Microsoft has launched Silverlight 3, its Rich Internet application (RIA) technology competitor to Adobe Flash. The new version of the application includes increased support and new features such as enhanced video performance. It will be just one product demonstrated at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans from July 13-16, along with Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010, and Windows Server 2008.
HP and Acer netbooks running Google’s new Chrome OS could be available as soon as this year, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt announced at the annual Allen & Company conference. Chrome OS may give Schmidt reason to leave Apple’s board, but he declined to acknowledge Microsoft as a competitor.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo plans to sue social networking site Tagged.com for allegedly stealing the identities of its members, raiding their e-mail contact lists and sending out spam in a bid to lure recipients to the site. Tagged's CEO denies the accusations.
As NAND flash capacities continue to get higher, notebooks with solid-state drives such as Toshiba's 512GB SSD laptop become more and more useful for both business and personal purposes. But prices remain 20 percent to 40 percent higher than standard spinning disk drive portables.
Launch weather conditions continue to threaten the Endeavour space shuttle's planned July 11 liftoff for its journey to the International Space Station. The mission to deliver the final permanent components of Japan's Kibo exposed space laboratory was scratched twice in June due to a launch-pad hydrogen gas leak that NASA thinks it has solved. Now, if only the weather will cooperate.
Expect accelerometers to be in one-third of mobile phones by 2010 and to reach sales of $1.6 billion in 2013, says iSuppli. The popularity of this screen-orienting feature has been encouraged by the Apple iPhone, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm, to name just a few of the devices they're now inside.
Storage management software maker Acronis is trying to bridge the gap between needs of small and larger enterprises with Backup & Recovery 10, a new, more scalable version of its backup and data recovery software.
The approved legislation supports allowing venture capitalist-backed small businesses to participate in the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. In addition to increasing R&D award sizes for all participants, the SBIR-STTR bill also aims to help small businesses that support NASA's space shuttle program with the transition through the fleet's 2010 retirement.
Analysis: Google's introduction of its Chrome Operating System is causing a lot of debate in the high-tech sector, with some pundits mulling whether Google has taken its free software model to the edge in its attempt to battle Microsoft. eWEEK asks readers what they would pay for Google's Web services.
NEWS ANALYSIS: Apple is more appealing to the enterprise than ever. And yet, despite the developments around the iPhone and the Mac in the past few years, Apple has not done much to make that happen.
In today’s news, the Apple iPhone 3GS’ overheating issues were attributed to iPhone covers, and in yesterday’s news its battery issues rested with the OS. An analyst with Strategy Analytics explains that as smartphone complexity increases, so, too, will similar headlines.
One day after the Senate Commerce Committee approves a bill for a survey of all U.S. spectrum, Rep. Rick Boucher introduces the House version to identify gaps in spectrum use and inefficient spectrum allocations in hopes of finding more spectrum for commercial use.
Google adds a usage rights tool in its Image Search to help users find images protected by Creative Commons and other fair use licenses. The move should help the search engine giant fortify its position as a company that respects copyright holders as it seeks to fend off a Justice Department inquiry over its Google Book Search deal.
For years it was the talk of the wireless industry: beaming television to the world's four billion cellphones would be the icon of the digital age. Now, mobile applications are hastening the demise of that vision.
AOL, which is in the process of being spun off from Time Warner, is reviewing assets it could sell or divest, but will likely keep its social networking site Bebo, CEO Tim Armstrong said.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he will discuss with Apple how his role on its board might change after this week's announcement of the Google Chrome OS. Chrome OS could compete with Apple's own Mac OS X.
Popular online rental company Netflix announced a partnership with Sony which will allow Sony Bravia owners to stream digital content to their televisions from Netflix's Website.
Amazon has moved further into the mobile phone retail business. AmazonWireless, currently in beta, allows Amazon.com customers to buy phones and service plans from AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
Security firm Trend Micro teams up with Sago Networks to provide businesses with an expanded range of security solutions.
Several storage industry analysts tell eWEEK they believe NetApp should take a breather and then pursue an acquisition that makes sense—one that it can afford yet one that will help the data storage company broaden its market opportunities and keep growing.
Microsoft Bing occupied 5.25 percent of the U.S. online search market during June, its first month of wide release, and also managed to grow at an average rate of 25 percent per week during the period, according to research company Hitwise. However, it remains to be seen whether Bing can maintain its momentum against Yahoo and Google once Microsoft begins to moderate its massive advertising budget for the project.
Microsoft is prepping fixes for vulnerabilities in the DirectShow and Video ActiveX Control components as part of July's Patch Tuesday. The Patch Tuesday release will consist of six security bulletins, three rated critical.
NASA says all systems are go for a July 11 liftoff to the International Space Station but predicted showers and thunderstorms may postpone the 16-day mission to deliver the final permanent components of Japan's Kibo laboratory complex. Forecasters predict only a 40 percent chance for Endeavour to hit the launch window.
The No. 3 U.S. carrier cuts a seven-year, $5 billion deal for Ericsson to manage its day-to-day networking services, provisioning and maintenance for Sprint-owned CDMA, IDEN and wire-line networks.
Microsoft will release free CRM Accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that allow the enterprise to pull data from social networks such as Twitter, centralize sales management across multiple channel partners through a common Website, and integrate Dynamics CRM with Web portals. Microsoft has been heavily promoting its Dynamics CRM throughout 2009 as an alternative to Salesforce.com and other cloud application companies.
As cloud computing environments become more commonplace and complex, users will have a difficult time integrating the various cloud services and ensuring their integrity, according to Gartner. That will give rise to what Gartner is calling “cloud service brokerages,” which will essentially negotiate the relationship between the end users and providers and make it easier for businesses to manage their cloud services.
