Hot Tech Gossip - Latest Trends, News and Reviews=>Two format of High Definition DVDs are available - Blu-Ray (50 Gb capacity and expensive, no porn allowed) and HD-DVD (25 Gb capacity and cheaper, porn allowed)
(First HD-DVD to be uploaded to BitTorrent is Serenity, the Firefly movie. It is a 19.6GB file in native EVO format that can play on PowerDVD and WinDVD with HD DVD playback. The HD-DVD ripper is BackupHDDVD)
=>Windows Home Server will store all of your important data (media and otherwise) in a centralized safe location where it will be constantly accessible, as well as backed up to prevent loss. The backup engine in Windows Home Server also silently backs up the entirety of each machine connected to it every night. And because the data is always online, using the built-in remote access abilities, you’ll also be able to access your data from any machine on the planet over the web.
=>Apple's Ipod is the world's most popular mp3 player.
=>Over 2 billion songs sold on Itunes (over 5 million songs a day, 58 songs a second).
=>Iphone (easy to use - no buttons and controls, just a screen, with multi-touch and no stylus needed, thinnest width, seamless web integration, 5 hours battery life for talk time/video/browsing, 16 hours audio playback, Operating System is 'OSX 10.5' with cover flow, 4Gb flash memory - $499, 8Gb flash memory - $599, carrier will be Cingular in US) is Widescreen Ipod with touch controls + Mobile phone (with random access voicemail) + Internet Communicator.
- Apple CEO Steve Jobs's Macworld Conference & Expo 2007 keynote address including the iPhone Introduction
=>Smartphone (complicated to use - Moto Q, Blackberry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62, LG Prada - buttons and controls can't change, with stylus) is Mobile phone + Internet + Email.
=>Samsung's Ultra Smart F700 smartphone is an iPhone killer. It has a technology that provides tactile feedback for touch-screen interactions and makes touch-screen buttons feel more like mechanical buttons by sending confirmation vibrations when users press the on-screen controls. Music phones (one side is phone, other plays music) include Sprint/Samsung Upstage (SPH-m620), Apple iPhone, LG Chocolate, Nokia 5300 XpressMusic, Sony Ericsson W580.
=>Safari is a first fully usable HTML browser on a mobile phone.
=>Yahoo! mail is the larget email service in the world with 250 million users.
=>Yahoo! mail, MS Exchange, .Mac mail are IMAP emails and Google Gmail, AOL Mail, most ISPs are POP3 emails.
=>Cingular is the best and most popular cell phone carrier in the US with 58 million subscribers.
=>Google Earth will be like a YouTube (YouEarth) for geo-located 3-D models using a new version of its 3-D design software Google SketchUp with a simpler, more realistic modeling.
=>IBM and Yahoo will together offer a free data-search tool for businesses (corporate search - IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, an entry-level search software for corporate Linux and Windows servers).
=>Nintendo's Wii and Sony's Playstation 3 game consoles machines are compatible with sexually-oriented Web sites which can be used to access pornography along with WarioWare and Guitar Hero (the porn industry is advertising to target those toys).
=>Students in Thailand, Libya and other developing countries will get their $150 XO laptop computers from the One Laptop Per Child project in 2007 (after mass production XO's retail cost would be $100). XO's user interface is designed to be intuitive for children and uses a hand-pulled mechanism for charging its battery.
=>Indian company Novatium Solutions (Chennai-based) launched in 2004 its up-and-running NetPC priced at Rs 4,500 only (little over $100 as of April, 2007). NetPC works on a 'thin client' concept. This is a small box and does not contain any software or application. It is linked to a central server, which hosts all applications and uses mobile chips (the basis of this low-cost computer model).
=>AdMob and Third Valley Inc. are middle man companies (between mobile phones and mobile websites) to buy and sell mobile web advertisements.
=>US Internet search giant Google Inc has signed up Cite Publishing Holding Group as its first content provider of Chinese book titles for Google Book Search. Through the Google Book Search service, readers can search for books and read part or up to 20 percent of the content online, instead of going "physically" to bookstores to flip through the books. And to ensure copyright protection, the system prevents users from printing or saving the content to a file.
=>Xenon is a tax man's spider: a program that downloads a web page, then traverses its links and downloads those as well, ad infinitum. In this manner spiders can create huge datasets of web material, while preserving the relationships between pages at the moment they were spidered - something that can reveal a lot about the people that made the pages. Xenon is the opposite of Google's web crawler, which traverses a tree of links and grabs a copy of everything it sees. Xenon is smart about link selection and context, and uses a "slow search paradigm. The slow search prevents the crawler from creating excessive traffic on a website, or drawing attention in the sites' server logs. Den Uyl declined to say what user-agent the Xenon software reports itself as, but it's likely to be variable or configurable on the tax investigator's part. The spider can also be configured and trained to look at particular economic niches - a useful feature for compiling lists of business in industries that traditionally have high rates of non-filing. For instance, weight control (yields) 85,000 hits, some for products...also services. Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon's Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. It uses that data to automatically identify mailing addresses and other identity information present on the websites it has crawled, which it puts into a database that can be matched in bulk with national tax records.
