Latest Technology News

Personal finance tracker mint.com, which picked up a "Best of Show" Tuesday at Finovate, has released its collection of investment tracking tools from closed beta.

The free personal-budgeting site, which also reports signing up its 500,000th user sometime in the past few days, thus adds a fancier set of financial-planning tools to its previous abilities to parse data from checking, savings and credit-card accounts. Mint CEO and founder Aaron Patzer describes the additions as making the site "more mainstream" -- and increasing its appeal to users over 35.

Lower-cost virtualization -- priced at just $70 per seat -- wins out over laptops in a bid to deliver computer education to 1.8 million schoolchildren in an Indian province.

Undercut on pricing by virtualization vendor NComputing, former partners turned rivals Intel and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) each got edged out this week on a deal to bring computing to 1.8 million schoolchildren in India.

What's bigger than Google? The vision of librarians, according to the academic institutions banding together to create HathiTrust -- a "universal library" built in part on Google's scanning efforts.

HathiTrust (pronounced haw-TEE -- it's the Hindi word for elephant, that animal that famously lives long and never forgets) launched Tuesday. It's a project of the member universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the University of California system. The CIC has been working with Google since last year to digitize books held in libraries at member schools; the UC system signed on with Google in 2006, and the University of Michigan's MBooks (now folded into HathiTrust) has underway since the school announced affiliation with the Google Books Library Project during its launch in 2004.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for Windows from FileForum now.

6:08 pm EDT October 14, 2008 - This afternoon, two Mozilla spokespersons confirmed to BetaNews the official availability of Firefox 3.1 Beta 1, which should include some features that could catch it up with IE8 Beta 2.

Samsung is actually known as an innovator in the notebook computer field, having equipped some models with solid state drives as early as two years ago. But it hasn't made its notebook presence known in America until today.

While the requisite drooling over the new MacBook Pro's slick glass surface goes on in Cupertino this morning, there's a tsunami under way in notebook computing, and its source appears to be Seoul. Samsung today announced it is storming onto the US notebook market with a complete lineup whose marketing structure has already been tested elsewhere in the world, and with price-competitive models that have intriguing features and a promise for quality.

Sonic Solutions announced Qflix download and burn technology for DVD nearly a year ago. Now, following Dell's lead, Pioneer has announced its own Qflix compatible burners.

Today, Pioneer announced two Qflix DVD/CD burners: the internal DVR-2920Q,
and the external DVR-X162Q. Both drives incorporate Sonic Solutions' Roxio Venue software, which was designed to create protected DVDs from legally purchased downloads, as stipulated by The DVD Copy Control Association in 2006. The drives will begin shipping this month, and carry an MSRP of $69.99 for the internal model, and $114.99 for the external, a scant $5 cheaper than Dell's.

Apple today finally broke the $1,000 barrier on MacBooks, yet it didn't break out a sub-$800 notebook or netbook. Will people forced into penny-pinching still be willing to pay what some call the "Apple tax?"

At a hyped-up Cupertino launch event today, Apple dashed the hopes of a lot of users, introducing the expected new models of its existing MacBooks, but not rolling out a rumored sub-$800 notebook or netbook.

Download OpenOffice.org for Windows 3.0 Final Edition from FileForum now.

Flattened by popular demand: Servers hosting the final version of OpenOffice 3.0, released yesterday, have been struggling to keep up with would-be downloaders.

Apple's spotlight on notebooks this morning in Cupertino unveiled the company's newest line of MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks, proving once again that there is nothing that Apple can make that the blogs can't leak.

The leaked images that have been circulating on Engadget and elsewhere for the last two weeks have been of the new MacBook Pro, which was announced today; likewise, the "brick" term that was thrown around in rumors referred to Apple's new manufacturing process of this chassis, also announced today.

During a Q&A session following Apple's special MacBook event on Tuesday, company CEO and industry magnate Steve Jobs said Apple was holding off on incorporating Blu-ray because licensing the technology is "a bag of hurt."

Apple was an early backer of Blu-ray, but has been silent about adding Blu-ray drives to its notebooks or desktop computers. Meanwhile, Acer, HP and others have already been shipping Blu-ray drives with their systems.

Contrary to earlier reports saying that P2P TV service Joost would release a browser plug-in not based on Adobe Flash, the site has done just that.

Joost has relaunched its free streaming TV service in Flash and intends for in-browser content consumption. Previously, users had to download and install a desktop client to participate; and though interest was high, beta testers expressed disappointment in the service's speed and bandwidth consumption.

Download Silverlight 2.0 for Windows from FileForum now.

1:03 pm EDT October 13, 2008 - In a teleconference today, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie told the press that the company's 2.0 version of Silverlight will be ready to ship tomorrow, October 14.

Convicted counterfeiters will now be subject to increased fines and the forfeiture of their property, under a new law that took effect yesterday. And the size of government just got bigger, with the creation of one more office.

While opposition was, as we put it some weeks ago, "mounting" against an intellectual property enforcement bill that would create a new government office in charge of enacting government policy against IP infringement, piracy, and counterfeiting, it's fair to say that opposition remained in large part outside of Congress. Last September 26, the US Senate passed the PRO-IP Act by unanimous consent; two days later, the House ratified it by a vote of 381-41.

While stopping short of confirming rumors of 1.5 million pre-orders, T-Mobile told BetaNews today that pre-sale demand for its G1 is "robust," and that the first Android device will, in fact, be available on Oct. 22.

In a statement to BetaNews this morning, T-Mobile finally lifted its veil of silence on reports that customers have pre-ordered 1.5 million G1 phones. Although neither confirming nor denying rumors flying around since Friday, a T-Mobile spokesperson said that the industry's first Android device is "one of the most highly anticipated phones of the year," that demand "continues to be robust," and that the phone will be available on Oct. 22 for customers "to be able to experience."

Sony's Bravia Internet Video Link will receive its first movie premiere, Hancock, on October 28, before it is released on any other media.

Early in the summer, Sony CEO Howard Stringer announced that broadband-connected Bravia TV's would receive a streaming movie service, beginning with the premiere of Sony Pictures' Hancock.