holy_calamity - Slashdot User

Submission + - Intel Demos Phone, Tablet in New Mobile Chip Push (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @01:19PM

holy_calamity writes: "Intel is making another assault on the mobile processor market, showing off a prototype phone, and a tablet, using its newest mobile processor, Medfield. The company claims that products based on the chips will appear in the first half of next year. There's reason to believe that Intel might get somewhere this time. Its chipsets traditionally comprise three separate chips, a design that guzzles power. Medfield introduces an all-in-one chip, mirroring the power efficient design of the ARM-based chips that run smart phones and tablets in the market today."

Submission + - Microsoft's So.cl Combines Search and Social Netwo (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Thursday December 15, 2011 @02:47PM

holy_calamity writes: "As Slashdot noted, Microsoft accidentally revealed a social network a few months ago. Now the company is talking about the site, known as So.cl. Technology Review has a write up with screenshots, showing a Facebook-like design. Users create status updates using a Bing search box at the top of the page, selecting chunks of text or collages of images from their results. Although the site looks like a slick, general purpose network it is aimed at helping students to collaborate while learning, says the team that built it. For now, only students at three schools can sign up, but that may change."

Submission + - Crowdsourcing Sites Host Multi-Million Dollar Astr (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Monday December 12, 2011 @03:58PM

holy_calamity writes: "Researchers at University of California Santa Barbara have uncovered a thriving astroturfing industry worth millions of dollars per year supported by crowdsourcing sites in China and the US. It costs only tens of cents to have a real person send a tweet or set up a new social media account, making crowdsourcing an effective way to inject subtle spam into social networks. The researchers conclude that the favorable economics and fact that anti-spam systems struggle to detect such activity suggest that "crowdturfing", as they call it, will become a major problem on social networks worldwide."

Submission + - Corporations Sign Up to Track Location of Customer (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Friday December 09, 2011 @02:21PM

holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review reports on Loc-Aid, a startup that enables companies such as banks to get a location fix on the device associated with a customer's cell phone number. The company has built a system that integrates the phone-tracking capabilities of all the major North American wireless networks. Banks are using the service to check a person's location when their credit card triggers fraud alarms. Retailers are expected to use the service to offer location-specific deals and to analyse patterns in customer movements. A person must opt in before a company can use Loc-Aid's service to track their phone. Challenge Loc-Aid to locate your device using their online demo."

Submission + - IBM Makes First Racetrack Memory Chip (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Monday December 05, 2011 @12:38PM

holy_calamity writes: "Slashdot has followed the progress of IBM's revolutionary "racetrack" memory which stores data inside nanowires for several years. Now Big Blue has made the first prototype integrated onto a single chip, using the CMOS processing used in commercial chip fabs. It's still a research prototype, but goes some way to validate IBM's claim that the technology could be commercialized."

Submission + - Qualcomm's Butterfly Wing Display Gets Nearer (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @03:49AM

holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review has an update on a screen technology from Qualcomm called Mirasol that delivers LCD-like colors and video but sips power like e-ink. Demonstration Android tablets with 5.7 inch Mirasol displays apparently held up well in bright light and were responsive enough for gaming. Qualcomm are in the process of building a $1bn new factory to make the screens, which should appear in devices from phone and tablet makers next year."

Submission + - Verizon Plans a Fast Lane for Some Apps (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Thursday November 10, 2011 @12:22PM

holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review reports that Verizon plans to allow mobile apps to request and get more bandwidth when a cell network is congested — for a small fee. Video calling or movie streaming apps could offer a "turbo" button for a user to press when a poor connection threatens video quality. An API will be offered to mobile developers wishing to use the service. The feature will likely be controversial because it breaches some definitions of net neutrality and granting more bandwidth to some users will necessarily take it away from others."

