Business & Technology » Technology

Robot child gets upgraded

Doug Welch — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:17:53 +0000

Robot child gets upgraded
Apr 27 – A robot designed to learn like a child is getting some new legs and smaller hands. The iCub was originally designed to resemble an infant but had hands of an 8-year-old child because of difficulties making them any smaller. Stuart McDill reports. (01:41)

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Firefox for Android

Doug Welch — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:31:30 +0000

A lot of people use Firefox as their main browser for the internet. Now it is coming to the Android. It is in a pre-alpha version so there will be some bugs, but it will be nice to have it for the Android. I downloaded it and will check it out
It is actually called Fennec

We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it.
You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device.
Edit: This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card.
There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha). But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop. —Vladimir Vukićević

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Thomson Reuters launches high-speed global network

Doug Welch — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:51:40 +0000

LONDON (Reuters) – Thomson Reuters Corp launched a global, high-speed network on Tuesday for financial firms to access real-time data as well as share information with each other directly.
The company’s new network, called Elektron, includes hosting centers in New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Singapore, with more to come in Hong Kong, India and Brazil later in the year, all connected by a fiber optic ring.
The company is operating the system in partnership with data center company Savvis Inc.

As trading decision are made increasingly by computers, the difficulty has been to execute ideas at high speed that require trades in multiple markets, said Jon Robson, president of Enterprise arm of Thomson Reuters.
“This provides the infrastructure, technology and connections to different markets so that trades can happen quickly,” he said.
Elektron will provide any Thomson Reuters client of any size equal access to high-frequency markets, Robson said.
It will also serve as a neutral distribution platform for participants to exchange research, prices, business ideas or transactions, he said.
Thomson Reuters plans to migrate all of its content to Elektron over time as well as use its greater bandwidth to add deeper levels of market information, Robson said.
Larry Tabb, chief executive of research and consultancy firm TABB Group, said the Elektron system “changes the whole paradigm of how people receive and deliver information.”
“It allows people to communicate more seamlessly, who would otherwise have to rely on slower channels or somebody remembering who gets what,” he added.
High-frequency traders currently install servers of their own next to an exchange’s server at hosting centers, known as colocation, to get rapid access to data and high-speed trading.
“This will be fairly close to what exchanges can provide but it will be an integrated set of data across exchanges instead of colocating at each exchange,” Tabb said.
In a marketplace where competition is focused on high speed information, known as low latency, this is a logical move for Thomson Reuters, said Sang Lee, managing partner specializing in market structure at consultants Aite Group.
Such a network has the potential to create a sense of community over the long term, with customers exchanging trading ideas and business opportunities, Lee said.
“It’s all about building trust. It’s an interesting concept,” he added.
(Editing by David Cowell)

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Cisco says new router 12 times faster than rivals’

Doug Welch — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:01:25 +0000

By Sinead Carew

A man looks at his mobile next to a Cisco banner at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 17, 2010.REUTERS/Albert Gea

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Cisco Systems Inc, introduced a new router that it says will handle Internet traffic 12 times faster than rival products, as it looks to compete with rivals such as Juniper Networks Inc.

The router, Cisco’s first major upgrade in six years, is aimed at helping operators handle surging Internet use driven by driven by popular smartphones like Apple Inc’s iPhone and Web services like Google Inc’s YouTube.

The company boasted that 72 of the new CRS-3 routers connected together could deliver every movie ever made in four minutes over the Internet, or connect China’s entire population of 1.3 billion by video conference all at once.

Analysts said that the new product was important for Cisco; but at least one said that by the end of this year Juniper will already have technology that rivals Cisco’s product, which becomes available in the third quarter.

“By the end of the year, I expect them to be the same in terms of equivalent performance and capacity,” said Avian Securities analyst Catharine Trebnick.

She estimated that carriers spend about 3 percent of their capital budgets on high-powered core Internet routers.

The CRS-3 router, which was developed over three years and supports data speeds three times faster than Cisco’s existing products, goes on sale starting at $90,000 each, said Cisco.

“It’s a big deal for Cisco and its carrier customers because these things come only every six years,” Broadpoint AmTech analyst Mark McKechnie said of the new router.

But analysts said it will be a long time before the product helps revenue at Cisco, which said it has invested $1.6 billion in the CRS product line.

“It’s probably a long evaluation cycle, so it’s not something we think will really impact Cisco numbers until 2011 or 2012. It takes a while for these things to ramp,” McKechnie said.

That didn’t stop Cisco from heralding the new router as a product that would “forever change the Internet” and show “what’s possible when networking gets an adrenaline boost.”

“It’s an important step. You need to do this with the demand in data rising; but it doesn’t live up to the name of the conference,” Trebnick said. Cisco called the webcast on which it introduced the new router Revolutionizing the Internet.

Shares of Cisco shares were up 4 cents at $26.17 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq, after climbing 4 percent to touch a 12-month high on Monday, partly in anticipation of the announcement.

In its optimal configuration, in that network of 72, Cisco said the new router could deliver the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, in just over a second.

“If we don’t provide this type of foundation for the future of the Internet, we actually become the constricting factor on the ability for it to grow,” Chambers said on a webcast announcing the product.