=>Enterprise business is a critical half of the domestic IT market in India (will be over 16.5 billion dollars (over Rs 75,000 crore) in 2006-07). Installed base of laptop computers in India is placed at about 1.9 million compared to 20.3 million desktop computers (PC penetration of 22 computers per 1000 Indians).
=>MySpace is launching video-filtering system which will block video clips containing copyright materials (MySpace is licensing technology from Audible Magic Corp. - that has obtained rights to a system for scanning video clips and looking for signature vectors such as a unique digital fingerprint to compare with vectors stored in a database - video can be blocked from appearing on MySpace when there is a match).
=>DRM hacker arnezami has found the "processing key" used to decrypt the AACS DRM on all HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc films. This "processing key" can be used to unlock, decrypt, and backup every HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc film released so far.
=>Swedish software company Xcerion plans to release a new, free XML-based Internet operating system (XIOS) and development platform that will run inside a Web browser. XIOS is an abstraction layer that sits on top of a true operating system (OS) like Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows (will become middleware). XIOS will replicate the desktop computing experience from inside the browser and add the benefits of cloud-based computing, where applications and data are available over the network. XIOS will run in a Web browser that will allow users to access their files from any computer with an Internet connection and compatible browser, regardless of platform. To use Xcerion's operating system ,a small file of only 2 Mbytes will have to be downloaded. XIOS will be immune to most of the viruses in circulation currently as it will run in a sandbox, a virtual environment where code can be executed without risk to computing resources on the outside.
=>Laptop PCs with secure hard drives (with built-in encryption technology) will be manufactured and sold by Seagate Technology LLC. They will include a chip that will make it impossible for anyone to read data off the disk, or even boot up a PC, without authentication. It will require users to have a key, or password, before accessing the disk drive or booting up the machine. Without the password, the hard drives would be useless.
=>Scribd is a text version of YouTube (a social network that lets you tag, share, and comment on uploaded documents - .doc, .pdf, .txt, .ppt, .xls, .ps, .lit).
=>Networked Readiness Index (countries are judged based on the integration of technology in business, the infrastructure available, government policy favourable for fostering a culture of innovation and progress, leadership in promoting the usage of the latest information technology tools) rankings for 2006(2005) -
1. Denmark (3)
2. Sweden (8)
3. Singapore (2)
4. Finland (5)
5. Switzerland (9)
6. Netherlands (12)
7. US (1)
8. Iceland (4)
9. UK (10)
10. Norway (13)
=>Downtime for Top 20 Alexa websites (2007 GIGRIB report) -
Site Downtime
1 yahoo.com 0m
2 google.com 7m
3 myspace.com 1h 0m
4 msn.com 2h 45m
5 ebay.com 6m
6 youtube.com 4h 44m
7 facebook.com 25m
8 wikipedia.org 2h 23m
9 craigslist.org 1h 9m
10 live.com 1h 48m
11 amazon.com 21m
12 blogger.com 4h 47m
13 go.com 8m
14 aol.com 3m
15 microsoft.com 13m
16 cnn.com 22m
17 comcast.net 3m
18 imdb.com 29m
19 flickr.com 30m
20 photobucket.com 1h 23m
=>Top Digital-Doll virtual websites - www.cartoondollemporium.com, www.stardoll.com and www.thedollpalace.com=>Google will partner with satellite television provider EchoStar to allow advertisers to purchase Google TV ads through an auction model similar to Google's Adwords product. The company tested Google Audio Ads in December(2006), and its November(2006) print ads test allowed advertisers to bid through an online marketplace for space in more than 50 major newspapers (including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Denver Post) across America. In 2005, Google brought its AdSense contextual advertising service to RSS content in a beta test which followed after Google's AdSense model for Web sites and blogs.
=>Preliminary injunction against Google Inc from showing thumbnail-size photos from sexually explicit Internet sites has been lifted (after a lower court had found that Google's thumbnail images violated the copyright of adult magazine and Web publisher Perfect 10, but said the Internet search company was probably not responsible for displays of the underlying images from Perfect 10's Web site).
=>Google Switch is the latest version of Googlephone and is the result of a collaboration with Samsung. It's a button-less touchscreen device with GPS built-in for pinpoint navigation around Google Maps.