At international tech tradeshow CeBIT on Tuesday, eye tracking technology company Tobii took the wraps off its first fully functional prototype notebook with integrated eye control. The company collaborated with PC maker Lenovo to include "eye control" technology on top of the standard keyboard/trackpad layout.

Another example of the growing sophistication of natural user interfaces, Tobii's eye control system lets users control the mouse pointer, select windows from exposé view, automatically scroll through a website, and create special eye controlled gadgets in a Windows sidebar.

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The question is meant for people who bought or received the original iPad since its release in April 2010. See, I keep meeting people who gave up iPad -- and not because they're preparing to buy its successor, which geekdom expects will be announced tomorrow. I consistently hear giver-uppers say they no longer used Apple's tablet much, or at all.

I sold my iPad in December, mainly because my smartphone, the Google-branded Nexus S, proved to be good enough on the go and the 11.6-inch MacBook Air otherwise was light enough and offered more capabilities (granted reading ebooks or from the browser is more enjoyable on iPad). I know of at least two other MBA users who ditched iPad for similar reasons. Disclosure: I'm not exactly feeling good about the Air quality today. After several days of ongoing program crashes, the laptop locked up and won't bootup past the grey system check screen. If there wasn't flash memory in the thing, I would assume it was hard drive failure. But that's topic for another post.

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If you want to back up a CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc, then the ISO file offers the opportunity to take advantage of all that spare capacity on your backup drive, using that as a storage medium for your backed up discs. ISO files are exact images of discs, which also comes in handy when you, or someone else, wants to distribute a CD without incurring the costs of burning a disc and posting it.

Windows 7 has some limited support for ISO files built-in: you can create an ISO file from a disc, or burn a disc from an ISO file using tools built into the OS, but what if you're using an earlier version of Windows, or you've been handed a disc image in a format other than ISO? The quick, simple and completely free answer is ISO Workshop, a new release from Glorylogic.

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If you've got a small business odds are very high that you use Intuit's QuickBooks for your accounting. You may have figured out by now that things go wrong with QuickBooks now and then. On occasion, they go wrong to the point of corrupting your database.

You might not be able to open your company file. Perhaps QuickBooks says it's "Not a QuickBooks data file or is damaged", perhaps along with a helpful code like "(-6189, -83)."

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HP today announced a new direct digital dispensing design for medical research that utilizes inkjet printheads to accurately apportion tiny doses of drugs.

In the fields of medicine and biotechnology, the process of drug discovery is long, costly, difficult, and sometimes wasteful. We often hear it said that each new drug costs about $1.3 billion to develop. HP today said pharmaceutical companies are spending upwards of $16 billion a year in drug discovery research.

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Apple seems to be set to release a cheaper iPhone after the company's executives made some uncharacteristically frank comments during an analyst meeting with Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. Chief operating officer Tim Cook appears to have all but confirmed a cheaper iPhone is in the works.

Cook told Sacconaghi that the Cupertino company wants its iPhone to not be just a device "for the rich," and said the company is planning "clever" things for the prepaid market. He acknowledged that China, a major mobile market which the company is now focusing heavily on, is a country which has a large prepay base.

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Google was still working to restore access to its Gmail e-mail service to a handful of customers on Monday, a day after an outage prevented a few users from accessing their e-mails. A message posted to the Google Apps status page at 10:40pm Eastern Sunday said engineers were "working to restore full access," and full access would be restored in the "near future."

No update had been provided as to if the issue had been fully resolved, although the company noted the issue affected only .08% of the total Gmail user base.

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Microsoft on Monday announced that its new cloud PC management solution, Windows Intune, will be launched in its first complete RTM build on March 23 at the Microsoft Management Summit, and will be commercially available in more than 35 countries thereafter.

Windows Intune is a cloud-based desktop management solution which lets IT techs manage remote systems through their browser. Microsoft is marketing Intune toward two different types of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs.) First, companies that don't yet have a PC management infrastructure, and want one that won't incur a big material cost; Second, companies that have lots of "virtual" and remote employees.

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When it comes to desktop image editing, Photoshop is the undoubted king. However, when an iOS version of the popular editing software was released, many users were left a little disappointed. TouchUp for iPad is another image editing tool which not only makes it possible to make subtle adjustments to enhance imperfect pictures, but also to make more creative edits for greater impact.

The app can be used to work with any of the images in your photo library, but it also works in conjunction with Apple's Camera Connection Kit so you can pull images straight from your digital camera.

