Latest Technology News

Sadly we can't feature every new and updated application, but that doesn't mean that some of the apps we haven't covered aren't worth rounding up. There are a number of interesting applications that are worth some investigation and we've rounded up some of them put live during the last week.

doPDF 7.2.363 is a powerful free tool you can use to produce a PDF from just about any Windows application. Instead of sending it to your printer, simply print to the doPDF device. Creating a PDF is the ideal way of distributing a document for download, by email or for commercial printing. Just about any printer will take a PDF as your master.

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Everything we knew about breaking news has changed.

By this point, it's generally believed that CBS News Capitol Hill Producer Jill Jackson broke the stoy of Osama bin Laden's death with one tweet at 10:32pm EST. Whether Jill scooped her own network is a question for another time, but the point is this: One tweet, retweeted by me and thousands of others, came more than an hour before the President of the United States took the podium and confirmed what we'd all read.

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Researchers from Queen's University in Ontario Canada this week unveiled a prototype of their "paperphone," a smartphone that has a flexible e-paper display instead of an LCD/TFT touchscreen.

The prototype consists of a 3.7" electrophoretic E Ink display rigged up with 2" bi-directional bend sensors so that the user interface can respond when the screen is bent. The machine was built with E Ink's Broadsheet AM300 prototyping kit, Gumstix processor and Arduino microcontroller. All of the sensor recognition takes place in a connected laptop running Cycling 74's Max 5 programming environment.

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As Sony is in the final stages of getting the PlayStation Network back online, a new threat may be emerging. People with knowledge of the IRC chat room where hackers have been congregating to discuss the attacks are discussing a new effort, CNET reported late Thursday.

This news comes amid word from Sony that it had entered "the final stages of internal testing of the new system," likely indicating PSN would be back up in a matter of days. The issue also has prompted a letter from Sony chairman and CEO Sir Howard Stringer, who reiterated that the company was working "around the clock" on the issue.

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Has it only been a week since Hulu Plus came to Xbox 360 via Xbox Live? It seems so much longer. I'm more than just a little excited about it, if you can't tell.

A friend of mine recently bought a Roku player, and I asked him what he thought about the Hulu experience. He wasn't very happy about it, citing the lack of previous seasons for some of his favorite shows -- then there is the number of commercials. I personally didn't really see those as negatives, and so when Hulu Plus finally arrived on Xbox 360 I was anxious to try it out.

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Trying to cut down on paper waste, Seattle yesterday launched the United States' first yellow pages opt-out website. The city's biggest commercial phone book distributor, Dex One, filed for a restraining order against the city the same day.

Commercial "yellow pages" phone books are almost totally irrelevant to anyone with a search engine at their fingertips, yet they are still made and distributed on a massive scale.

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The online Remember The Milk service is one of the easiest and most popular ways to keep track of shopping lists, manage a list of thing that need to be done and anything else that needs to be remembered. An iOS app has been available for some time, but now Remember The Milk 2.0.0 has been released as a universal app with vastly improved support for the iPad.

The app has been completely redesigned from scratch to come up with something that feels perfect for the iPad's larger screen. An iPad specific version of Remember The Milk has been a long time coming, but it seems as though the wait has been well worth it. This is a polished piece of software. it is something of a shame to find that no new features have been added in the transition to becoming a fully-fledged iPad app, but Remember The Milk was already leader of the pack in its field.

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Why purchase a brand new computer when you might be able to save serious cash by extending the life of your existing model through a judicious upgrade or two? Memory is one of the most cost-effective upgrades -- doubling your system RAM to 2GB or more can really make a difference, but the emergence of affordable SSD drives offers an even bigger fillip, with programs and your OS loading in a fraction of the time they used to.

Of course, shelling out for a new hard drive is one thing, migrating the contents of your old hard drive to the new one is quite another. In this roundup we've identified a number of apps that can help you upgrade with the minimum of fuss. Instead of covering them separately, however, we've identified several scenarios you might face when performing an upgrade. Just select the scenario that applies to you, and read on for our choice of apps, many of them free, that can make your upgrading process as simple as possible.

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Diagnosing Windows problems on your own PC can be difficult. But understanding what's happening on a friend's system, far away, is a far greater challenge. Especially if they're less than technical, and unable to answer even basic troubleshooting questions without a lot of help.

So what should you do? It's surprisingly easy: just follow Microsoft's lead. The company has developed a Premier Support Reporting Tool that makes it easy to collect a huge amount of data on just about any PC. And if you use it, too, the program will make it much easier to figure out exactly what's going on with a remote computer system.

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Yes, you're a minority. But do you feel like an individualist -- that grand defiant person who refuses to be one of the sheep? Or are you embarrassed to take your tablet out for fear the pad people will scoff at you? If it's any consolation, your numbers are growing ever so slightly -- from 9 out of 10 (based on Apple assertions) just two months ago. If there's safety in numbers, you've got a long way to go yet.

Eighty-two percent of U.S. tablet owners are pad people -- er, iPad owners, Nielsen revealed on May 5. But that's not you. You're more likely to be an "other" tablet owner than any, well, other. That category accounts for 9 percent of U.S. owners -- right, nearly one in 10. The next lot of you own Samsung Galaxy Tab (4 percent). Another 3 percent own the Dell Streak and 2 percent the Motorola XOOM. Well, so much for Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" pulling away people from iPad, eh.

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This week, social media marketing company mBlast released a free Web-based tool called mPact Free that lets users search for the most influential people in the media by subject matter.

MBlast is offering the solution as an alternative to social media "scoring" services like Klout, which rank people according to the amount of influence they have over the public, thereby singling out the most desirable people for marketing companies to target. The belief is that a company can establish a positive relationship with a particular "influencer" in hopes that that person will organically spread the word about the company's products or services.

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Global smartphone shipments grew 79.7 percent in first quarter 2011, according to IDC, which released numbers today. Apple moved into second place, pushing ahead of ailing Research in Motion and closing the distance on Nokia. Manufacturers shipped 99.6 million smartphones in the quarter, up from 55.4 million units a year earlier.

Most surprising is Apple's change with respect to Nokia. In Q1 2010, 12.8 million units separated the two handset manufacturers. Last quarter, Apple closed the distance to 5.5 million. Given Nokia's transition to Windows Phone 7 and Apple's continued carrier expansion, particularly China and the United States, it's conceivable Apple could match or pull ahead of Nokia during 2011.

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Skype once again finds itself as the target of a possible buyout, as both Google and Facebook have been said to seeking either a joint venture with the company or an outright acquisition. Any deal is said to be worth some $3 to 4 billion according to Reuters sources.

The company is also in the midst of seeking an initial public offering, which could raise up to $1 billion for the company. That is expected to take place sometime in the second half of this year, and it is not clear if the talks with either company may cause Skype to change plans or scrap the idea altogether.

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Google Earth for Android has been available for just over a year, giving mobile users an on-the-go access to the 3D mapping software previously only available for full desktop operating systems.

With an update to Google Earth for Android that rolled out on Thursday, Google unveiled a version of the software optimized for Android tablets running Honeycomb (Android 3.0) in addition to the existant version for smartphones running 2.1 and up.

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Let's say your company wants to produce smartphone apps. On the conference room white board, developers have laid out the beginnings of a small-screen game that will make Angry Birds look like Ms. Pacman. Everyone's pretty excited.

You don't have much budget, so you're going to have to start by focusing on one platform and fan out to others once you're successful. Time to bet on a horse, and start immersing yourself in the ecosystem.

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