Archive August 2009
Live Webchat With Leading Entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den Star James Caan Today
As part of the promotion of UK’s innovation and technology iawards there will be a live webchat with leading entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den star James Caan today (Thursday 27 August) at 1.30pm UK local time.
Aiming to recognise and celebrate the best British achievements in science, innovation and technology, the iawards are backed by Science and Innovation Minister Lord Drayson and leading entrepreneur James Caan.
Hats off to cool innovation and technology!
14 Things Which Are New in Snow Leopard
With Snow Leopard set to be released in only a couple of days, what can be expected of the new “refined, not reinvented” version of OS X.
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs first announced Snow Leopard at WWDC on June 8, 2008, with the first public demonstration being given at WWDC 2009 by Bertrand Serlet and Phil Schiller. After months of work it is now ready.
For Snow Leopard, Apple engineers had a single goal: to make a Snow Leopard a better Leopard. The aim was to refine, simplify, and speed up. Refinements (both big and small) have been made to a wide range of applications, processes, and interface elements. Here is a summary of what is new and refined!
- The Finder has been completely rewritten in Cocoa to take advantage of all the modern technologies in Mac OS X.
- Exposé is refined and more convenient. It’s now integrated in the Dock, so you can just click and hold an application icon in the Dock and all the windows for that application will unshuffle so you can quickly change to another one.
- Time Machine is up to 80 percent faster and reduces the time it takes to complete your initial backup to Time Capsule.
- Snow Leopard, wakes from sleep up to twice as quickly when you have screen locking enabled. And shutting down is up to 80 percent faster.
- The upgrade process has been simplified, streamlined, and is up to 50 percent faster. Also Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB.
- Snow Leopard includes QuickTime Player X with a new, clean, uncluttered design, a new trimming interface, and easy uploads to YouTube and MobileMe.
- Mac OS X 10.6 can download the latest printer drivers available over the Internet. And it periodically checks to make sure it has the latest driver.
- Automatic time zone setup. Snow Leopard locates known Wi-Fi hotspots to set the time zone automatically.
- Easy PDF text selection. Mac OS X Snow Leopard applies sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms so you can select text just in one column rather than across the whole page.
- Snow Leopard improves the reliability of ejecting discs and external drives.
- To see your files clearly in the Finder, you can use a slider to adjust the size of the icon previews up to 512 by 512 pixels, four times their maximum resolution in Leopard.
- Snow Leopard takes the next big step by rewriting nearly all system applications in 64-bit code and by enabling the Mac to address massive amounts of memory. Nearly all system applications — including the Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat — are now built with 64-bit code.
- 10.6 includes OpenCL, a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.
- Out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard comes with built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server.
OS X 10.6 To Be Released on August 28th; Snow Comes Early
There have been loads of rumours about the early release of Snow Leopard, Apple’s next iteration of its OS X operation system for Macs. Originally marked for release in September, Apple have managed to get the OS up to scratch early and it is now being released on August 28th.
You can pre-order it from the Apple store today. Prices for the USA are $29 for a single user upgrade and £25 for those in the UK.
China Mobile Calls off iPhone Negotiations with Apple
There are a total of 600 million mobile users in China of which China Mobile has the largest subscriber base with more than 450 million users, with 140 million customers is the second largest mobile service provider. iPhone sales all over the world are increasing in rate even in the critical period of recession. Supporting the previous statement Apple has shown a 15 percent increase in the company’s profit over the last quarter with the credits to its own gadget – the iPhone. Apple also has a manufacturing unit in China, which deals only with the export of the product.
There was news about the joining of Apple and China Mobile recently in China Business News, a local channel. It was also told that the iPhones will be hitting the Chinese mobile market this September in a specific French retail store after the company had bought 5 million units from Apple. But both Apple and China Mobile refused to accept that there was a deal between the two wireless firms for now and said that negotiations have ceased on both sides. It is to be noted that there are many production units in China which produce fake pieces of all mobile phone types including iPhones there are also a good number of unlocked iPhones being used in China.
Inorganic LEDs for Flexible Displays
The technology has developed so rapidly that the billboards which were large in size can be made more flexible and transparent. This new technology has made possible to create tail lights that fit the curves of the car. These are all possible with the help of a new technology called inorganic LEDs which allows the tiny Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) to be attached to materials like rubber or glass. Professor John Rogers of the University of Illinois said that with the help of this new technology, it will be possible to put light sources in curved surfaces or in corners where at present light source cannot be placed.
