Able-HD wants to put a monitor in your bag
As long ago as 2003 Microsoft research found that having a second monitor made people up to 50 percent more productive.
However, having two screens is fine for those of us tied to a desk but isn’t exactly practical for people on the move.
The Internet of Things: Hasn't SkyNet taught us anything?
Watching my RSS streams in Feedly on a daily basis has had my head spinning lately. It's not the usual flood of tech news getting to me. It's all the stories hitting recently about the so-called Internet of Things. For a topic that has so little to show for it in the real world thus far, it sure garners a disproportionate amount of attention in the tech media. So what gives?
Perhaps someone can fill me in on what this Internet of Things is supposed to look like. Is it a different internet? Is it a network solely designated for these newfound "things" that need to talk to every other "thing" out there? Or is it just more of what we already see in the market: giving every device possible an IP address to sit on. I'm just as perplexed at this bogus concept as Mike Elgan from Computerworld. He's calling it a wild idea that is rightly "doomed from the start" for numerous reasons.
Is Bitcoin the future?
There has been a lot of talk lately about Bitcoin, a digital currency that aims to provide the security of cash and is more convenient than a credit card. Just under a year ago, the "cryptocurrency" -- so named for its reliance on cryptography in order to operate -- was traded somewhere between $13–14. However, one year later, Bitcoin is now trading for over $800, with a peak somewhere in the $1,200 range.
Bitcoin’s rise to popularity has been sparked by its many advantages: it claims to be inflation-free; have low or zero transaction fees; anonymity for transactions; totally transparent transaction history; irreversible transactions (no chargebacks); protection from fraud; freedom from exchange fees; and does not require the acceptor to be PCI Compliant.
Come on! Technology makes us more impatient
A new research study in the UK commissioned by customer service specialists KANA Software shows that consumers are getting more impatient.
Our expectations of getting a response to our communication with businesses have shortened from days to minutes in the space of just one generation.
How infected are you? TIME tool shows how much time you have wasted on Facebook
Regardless of whether you feel Facebook exhibits disease-like characteristics or not, one thing is for sure -- it can certainly turn into a time-sucker. There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg's social network is blocked in many workplaces you know! Just like many people "underestimate" how much alcohol they drink, particularly when speaking to a doctor ("Oh, not much... just a beer twice a year, doc!") many Facebook users are likely to be surprised -- or perhaps scared -- by just how much time they spend using the site.
If you've ever been curious, but haven’t bothered to sit with a stopwatch every time you log on, a new tool from TIME magazine could be what you've been looking for. The how-much-bloody-time-have-I-really-wasted-reading-other-people's-pointless-crap calculator has been created ahead of Facebook's tenth anniversary. It's on 4 February if you were thinking about getting a card and present, by the way.
PayPal's second global Hackathon invites you to become the 'ultimate hacker for good'
Hackers get a bad rap, but that's usually down to a simple misunderstanding of the term. PayPal is doing what it can to set the record straight with its second annual Hackathon competition, Battle Hacks, where participants are invited to "become the ultimate hacker for good". This is not the type of hacking you see on TV and in movies -- there are no passwords to be broken, no encrypted files to crack. Instead, developers are invited to create something magical and useful based on the PayPal API, or the Braintree and Venmo SDKs, in just 24 hours.
The Hackathon takes place in eleven cities around the world, starting in Tel Aviv on 6 February, and ending in London on 11 October. The world finals take place in San Jose, CA over three days starting 14 November, and the winner will walk away $100,000 richer. Oh, and they get the chance to wield the axe trophy -- "good luck clearing customs," quips PayPal.
Google Chrome + LEGO = Awesome!
I was a massive fan of LEGO as a child, and now that I’m a parent I get to play with the interlocking plastic bricks all over again, even though they’re a lot more advanced than they were back in my day. LEGO Group has done a fantastic job of keeping its product modern, with video games like LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Hobbit, and there’s even a fantastic looking LEGO Movie to look forward to later in the year.
If you fancy playing with some LEGO, but don’t want to buy a set, the great news is Google has announced a new Chrome experiment that lets you build fantastic virtual LEGO creations on a Google Map. Just find a spare plot of land (or build in the sea if you prefer) and start your construction.
Is a 'quantified self' the best way forward?
Through smartphone apps and wearable technology we can monitor virtually every aspect of our lives, gathering information about our habits and tracking behavior to discover patterns and trends.
This so-called "quantified self" movement is seen as a clever and efficient way to enhance our lives -- getting one’s body, mind and behavior in their best possible shape.