AT&T Inc, the biggest U.S. telecommunications company, said it had successfully completed a 100-gigabit-per-second field test of the new router and expects it to be ready for deployment in the next few years.

On Monday, AT&T’s biggest rival Verizon Communications Inc and Cisco’s biggest rival Juniper said they had completed a field trial at a similar speed.

Juniper shares were up 14 cents to $29.74.

Cisco has benefited from the rising popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web services, which has driven sales of powerful network equipment.

Cisco said on the webcast that it expects to keep selling the CRS-1 for many years even after it launches the CRS-3. It has already installed more than 5,000 of the CRS-1 routers in networks around the world, the company said.

The news comes a week ahead of the expected announcement of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband plan, aimed at boosting high-speed Internet adoption in the country.

The FCC is expected to propose that operators provide minimum Internet data transmission speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) to 100 million homes within a decade. Today’s typical speeds are closer to 4 Mbps, according to industry estimates.

(Additional reporting by Franklin Paul and Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Tiffany Wu)

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HP Slate

Doug Welch — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:19:01 +0000

Looks like the iPad will have some competition for the tablet wars. HP’s Slate will be able to use Adobe Flash and AIR, which the iPad will not. This I think will make it more marketable and a much better choice than an iPad.

Here are some videos from Mashable.

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Yahoo partners with Twitter to boost social features

Steven Foley — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:36:24 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites, as the company seeks to enhance the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features.

The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo.

The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world’s No.1 social networking site.

Earlier this month, Google Inc unveiled a new service dubbed Google Buzz that replicated many of the social networking features that have made services like Twitter and Facebook Internet success stories.

Facebook and Twitter – which said on Monday that users of its service generate more than 50 million Tweets every day – pose an increasing threat to established Internet giants like Yahoo and Google whose businesses depend on selling online ads to large audiences.

In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo said that beginning on Tuesday its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called “real time search” capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year.

Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year.

Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example.

“We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique,” Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters in an interview.

Yahoo would not comment on any financial terms involved in the deal with Twitter.

According to some media reports, Microsoft and Google paid a combined $25 million for the right to include Twitter data in their search results.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric)

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Intel plans $2 billion fund to invest in U.S. companies: report

Steven Foley — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:02:33 +0000

(Reuters) – U.S. technology giant Intel Corp is planning to set up a $2 billion fund to invest in U.S. companies, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The chipmaker, which has a unit that invests in many technology companies, is in talks with venture capital firms to seek investment ideas, the daily said.

The investment plan would not require raising additional capital, the business daily said, adding that the response to Intel’s proposal was not immediately known.

Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini is scheduled to give a speech Tuesday at the Brookings Institution, the paper said.

Brookings said in its invitation to the event that Otellin’s speech will focus partly on “the need to create a culture of investment in the United States,” according to the paper.

Intel could not be immediately reached by Reuters for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

(Reporting by Archana Shankar in Bangalore; Editing by Mike Nesbit)

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Handset market rebounding in 2010: report

Steven Foley — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:01:22 +0000

By Tarmo Virki, European technology correspondent

HELSINKI (Reuters) – The cellphone market will rebound more strongly strongly than expected this year as improving economies boost spending on new gadgets and handset vendors push cheap smartphones, research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.

The market fell 1 percent in 2009, the first decline in eight years as consumers cut spending amid recession.

But Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said she now expects the market to grow 11-13 percent this year, compared with the firm’s December forecast for a 9-percent increase.

“The economy seems to be stabilizing more into a recovery trend than we forecast back in December,” Milanesi said.

“Sales will return to low-double-digit growth, but competition will continue to put a strain on vendors’ margins.”

Gartner is more optimistic than the top cellphone maker Nokia, which has forecast growth around 10 percent, and also slightly ahead of analysts consensus of 11 percent in a Reuters poll this month.

Gartner sees smartphone market volume growing a whopping 46 percent from 172.4 million sold last year, boosted by cheaper models. The most affordable now cost just over $100 excluding operator subsidies.

Gartner said it expects average sale prices in 2010 to fall more slowly than last year — when intense competition hurt pricing in markets such as China and India — helped by an improving economy and consumers upgrading to cheap smartphones.

NOKIA H1 TOUGH

Industry leader Nokia saw its market share slip last year to 36.4 percent from 38.6 percent a year before, and the research firm said more challenges lay ahead.

“Nokia will face a tough first half of 2010 as improvements to Symbian and new products based on the Meego platform will not reach the market before the second half of 2010,” Milanesi said.

“Its very strong mid-tier portfolio will help it hold market share, but its ongoing weakness at the high end of the portfolio will hurt its share of market value,” she said.

Korean vendors Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics gained handset market share last year, up to 19.5 percent and 10.1 percent respectively.

ANDROID GAINING

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion and Apple controlled 19.9 percent and 14.4 percent of the smartphone market in 2010, but both lost some share in the fourth quarter to phones with Google’s Android software.

All vendors in total sold 6.8 million Android phones last year, giving it a 3.9 percent share of the smartphone market, compared with just 0.5 percent a year before.

