From Seoul comes Soul, Samsung's new handset
Samsung unveiled its newest flagship handset and member of its "Ultra Edition" family, a line which seeks to provide the slimmest phones in attractive designs: The Soul.
The standout feature of this slider is the "Magical Touch" panel, produced by DaCP. A small panel beneath the 2.2" QVGA screen changes and adapts its functions in response to which application is running. For example, while running the MP3 player, it can act as the media control interface, or while using SMS functions, it can manipulate text.
Could the economic stimulus plan delay patent reform?
After warning as late as yesterday afternoon about the possible disruptive side effects that Congress' economic stimulus program might have on future legislation, a powerful trade organization is suddenly applauding its passage today.
Last night, the US Senate passed the Economic Stimulus Package of 2008, after a few moments of heated debate over cloture (the rules of debate) that threatened to kill the bill, and that even led cable news to report at one point the bill was already dead. Among its provisions is one measure that extends the cap on business deductions on assets from $150,000 to $250,000.
Yahoo launches live cam site, but can't handle traffic
Yahoo Live, the search company's new live cam site, underwent what you might call an "experimental" launch last night. If the Greeks ever considered a letter that could come before "alpha," this might have been the time to use it.
While similar to the host of webcam sites that already exist, such as Ustream, blogTV, mogulus, Stickam, and justin.tv, it can be said that few have garnered as much attention as Yahoo Live has in such a short time with so little pre-launch hype.
Hackers manage to unlock newest iPhones
February 8, 2007 4:00pm Further tests and research by BetaNews have indicated that users performing the unlock should not upgrade to 1.1.3 from within iTunes. Instead, the 1.1.3 upgrade package from the iPhone Dev Team should be used, say developers.
The unlock survives this upgrade process according to our tests: the upgrade can be done through a variety of methods outside of the iTunes interface. Although it has not been tested by BetaNews, phones that ship with 1.1.3 installed are apparently also able to use this method directly according to web reports.
IBM explains its 'information on demand' strategy with Cognos
Last November's buyout by IBM of SOA software provider Cognos is already having a major impact on businesses that use vertical market software. That impact is being felt in the way these businesses warehouse and access their data.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - What do some police departments, retail chains, big banks, and hospitals have in common in the software department, that doesn't have to do with Microsoft or standards or open source? It's that they're using service-oriented software to help them warehouse their data, using some methods that were originally created for publishing houses to manage articles.
Bevy of critical Office fixes headline February patches
Microsoft plans to issue twelve patches next Tuesday, five of which deal with issues in its Office productivity suite.
Of those five, four are critical according to the company's advanced notice published on Thursday. All the critical patches deal with remote code execution errors, and all but one do not require a restart.
RIAA president proposes spyware-like solution to piracy
In comments to the State of the Net conference held in Washington, DC this past week, RIAA president Cary Sherman essentially said he'd support filters and spyware-like applications to prevent piracy.
While the panel went on for over an hour, the juiciest tidbits came in Cary's responses to filtering and encryption, which are sure to ignite criticism from the RIAA's detractors over their methods to fight piracy.
Study: Blogging about music may triple its sales
A study by NYU Stern business school professor Vasant Dhar and partner Elaine Chang shows correlational evidence that blog posts increase online sales of recorded music.
The study observed 108 albums over a course of eight weeks, and concluded that the amount of blogs about a certain album can actually predict how well it will sell. It also suspected that the amount of MySpace friends a particular band has acts as a "badge of popularity," actually generating more interest through that number alone.
Microsoft's Virtual Earth 3D gets boost with Caligari acquisition
Oracle tries a 'vaulted' approach to its e-business database security
In an effort to step up its approach to "unbreakable" databases, Oracle today announced its Database Vault technology can now be used in conjunction with its E-Business Suite.
Oracle previously launched the Database Vault software suite in April 2006, hoping to limit insider security threats and other issues that may arise during typical database operations. Using time of day, PC and database IP addresses, and authentication, Database Vault is able to pick and choose what rights the database administrator has while not interfering with the system administrator's everyday tasks.
Google News to place greater focus on local content
The Mountain View, Calif. search company is debuting new functionality that will allow users to drill down to localized news.
While the inclusion of local news is something that has already existed news sites, the way Google plans to do it is unique. Instead of using actual people to separate the news, the site automates the process.
New Wii title from THQ seeks to mash up Guitar Hero
THQ has announced a new game for the Wii which turns the Mashup musical genre into armed combat.
Band Mashups for the Wii, expected in stores in April 2008, is based upon the combinative musical genre known as mashups. These are songs made up of two or more existent songs, usually of quite divergent syle, and mixed together to form a new hybrid song.
FCC shifts gears for 700 MHz auction
If the FCC's auction of former UHF bandwidth were to end here, it might raise over $19 billion. But with bidding activity slowing to a crawl, the Commission has one more tool in its arsenal to squeeze out some more value.
Sensing a lull in the action, the handlers for the 700 MHz auction by the US Federal Communications Commission have exercised their discretion, and have moved the auction into what the rules call "Stage Two." In this second -- and, according to the rules, final -- stage, anyone who wants to stay completely in the game must continue bidding no less than 95% of the time, to maintain its full eligibility in later rounds.
Motorola announces second gen WiMAX hardware
Today, Motorola announced two new 802.16e devices, one for fixed connectivity, and one that's somewhat more nomadic.
Motorola's recent announcement that it would be departing the mobile phone business drew attention to other strong offerings from the company, such as its WiMAX solutions. Today, the company announced two second generation 802.16e devices.
Will authorized hosting put MySQL on a par with Oracle and DB2?
Although real comparability to Oracle and IBM databases could still be some time away, MySQL's new authorized hosting program might help broaden out the niche for the open source database a lot more quickly.
MySQL AB started developing a new program for hosting partners in early 2007, about a year before Sun announced its $1 billion bid to acquire the open source database vendor, said Rich Nigro, MySQL's service provider business manager. Unveiled earlier this week, the new MySQL Authorized Hosting Partner Program gives managed hosting companies using the top-of-the-line Enterprise edition of the MySQL database an option for 24/7 database support directly from MySQL.
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