Latest Technology News

We've always known that the Internet has evolved since 1996 (whose laws were based to some degree on the world circa 1978) to something that current US telecommunications law doesn't adequately describe. The whole court debate over whether the Federal Communications Commission could legally address how Comcast manages its network traffic wasn't really about whether it should, but rather whether current law designates that it can.

Up until yesterday, the two choices before the FCC were whether the broadband system it wants to regulate is more like a telephone (Title II) or a teletype (Title I). For years, its leaders argued that Title I of the Telecommunications Act, amended in 1996, was more fitting, making the case that since broadband services were usually piggy-backed over communications services anyway, its ancillary authority to protect information services could be attributed to its primary authority to protect communications services. In a decision very, very likely to survive judicial review, the DC Circuit said that's wrong.

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Borders, the United States' second largest bookstore chain behind Barnes and Noble, announced it is now taking pre-orders on its Kobo e-reader, which will arrive on June 17.

At $149.99, the Kobo is considerably cheaper than Barnes & Noble's nook and Amazon's Kindle, both of which retail for $259.00, and it comes pre-loaded with 100 classic books. Borders has not yet launched its cross-platform eBook store, but says it will be open in June when Kobo ships.

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Late in 2009, leading telecommunications company Nokia sued Apple, alleging that the iPhone infringed upon ten of Nokia's patents, most of which revolved around the fundamental wireless technologies used in the device.

Now, the Finnish company has filed another suit against Apple, this time in the Federal District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin. There, Nokia is accusing Apple of five additional counts of patent infringement in both the iPhone and the iPad 3G.

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ComScore's most recent MobiLens market data ranks Samsung as the top mobile original equipment manufacturer in the United States with 21.9% of the mobile market, a tie with Motorola.

Samsung is attempting to use its lead to advance its own open mobile operating system, called Bada, which the company launched back in November. In February, Samsung started showing off its first device running Bada, the 3.3-inch super AMOLED-eqipped Wave, but the device has not been released yet.

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Worldwide in first quarter, smartphone manufacturers shipped 54.7 million units, growing 56.7 percent year over year, according to IDC. Apple surged strongest -- 131.6 percent. While seemingly good, Apple needs to look back at approaching HTC and Motorola. Motorola is making a big comeback, and by way of smartphones; shipments grew 91.7 percent year over year. Motorola is betting big on iPhone OS rival Android. IDC noted that Motorola is expected to launch 20 new handset models during 2010, shipping an estimated 12-14 million Android smartphones.

About 27 percent of Motorola's total handset shipments were smartphones, which was higher than the market average of 18.8 percent, up from 14.4 percent a year earlier. Apple ships 100 percent smartphones.

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Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2 (v. 1.9.7.7.66.6600) from Fileforum now.

This week, Microsoft continued its public demonstration that it's working hard to improve the underlying Internet Explorer platform, with a release on Wednesday of the second preview of just the platform of the next IE9 -- not a fully functional Web browser, but a demonstration of where the rendering engine is going. Again, it's just a minimal front end on top of a rendering engine, and its main purpose is to show off the HTML 5, SVG, and JavaScript functionality pointed to on Microsoft's IE9 test site.

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The sound you heard after HP's purchase of Palm last week was that of Windows reaching the top of the roller coaster and beginning its inevitable trip back down. Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with the transaction, of course, but the ripple effects of the buyout foreshadow a significant shift of one of Microsoft's most stalwart partners away from its core products.

Worse for Microsoft, the HP/Palm deal shines a bright light on the software giant's seeming inability to set a course for a post-Windows world. Giants can and do get left behind if they fail to move quickly enough.

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Google Goggles, the optical search tool released for Android last December received a significant update today which improves the app in a number of ways; including giving it the ability to recognize and translate languages.

