Latest Technology News

Today, Corel is making available the first service pack for its CorelDRAW X4 graphics package, the latest edition of the first great illustration app for Windows. In my experience with the package (I wrote a book on version 6 way, way back, and I reviewed version 1.0 for Computer Shopper two decades ago), it's my opinion that X4 could use some help in the stability department.

Though Corel's marketing is touting SP1 for its increase in the number of cameras supported for RAW images, a check of the change log shows SP1's main focus is stability improvement. Since simply moving the X4 palette around can crash the program, I'm hopeful that Corel has paid serious attention to its users' complaints. Of course, being able to actually download SP1 will help; in my experiences today, X4 is certain it already did download it. When it tries to install SP1, though, that routine naturally fails. Maybe it's a firewall problem (that's always a candidate), though I'll keep you apprised as to what I find.

Samsung announced today that it will split itself into two parts, with one new division to focus on consumer electronics items such as mobile phones and TVs and the other on semiconductors and LCDs.

The two new divisions will be led by executives with hefty experience in the two respective areas. Choi Gee-sun, now in charge of the new consumer products unit, headed up Samsung's mobile phone operations for the past two years.

Bringing YouTube to the living room television has been a mostly incomplete mission thus far. Series 3 and HD TiVo DVRs can browse YouTube, and Apple TV has been able to play clips from the site since 2007. Yesterday, YouTube announced youtube.com/tv, a new sub-site dedicated to bringing its content to connected devices, namely the PS3 and Wii.

"Very few...devices today contain a Web browser or provide access to YouTube," reads a YouTube Team blog post yesterday, "Our hope is that this site may help to accelerate an industry evolution towards open television access to Web video. Over time, we plan to add support for additional TV devices that provide Web browsers."

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Circuit City has reached an agreement with liquidators to sell all the merchandise in its remaining 567 stores in the US. This is the beginning of the endgame for the nationwide electronics retailer, which already filed for Chapter 11 protection last November.

In a press statement minutes ago, the court-appointed CEO of the company, James Marcum, said, "We are extremely disappointed by this outcome. Regrettably for the more than 30,000 employees of Circuit City and our loyal customers, we were unable to reach an agreement with our creditors and lenders to structure a going-concern transaction in the limited timeframe available, and so this is the only possible path for our company."

NPD group yesterday released its figures representing the video game industry at large, and with total sales up 19% over 2007, Nintendo was responsible for nearly all of that growth.

Nintendo secured the top two spots in number of consoles sold in 2008. The Wii accounted for 55% of all gen7 console sales, moving 10.17 million units in America last year, breaking all previous single-year sales records. The company's handheld system, the DS, fell in just behind the Wii, with 8.52 million units sold. In December alone, the DS sold 3.04 million units and the Wii sold 2.14 million.

Although sales of digital music are increasing worldwide, the global recording industry's representatives are now calling on ISPs to temporarily shut down music pirates' Internet accounts if all else fails.

A large majority of digital music downloads are "unauthorized" -- meaning, no payment is made to either artists or producers. This according to a report issued Thursday by the IFPI trade association, which represents the recording industry worldwide.

Falling consumer demand for PCs is triggering declining orders for CPUs, Intel admitted yesterday, but not across the board. As it turns out, its smallest consumer processor may be the mightiest of all this year.

While the world's economic troubles have corporations everywhere clamoring for solutions, it's not as though nobody saw the storm coming. The news from Intel yesterday, during its quarterly conference call to financial analysts, indicates that the processor it created not as much for performance but for portability and price may be floating the company's boat: the unsinkable Atom.

Your DVR may rule your world, but it's also given you a special new sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you're away from home and remember that you forgot to punch something in. Enter kwiry, giving a lift to both you and your TV.

The kwiry service is free, and all you'll need to do ahead of time is set up your account. (You can remember that much, right?) When you realize that you're going to be away from home for that Very Special Episode of your favorite show, you'll text the name of the show to the kwiry service (59479) -- TiVo gossip girl, but we won't tell -- to the service. Kwiry picks up the ball from there and schedules the next available episode of the show on your recorder.

It was never the legendary Wild West of the early Web (as if that ever accurately described the early years, then or in retrospect), but on Wednesday, Twitter gained a list of rules designed to reign in current and future mayhem.

Twitter's been flapping along with the sparsest of Terms of Service for quite some time now. No more: On Wednesday, Twitter support team lead Crystal posted a list of rules of the road.

A growing number of general purpose applications, including Adobe's latest version of Photoshop Elements, are being built upon an open source software platform that was originally developed by a company called Trolltech, and that was originally marketed as a tool for developing "widgets." That may have been a misnomer; while it certainly provides widgets, the Qt platform builds an underlying graphical model for programs that can be deployed across Windows, Linux, and Macs on the desktop, and even on smartphone OSes.

It's for that reason that Nokia acquired Trolltech last year, resulting in the leading cell phone manufacturer having its first desktop software platform. The deal was approved by the European Commission last June, though developers remained skeptical about how seriously committed Nokia would be to maintaining the cross-platform aspect of Qt.

Neither confirming nor denying bloggers' accounts of a supposed deal with Best Buy around the Palm Pre, Palm today essentially issued a "no comment" to Betanews.

"Those are just rumors, and Palm doesn't really have a comment on them at this time," said Alex Hunter, a Palm spokesperson, speaking with Betanews on the phone today.

Expanding on its efforts to drive revenues from its online application suite, Google this week launched a plan to help authorized reseller partners sell, customize and support the Premier Edition of Google Apps.

Beyond the capabilities included in the free but ad-supported edition of Google Apps, the Premier Edition offers features such as Google Video (although we've learned today that may be scaled back), calendar resource scheduling, SSL enforcement for secure HTTPS access, and e-mail and phone support, according to a comparison chart on Google's Web site.

Separate reports released almost in tandem this morning by two of the world's three leading hardware analysis firms, show that what could have been a stellar year for PC manufacturers was wiped out in one quarter.

The downturn is being felt more keenly by Dell, which saw its annual growth rate slow by about 6 percent, according to figures from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report and preliminary figures from Gartner. That company lost about one point of market share in the process, and its slim lead over HP in US unit shipments narrowed even further -- from about 5 points to about 1.1 points, according to Gartner's numbers.

Qwest on Thursday announced the closure of its Seattle call center, taking 235 jobs out of Rain City. Some 216 affected employees will be given the option to move to Boise, where Qwest is consolidating its consumer credit-and-collection facilities, or to Qwest offices in Des Moines, Phoenix, or Salt Lake City. The other 19 -- managers -- can apply for jobs elsewhere in the company.

The company's office space in downtown Seattle is also on the market, though around 1,600 Qwest employees will still work there once the call center's gone. Qwest will announce its fourth-quarter and full-year 2008 earnings on February 10. Shares closed up .15 at 3.55 on the NYSE Thursday afternoon.

Adults and teens alike use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace more so to stay in touch with old friends than to make new ones, according to a new report by analyst group Pew/Internet.

Pew's study also found that the number of online adults with a profile on a social network site has more than quadrupled since 2005, from 8 percent back then to 35 percent today.