Latest Technology News

Transmeta's third-quarter earnings report will not be brought to you as scheduled today. Instead, the company will speak tomorrow morning about its just-announced acquisition by video processor firm Novafora.

The all-cash deal for $255.6 million (subject to the usual working capital and other adjustments) should deliver unto shareholders a return of between $18.70 and $19 per share -- nicely above even the 52-week high of $17.79. Transmeta was trading at $18 in after-hours activity.

Wideband in the form of 50 Mbps download speeds is on the way to Oregon and Washington State, according to a Comcast statement released Monday. And even current subscribers are getting a speed boost.

In the world of marketing-speak, "ultra" (Latin, "going beyond others") is less spectacular than "extreme." The Comcast "Extreme 50" service tier (50 Mbps downstream / 10 Mbps upstream) is thus the more powerful of the two new service tiers for $139.95/month; the Ultra tier weighs in at 22 Mbps / 5 Mbps and $62.95/month. (Both prices require Comcast's cable service.) Businesses have a version of the Extreme tier for $189.95/month.

Domino's Pizza and Papa John's are two fast food delivery franchises that have recently been showing the value of being connected. Today, both companies expanded their connection to customers further, but along divergent courses.

Domino's went for the TV, by giving users of broadband-connected TiVo units the ability to order pizza directly from their TV. Through interactive ad tags in live TV mode, or through the "Music, Photos, Products, and More" menu icon, users can place an order for delivery or carry-out food. A user with a Domino's Pizza online account need only enter his username and password, and once the order is placed, Domino's trademark Pizza Tracker comes up on screen.

Today Fujitsu Laboratories announced its newest in-vehicle camera technology that gives drivers a third person perspective on their vehicle while driving.

Four cameras, mounted on the driver side, passenger side, forward, and rear of a vehicle, feed live video into an MB86R01 system on a chip running the embedded OpenGL ES image and video processing platform.

Some people seem to have held their breaths all weekend waiting for Google's new voice search feature to show up on Apple's iPhone App Store. But in this case, that feature has yet to make its anticipated premiere.

As of 2:30 pm Eastern time today, a highly touted voice search feature from Google -- anticipated by many to have been posted last Friday -- still hadn't appeared on Apple's App Store. Over the weekend and through early Monday, pundits mulled the possible implications.

Today's announcement officially means Microsoft is the latest entry in a market of services that Microsoft actually made feasible: It can now host Exchange mailboxes for Active Directory users that do not have Exchange Server 2007.

As those who already enjoy its benefits are currently aware, an Exchange server does quite a bit more than just host e-mail. Perhaps even more importantly, it can synchronize the schedule of everyone who works together in a widely dispersed business. With Outlook 2007, that means having access to personal schedules as well as group schedules that are updated in the background. Ongoing tasks and company-wide contacts and phonebooks are also maintained and synchronized across devices. In more sophisticated environments, Exchange also facilitates the use and maintenance of voice mail.

Just shy of one year old, the "Project Canoe" joint venture between six of the biggest Multi-System Operators has announced that the earliest stages of its targeted ad system will begin testing within the next 60 to 90 days.

The joint venture's stated goal from the outset has been to create a targeted advertising platform for cable television. Participating in the venture are Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House.

Internet connections lead the pack at 44 percent among technologies that are not working for home users, says a study released today. In one intriguing result, cell phones pose more problems for 18-to-29-year-olds than for senior citizens.

Some 44 percent of adult Americans with home Internet access claim that their connections failed at some point over the past 12 months, says a new survey by Pew Research, which also points to significant problems with the operation of PCs, cell phones, and PDAs.

After one technology initiative involving Adobe and processor manufacturer ARM was announced last April at the CTIA Wireless show, another one with much the same purpose between the same parties was announced this morning.

From a technical standpoint, there should be very few -- if any -- boundaries to the ability of Apple's current ARM-based iPhone design to run Flash video. But Apple continues to show obstinacy to the idea; and Adobe continues to follow a kind of parallel development course that could, at presumably any time, lead to Flash on the iPhone. Unlike last March, when Adobe executives stated they were committed to the idea before their PR teams redefined what they meant by "committed," today's announcement doesn't make any promises whatsoever.

Nonprofit equity computing project One Laptop Per Child this morning opened its Give One, Get One (G1G1) store on Amazon.com.

For $399, customers buy one OLPC XO Laptop to donate to a developing nation, and get one for themselves or to give as a gift. The G1G1 program last year initially was slated to last only one week, but was extended due to the extremely high demand placed on the company's ordering infrastructure.

Though we'll know the complete details tomorrow when the final semi-annual Top 500 Supercomputer list is released, only IBM's and Los Alamos' Roadrunner has only gotten faster, but it's no longer alone in crossing the petaflop barrier.

We'll learn the final score tomorrow, but the University of Mannheim which manages the global race for supercomputing supremacy announced over the weekend that Los Alamos National Laboratories' colossus, which beat the long-reigning BlueGene/L last June by an impossible 231%, accelerated its performance to an Rmax score of about 1,105,000 -- just over 1.1 petaflops per second. That's a gain of 7.7% over its June score.

Looking to slash development times and further blur the lines between Mac and PC, not to mention mobile and fixed, several efforts are afoot to bring virtualization to your mobile phone.

The possibilities are tantalizing. For instance, Citrix is said to be nearing the Apple App Store (metaphorically speaking) with virtualization software for the iPhone. If the makers of the popular GoToMyPC app can deliver, the new number-two smartphone vendor could offer a powerful push for adoption to business folk using Wintel systems at work.

There appears to be good news, according to a Microsoft support site: Office Web applications can run on operating systems besides Windows. But the questions of how and why were left unanswered, and not even Microsoft can explain.

A blog post to a Microsoft-managed site, turned up this morning by Computerworld reporter Gregg Keizer, seems to indicate that the Web applications in Office 14 will run in a Mac- or Linux-based Web browser. That information contradicts what BetaNews was told two weeks ago at PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, where attendees were given the first peek at Office 14's Web applications suite.

Do your earphones ever fall out of your ears? Is your headset too heavy on your head? Vendors will show some intriguing new options at CES 2009, ranging from Acoustibuds adapters to a NxSET "neckband."

Tossing aside any worries you might have about money, health, politics, or anything else, how do you feel about your earphones these days? Are you pleased with them? Guessing that a lot of people aren't, vendors will be on hand at CES with new designs aimed at raising comfort levels as well as just making earphones more interesting to wear.

They're not guaranteeing users the coveted top spots on search results, but Google's got a free guide for those looking to make their Web pages as tasty as possible to the search giant's robot spiders.

Posted Wednesday, the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF available here) explains for SEO novices how to structure your pages so search engines -- any search engine, not just Google -- can best find and parse them.