Currently, the optical character recognition of Goggles is limited to five languages with Latin-based alphabets: English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. When you snap a picture of text, the app scans the content and offers a translation window where you can choose what language you want the text to be translated into. In Google's mobile blog today, Software Engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz said the goal is to eventually be able to read non-Latin languages like Chinese, Arabic and Hindi.

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Last week, VMware and Salesforce.com announced a new partnership around VMforce, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering aimed at enterprise Java developers. The companies' CEOs Paul Maritz (VMware) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce) described VMforce as an enterprise cloud designed to serve the needs of more than six million enterprise Java developers, including some two million who are using the Spring framework VMware acquired last August when it purchased SpringSource.

According to Maritz and Benioff, by harnessing the VMforce cloud, enterprises and developers can dramatically simplify Java development "without compromising the flexibility, control and choice they require." In plain English, VMforce is a for-pay service whose cloud-based elements are designed to attract Java-loving enterprises and vendors.

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Mobile network operator Sprint has been wrangling the prepaid wireless business since well before its acquisition of Virgin Mobile USA last year. While the network consistently lost "postpaid" contract subscribers, it consistently gained more prepaid customers than any other major mobile carrier.

In the company's earnings call two weeks ago, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said "I think we're really going to start to pick up prepaid momentum in the second half of the year … Prepaid, in terms of its percentage of the overall wireless industry, is going to grow, so our turnaround is really focused on prepaid becoming a more and more important part of the company and doing better in that market."

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Three monopolies. All vying to be the next Microsoft. Will one of them succeed, and will it cost you dearly?

Today, I officially announce the end of the Wintel hegemony. Like IBM before it -- heck, even the Roman Empire starting about 19 centuries ago -- Wintel will continue to dominate huge swaths of the technology industry, while rapidly declining in relevance. Perhaps duopolies Microsoft and Intel will make a last rally, maybe by changing leadership, and hold out longer against the advancing mobile-to-cloud hordes. Rome's decline was long, so could be Wintel's.

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Since 1996, the Federal Communications Commission accepted, and has positively argued even up until two months ago, that broadband Internet service is an information service under US law -- an enhancement to telecommunications service that is regulated under Title I of the Communications Act. But when the FCC made its strongest effort to censure a carrier for net neutrality violations -- its fine of Comcast for throttling BitTorrent -- the DC Circuit Court said that wouldn't fly under Title I.

So policy advocates pressed the FCC to simply redeclare broadband Internet service as a real communications service under Title II. That would put broadband on a par with wireless voice, and give the Commission the authority to tell Comcast, or anyone else, how not to police its network traffic. The downside of that approach could be that US carriers may pull back on broadband buildout investments, which could render the ambitious goals of the Broadband Plan unattainable.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally begun to enable top-level domain names based on non-Latin alphabets. The first three country code top level domains (ccTLD) written in Arabic script are now available for use.

The three new top-level domains are: "Al-Saudiah," "Emarat, and "Misr," and they allow site names to be written right-to-left.

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Partly in a bid to keep PC pricing down in a tough economy, most of HP's nine new business notebooks are available only with AMD chips, and so are most of the eight new entries on the consumer side.

HP's nine new business notebooks include seven new ProBook models, priced starting at $619, along with the new 14-inch HP 425, offered for $549 and up, and the 15.6-inch HP 625. The 425 and 625 come with spill resistant keyboards; a choice of two types of LED-backlit displays; a 2 megapixel webcam with an integrated microphone; and multiple wireless networking options, said Mike Hockey, HP's worldwide public relations manager for business notebooks, during a press conference.

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WiMAX is indeed gaining momentum as the United States' first and only commercially available "4G" wireless technology.

In its earnings report for Q1 2010 today, network operator Clearwire added 19 cities to its list of upcoming 4G deployments: Nashville, Tennessee; Daytona, Orlando and Tampa, Florida; Rochester and Syracuse, New York; Merced, Modesto, Stockton, and Visalia, California; Wilmington, Delaware; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Eugene, Oregon; and Yakima and Tri-Cities, Washington.

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