IT News Digest

Archive: 12-2007

• Forbes comes out with list of likely Apple upgrades

  Forbes has drawn up a list of what it touts as an Apple’s fan most cherished items this year.

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 13, 2007, 11:57 PM PST

• Toshiba to launch new batteries in Q1 2008

  Toshiba has developed a new type of rechargeable battery that is superior to current generation lithium-ion batteries. Dubbed the Super Charge ion Battery (SCiB), Toshiba claims that the new...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 13, 2007, 11:55 PM PST

• Iomega acquires China disk drive manufacturer

  Iomega has acquired ExelStor Great Wall Technology, a hard drive manufacturer based in Shenzhen of China via a stock swap. No cash will change hands.

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 13, 2007, 11:54 PM PST

• Smart paper, smarter pen

  Building on the concept of paper-based computing, the SmartPen from Livescribe will enable users to build and use audio and visual data in sync with written materials.

  Posted by Arun Radhakrishnan | December 13, 2007, 6:52 AM PST

• Cisco plans Software as a Service offering with EOS

  Cisco Systems announced its Entertainment Operating System (EOS), a portal to let content developers create communities around content and pay the host based on revenue collected from ads.

  Posted by Arun Radhakrishnan | December 13, 2007, 6:12 AM PST

• New FireWire specification to boast transmission speeds to 3.2 Gbps

  A new version of IEEE 1394 has been approved by the IEEE. Called S3200, it builds on the earlier specification and will quadruple top speeds to a blistering 3.2 Gbps over distances of up to 100...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 13, 2007, 3:20 AM PST

• Ninety-five percent of e-mails sent in 2007 are junk

  Barracuda Networks released its annual spam report, which shows between 90 to 95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 is spam.

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 12, 2007, 11:59 PM PST

• China tops the average number of text messages sent in the world

  If you consider yourself a “heavy” text user, you might be interested to know that cell phone users in China sent 429 billion text messages last year, or the equivalent of 967 text...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 12, 2007, 11:58 PM PST

• Some users locked out of Rhapsody by extended outage

  An unknown number of users are finding themselves locked out of RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service. This is the second time since March that this has happened. The irony is that the...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 12, 2007, 11:57 PM PST

• Layoffs coming to Palm

  Palm confirms earlier reports that the company has begun informing employees of impending job cuts. Palm is not disclosing how many employees will be affected, though rumors peg it in the hundreds.

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 12, 2007, 10:24 PM PST

• Intel demos single-chip software radio for WiMAX, Wi-Fi, and DVB-H digital TV

  Intel has developed a software-defined radio that can handle Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and DVB-H digital TV all in one chip. The problem it addresses is that of too many radios, according to system architect...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 12, 2007, 10:00 PM PST

• The most disappointing tech products of 2007

  Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet blogs has come out with a list of the most disappointing products of 2007. Find out what Adrian has to say in his “Hardware 2.0″ roundup.

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 12, 2007, 9:43 PM PST

• Movable Type goes open source

  Six Apart has finally transitioned its Movable Type blogging software to an open-source license, or GPL version 2 to be exact. This is probably due in part to pressure from the success of...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 12, 2007, 10:12 AM PST

• Sun open-sources UltraSPARC T2 processor design

  Continuing with its SPARC open-source program, Sun Microsystems has made available the RTL (Register Transfer Level) processor designs for the UltraSPARC T2 processor.

  Posted by Arun Radhakrishnan | December 12, 2007, 7:51 AM PST

• Are Apple fans analogous to Trekkies and Hells Angels?

  Cult is a strange way to describe a corporation’s customer base, but as they have proven time and again, Mac users definitely seem to qualify.

  Posted by Andy Moon | December 12, 2007, 6:56 AM PST

• Google Trends API coming soon

  The search engine company continues to roll out Application Programming Interfaces (API) for Web developers. This time, it’s the Google Trends API, a tool to view the general trends in search.

  Posted by Arun Radhakrishnan | December 12, 2007, 6:16 AM PST

• Ask.com lets users delete search history within hours

  A new privacy feature by search engine Ask.com gives users the option to have their search history deleted within a few hours.

  Posted by Arun Radhakrishnan | December 12, 2007, 5:37 AM PST

• Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 for Office 2007

  Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released on December 11, 2007. This comes roughly a year after the release of Office 2007 to businesses — but earlier than the Q1 of 2008 date...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 11, 2007, 11:59 PM PST

• SWsoft to change its name to Parallels

  SWsoft, the software giant popular with Web hosting firms, has renamed itself Parallels after its new product line that lets Windows run on Intel-based Macs.

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 11, 2007, 11:58 PM PST

• Internet activists up in arms over Roger's hijacking of Web pages

  Rogers Communications Inc. is drawing fire for what some critics are calling a violation of Net neutrality. It appears that Rogers is testing the deployment of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)...

  Posted by Paul Mah | December 11, 2007, 11:57 PM PST