Latest Technology News

Intel on Monday announced the availability of its "Oak Trail" Atom processors, designed for use in mobile tablets, convertible notebooks, and fanless environments that run Windows, Chrome OS, or Meego.

With more than 35 design wins to its name so far, Intel's Oak Trail Atom chipset (Z670) is expected to make its first appearance next month, and continue to appear throughout 2011.
Companies such as Asus, Samsung, Evolve III, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Motion Computing, Razer, and Viliv have all announced products based on the platform.

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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, software firewalls would essentially carry out just a single task: monitoring your network, and blocking any unauthorised connections. That's no longer enough to make your product stand out from the crowd, though, and firewalls like Online Armor 5.0 now cram in so many other functions and features -- keylogging detection, behaviour monitoring, browsing protection, script blocking and more -- that they begin to look more like security suites.

The extra functionality is apparent as soon as you launch the Online Armor installer. This doesn't simply unpack its files; its Safety Check Wizard first scans your PC for known dangerous processes that might interfere with the program's operation. This takes a while -- 55 minutes on our test PC -- but is probably worth it, just to be sure that we were starting with a clean system (although if you know you're malware-free then the wizard can be skipped altogether).

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This morning, I tweeted San Francisco Chronicle article "1 million homes cut cable, switch to antenna, Web," which showed up in my RSS feeds. The story is actually three days old. A surprising number of people tweet-replied that they had cut the cable, completely or partially. I've been thinking about doing the same and wondered about Betanews readers. Would you go or have gone from cable to online video streaming (from networks and services like Hulu or Netflix) and over-the-air HD broadcasts?

You can answer the question in comments or email joewilcox at gmail dot com. I'll be swapping out that email address in a day or so as I seek to create, at least temporarily, a Google-free zone. Messages will forward after the switch. Your answer could benefit other people considering a similar move, but struggling to cross that psychological barrier of "What will I give up?"

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At the NAB Show in Las Vegas on Monday, Mushroom Networks debuted the Teleporter live video streaming rig, a portable video streaming module that bonds the connections of multiple cellular data modems for live HD video streaming.

Since early last year, a handful of companies have marketed their own "streaming backpacks" as cost-effective solutions for enabling live, on site video feeds that don't require a satellite truck and a news team of half a dozen people. The Ustream Livepack, and KIT Digital's Kyte LivePro Unwired, for example, utilize multiple cellular data lines to transmit video signals from a handheld camera to the Web or to television stations and can be run by a crew as small as one person.

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It was recently revealed that one of Windows 8's new features will be the ability of Windows Aero to automatically adapt the color of Aero Glass to match the desktop background, so, for example, if you set a background that's predominantly red, Windows Aero will adjust its color so your semi-transparent windows blend in with the new backdrop.

The good news for Windows 7 and Vista users -- particularly if you're the kind of person whose desktop changes with the weather (or at random intervals) -- is that this feature is available now for free. The tool in question is Aura, which was recently updated for a second beta release.

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Microsoft on Monday offered new information about the next version of its enterprise resource planning software, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, and revealed that beta testing for the suite is expected to begin this month.

Here's a point by point list of the improvements that Microsoft announced today:

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Are you thinking of developing apps for Honeycomb, or perhaps are waiting to buy an Android 3.0 tablet? Perhaps you should reconsider iPad. Gartner claims that Apple's iOS will dominate the media tablet operating system market at least through 2015. If the analyst firm is right, Apple's tablet -- and broader mobile platform -- will be the premiere choice for the foreseeable future and the one where the larger number of apps will be.

Of course, as I've been repeatedly writing, the categories media tablet and smartphone are in such huge flux, making any prediction is questionable at best. However, with iPad selling so well and most Honeycomb tablets MIA until at least summer, this forecast is more credible than Gartner's predictions about smartphones in 2015 -- at least in the short term.