Basically there are two types of LEDs namely inorganic LED and organic LED but most of the consumer electronics use the inorganic LEDs which are 400 times brighter than organic LEDs for a square centimeter. In billboard displays, an array of inorganic LEDs are used which are made in a large wafer which is cut into pieces and each bit is placed individually by a robot arm which makes the production of large arrays complex. On the other hand, Organic LEDs (OLEDs) are also used in some of the consumer electronics like television but they are not robust like inorganic LEDs.
Source: BBC
MySpace All Set to Acquire iLike
Social networking site MySpace is all set to acquire the popular music service – iLike that has taken social networking to an all new level. iLike, a famous application in MySpace’s rival site, Facebook has over 55 million registered users and stays as one of the most used application on Facebook. Owen Van Natta, CEO of MySpace said that the acquisition was part of MySpace’s pursuit of innovation.A rather interesting fact is that iLike has been on most of the social networking sites earlier except for MySpace.
Although MySpace hadn’t revealed anything much about the deal, it was reported that iLike was sold for a pretty cheap price of $20 million USD. Owen Natta also said that, they had plans to branch out iLike into various fields like videos and games and not just music. This new move by MySpace has left internet users confused as most of iLike’s traffic is from Facebook and no one knows what Facebook will do about it. However, many of them were of the opinion that Facebook would most likely either block the application or restrict it.
Source: BBC
K7 Computing Launches K7 TotalSecurity Version 10.0
K7 Computing, who are very big in Asia with over nine million customers (including a quarter of the Japanese market), has announced its release of K7 TotalSecurity Version 10.0, Internet Security Software to help safeguard users from virus threats, spyware and hackers.
Microsoft Banned From Selling Office in the USA
Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a ban of the sale of Microsoft’s products which can open XML, .DOCX or .DOCM files containing custom XML. The operating system giant was handed the judgment for violating a patent of i4i, a Canadian company and collaborative content solution developer, which states “A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations”.
Microsoft strongly deny the charges. The case, that was filed on March 6, 2007, ended with the Office developer being asked to pay $290 million to i4i.
The company has reported $3 billion sales of office products last year. Commentators say that it is just common sense that a word processor needs to open or modify an XML file as is it made up of nothing but text.
LiveScribe – Creating a Revolution Among Mac Users
Smart Pen manufacturers have often failed to win the hearts of the customers. But those days have passed with the new application for Mac, MyScript for Livescribe. MyScript for Livescribe converts your handwritten notes to digital text.
The smart pen, like its predecessors, can be used on a specially designed paper for the software to monitor the words and save them as images in the system. This new gadget has its own handwriting recognition software and a digital audio recorder which can simultaneously record audio while writing, which are indexed to the words written, allowing the user to playback from any word he wants. The new product has a special OLED display on its back. Audio and data are stored to the in-built flash memory on the device which varies according to the price.
The company’s main targets are higher education students who don’t want to miss even a word in their lectures. It is told that the product is picking up its sales and has reached many already. Some of the problems reported are the ambient noise and the pen tapping noise heard during playback which is overcome to some extent by the headphones provided with the product. Also as the smart pen users are forced to use only this smart pen, pen lovers feel a bit bad about it.
Microsoft – Nokia Sign an ‘Office Deal’
Microsoft and Nokia have signed a deal, that will ensure Microsoft office suite’s presence in Nokia Symbian mobiles in the near future. Nokia’s Vice President Robert Andersson said that, RIM being the North American e-mail expert, dominates the field with Blackberry. This additional component that is to be added into the Nokia E series phones is expected to bring up more competition in the domain. Hundreds of employees from both the companies are to co-ordinate and work for the project, which could be found on the phones next year.
Microsoft recently made a search deal with Yahoo, sharing its revenue and is going to provide the search engine for Yahoo, while the other will be dealing with the adverts.
Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 is scheduled to hit the market by next month. It has made a variety of advancements on the menu styling and more options suitable for the users. Most of the upgrades seem to be made to compete more with the iPhone.
Microsoft Windows Mobile is the only smart phone operating system available, which could read and edit documents. Nokia have said that there are no chances of the company releasing smart phones based on Windows Mobile. They are planning to stick with their Symbian operating system and its upgrades.
Source: CNET
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