Latest Technology News

Just like every other major player in the PC industry these days, Lenovo is having to rethink the way it has already rethought its short-term business plan. After already having shuffled its executive ranks earlier this month, the company's reassigned CEO Yang Yuanqing announced yesterday an additional 450 job cuts, in addition to the 2,500 the company already decided to make, with the new cuts affecting workers in Lenovo's native China.

But the part of Yang's message that rang the loudest bell yesterday was this: "While our business in China remains very strong, many of our global support functions have employees based in China," an indication that the latest round of additional cuts will impact Lenovo's product support team first.

According to conventional wisdom, teens are the ones actively downloading all the hot new tunes from the Internet on to their iPods. Baby Boomers, on the other hand, hit the shopping mall once or twice a year to lazily fill in missing pieces in their personal CD collections of Golden Oldies.

In reality, though, a lot of under-20-year-olds are scouring the Web for information on the Beatles, while their parents trade songs with their own peers on Facebook or MySpace, according to participants in this week's Digital Music Forum in New York City.

Asus ushered in the netbook craze with its Eee PC in 2007 by hitting a sweet spot in price, features, and aesthetic appeal. When all of those aspects are in harmony, and the timing is right, the overall value of the product soars. We could be seeing a jump in value right now.

The 8.9" solid state, Linux-driven, Eee PC 901is being sold with a $100 rebate from Asus until March 8. It is equipped with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, 1GB of Ram, 20GB of solid state memory, a 6-cell battery that promises up to 6 hours of use, and the Xandros Linux operating system.

This week, Microsoft issued a copyright infringement suit in US district court and with the US International Trade Commission against Dutch PND maker TomTom, claiming the company has violated eight of Microsoft's patents.

From Microsoft's filing with the USITC, the company says, "The portable navigation computing devices in question run a version of the Linux operating system, which is a general purpose operating system capable of supporting a wide variety of software applications. For example, the Linux operating system on the portable navigation computing devices executes a navigation application that uses the GPS data provided by the GPS receiver to generate driving directions. The Linux operating system used in the personal navigation computing device and/or the software applications supported by the operating system also provide the devices with additional functionality such as file system support for long and short file names, memory management for flash memory commonly used on such devices, and a platform for integrating and controlling various electronic components used with the portable navigation computing devices, such as other components in a vehicle."

Once, businesses were interested in green computing mainly as a matter of corporate responsibility. But now, increasing regulatory pressures and skyrocketing fuel prices are spurring companies to want to take a very hard look at both their carbon footprints and energy costs, according to Jennifer Pollard, a senior product manager at Microsoft.

Earlier this month, Microsoft released the first edition of a tool aimed at taking the heavy lifting out of measuring the environmental impact of business activities and tracking your company's expenditures on oil, gas, and other forms of energy.

Convergence is happening on all sides. PC makers Acer and HP pushed their way into the smartphone market this month, and now we await the push by a phone maker into the PC business.

Statements from Nokia's President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo yesterday affirmed his company's interest in making notebook computers, if nothing else. Kallasvuo told Finnish broadcaster YLE that Nokia is "looking very actively" at producing a PC.

Although music enthusiasts are out there online Googling for downloads and information, a lot of musicians still find it tough to connect with fans and to sell their music over the Web, said speakers at the Digital Music Forum here in New York City today.

A big part of the challenge is that those likely to buy music online constitute a small and elusive bunch. "In the US, 50 to 65 percent of people don't buy any music at all," noted David Card, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Nokia will introduce Comes with Music in the United States later this year, disclosed Tom Erskine, director of global sales in Nokia's Music Division , during the Digital Music Forum in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Comes with Music offers subscribers unlimited downloads of millions of tunes in the Nokia Music Store.

Download Safari for Windows 4.28.16.0 Beta from Fileforum now.

We've been hearing quite a lot from every browser manufacturer, including Microsoft and Mozilla, about the incredible speed increases that eventually, pretty soon now, right around the corner, will be realized the moment one of them bites the bullet and installs a new, faster JavaScript interpreter. Well, consider the bullet officially bitten. Betanews tests of Apple's new beta of Safari for Windows, using a freshly cleaned Windows Vista SP1 virtual machine "white box," demonstrates significant speed improvements even over previous Safari versions, which were already quite fast.

If you like fresh new algorithms, dream of hanging sticky notes in mid-air, or have always wished your e-mail looked a little more like a beach ball, Microsoft Research's annual TechFest event will restore your faith in technology -- or, at least, the benefit of giving smart people room to run with ideas that aren't immediately profit-center-ready.

The yearly gathering of researchers from Microsoft's six research labs (Beijing, Bangalore, Mountain View, both Cambridges, and Redmond) is mainly a chance for the far-flung members of the group to present their ideas to colleagues at the mothership, but for a few hours, journalists are allowed to venture in.

Like most current and former children, the lawyers at Verizon presumably have nothing against the Velveteen Rabbit. They do not, however, care for the Utah-based telemarketer that apparently made nearly half a million calls to Verizon Wireless subscribers on behalf of Family 1 Films, which is distributing a movie version of the beloved book.

The suit, filed in US District Court in Trenton, NJ, states that a Utah telemarketing outfit called Feature Films for Families made nearly 500,000 calls over several days in early February -- an average during some one-hour periods of a call every .32 seconds. Calls consisted of either a prerecorded voice message or a live human reading a script promoting the movie. (An IMDB commenter wasn't wowed by that script, describing it as "it's about a wonderful rabbit who goes on an adventure....blah blah blah....for every dollar you spend at the box office we will give you a credit for a DVD in our video library.")

Before January 1, 2010, Congress must reinstate SHVIA (the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999), the pro-competition law that lets satellite television companies carry local broadcast TV stations, so a rare opportunity has been presented to change the law in its period of review.

Congressman Bart Stupak (R-Michigan) proposed a bill this month that would ultimately require satellite TV companies to provide local TV signals in all of their markets. Stupak proposed H.R. 927, or the "Satellite Consumers' Right to Local Channels Act," because two of the thirty satellite markets that cannot receive local TV broadcasts are in his district. Satellite coverage in the U.S. is comprised of 210 market areas.

While Microsoft continues to maintain that Windows 7 will launch "3 years from Vista," or early 2010, a Microsoft ODM partner says otherwise. The president of Compal, a Taiwanese manufacturer that builds laptops for HP and Acer, told Bloomberg that Microsoft may begin shipping Windows 7 in late September or early October of this year.

Ray Chen made the statement at an investors' conference in Taipei on Wednesday, adding that he hoped Windows 7 would help boost sagging PC sales due to the global economic crisis. Microsoft, for its part, didn't say Chen was incorrect, but repeated its January 2010 timeframe to Bloomberg. Who to believe? It's hard to say, although some signs have pointed to Microsoft fast-forwarding its release roadmap.

Not only have sales of Nintendo products continued to rise, but so has piracy of those products. In a report to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the body specializing in international trade agreements, Nintendo listed six countries where piracy of the Wii and DS are out of control.

The Special 301 process looks at the adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights worldwide, and countries are then classified according to the frequency and severity of their violations of IP rights.

One of the most repeated and memorable quotes from the tech world in the last six months was Steve Jobs referring to Blu-ray as a "bag of hurt," not for any consumer end shortcomings, but rather for its complex licensing process.

Today, Sony, Phillips and Panasonic issued a joint press release announcing the creation of a "one stop shop" for Blu-ray licensing that will seeks to simplify and cheapen the process. The idea has been discussed numerous times since 2007, well before Blu-ray had even won the high-definition format war.