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Adobe is fully integrating mobile tablets into Photoshop CS5, turning them into powerful peripherals for content creation and display. On Monday, Adobe announced the Photoshop Touch SDK, and three iPad applications (Color Lava, Eazel, and Nav) which show the impressive new capabilities that an iPad or touchscreen tablet can give your Photoshop setup.

With the launch of the iPad 2 earlier this year, Apple launched iPad-optimized versions of Garageband and iMovie, two pieces of software that finally began to prove mobile tablets aren't just for content consumption, but also content creation. But those apps, like Photoshop for iPad, are just pared down versions of desktop software meant to stand on their own.

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Microsoft's big web developer event, MIX11, unofficially begins tomorrow, with the big action taking place from April 12-14 in Las Vegas. It's Microsoft's most important MIX ever, because of the user interface and user experience (UX) changes accompanying the tumultuous move from the PC era to cloud-connected devices. Then there is Microsoft's increased emphasis on making you the natural user interface for all CPU-driven devices.

This year's keynoters include three important Microsoft execs:  Joe Belfiore (Windows Phone), Scott Guthrie (.NET development) and Dean Hachamovitch (Internet Explorer). Sessions cover a wide range of Microsoft development tools or platforms, including Azure, IE, Silverlight and Windows Phone. Like the last two years, attendees can expect to hear lots about natural user interfaces, cutely referred to as NUIs.

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Or should that be goose is cooked? Perhaps you have a better cliché.

It's a good week to end with the question. On Tuesday, Gartner told CIOs to get off their butts and start adopting tablets right away. Today, a Google AdMob survey revealed that 28 percent of tablet owners have made the device their primacy PC. Gartner's recommendation cuts into Microsoft's core business. The tablet survey foreshadows dramatic consumer, and eventually business, behavioral changes ahead.

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Google's planned $700 million acquisition of flight data provider ITA was given the go-ahead by the justice department on Friday, but not without some key concessions. One of them may erase any competitive advantage from the deal: it will require to both develop and license travel software as a result.

For a period of five years, the company will be required to provide these licenses "on commercially reasonable terms." Google will also be required to keep investments in research and development at similar levels to past years for those five years as well.

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Aiming to take on the iPad where few competitors have -- on price -- Acer on Friday said that it would begin shipping its Iconia Tab tablet for $449 later this month. The device sports a 10.1-inch screen, a NVIDIA 1GHz dual-core processor, 16GB of storage and runs on Android 3.0 "Honeycomb."

The Iconia Tab's feature set will put it on par with Apple's top-selling tablet, and will be one of the few that sells at a lower price yet matches the iPad on features. Tablet manufacturers have so far struggled to produce devices that could viably compete with Apple's tablet, likely due to economies of scale.

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The list of victims in last week's security breach at email marketing firm Epsilon Interactive continues to grow, expanding to as many as 50 companies and exposing thousands -perhaps even millions- of customers' names and email addresses to potential spammers and phishing scammers.

Email marketing expert and CEO of Zeta Interactive, Al DiGuido served as CEO for Epsilon Interactive from 2001-2007. On Friday, he gave us his insight into what possibly went wrong at Epsilon and what could have been done to prevent the breach.

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Skype for Windows has been updated to version 5.3, with the latest release offering a number of enhancements including better quality video during calls received from mobile devices. Skype improved calling by moving the video rotation tasks from the mobile device to the computer receiving the call, making it possible to send higher resolution video and therefore producing a better overall video call experience.

Other new features include the return of the icon that appears in reduced-size contact cards, making possible to see the online stats of contacts at a glance. It is now also possible to change conversation topic by clicking the 'i' button that appears in the header of all conversations.

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There are many possible reasons why a PC might suffer from audio glitches, like pops, crackles or dropouts. And so troubleshooting the problem often becomes a matter of trial and error, where you'll maybe close down every possible background process that you can in an effort to find anything that might help.

LatencyMon offers a much simpler solution. The program uses Microsoft's Event Tracing for Windows technology to monitor what's happening on your PC, and in just a few minutes can produce a detailed report that will highlight some of the processes and drivers that are the most likely cause of your audio issues.

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