Submission + - When Will Apple Let Siri and Apps Connect? (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday October 19, 2011 @09:43AM

holy_calamity writes: "Developers want to knowwhen their apps will be able to connect to Siri, the virtual assistant built into the new iPhone 4S. Technology Review reports that providing APIs for Siri would not only make it possible to control apps with casual voice commands, but could also make Siri smarter if it is connected with other AI services able to do things like make very specific restaurant recommendations based on a person's past actions."

Submission + - Android Phones Get Dual Accounts (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Thursday October 13, 2011 @12:31PM

holy_calamity writes: "AT&T is adopting technology that gives a person with an Android device two user profiles, enabling company email and other data to reside in an encrypted partition separate from a users apps, games and unfettered web browsing. AT&T are calling the feature Toggle, and plan to release it later this year. Toggle is a regular app that once installed creates its own, encrypted desktop under the control of company IT bosses. Toggle is a rebranding of an app developed by startup Enterproid, which continues to develop its own version. AT&T think this move will encourage smartphone adoption in the enterprise. Interestingly, Apple's current version of iOS and app guidelines exclude multiple profiles on one device."

Submission + - Patents Google bought from IBM are "weak" (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Friday October 07, 2011 @05:51PM

holy_calamity writes: "Slashdot noted in September that Google had bought 1023 patents from IBM. Now IP analytics firms IPVision says they're a "mixed bag" of mostly unrelated patents that won't be much use in defending against competitors such as Microsoft or Apple. Patents are most useful when they are tightly linked into clusters by references, such that they cover every angle on an idea, something Google's new collection lacks. Is the search giant clutching at straws in its bid to arm itself against litigious competitors?"

Submission + - First von Neumann architecture quantum computer (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Thursday September 01, 2011 @03:56PM

holy_calamity writes: "The first computers with a von Neumann architecture, where a processor has access to RAM, appeared in the 1940s. Now the first quantum computing system with a von Neumann design has been made, at University of California Santa Barbara. Their quantum processor made up of two superconducting quantum bits can use a 2-bit "quantum RAM" to save entangled bit values into."

Submission + - Crowdsourcing makes an API for human intelligence (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Monday August 29, 2011 @06:05PM

holy_calamity writes: "A startup called MobileWorks claims to offer human-level intelligence to any piece of software, with APIs for image, text or speech processing that crowdsource tasks to workers in India. Unlike Amazon's Mechanical Turk, jobs can be sent in by software without human help and can also be completed in "real time" with a turnaround of a few seconds. The company claims that for problems like OCR and image recognition it makes more sense to find ways to use human intelligence than developing complex custom algorithms."

Submission + - A TV That Knows, Shares, What You're Watching (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Friday August 19, 2011 @12:21PM

holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review reports on technology appearing soon in TVs that fingerprints what is onscreen and sends that information to an internet server able to identify the content, whether live TV or another source like a DVD. Web pages and mobile apps using the same connection as the TV can access that information using an API, allowing online content to dynamically provide relevant information and ads to be more targeted. Startup Flingo, which developed the technology, says one of the top 5 TV brands in the US will launch a set with the Sync Apps system in coming months."

Submission + - Microsoft Says Homomorphic Computing Is Practical (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Monday August 08, 2011 @09:44PM

holy_calamity writes: "Homomorphic computing makes it possible to compute with encrypted data and get an encrypted result, something that could make cloud services more secure. Such systems have so far been mathematical proofs, but researchers at Microsoft now say that stripped down versions able to only compute certain mathematical functions are efficient enough to be used today. They built prototype software capable of calculating statistical functions using encrypted data and say it could be used for processing medical data while protecting privacy."

Submission + - Harnessing Interference for Faster Wireless Data (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @08:41PM

holy_calamity writes: "Inventor of the Quicktime codec Steve Perlman has unveiled a new wireless technology he claims can deliver thousands of times more bandwidth to mobile devices than existing technology. Each user is served by multiple transmitters, which send out waves carefully designed to combine into a data signal only at a device's location. That technique enables every user to be targeted with a signal with the same total bandwidth that would usually be shared between users, says Perlman."

Slashdot Top Deals