Latest Technology News

Today at the Bluetooth SIG press event in New York City, Polaroid previewed a pint-sized, inkless portable printer dubbed the PoGo, that can turn your digital camera into a modern equivalent of the old Polaroid Instant.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Remember those old Polaroid instant cameras from the latter half of the 20th century? (Would you believe they still make them?) Today at a Bluetooth SIG press event, Polaroid showed off its PoGo portable printer, which uses a Bluetooth link from a cell phone's camera to make your handset into a modern SX-70 equivalent.

Gartner analyst Bryan Lewis has said that in trying to save money in producing the graphics chip for the Xbox 360, Microsoft actually ended up paying much more due to repair

The Redmond company wanted to avoid using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vendor in an attempt to save millions in production costs. Instead, it designed the chip on its own, outsourcing the manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor.

Originally signing a deal in February of this year, Symantec has completed its acquisition of online backup and storage service SwapDrive and related properties for a reported $125 million.

Online backup service Swapdrive is now labeled with a prominent Symantec logo and states "Now part of Symantec!" along with SwapDrive affiliates (and former acquisition targets themselves) backup.com and whalemail.com.

It's getting more difficult to keep track of the various stages and permutations of malware, whose definition has expanded to mean "anything you didn't ask for and don't want running." But since when did Yahoo IM become malware?

It's no secret that a lot of our Windows-based production systems, and even some of our virtual ones, run ZoneAlarm Pro. There are a lot of software-based firewalls available now, but for the most part, we've been able to trust ZoneAlarm, even now that its originators have been absorbed into Check Point Software Technologies.

Glassdoor.com, a site that allows users to anonymously share workplace information -- including salary, job satisfaction, and workplace and protocol reviews -- has opened in beta.

With currently around 3,300 reviews and salary reports of almost 250 companies, Glassdoor seeks to, in the company's words, "become the TripAdvisor of the workplace." To do this, the site asks users to first submit an anonymous profile containing information about their current or former employer (from two years prior or less) before they can access anyone else's in-depth information.

This morning, Mozilla's FTP servers were updated once again with a new round of release candidates for its next Web browser, but curiously, we noted RC3 for Windows was identical to RC2 for Windows.

Download Firefox 3.0 RC3 for Mac OS X from FileForum now.

SanDisk could be considering offering customers of its Wi-Fi enabled music players a method to download music directly to players, if its latest acquisition is any indication.

SanDisk's Sansa Connect is the company's signature Wi-Fi enabled player, which allowed for Yahoo Music Unlimited downloads wirelessly. With that service now defunct and users being transferred to Rhapsody, the company is likely looking to fill that hole.

Andrew Cuomo, New York's high-profile Attorney General, announced yesterday his office has made agreements with Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to block child pornography newsgroups and known sites.

The statement issued from the Attorney General's office contains the following passage: "An undercover investigation...uncovered a major source of online child pornography known as 'Newsgroups.'"

Red Hat said Wednesday that it had settled claims against it from two companies related to a method of interfacing with a database.

Firestar produces a product called EdgeNode, which is a system that assists in the exchange of business transactions between enterprises. DataTern's signature product is ObjectSpark, which is a runtime engine that "manages delivery and persistence of data" across an application and multiple data sources.

On Monday, Apple made mention of a curious new technology it said would help accelerate the development of CPU-to-GPU process sharing, calling it OpenCL. But the lack of information about what it is makes us all the more curious.

In its press materials released Monday, Apple made mention of a technology it called OpenCL, whose purpose was reportedly to enable so-called GPGPU functionality -- the ability for graphics processors to handle some of the heavy computing tasks normally threaded to CPUs. Since Apple is already involved with a project that's part of Khronos Group's OpenGL, specifically to enable GPGPU functionality, our first reaction was that this must be a typo.

Microsoft has released a public beta of the first Windows Home Server update in order to show the world it has finally fixed an embarrassing data corruption bug it discovered six months ago and has been trying to correct since.

The public beta of Home Server Power Pack 1 is intended to help the Windows Home Server team "prove we fixed 'the bug'" that plagued the product's initial launch last year. The "bug" in question was a data corruption issue that occurred when certain programs were used to edit or transfer files stored on a Windows Home Server-based computer that has more than one hard drive.

To help get more consumer electronics (CE) devices out the door for WiMAX wireless broadband networks, Intel, Clearwire, and several other members of the WiMAX Forum today rolled out the Open Patent Alliance (OPA).

During a press conference, officials contended that the OPA will advance an "open and transparent" intellectual property rights (IPR) model that will make it simpler for both established players and small start-ups to build hardware and applications for WiMAX.

As more manufacturers aim for the 1 TB storage high-water mark, Western Digital pushed the pace further today with the announcement of its new 7200 rpm 3.5-inch SATA Caviar hard drives, in 750 GB and 1 TB capacities.

The new line of 3.5-inch Caviars, which will ship next week, features 7200 rpm spin speed, 32 MB cache, SATA 3 GB/s interface.

Just a few weeks after Google's release of its personal health care record tools, Microsoft has launched a pilot of its competing HealthVault platform, conducted with the help of the largest HMO in the US.

Announced this week at Microsoft's HealthVault conference, the new pilot will test the exchange of patient health data between My Health Manager, the existing electronic record program of Oakland-based HMO Kaiser Permanente, and HealthVault, a cloud-based, consumer-oriented health records system launched by Microsoft last October.

The ability to plug a laptop into a network and quickly print documents on any available printer has historically been difficult, if not impossible. Now, a new Xerox software tool designed for office workers could change that equation.

Download Xerox Global Print Driver from FileForum now.