Latest Technology News

ORLANDO - Last Friday, I wrote about how Microsoft appeared to be scheduling TechEd this year in a way that reduces its emphasis on "what's coming next," and focuses more on what developers should be doing to improve their standards and practices, to catch up with the operating systems that are already on our doorstep: Vista and the forthcoming Windows Server 2008.

I said it was a welcome change, and on Monday, I emphasized that point once again with some words of approval of the abbreviated keynote event (down from an often three-day affair to 90 minutes), giving more time for attendees to attend sessions and hands-on labs.

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Following in the footsteps of rival CBS, NBC said Wednesday that it will allow users to post snippets of popular NBC news and sports programs to their personal Web sites. Programs to initially be offered include Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Dateline NBC and programming from NBC Sports, DotComedy.com, and iVillage.com.

NBC has allowed users to post clips of Saturday Night Live and Heroes in the past. A Web site owner can post the video through the use of a widget, much like YouTube does to allow its videos to be distributed.

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Although it stops short of an all-out ban like some wildlife activists are looking for, eBay said Tuesday it will no longer allow cross-border sales of ivory.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) accused the site in mid-May of not following its own wildlife policies, and in some cases aiding the illegal trade of the material in as many as nine out of every ten listings.

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eBay will begin to sell radio advertising time through its auction site thanks to a partnership with Bid4Spots, which holds inventory from 2,300 radio stations in the top 300 markets.

The auction site typically offers unsold ad inventory, according to Bid4Spot's website.

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ORLANDO - During an updated version of one of the more popular sessions at TechEd each year, senior security engineer and Microsoft MVP Marcus Murray did attendees a major service by demonstrating that hacking into a network is not really an art, and in some ways, not even much of a science.

His "Why I Can Hack Your Network in a Day" session is actually something of a misnomer, as many of the tools he uses (including one written by SysInternals guru-turned-Microsoft fellow Mark Russinovich) can enable individuals to work their way to revealing the passwords of domain administrators in closer to 15 minutes.

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ORLANDO - During an invitation-only demonstration here at TechEd, small device developer EmbeddedFusion demonstrated a prototype programmable small device - actually a circuit board with a 2x3 color LCD display - that is capable of being programmed using Microsoft's .NET Micro Framework. It's a managed code system with which developers can rapidly build programs for embedded devices, and embedded device drivers.

Within the first 20 minutes of programming the card using C# in Visual Studio 2005 (after re-installing the EmbeddedFusion SDK), we were able to construct a simple application that...[drum roll]...blinked an LED on and off.

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Continuing its effort to provide an alternative to the One Laptop Per Child project, Intel announced plans on Tuesday to team up with Asustek to produce a notebook for developing countries that could cost as little as $200. The 'Eee PC' will be a full-featured low-end notebook, whereas the OLPC is more aimed at children. Intel has criticized the device in the past for being too simple, and not having enough functionality to even make it worthwhile.

Depending on the feature set, the Eee PC will retail for $199 to $299 and be available publicly. The OLPC currently retails for about $180 to government clients, but there is no currently planned retail push. Intel said it hoped to ship about 200,000 of the notebooks this year after production begins later this summer.

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Toshiba will ship HD DVD drives in all of its laptops beginning in 2008, its senior vice president said Tuesday. While it is unclear what effect the decision will have on the prices of its laptops, typically bundling the high definition drives have resulted in higher retail costs.

Doing so, however, holds promise for the future of the format. According to data from IDC, the company sold 9.2 million notebooks last year, and is in the top five overall in shipments. The company is also planning to use flash memory in its laptops beginning this month, as prices on NAND chips have fallen far enough to make them feasible for such use, it said.

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HTC shot back at Apple on Tuesday, introducing the Touch mobile handset that boasts many of the innovative features of the iPhone in a similar package.

The Taiwanese phone maker, which typically sells its phones directly to carriers that are then branded as that company's own phones, is betting highly on the product. It believes the Touch could contribute significantly to the company's financial performance.

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In a blast from the past, the Netscape Browser, which was resurrected in 2005 by AOL, has become Netscape Navigator once again for version 9.0. The new release, currently in beta, brings a number of new features such as built-in news, URL correction, and link-sharing.

As expected, Netscape Navigator 9 (screenshots) closely integrates with AOL's new Netscape.com site, which lets users vote on stories and leave comments. A new Friends' Activity Sidebar and Tracker provides a quick view of recently posted news and comments on the site.

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Web log software company Six Apart said Tuesday it had released a beta of the newest version of its Movable Type software, as well as announcing the platform would go open source by the end of this quarter.

The release of Movable Type 4.0 returns the software "to its roots," with the company relying heavily on its users to shape the next version of the software. Although many have treated the software like it was open source, in reality it was not.

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The OpenOffice.org development team on Tuesday released the first alpha test version of OpenOffice Aqua, which is built specifically for Apple's Mac OS X operating system. The previous Mac port of OpenOffice required the use of the X11 system, making the software slow and difficult to run.

Although the release is six years in the making, developers warn that the early alpha is still very buggy, and "it may crash and destroy your data." A number of features are still not functional, including printing, PDF export, copy and paste, and multi-monitor support. In addition, OpenOffice Aqua will crash after quitting.

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In an effort to better compete with rival Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com said Tuesday that they would collaborate on several services aimed at small business. The first is a web advertising collaboration where Salesforce.com customers can order ads from the company's website. Other collaborations could include integration with other Google products as well, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Neither company will confirm that the moves are indeed aimed at taking on Microsoft head on, although Google's onine productivity applications could be combined with Salesforce.com's business applications to offer a comprehensive package for enterprise customers, some say.

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Acer is showing strength in the global PC industry, becoming the world's third largest PC maker in the first quarter of 2007, according to data from research firm iSuppli.

The Taiwanese company posted a 42.7 percent increase in shipments over the same quarter last year. That was enough for Acer to take the third spot from rival Lenovo. The Chinese PC manufacturer still leads in desktop PC shipments, but Acer's widening lead in notebooks gave it the number 3 spot overall.

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ORLANDO - Product managers at TechEd 2007 here gave BetaNews an early glimpse of Microsoft's next videoconferencing application, which will tie into both Office Communications Server (which we saw in detail at WinHEC three weeks ago) and Microsoft's own subscription-based conferencing services.

Office Live Meeting 2007 will give attendees of virtual meetings and conferences a single, simple frame from which to view conferences - an important advance, especially in view of the abundance of browser-based conference schemes where the video appears in a postage stamp.

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