Latest Technology News

Writing is what I do for a living, but also for enjoyment. So I was intrigued when Moleskine for iPad popped up in Apple's App Store on April 15, 2011 (It's available for iPhone, too). The Moleskine notebook is the legendary journal of great writers.

Moleskine uses Ernest Hemingway in its marketing. He's not around to complain or dispute the pocket journal's value to him as a writer. During 1920s, Hemingway frequented several Paris cafés where other artists also used the journal to jot down thoughts, stories and sketches. Of course, this mystique is all marketing now. Use Moleskine, too, and you can be a great writer -- or at least feel part of the select community of artists.

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Finally, after three years, Google on Tuesday opened the United States maps in its Google Map Maker project to public editing.

Now, any user can submit or update mapping information in the browser-based Map Maker interface, from buildings and businesses to streets, footpaths, and bike trails.

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Google said Tuesday that it had begun to transcode all new videos on YouTube to the WebM codec, an open source effort supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and others. The technology supports high-quality video using the HTML5 video tag, and is available for use under a royalty-free license.

The site has been at work transcoding YouTube videos in the catalog since Google first open-sourced the VP8 codec -- the basis for WebM -- in May of last year. Currently about 30 percent of all videos that make up about 99 percent of the views on YouTube have been transcoded, Google says.

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San Fransisco-based social network Tagged has announced that it will buy the popular Social/Instant Messaging Client digsby.

Digsby is a multi-platform Social and Instant Messaging Client available for Windows (eventually due on Mac and Linux) and brings a combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber and Facebook Chat Accounts. Not only that, digsby delivers everything important from your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts and has a fully featured email client integrated. With more than 3 million registered users as of today it will remain a standalone product in the 100 million user community Tagged.

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The relationship between Apple and Samsung looks to be taking a dramatic turn for the worse, as Apple sued the company over alleged copying of its iPhone and iPad devices in Samsung's own products. Specifically named was the Galaxy Tab tablet as well as the Nexus S, Epic 4G and Galaxy S 4G smartphones.

Apple filed the suit on April 15 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and claims that the appearance and methods of operation of Samsung's devices directly violate patents held by Apple. Indeed, as of late the Korean electronics maker has mimicked Apple's popular products in its own efforts.

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"Blah, blah, blah" is the sound of analysts, bloggers and reporters sounding off about how Android handsets outsell iPhone -- true Google's OS is like Pac-Man gobbling smartphone market share. But cell phones are but one category among several vying to become the PC's platform successor. By that measure, at least in the United States, iOS' reach exceeds Android's by more than 59 percent, according to ComScore on "connected media devices" -- what I have longed called cloud-connected mobile devices.

ComScore measured the U.S. "unduplicated" install base of Android and iOS devices -- 23.8 million and 37.9 million, respectively. Apple claims to have shipped more than 100 million iOS devices -- iPads, iPhones and iPod touches -- but that's globally, and not all may still be in use. Assuming ComScore's methodology is accurate, install base is a good measure.

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LocalResponse on Tuesday launched the beta of its platform that lets businesses search and instantly respond to customers who have "checked in" at their location using Facebook, Twitter, foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt, Flickr, Instagram and more.

Social media has allowed companies to more directly engage with consumers and tackle customer service issues or even sales head on.

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Internet Explorer's security zones provide support for more than 70 key settings, which gives you very fine control over what websites can and can't do on your system. These settings are spread around several dialogs, though, and it can be difficult to get a feel for your current configuration, or spot any problems -- unless you get a little help from IEZoneAnalyzer 3.

If you'd like an overview of your current security settings, for instance, don't waste time browsing around the Tools > Internet Options dialog. Just launch IEZoneAnalyzer, choose "Internet" in the Security Zone box, click "View Effective Settings," and the program will display your configuration in a single dialog. This includes the source of each setting, so you'll know if a particular restriction was applied by your preferences, machine preferences or Group Policy. And a couple of clicks will export this data to the clipboard, a CSV file, or even directly to Excel, if you'd like to run further analysis or just save it for posterity.

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German software house Jumping Bytes Software has released PureSync 3.0 for Windows PCs, a file backup and sync tool. Version 3.0 includes a number of bug fixes for both Personal (free for non-commercial use) and Professional Editions (€14.95; about US $21.50), but significantly adds to the feature set of the paid-for Professional Edition.

PureSync 3.0 Professional, which is unlocked via a license file after purchase, now supports synchronizing over FTP, plus the ability both to compress and encrypt files. It's also now capable of copying open and locked files and can provide email notification of a finished job, complete with log.

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At the Philadelphia Police Academy on Tuesday, Motorola Solutions demonstrated the public safety LTE network technology it hopes to use to link up many of the cities that have already committed to constructing networks this year.

Philadelphia is part of the United States' East Coast megalopolis that is treated to the best in new communications technologies and infrastructure. Just about four months ago in December 2010, Verizon Wireless launched Philadelphia's 4G LTE network along with 38 other major metropolitan areas.

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Apple has released a minor update for its iTunes software application for Windows and Mac users. iTunes 10.2.2 features a number of minor bug fixes, plus closes several security holes in the Windows client (these holes were closed on the Mac platform in a recent update to the Safari browser).

The bug fixes resolve a problem whereby iTunes becomes unresponsive when syncing to an iPad. It also resolves a problem whereby syncing photos to iOS devices took longer than necessary, plus prevents video previews from skipping during playback on the iTunes store. The update also addresses other non-specified issues with stability and performance.

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There's a strange irony about i4i's patent case against Microsoft. Yesterday, lawyers representing both companies pled their different positions before the U.S. Supreme Court -- in one of the most important, and potentially precedent-setting, patent cases in recent memory. Microsoft' defense is essentially an indictment of the patent system, including operations of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Strangest coincidence: The agency was one of i4i's earliest and largest customers for the patented technology in dispute.

"The USPTO itself was the organization that realized the potential of the innovation of what we were doing," says i4i Chairman Loudon Owen. "They were our biggest customer, and the biggest rollout in history. It's a pretty cruel joke to turn around now and say that the patent office didn't understand the industry, considering they were investing an enormous amount trying to manage the whole patent process through our technology."

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Not more than a week after reports indicated developer UberMedia may be making moves to create its own Twitter-like short message service, Twitter may be preparing to play defense. The company is said to be in "advanced talks" to acquire UK-based TweetDeck for $50 million, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

UberMedia was said to be close to purchasing TweetDeck's assets. This was likely in an effort to either solidify its position as the largest third-party Twitter developer, or possibly to quickly bolster whatever competitor to the microblogging service it has been said to be working on.

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ALICANTE, Spain -- For as long as I've been a tech journalist -- and it's been a long time -- I always thought of the United States as the single biggest market for consumer electronics, followed by Japan with China rapidly rising in the ranks.

My oh my, have I been wrong. In fact, the biggest market is Europe. Last year, it accounted for 29 percent of the $913 billion worldwide market for "technical consumer products," a designation that also allows for counting appliances that are becoming smart and connected, too. Turns out we Yanks finished second, accounting for 21 percent of all goods sold. Third place went to China, with 12 percent share.

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One of the conditions put into the 2008 merger of satellite radio companies Sirius and XM by the Federal Communications Commission was that the merged company had to allow unaffiliated third parties to lease channels on a long-term basis (.PDF here). On Monday, nearly four years after the merger was first announced, the FCC announced the condition has been implemented at Sirius XM, and listed the first third-party lessees.

The first stations involved in the program are by no means commercial in nature and instead are geared toward providing programming for a very specific audience:

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