Latest Technology News

As a company exec noted in a blog post this week, RealNetworks is on track for record revenue this year. In the same post, the company announced it's laying off around 130 employees, or 7.5% of staff.

Bill Hankes, VP of corporate communications for Real,

CDs are still selling, but a report out yesterday from Jupiter Research says that the long slow decline isn't as slow as previously thought. But what will make up for the drop in shiny-disk sales?

According to the study, digital downloads will fill the void -- but not entirely. The Jupiter survey predicts that overall, the music market will shrink by about 0.8% by 2013, to $9.8 billion in sales, with the percentage of sales of "offline physical format" forms (CDs, albums, etc.) plummeting from a 64% share of sales down to 40%. That's a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of -8.7% -- a worse number than Jupiter predicted last time they looked at the market (-7.1%).

Although not divulging many specifics, David Liu, the founder of Good OS, said this evening that netbooks will, in fact, be demo'd at CES running the company's new Cloud OS.

"While I can't disclose detailed information, I can say that Cloud [OS] will be shown running on netbooks at CES," said David Liu, the founder of Good OS, in an e-mail to BetaNews Friday evening. Liu was responding to a request for information about Cloud OS, a product that brings together a compressed edition of Linux with a browser built by Good for use in the netbook environment.

Yesterday, both Facebook and Google took their respective OpenID systems out of beta, continuing their neck-and-neck move away from "walled garden" status.

Back in May, Facebook, Google, and MySpace all debuted their open identification platforms which allow the sites to work with other services based upon a single login and user identity. However, there was immediate tension between Google and Facebook, which resulted in Facebook blocking Google's Friend Connect.

Answering an inquiry from BetaNews about Wal-Mart's reputed plans to sell an iPhone 3G for $99, a spokesperson today issued a statement that neither confirms nor denies the rumors.

"We have made no official announcement on offering the iPhone at Wal-Mart," said spokesperson Kelly Cheeseman today, when asked by BetaNews for comment on published reports that the retail chain will start selling a 4 GB version of Apple's iPhone 3G for $99 just before New Year's Day.

Download Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta from FileForum now.

The first public tests of Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 2 and Windows Server Service Pack 2 (both have the same kernel) were released this morning, and you can download them for yourself now.

The proprietors of Dynamism have spun off the Asian-pop-tech's lower-end gadgets and baubles into their own site, Gizmine. As the Japanese girls coo, cuuuuuuute!

Kawaii ("cute") certainly seems to be the byword for the new shop, which eschews Dynamism's cutting-edge mini-notebooks in favor of blinged-out earbuds, inexplicable but fun USB gadgetry (Dynamism veterans, this is where your rubber-duckie USB drive lives now), and all those watches that are so fashionable you can't read the time on them.

After being out in its homeland for nearly two years, Japanese company ZMP has released the SDK to US developers for its music robot called Miuro.

Miuro is Japanese consumer robotics company ZMP's answer to the Roomba. But instead of scuttering around to perform cursory cleanup tasks, Miuro scutters around playing music.

At CES next month, future netbooks are likely to be on hand running Cloud OS, newly introduced software from Good OS that lets users access lightweight applications like Google Apps in a browser.

Good OS, which makes the gOS used on the sub-$200 desktop PCs sold at Wal-Mart, this week announced new software known as Cloud OS that could further improve the prospects of both Linux and Windows XP as operating systems for portable PCs while dampening Vista's chances.

The man who could very well have given Yahoo the keys to the kingdom of online advertising, is now a very senior executive at its arch-enemy and would-be suitor. But will Microsoft do more with Dr. Lu than it did with aQuantive?

In a move that, by now, surprised precisely no one, the man who helped Yahoo get its next-generation advertising platform off the ground has now officially joined Microsoft. Dr. Qi Lu, the principal architect for the Yahoo advertising platform first known as Panama, then Apex, then AMP, then finally APT, is now Microsoft's President of Online Services.

It's a huge hit on the iPhone, and though we experienced a few quirks during testing, the Shazam music-ID service seems to have gained nothing but goodness by adding 2 million tracks to its knowledge base. We do, however, wish it took a broader view of music history.

The idea is appealing -- let your phone help identify a song you're hearing by transmitting it to a database that can ID it for you. It's a tricky task and there are a lot of services that think they have an angle on it: Midomi lets you sing or hum your track, the Open Music Encyclopedia has a variety of searches for the musically adept, Unknown Track awaits for those quick enough to record a sample, and SongTapper keeps time for those who can only manage percussion.

Comcast will reportedly be offering a Web-based bandwidth monitor beginning January 5 to accompany the usage limits made official last October.

The 250GB monthly bandwidth usage cap for Comcast subscribers that took effect in October received some minor fallout, but has been generally viewed as a reasonable limit to a household's bandwidth consumption. The cable operator has said the limit was simply a continuation of unwritten rules previously followed.

A 12-nation crackdown on software counterfeiters is keeping Microsoft's lawyers busy this week, with 63 legal actions under way against shady online sellers.

The majority of cases announced on Thursday involve fake versions of XP and XP-related software; no surprise, as popular products at the end of their life cycle are often vulnerable to counterfeiters' wiles, as would-be buyers freak out and stock up. What's surprising is the amount of effort the auctioneers put into their marketing schemes -- a trend toward "more brazen" pirate activity, according to Matt Lundy, a senior attorney with Microsoft's World-Wide Anti-Piracy Team.

Download Opera 10 Alpha for Windows from FileForum now

The Opera team has unveiled an alpha version of its Opera 10 browser, intended to show off the speed and feature support of the new Presto 2.2 rendering engine.

Although Apple isn't clear on the identities of the accused perpetrators yet, the company went to court this week claiming that Mac clone-maker Psystar isn't working alone in its alleged violations of Apple's IP rights.

After convincing a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing Apple of monopolistic practices, Apple went back to court this week to file an amended complaint charging that "persons other than" Apple's nemesis Psystar are also involved in the clone-maker's alleged trade infringement against Apple.