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Today, AT&T announced that, starting March 6, it will carry Amazon's Kindle reader in its retail stores nationwide. Timing is interesting, given iPad 2's imminent launch and Apple App Store subscription changes that could compel Amazon to curtail or even stop distribution of Kindle software for iOS devices. Buyers considering iPad in AT&T stores will now have option of the lower-cost and ebook reading-dedicated Kindle.

Retail distribution isn't new for Kindle, which I've seen available here in San Diego from Best Buy and Microsoft Store. Given that Barnes & Noble and Sony sell their readers at retail, Amazon levels the competitive field for people that want to hold and experience Kindle.

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Security researchers at Sophos Labs last week discovered a new, "still in beta" backdoor Trojan targeting Mac OS.

The Trojan, identified as BlackHoleRAT, is a variant of the free "remote administration tool" darkComet RAT for Windows, and gives the administrator the ability to place text files on the desktop, send restart, shutdown or sleep commands, to run shell commands, to place a full-screen window with a message that forces a reboot, to force URLs to a client, and to pop up a fake "Administrator Password" phishing window.

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Microsoft's Craig Mundie and Don Mattrick recently announced that the company would be releasing a non-commercial SDK for its Kinect 3D motion controller sometime this spring. Today, just seven days later, Belgian 3D interface company SoftKinetic has launched its free SDK for all depth-sensing cameras, including Microsoft's Kinect.

"We want to expand the community of developers able to access to our professional tools and technology," said Eric Krzeslo, Chief Strategy Officer of SoftKinetic. "We believe that opening up our cross-platform, multi-camera software to a broader community will enhance productivity and creativity, and we cannot wait to see the incredible innovations that emerge as a result."

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There has been lots of recent speculation about whether Apple can go on without its CEO should he not return from medical leave. Steve Jobs may be visionary and iconic, but Jony Ive's value simply can't be overstated. Apple's vice president of industrial design has influenced most of the major hardware product designs since joining the company in 1996. I have long felt that Apple could more easily go on without Jobs than Ive, but never really had cause to state so until today, following a report from the Sunday Times of London that is spreading like wildfire across the InterWebs.

Ive is the creative genius behind designs for iPad, iPhone and iPod, which, combined, accounted for two thirds of Apple revenues during calendar fourth quarter. He takes credit for Macs, too -- aluminum PowerBook, iMac, Titanium PowerBook and unibody MacBook Pro. Ive is an indispensable employee -- like Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter is to Pixar -- someone Apple shouldn't want to lose. If the Times report is even marginally accurate, Ive and Apple are in a tuff over whether he works in Silicon Valley or his native United Kingdom. The outcome raises questions about his departure from Apple.

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Initial sales didn't meet expectations, and the company is stalling until its next earnings report -- perhaps hoping sales will surge meanwhile. Moreover, if Verizon Wireless sold 60 percent of initial iPhone sales online, as the CEO claims, the other 40 percent leads to a surprisingly small number.

On February 14, I asked: "Say, whatever happened to that 1 million Verizon iPhones sold announcement?" If first weekend demand was good, then surely somebody, either Apple or Verizon, would have released sales figures. After all, Apple could have scored a big, distracting PR coup just as Mobile World Congress was beginning. Instead, there was silence, which Verizon Wireless CEO Daniel Mead broke as the weekend started. He told the Wall Street Journal and Reuters that the iPhone 4 launch broke sales records. Funny thing, neither news organization actually quotes Mead about Verizon iPhone sales. They summarize instead. Now why is that? Regardless, Mead gives no actual sales numbers, which removes real credibility from his summarized claims. He defers revealing sales until Verizon's next quarterly earnings report.

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Perhaps Apple chose the wrong time to get out of the server market. The company stopped selling Xserve at the end of January. Now the 2010 server numbers are in, and they're looking pretty good. Server shipments grew 16.8 percent during 2010 and revenue by 13.2 percent, year over year, according to Gartner. It was a remarkable turnaround compared to 2009, when shipments and revenue fell 16.6 percent and 18.3 percent, respectively. Manufacturers shipped 8.8 million servers for the year, generating $48.8 billion in revenue.

Gartner largely credited the rebound to x86 server upgrades delayed by the economic crisis set in motion by the September 2008 stock market crash. "2010 was a year that saw pent-up x86-based server demand produce some significant growth on a worldwide level," Jeffrey Hewitt, Gartner research vice president, said in a statement. "The introduction of new processors from Intel and AMD toward the end of 2009 helped fuel a pretty significant replacement cycle of servers that had been maintained in place during the economic downturn in 2009."

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