Latest Technology News

A slimmer version of Samsung's series of optical disc drives, due next July, will connect directly to digital cameras and will enable faster burns of multimedia content than internal PC drives, the manufacturer told BetaNews today.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) -- In an interview with BetaNews during an invitees-only press event here today, Richard Aguilera, Samsung's national sales manager for optical storage, told us that the company's next round of external TruDirect drives (model SE-T084M) will let consumers burn videos, photos, and music in a fraction of the time it would take for them to burn content onto a PC's hard drive.

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Samsung officials told reporters it will ship a Blu-ray write-capable PC drive in the first half of next year, preceded by a combo drive in the fourth quarter of this year.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) -- At an invitees-only press event here this morning, representatives from Samsung told BetaNews they're looking to catch up with Hitachi in the Blu-ray PC drive market.

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Celebrating the release of British alt-pop group Coldplay's new album "Viva la Vida: or Death and All his Friends," Amazon has taken the opportunity to offer customers the band's entire back catalog for $1.99 per album.

Even though Apple's iTunes has been running "exclusively on iTunes" commercials for Coldplay's newest album since May, "Viva.." is Amazon's top-selling album today. The retailer is now offering the album DRM-free for one dollar cheaper than iTunes.

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After 13 straight quarters of growth, revenue from online advertisements shrunk slightly. Either way, Internet ad revenue is up year over year.

The data comes from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and shows that overall revenues were still up year over year by 18 percent, to $5.8 billion USD. But this was down slightly from the $5.9 billion recorded in the last quarter of 2007, which was a record.

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With giants in the social networking field opening up their APIs to developers, social news sharing site Reddit is going a big step further today, opening its site's entire source code to the open source community.

Reddit competes with Digg, Newspond, Mixx, and similar news aggregation sites. Its Web site was built using an open source platform and open source tools, but now the site's source code will be freely available to everyone, downloadable from this address.

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To appease gamers, filmmakers and users who want a portable notebook, Toshiba introduced three new notebooks in its Digital Products Division (DPD) yesterday.

The Qosmio G55, using the Cell processor currently used in the Sony PlayStation 3, has been designed specifically for multimedia enthusiasts. The notebook is available with up to 500 GB of storage, and is the first Toshiba product to ship with an 18.4-in. screen.

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Since early morning yesterday, Google's App Engine Web application hosting service has been forced into a limp, yielding persistent errors for users attempting to access their applications.

In the App Engine Forum at 6:35 pm PT yesterday, a team member posted a brief explanation of why users were having difficulty: "This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries. We have isolated the bug and we're currently working on a fix. Going forward, we're also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won't affect the stability of the system as a whole."

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Playing a little bit of catch-up to rival Google, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Navic Networks on Wednesday, giving it a foothold in the television advertising business.

The interactive TV advertising market has been considered a "new and burgeoning" industry for well over a decade now, and for perhaps all of that time, Microsoft has been working to gain a competitive position there. But this morning's announced acquisition of interactive ad platform provider Navic Networks is being perceived as a catch-up play with Google, whose recent deal with Dish Network has been the talk of the industry.

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2008 has begun to look a lot like 2006 for Sony BMG in Europe. Publishing association Impala asked courts to overturn the EC's merger approval a second time, and joint venture partner Bertelsmann AG again expressed its desire to back away.

Independent music industry representative Impala has built a platform of opposition to major label mergers, and in its "mission statement" makes this assertion: "Independent music companies are often micro companies and SME's [small and medium enterprises], they're are at a disadvantage with regard to the majors; they do not have access to the same developed communication networks, financing, means to run marketing campaigns, the distribution networks. Some acquisitions and mergers squeeze SMEs out of the market, leading to a lack of diversity for consumers. "

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The petaflop barrier was not only broken last week, it was pulverized into infinitesimally small, neutrino-sized particles. While Intel continues to blow even more horns, suddenly it's the Cell processor that has engineers talking.

When in November 2003, the Oklahoma Sooners football team blew out Texas A&M by a score of 77 - 0, a sportscaster was heard to have said, "It wasn't that close." When the news arrived this morning from Mannheim -- after a few days delay, apparently to celebrate -- of the absolute trouncing of the once unstoppable IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer by, quite literally, a hybrid collection of AMD Opterons and parts you'd find in a PlayStation 3 -- not a vanquishing, not a clobbering, but a mathematical and systematic decimation of the former champion by 231% -- it was the type of blowout that the late, great Jim McKay would have loved to have described, up close and personal.

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With a new application framework entering open beta early next year, eBay is working to build a kind of 'open' market for both developers and vendors to earn money, as a key eBay developer told BetaNews Tuesday.

A private beta of eBay's Project Echo will commence in Q4 2008, limited to participation among five ISVs including research tools provider Terapeak and CRM service provider Hosted Support. That will be followed by an open beta early next year and commercial availability by mid-year. This news Tuesday from Kumar Kandaswamy, senior director for platform strategy of the eBay Developers Program, in a briefing for BetaNews.

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Early Tuesday evening, the Mozilla organization gave BetaNews an update on its quest to have posted the single most downloaded (tracked) software item in a single day, having exceeded Firefox 2's single-day mark in just five hours' time.

As BetaNews confirmed this afternoon, the worldwide usage share of all Web browsers declaring themselves as Firefox 3.0 in HTTP requests, catapulted by 265% between 11:00 am and 6:00 pm EDT today, according to independent data compiled live by analysis firm Net Applications, from 0.96% to 2.54%. That means nearly one Web browser in 40 worldwide is using Firefox 3, as of Tuesday evening.

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In a move to bolster its Portege notebook lineup, Toshiba today introduced a new notebook that features a single 128 GB solid-state drive.

Although the Alienware Area-51 m9750 can be configured up to 128 GB SSD using two 64 GB units, the R500-S5007V Portege is the first truly portable notebook with a single 128 GB SSD.

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Hewlett-Packard's MediaSmart Connect digital receiver -- which enables people who store content on a home network or notebook PC to transfer it via wired or wireless connection to their HDTVs -- is now available for pre-order.

Originally introduced during the CES last January, the MediaSmart Connect receiver uses Windows Media Center to connect HDTV viewers not only to locally stored programming but also online content. This includes renting or purchasing movies using CinemaNow, sharing photos on Snapfish, and listening to online radio through Live365, according to HP.

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In a stunning announcement, the city of Philadelphia said that it had reached a deal with a group of private investors to keep its wireless network alive and free.

Although details are still being worked out, free wireless access will be available to Philadelphians as of today. The system will be reassessed over the the next few months along with a formal roll-out later this year.

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