Wikipedia's celebrity voice archive gets underway with the help of Stephen Fry
Wikipedia. It's one of the cornerstones of the internet. It's a global resource which has quite a reputation and has spawned numerous copycats and offshoots; the latest addition to the wiki canon is the Wikipedia Voice Intro Project (or WikiVIP). As you may have guessed from the name, this is a project concerned with audio -- voice recordings specifically. The Wikipedia entries for celebrities and notable figures are to be spruced up with the addition of audio clips.
The first name to enter the vocal history books is Stephen Fry, a man known for his love of technology as much as his comedy, general knowledge and general loveliness. This month he recorded a ten second clip ("Hello, my name is Stephen Fry, I was born in London, and I’ve been in the entertainment business, well I suppose since 1981") which now appears on his Wikipedia page.
Policing Twitter -- can the existing legal system cope with the technological age?
Twitter is rarely out of the headlines, but this week two legal cases surrounding the social network slash micro-blogging service brought it to attention for slightly different reasons than normal. On one side of the Atlantic a couple fell foul of the law for using Twitter to make threats to a feminist campaigner, while on the other a celebrity managed to avoid prosecution for libel after managing to plead ignorance about the falsity of a claim made online.
For a court case victory, it was announced in a very restrained, quiet way... particularly when you consider that the victor was none other than Courtney Love. The celebratory tweet reads simply "I can't thank you enough Dongell Lawrence Finney LLP, the most incredible law firm on the planet. We won this epic battle. #justiceprevails", and the decision to use Twitter was slightly ironic considering the fact that the court case stemmed from a previous tweet made by Ms. Love.
British school children subjected to NSA-style surveillance
The idea of being monitored, spied upon, surveilled, call it what you will, is something we are gradually becoming used to. CCTV cameras abound, we now know that our private communication could be intercepted at any time, and god only knows what else is going on unbeknownst to us. The plots of Person of Interest look positively tame compared to what is actually happening. Look, a whole introductory paragraph about modern-day surveillance and not one reference to Big Brother, 1984 or George Orwell. Oh ... damn.
But it seems that it is not just potential terrorists, criminals and other ne'er do wells who might feel concerned about who is reading their emails and monitoring their online activity. Hundreds of schools up and down the UK are actively monitoring the online communication of pupils using methods not too far removed from those employed by the NSA on a global scale.
The most popular stories on BetaNews this past week - January 19 -- 25
Handset news aplenty this week. The Nokia Lumia 929 appeared for sale in China, and also showed up on Verizon's US website under the Nokia Lumia Icon name before quietly disappearing. None of this did anything to improve Windows Phone sales for Nokia which were found to be disappointing. Figures released this week showed that phablets are going to become increasingly popular as user look to merge smartphones and tablets in to a single device. It will probably come as little surprise that in the next few years it is predicted that mobile apps will be the most used software. Samsung Galaxy Note 3 owners were disappointed to find that upgrading to KitKat killed their ability to use third party accessories.
Ahead of the release of Update 1 to the operating system, Microsoft finally got around to releasing a guide to mastering Windows 8.1. So keen is Microsoft for you to learn more about Windows 8.1, a second batch of guides was released later in the week. And while you're becoming an expert Windows 8.1 user, Microsoft would like you to take a second look at Internet Explorer and rethink its web browser.
If Facebook is like a disease, I don't mind getting infected
Facebook has been in the news over the past few days after a report suggested that the social network is spreading in a similar way to a virus. Like all epidemics, the report suggests, the rate of infection will ultimately drop off, leading to the suggestion that by 2017 the social network will have shed 80 percent of its users. To which I -- and many others of reasonably sound mind -- cry "nonsense!" The catchily titled "Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics" paper published by, of all places, Princeton University puts forward the idea that Facebook users are set to abandon the social network in droves in the coming years.
Things don’t get off to a good start. In explaining the methodology, authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler say they will use "epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs [online social networks], where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery". The abstract gets off on the wrong foot by suggesting that Facebook "is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase" -- a wonderfully vapid term with no grounding in, well, anything really. It's easy to pick holes in papers that have slight flaws, but right from the start it is almost too easy here.
Fastest ever broadband test achieves a staggering 1.4Tb/s
In trial run by BT (British Telecom) and Alcatel-Lucent in London, UK, a data transfer rate of 1.4Tb/s has been achieved. This certainly sounds fast, and Alcatel-Lucent is claiming that it is the highest data transfer speed ever achieved using commercial-grade hardware.
What could you do with an internet connection of this speed? If you felt so inclined you would be able to download no less than 44 HD quality movies in a single second. One. Single. Second.
Mobile apps will take over the world by 2017
New research by Gartner predicts that over the next few years mobile apps will become the most popular computing tools across the globe.
It says that by 2017 mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating a revenue of over $77 billion. As a result it predicts that mobile users will provide personalized data streams to more than 100 apps and services every day.
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