Latest Technology News

Motorola today unveiled a new 5-megapixel camera brought to market with the aid of Kodak, with emphasis shifted to the built-in camera and away from the features on the phone itself.

During an official event hosted in Beijing, Motorola introduced the MOTOZINE ZN5 -- the first device in a newly created line of phones optimized for multimedia.

On Friday, the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) began an ongoing debate between McCain and Obama representatives on Twitter, moderated by prominent blogger Ana Marie Cox.

Representing Sen. John McCain is Online Communications Director for the Republican National Committee Liz Mair, and Georgetown professor and Technology, Media and Telecom advisor to the Obama campaign Mike Nelson (no relation to Michael J. Nelson from MST3K...although that might have been cool).

After the judge in the Jammie Thomas trial admits he may have made some serious mistakes, the organization helping to defend her in court is now seeking a retrial.

A hearing on the subject is scheduled for August, where the two sides will argue for and against throwing out the October verdict that found Thomas guilty and fined her $220,000.

Disney had attempted to break into the movies-on-demand business with movies.com, and had partnered with Fox, However, the company was unable to make that a reality.

On Monday, the Disney Company -- parent company of ABC Television -- announced that it had sold movie information site movies.com to Comcast, which would then fold the site into its Fandango service. As of today, we noticed Movies.com has already begun to integrate itself into that site; clicking on some links took us to pages on Fandango.

Despite high entry-level salaries and an abundance of jobs, the numbers of students completing undergraduate information technology programs in North America continues to fall, according to recent statistics.

The just released latest results of the Computing Research Association's Taulbee Survey -- an annual study conducted at universities with Ph.D. programs -- shows a 20% drop between 2005-06 and 2006-07 in students completing bachelors degrees in professional IT fields.

It's way too early to declare the battle between Microsoft and arch-rival Alcatel-Lucent over. Last week, a judge upheld a big jury decision against Microsoft and tacked on some interest. That just made the defendant a little angrier.

The state of affairs between Microsoft and French telecommunications firm Alcatel-Lucent, the current holder of patents developed by the old Bell Laboratories, remains contentious. Last Thursday, a US district judge in Southern California upheld an April jury verdict against Microsoft for violating a series of patents Alcatel holds for how a user selects a calendar entry from a menu ($357.7 million) and the use of styluses on touch-screen devices ($10.4 million). Judge Marilyn Huff opted to charge interest on both rulings in the interim, raising the award to $512 million.

A spokesperson for CA this afternoon confirmed to BetaNews that it is launching its registered beta program for its upcoming consumer-grade Internet security suite, and is looking for capable testers to help perfect the product.

New on CA's features list with this upcoming version is a firewall that can optionally grant or deny programs' access to the Internet without automatic notification to the user, an in-game suppression mode that stops CA from interrupting you while you're playing, and a mobile notification option that notifies you when you're about to enter a new Wi-Fi hot spot.

Talkster, a company that provides free ad-subsidized international calling, can now be used with Skypeout, which already enables Skype users to pay for calls to landlines as they go.

VoIP in Europe has been popular for several years, as it levels the formerly prohibitive costs of international dialing. Because of this, consumers currently have a wide selection of VoIP service providers, ranging from the now-classic desktop client, to mobile handset solutions in Wi-Fi equipped devices.

Like a side project of revered indie stars, Topspin features former stars from Yahoo Music, Digidesign, and Real Networks taking charge of the changing record industry landscape.

At a Billboard Magazine music industry panel discussion at CES 2008, Topspin's CEO Ian Rogers, then working for Yahoo Music, contributed to the dialogue about the value held by the subscription model for music sales.

In a move that could help boost the scalability of Linux for grids and other advanced 64-bit multiprocessor applications, HP has release its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) source code to the open source community.

Originally limited mainly to 32-bit workgroup applications, Linux has been gaining ground on 64-bit platforms vs. Unix over the past few years, especially since the release of 64-bit processors from Intel and AMD.

In an indication that it is indeed possible to construct fences with a herring, a very public spat erupted this morning between representatives of musicians and broadcasters, with a can of fish as the proverbial bone of contention.

In an effort to maintain public attention in the debate over performance royalties paid annually by Internet radio services and not paid by terrestrial radio broadcasters, this morning, the musicFIRST coalition -- representing musicians and performers seeking royalties parity among multiple media -- sent National Association of Broadcasters President David Rehr a can of herring.

The phone manufacturer says acquiring the producer of a geo-locating service for finding one's friends, helps accelerate its vision of connecting people under its services strategy.

Plazes is a privately held company based in Berlin. Founded in 2006, it employs 13 and focuses on allowing users to post there location along with a short description of what they are doing, much like Twitter.

It appears likely that individuals believing their rights were violated by ISPs during anti-terrorism investigations, will not have much recourse against them after a sweeping House vote Friday that galvanized Republicans and split Democrats.

By a vote Friday afternoon of 293-129, with 13 not voting (including one-time Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul), new compromise legislation passed the US House of Representatives that would restrict the government's ability to conduct warrantless wiretaps on "non-United States persons" in the future. However, the means for those involved in such operations since 9/11/2001 to obtain legal immunity remains in the bill, thereby increasing its chances of being signed by President Bush should the Senate also pass the bill.

Although Dell now offers Samsung's solid-state drives across 18 different notebook PC models, Samsung still views SSDs overall as just a "complement" to its HDD line-up.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - At a press conference this week hosted by Samsung, Dell Storage Director Hubbert Smith told reporters that while flash memory-based solid-state disk drives (SSDs) offer performance benefits across many notebook PCs, enterprise servers, and other applications, he believes Samsung will also keep relying on lower-cost, high density HDs to meet users' capacity needs.

Linden Lab will celebrate five years of Second Life with a two-week festival in the virtual world, starting on June 23rd and ending July 7.

Residents of the virtual social environment will log in and have their avatar explore the virtual fair, with each session taking place in a different conference room.