Latest Technology News

Microsoft today released a new version of its free Windows Live app for Windows Mobile devices. The application, which was first debuted almost exactly one year ago, now includes Windows Live Messenger in addition to the push Hotmail syncing, Contact syncing, and Spaces upload support it previously offered. The software is available in both touch-based, and non touch-based formats.

Separately, all non-Windows Mobile devices will enjoy the upgrade to the Windows Live Mobile portal. The mobile page has been upgraded with a brushed-up UI and has received support for full HTML in Hotmail, a feature that Google's Gmail's mobile client does not yet offer.

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Representing a veritable 180 degree turn in opinion, a Nokia spokesperson told the Financial Times today that the company no longer believes WiMAX is a viable wireless mobile standard.

"I don't think [WiMAX's] future is very promising. This is a classic example of industry standards clashing, and somebody comes out as the winner and somebody has to lose," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of New Markets at Nokia. "Betamax was there for a long time, but VHS dominated the market. I see exactly the same thing happening here."

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It took Netflix over 7 years to ship 1 billion DVDs to subscribers. It has now doubled that milestone in another two. The company announced Thursday that a Blu-ray disc of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist was its 2 billionth delivery, and to celebrate, subscriber Clay Shannon will receive a free lifetime subscription to Netflix.

Netflix ships two million movies each day from its 58 distribution centers. Its library has grown from 2,000 titles in 1999 to over 10,000 -- 1,300 of which are on Blu-ray, leading the company to hike fees for the high-definition format. The delivery figures do not include the number of movies Netflix has streamed through its Instant-On feature, which may prove the significance of Blu-ray simply a blip in the company's timeline by the time its 3 billion milestone arrives.

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Thanks to its open API, sometimes it seems as if there are many ways to parse the Twitter tsunami as there are people actually using the service. That said, social-web search site OneRiot has turned its experienced attentions to the microblogging service, and the results -- launching today -- are promising for those seeking to track the viral spread of URLs through the Tweetosphere.

Twitter's own search capacities are becoming increasingly integral to the service, as evidenced by the new homepage design they're working on over there. Third-party sites offer search-based slices of profanity on Twitter (Twittourette, spectacularly NSFW) or mental states on Twitter (twistori) or recurring keywords on Twitter (Tinker and Sideline, both launched earlier this week) or what you will. OneRiot's unique angle is to examine which URLs people are sharing in real time, learning from their tweets what it is people are talking about from moment to moment.

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Another morning, another projects involving Hadoop and the cloud. This time, Amazon's the proprietor, announcing the beta launch on Thursday of their

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Two and a half months after the unveiling of the Pre and many, many hours after tormenting visitors to their blog with the promise of a big announcement, Palm on Wednesday fought the April Fools urge and told the world more about what to expect for the hotly anticipated handset.

Blogging from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where Palm's Michael Abbott (senior vice president of Applications Software and Services) and eBay's Mark Carges jointly gave the evening "High Order Bit" keynote, the company revealed that the beloved Pandora music service and Fandango will both be available for the handset. That's apt to cheer the civilians, who were nonetheless hoping for news on obscure matters such as pricing and ship date today.

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Roger Baker, a veteran of the DC merry-go-round, climbs aboard again at the request of President Obama. Baker, who served as CIO at the Department of Commerce from 1998 to 2001, now joins the Department of Veterans Affairs in the same position pending confirmation by the Senate. Baker has also held executive-level positions at Dataline, General Dynamics Information Technology, CACI International and Visa, and served on the administration's transition team. he holds BS and MBA degrees from the University of Michigan.

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Yahoo has turned to the Hadoop open source cluster framework for crunching the data from "500 million users per month and billions of interesting events per day," said Yahoo's Ajay Anand, speaking at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York City this week.

Researchers from Yahoo Mail have already used Hadoop as a platform for finding botnets that are spewing out spam. Other Yahoo researchers have collaborated on Webmap, "a gigantic table of information [showing] every Web site, page, and link that Yahoo knows about," he told a packed hotel conference room on Tuesday.

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Yesterday, the US Dept. of Homeland Security issued a statement that was intended to soothe the public's fears regarding the impending payload activation of the dreaded Conficker worm -- a piece of malware whose impact on this week's news cycle easily outweighed its impact on networks. That statement made news in itself, though, by referring to a sophisticated free tool for securing networks based on the latest research, but noting that tool was being released only for government agencies and their direct partners.

It revealed the priorities of DHS in a world that's legitimately threatened by malicious developments with far more potentially serious repercussions than Conficker. Now, a bill introduced today in Congress by Sens. Olympia Snowe (R - Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D - W.V.) -- one which was being drafted two weeks ago -- would relieve DHS from the responsibility of reacting to Internet threats, and most likely relocate the US-CERT response team to another node of the executive branch.

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IBM has now set April 7 as the commercial launch date for LotusLive Engage, the latest addition to its new LotusLive line-up of social network-inspired business collaboration software. Engage is aimed at collaboration outside the organization's firewalls, meaning that business partners and customers can also be part of the online loop.

Major features of Engage include a Web meeting space, with desktop sharing, recording, and security; instant messaging, with photo and file sharing; online file storage and sharing; and project tracking, to-do lists, and brainstorming. Price Waterhouse Coopers, Nortel Networks, and Penn State University are a few of the early users.

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According to Sprint, its new caller-ID notification service announced today can be personalized just like caller-ID on mobile phones themselves, including pictures, nicknames, custom fonts, and colors for different callers. Even before the phone rings, the company says, a caller-ID message pops up on the user's TV or PC screen.

Betanews contacted Sprint today, but since CTIA WIreless is this week, the reply channel for telecommunications companies has been slow. Our main question, after, "Is this an April Fool's gag?" was "How do you ignore calls?"

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It may not really have the look and feel of a "world" just yet, but let's face it, Research In Motion is a late enough entry into this field that all the really good metaphors have already been taken. Today -- no fooling -- is the first day of BlackBerry App World, which is an application in itself that enables a market for other usable features, for a brand name that does find itself playing catch-up to its rivals these days.

The most appropriate word for the application shopping experience for BlackBerry up until yesterday has been "painful," but this is coming from someone who has built up quite a resistance to being impressed by software. Carriers prefer to set up users' browsers so that the application purchase process goes directly through them, often through their default home pages. So business relationships with major carriers such as Verizon Wireless, more than any other reason, have kept RIM from mounting a respectable challenge to Apple and others up to now.

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Now leaving beta and entering general availability, the newly announced ParaScale Cloud Software is designed for clustering together low-cost commodity PC servers to act as a highly scalable file repository for private clouds.

In an interview with Betanews at this week's Cloud Computing Expo in New York City, Michael Maxey, director of product management for ParaScale, described PCS as similar in functionality to EMC's Atmos, but with a couple of differences.

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Virgin Mobile announced today that beginning on April 14, Opera Mini 4.2 will be available as a free download for prepaid customers in the VirginXL store, and that a number of future devices will ship with the browser pre-installed.

Opera said that customers with the Samsung Slash, or the UTSTARCOM Super Slice, Shuttle, and Arc will all have access to the new browser.

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MocoNews yesterday got some critical information from T-Mobile USA about Google's Android Market, the most interesting of which is the average G1 user's voracious consumption of Apps.

According to the report, 40 million apps have been downloaded since the G1 debuted just over five months ago, and based upon the number of handsets sold, the average user downloads 40 apps from the Android Market.

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