IBM pulled the covers off new technology today that uses optical character recognition to conceal data. The data masking tool does not change data but filters it before it reaches the PC screen, making it unnecessary to develop sanitized copies of enterprise data for individual users.
A new survey by research firm Gartner found that businesses were relatively lukewarm to software as a service, suggesting that, despite the hype, these applications need more work in order to gain full acceptance within the enterprise. Those who declined to use SAAS cited high costs, difficulty with integration and failure to meet technical requirements as primary reasons.
Zoho continues to create plug-ins to let users migrate data created in Microsoft's on-premise applications to Zoho's cloud computing application environments. The latest free plug-in, Zoho Plug-in for Microsoft Access, lets users import their data from Microsoft Access database applications to Zoho Creator. The idea is to help Microsoft customers migrate to Zoho's SAAS suites.
Broadband integrated circuits manufacturer Broadcom drops its $909 million bid for converged networks developer Emulex after Emulex's board rejects the sweetened offer.
The Toshiba TG01 smartphone boasts a 4.1-inch WVGA screen, slim good looks and Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor for enhanced multimedia viewing and power efficiency. First introduced at Mobile World Congress, the TG01 may be Toshiba's attempt to offer a competitive answer to Apple's iPhone.
In its latest IT Monitor survey, reseller CDW found increased optimism among large enterprises and midsize companies, which reported plans to increase their IT investments in products and people over the coming months. According to the survey, many of these companies and federal government agencies are seeing the IT industry hit the bottom and are preparing to spend money. However, smaller businesses and local governments are less optimistic in their anticipated IT spending, the survey found.
Government contracting company Smartronix nabs a contract worth $18 million to redesign the Recovery.gov, the federal Website dedicated to tracking stimulus spending.
Microsoft has integrated Bing into Hotmail, with a Quick Add feature that uses Bing search to pull video, maps, images and other content into users’ e-mails. Since its June 3 release, Microsoft has been aggressively pushing Bing through a number of channels in a bid to claim some search-engine market share away from arch-rivals Google and Yahoo.
IBM's software is the lifeblood of its Smarter Planet initiative to add a layer of intelligence to the basic processes that run today's world, including roads, water and power.
The Nokia 3720 classic, shipping this summer, was designed for use in the great outdoors. It features a sealed casing and a built-in flashlight, comes preloaded with Nokia Maps, and can withstand bumps, splashes and drops.
Chrome OS looks sleek and feels fast, according to screenshots from Engadget, but what do we really know about the Chrome OS experience? Not much, though a source familiar with Google's application development says Chrome Web browser will essentially leverage Chrome OS to run Web apps really fast. That sounds all well and good, but what will this ultimately mean for Linux distributions?
A new series of cyber-attacks targeting Websites in South Korea was launched today, disrupting both commercial and government sites. The DDOS attacks continue a campaign that began targeting sites in the United States over the July 4 weekend.
Driven by $20 billion in stimulus funds for digital medical records, a research firm sees a boom for Wi-Fi RTLS hardware and software, access points, managed services, and pure Wi-Fi and dual-band handsets.
Research firm iSuppli said a tougher-than-expected first half of 2009 led it to downgrade its revenue projections for the electronic equipment and semiconductor industries. However, like other analyst firms, including Forrester and Gartner, iSuppli is seeing positive signs for the second half of 2009 that could bode well for a better 2010.
NEWS ANALYSIS: Google's new operating system, called Chrome OS, is exciting consumers and those interested in netbooks, but does it have what it takes to take on the enterprise? If Google does target the business world, it will then have to take on Microsoft head-on. We take a look at what Google Chrome OS holds for the enterprise.
Some Apple iPhone 3GS owners are finding battery life on the new smartphone lacking. Some analysts suspect the iPhone OS 3.0 is to blame. With an SDK for 3.1 already rolled out to developers, a software upgrade is likely before the fall.
Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle 2 e-reader to $299 from $359 with little fanfare, though it suggests Amazon hopes a $60 price cut will make the device more attractive in an increasingly competitive market.
Acronis announces the next generation of disaster recovery products aimed at cost-conscious businesses, the Backup & Recovery 10 line of software products.
Microsoft could potentially face a threat in the newly announced Google Chrome OS, intended to operate on mininotebooks, known popularly as "netbooks." If netbooks continue to increase their share of the overall PC market, some analysts predict Google’s OS could seize a respectable OS market share within three to five years. Google has also suggested that Chrome OS will eventually be able to power full-size desktop systems, an idea that directly threatens Windows.
Research by Symantec MessageLabs shows the amount of spam that contains links masked via URL shortening services has jumped dramatically in the past few days. While services like TinyURL and Cligs are popular for legitimate users, people should treat shortened URLs with at least as much caution as other links, security researchers say.
The next time you download new or updated Java networking software for a mobile device, laptop or desktop computer, you'll be offered a free 30-day trial of Carbonite, a Web service that offers unlimited data backup for $4.95 per month or $55 per year.
As security researchers work to break down the malicious code tied to a DDOS attack targeting government and commercial sites in the United States and South Korea, more information is leaking out on how the attack happened. Still, much about the attacks–including the motives and identity of attackers-remains unknown.
Google announced its plans to roll out an operating system that looks to compete with the likes of Microsoft. Here are five reasons why Google Chrome OS is a real big deal and five reasons why it isn't that important.
Microsoft names Steven Sinofsky, a 20-year Microsoft veteran, president of the Windows Division. The role involves overseeing the engineering and marketing for Windows, Windows Live and Internet Explorer, just ahead of the Oct. 22 rollout of Windows 7. Microsoft needs its new operating system to be a hit to overcome bad memories of Windows Vista and help keep revenues up in the midst of a global recession.
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