. It's a great combination for a generational upgrade.

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Tuesday afternoon, seven members of Microsoft's Surface team, led by General Manager Panos Panay, fielded questions from the public in an "ask me anything" (AMA) forum on popular Web community Reddit.

In the two-hour session on Reddit, the team was hit with several hundred questions about Surface; of which, about 50 were directly addressed. Like the United States Presidential debates, there is a considerable amount of equivocation and evasion involved in this sort of question and answer session, so some questions get glossed over with no mention. This happened quite frequently with two questions in particular: Why is there no NFC (near field communications) and why does it cost as much as it does? Neither was directly answered.

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Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder of Russian security company Kaspersky Lab announced on Tuesday that his company is building its own operating system specifically for industrial control systems for critical infrastructure such as nuclear power and other energy supply companies, transportation control facilities, and financial and telecommunications systems.

With this work, Kaspersky is addressing deep-seated fears that a state-sponsored cyber weapon could take down a country's energy grid through its supervisory, control, and data acquisition (SCADA) networks. The subject has been a concern for more than a decade, and five years ago, a team of whitehat security experts made waves when they claimed to have taken down an industrial power grid in just one day through the old standard social engineering method.

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Ever since a 2009 article in the Archives of General Psychiatry declared bullying may make kids psychotic, the topic of bullying online and in schools has become one of increasing interest among policymakers and parents.

Today, the Anne Arundel County Police Department in Maryland has rolled out an Android application called AACoPD Speak Out that lets county students and their families communicate directly with the Anne Arundel County Police School Resource Unit specifically about instances of bullying.

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My hands plunge into a beaten-up cardboard box sitting atop a black flea market chest of drawers, pulling out one rarity after another…Tigervision's "King Kong," Spectravision's "Mangia," a prototype of Spy Hunter for paddle & keypad controllers, it's every rare game that ever existed and a whole lot of ones that have never been seen before. I am elated.

Then, of course, I wake up.

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With Softbank's majority stake acquisition of Sprint Nextel Corporation, the amount of foreign interest in the United States wireless market is greatly expanded. On the other side of the coin, wholly-American owned wireless companies are beginning to look like an endangered species.

The two largest US carriers, Verizon Wireless and AT&T are mostly owned by American companies, but based upon first quarter 2012 market share figures (source: Strategy Analytics) and corporate ownership percentages, we estimate that 45.3 percent of the United States' wireless market will be controlled by foreign multinational companies pending the regulatory approval of SoftBank's acquisition of Sprint. As the next four years fan out, we must turn our eyes to the smaller national competitors and regional carriers and see how they merge and change.

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In advance of Windows 8 Day on October 26, the big computer makers are all rolling out incrementally updated models in their different PC lines to support the touch activities central to Windows 8. Friday, long-running Texas PC maker Dell announced it had put up three new touch-enabled PCs for pre-order in the U.S., which will ship on October 26.

The three new PCs fall under the category of "seen it before, but not in this exact way," and they include the XPS 12 convertible notebook with the "spinning target" hinged display we first saw on the Inspiron Duo two years ago; the XPS One 27 All-in-one PC, and the Inspiron One 23 All-in-one, both of which had launched previously, except without the touchscreens.

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A couple of months ago, BetaNews contributor Mihaita Bamburic complained that he couldn't do his engineering work on any tablet, and what he really needed was a tablet with at least a 15-inch touchscreen. Sony appears to have met my colleague's demands with five inches to spare in a new tablet-ish PC of massive size. Sony calls it the Vaio Tap 20 PC...the first "mobile tabletop PC."

Imagine if you took a desktop all-in-one PC and slapped a battery inside its chassis. That's essentially the Vaio Tap 20. It has a 20-inch screen (1600x900) with 10-point multi-touch recognition and it has a built-in stand which allows it to be propped up and used as a traditional all-in-one PC when not being used as a pseudo-laptop-tablet thingy.

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Back in June, computer maker Acer launched its Aspire Timeline Ultra M5 line of Windows 7 Ultrabooks which came with a clause for $15 Windows 8 upgrade. Today, four months later and just a couple of weeks ahead of the official launch of Windows 8, Acer has debuted new Aspire M5 Ultrabooks equipped with a 10-point multitouch display to go with the new OS.

Like the M5 models unveiled last June, the new M5s come with either 14" or 15" displays, third generation Intel Core i3 or i5 processors, 500GB HDD/20GB SSD storage configuration plus optical drives, and a promised 8 hours of battery life. In case the same "M5" name didn't give it away, I'll make it clear, these are practically the same notebook spec-wise, just with the added touchscreen, Windows 8 installed out of the box, and no "Timeline" in the name.

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It's no iPad Mini, but it is a mini alternative to one of the more popular smartphones on the market today, Samsung's Galaxy S III. The Galaxy S III Mini is smaller in size and specs than its older brother, and is clearly gunning for the entry-level smartphone consumer. Unfortunately, because of its modest bag of tricks, putting it next to the Galaxy S III is kind of an unrealistic comparison and this device could easily fall behind last year's Galaxy S2.

The Galaxy S III Mini has a 4" WVGA Super AMOLED touchscreen, which is more than three quarters of an inch smaller than the screen on the full-sized Galaxy S III. This reduced screen size helps shrink the overall footprint of the device by two tenths of a square inch (.6" smaller length x .3" smaller width.) It's not a tremendous reduction in size, but it defies the general trend of smartphones going bigger.

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Perennial Evernote runner-up Springpad on Thursday rolled out an update to its note-taking Android and Web apps, pushing them out ahead of the company's iOS app in functionality, and taking better advantage of the latest build of Google's Android, Jelly Bean.

The update brings some added functionality to Springpad users, including actionable notifications for Android users running Jelly Bean, notebooks and items that can be manually re-ordered, and a new Board view that lets users drag and drop content in a scrapbook-type interface.

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United States wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corporation could be an acquisition target for Japan's third-largest mobile carrier Softbank Corp, the U.S. wireless carrier confirmed on Thursday. Sprint has publicly acknowledged that the two companies are "in discussions" over a SoftBank investment, but the exact nature of this investment has not been clarified.

The competitive landscape of wireless networks in the United States is a difficult one, especially with the high cost of building 4G network infrastructure versus the general scarcity of wireless spectrum licenses. The dominant spectrum holders are the two networks with the most subscribers: Verizon Wireless and AT&T. To compete, the smaller national carriers have to look for new growth opportunities.

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Months after releasing the Wi-Fi controller pack for its Hero2 action sports cameras, GoPro on Tuesday finally released the first version of the mobile app to go along with it.

The GoPro App gives users full control of all camera settings, a live video preview window, and access to GoPro's "social-ish" Photo and Video of the Day site. The app is free and compatible with iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S (iOS 4.3 & 5), iPod Touch 4 (iOS 4.3 & 5), and iPad 1, 2 & 3 (iOS 4.3 & 5). It is available in the iTunes app store right now.

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Video game accessory company PowerA on Tuesday announced the retail availability of Moga, the company's dual analog game controller for Android 2.3+ handsets. The device will be available for $49.99 through major retailers and national wireless carrier T-Mobile beginning on October 21.

Last year, I said the time was right for an Android-based video game console, but not much has been done to bring my assertion into reality. Moga doesn't bring us any closer to a traditional video game console powered by Android.

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