Latest Technology News

In September, networking technology joint company Alcatel-Lucent named Ben Verwaayen, formerly of British Telecom, its new CEO. The company today announced its completed leadership team that will take office on the first of the new year.

Alcatel-Lucent has been in a protracted transitional phase where it has not yet become profitable. As such, it has taken on an all new leadership team and a new business model. The new model breaks operations into three regions: the Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Asia-Pacific (APAC).

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Microsoft Today unveiled upgrades to its Games for Windows Live service -- the PC equivalent of Xbox Live -- that immediately updates the interface, and promises a Games for Windows Live Marketplace in early December.

The re-design optimizes the Live interface for Keyboard and Mouse, John Schappert, VP of Live Software and Studios said, "This new release was designed specifically with our community of PC gamers and game developers in mind. It's a natural next step in delivering a world-class online service for Windows gamers."

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Research in Motion's first touchscreen BlackBerry, the Storm, will be coming to Verizon on November 21 for $249.99. Germany will be getting the Curve 8900 (a.k.a. "Javelin") by the end of the month.

Officially announced in October, the 3G touchscreen Storm offers tactile feedback, accelerometer-driven portrait/landscape layout swapping, a 3.2 megapixel camera, and BlackBerry's famous productivity application lineup.

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NEW YORK, N.Y. - Pending Apple's approval, an iPhone app will let you redirect business calls to voice mail when you're out with friends, while letting personal calls through. But the manufacturer is also eyeing Android and Windows Mobile.

Instead of depending completely on whichever mobile phone is in your pocket, what about making the phone number itself "mobile"? An application first built to do just that is still being considered by Apple's App Store -- and start-up FreedomVOICE Systems is now thinking very seriously about versions of its Newber software for other mobile platforms.

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Microsoft's Windows Live team today formally announced a number of upgrades to the Live platform that constitute its "next generation," a more unified experience across all the services within Windows Live.

Beginning in the coming weeks, existing Windows Live users' home.live.com page will change from the current straightforward (read: Google-ish) list of services to a social, profile-based (read: Facebook-ish) setup where all the existing Windows Live services are tied together with a central update feed.

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It's being called the "economic Katrina," and now there are signs that it has officially made landfall. After already preparing investors for bad news, Intel yesterday took the unusual step of proclaiming the news will actually be worse.

The first clear signs of an approaching financial maelstrom for Intel came as early as last April, when the typical seasonal downturn in revenue extended into double-digit percentages. Something was wrong -- demand from businesses and consumers alike was falling demonstrably, and low-margin businesses such as flash memory were already feeling a serious squeeze.

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It's the first holiday season since Blu-Ray put a stake in the heart of the rival HD-DVD format, but if Sony and friends thought that would mean a clear field of fire on shoppers' wallets...sorry, wrong year.

One would think that the looming digital TV deadline in February 2009 would drive the purchase of at least the new television equipment. According to most statistics so far, one would be wrong about that -- even though HDTV prices are on the decline.

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NEW YORK, N.Y. - At the CES Unveiled press event Tuesday, Navigon previewed the 8100T, a device touted as the first in-car GPS navigation system to offer panoramic 3D views of mountains, valleys, and other highlights of the surrounding landscape.

During a stop by BetaNews at the booth, J. Michael Martin, channel marketing manager, showed how the upcoming Navigon 8100T will use maps based on NASA terrain data -- along with a built-in graphics accelerator --to capture experiences such as driving up hills and peering down through ravines on its wide-screen 4.8-inch display.

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Belkin today announced what would have otherwise been an unremarkable piece of cabling had it not been given a name that sounds like a piece of advice.

The cable is meant to recreate on a Windows machine the Mac's built-in Migration Assistant, which is used to transfer user accounts, applications, network and computer settings, files and volumes between Macs. Migration is also an optional process when initializing a new Mac.

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Download a 60-day trial edition of Windows Essential Business Server 2008 from FileForum now.

At last, small- and mid-size businesses now have access to the final commercial editions of Microsoft's pre-configured, feature-packed buildouts of Windows Server 2008 tailored for the needs of corporations smaller than, say, GM.

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Stop calling your mom to ask her if those sniffles and aches mean you've got the flu. You're going to mess up Google's stats.

After a year of testing that involved correlating data and tweaking algorithms with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google's got a new map that shows where people are searching for info on flu-related topics. According to its tests, the map can accurately estimate current outbreak levels two weeks faster than traditional flu-monitoring systems such as the CDC's own reports.

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Citi Investment Research (formerly Smith Barney) looked at the near future of advertising and predicted yesterday that US advertising budgets will shrink by almost 2% by the end of this year, and as much as 4% next year.

Analysts from Citigroup said that decreased consumer spending, as well as budgetary and credit constraints placed upon businesses, will lead to an overall advertiser pullback in all media that could last until the fourth quarter of 2010.

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The ad hoc volunteer election-monitoring effort undertaken on Twitter last week had problems with imprecise methodology and random trolls, so much so that one researcher calls the compiled data "a mess."

A three-page paper from Bob Conrad, a Nevada-based PR person, blogger and doctoral student, looks at last Tuesday's Twitter Vote Report -- a volunteer effort to give voters a place to describe what was happening at the polls on election day. The project allowed observers to send reports in via Twitter, text or phone, with special apps available for the iPhone and Android.

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Download Windows Mobile 6.1.4 Emulator Images for Visual Studio 2008 from FileForum now.

What will customers with Windows Mobile phones be doing with your application, and how will they perceive your Web site, with the upcoming 6.1.4 release? The latest round of emulator images can answer those questions.

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NEW YORK, N.Y. - ISP and consumer VoiP specialist Ooma will soon start selling its phone system in Best Buy stores and other retail outlets, while also bringing out a new model named Telo which adds cordless phones to the "free calling" mix.

Under Ooma's current plan, a consumer pays $249.99 for an Ooma phone system, and all calling inside the US is then "free for life," according to Matthew Podboy, who heads up affiliated company Voce Communications.

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