Gartner said Android’s success should continue into 2010 as more manufacturers launch Android phones, but noted some manufacturers have expressed growing concern about Google’s intentions in the mobile market.

If such concerns cause manufacturers to change their product strategies or operators to change which devices they stock, this might hinder Android’s growth in 2010, Gartner said.

(Editing by David Cowell)

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Microsoft Phone System Hits Reset on Digital Music

Steven Foley — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:59:04 +0000

By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) – It’s been more than six years since then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates admitted that Apple caught the company “flat-footed” in the digital music market and directed his team to make up for lost ground, according to recently surfaced internal e-mails.

To date, Microsoft’s effort to address the digital music market has largely focused on its Zune player and Zune Pass subscription service, which have won favorable reviews but few customers. But with the recent unveiling of its Windows Phone 7 Series operating system at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Microsoft hopes to reboot its struggling digital music strategy.

Even the well-received Zune HD device, introduced last fall, hasn’t been enough to convince music fans to convert to the Zune Pass. The company says it has sold only 3.8 million players since 2006, and NPD Group estimated in November that it has a 2 percent share of the U.S. portable media player market, compared with 70 percent for Apple’s iPod.

So Microsoft has made it a priority to expand the Zune service to other platforms. In November, it added the Zune’s video service to its Xbox Live network, consisting of more than 20 million worldwide users of the Xbox 360 gaming console. Since then, Zune communications director Jose Pinero says the number of daily HD video downloads and streams has doubled. Now, Microsoft plans to use its Windows Phone 7 platform to bring Zune to mobile customers.

“Anybody who gets a Windows Phone 7 Series phone is going to get a Zune within that device,” Pinero says.

INTERNATIONAL PUSH

The most immediate impact this has is to expand the Zune service to countries outside of the United States and Canada, which are the only markets where the Zune is sold. While Microsoft will continue to sell the original Zune player in the States, Pinero says it doesn’t plan to expand it to other countries, instead relying on the mobile phone software to bring the Zune service to those markets.

For this strategy to work, Microsoft will have to turn around its equally struggling mobile phone business. According to technology research and consulting firm Gartner, Windows Mobile handsets rank fourth in worldwide smart-phone sales, at 7.9 percent, as of third-quarter 2009, down from 11 percent a year earlier and behind Nokia, BlackBerry parent Research in Motion and Apple.

But those rankings remain fluid, as analysts expect global smart-phone sales to double in the next three years.

“There’s certainly opportunity for Microsoft and other players in this market to grab share in the smart-phone space,” says Sue Kevorkian, an analyst at tech market research firm IDC.

Early reviews of Windows Phone 7 have been positive, with its simple interface and clean design winning high marks. But handsets featuring the new technology aren’t expected to hit the market until the 2010 holiday season. By that time, Apple is expected to release an updated iPhone.

Zune will need to do more than piggyback on an innovative new mobile phone platform to generate the kind of momentum needed to elevate itself from the status of also-ran. It must compete with rival mobile music services sure to be created for handsets using Windows Phone 7, and the company hasn’t yet detailed how developers will be able to integrate Zune functionality into their applications, if at all. Answers to those questions are expected in March at Microsoft’s annual Web developer conference, Mix.

Zune will also need to increase its footprint to encompass more than mobile technology. That includes adding the music service to the Xbox Live network, as well as taking a larger stake of the subscription market and expanding that lackluster model beyond its current state.

Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi estimates the entire U.S. music subscription market totals just 2.5 million users, and that includes not only Zune, Rhapsody, Napster and MOG, but also eMusic and those paying for the premium tiers of such streaming services as Pandora and Live365.

While Microsoft’s recent moves may lend an important boost to Zune, the company will have to look beyond the subscription model if it is to have much of an impact on overall digital music revenue.

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How to Decline Facebook Friends Without Offence

Steven Foley — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:19:04 +0000

By Richard Baum

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don’t want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know.

Can I ignore their invite?

“Can I be your friend?” might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it’s not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas.

Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor’s power tools.

Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard.

Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after we’ve become friends in the real world, many of us are using Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship building.

Why bother asking someone you’ve just met questions about their family, interests and ability to run a farm or aquarium, when you can simply send them a friend request and read the answers in your Facebook news feed? And so we think little of receiving friend requests after we meet someone for the first time at, say, a dinner party.

If you like the person, perhaps because they brought an excellent bottle of wine to the party, then you can accept the request in the hope of further opportunities to sample the contents of their cellar.

If you didn’t get to taste the wine because they accidentally spilled the bottle over your brand new party dress, then etiquette experts would probably agree that you can decline the friend request, send them a dry-cleaning bill and humiliate them in a derisory posting to your real Facebook friends.

In the workplace, however, the dynamic is very different. The consequences of offending someone by ignoring their friend request are greater with a colleague you see every day than with a careless dining companion you may never meet again.

So why are people you work with increasingly offering to share their Facebook output?

Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher who studies social software in the workplace, said it’s partly because some people just don’t anticipate the ramifications of sharing their personal life with colleagues.

But it’s also a function of the Facebook interface, which recommends other people for you to friend.

“Once you’ve connected to one person you work with you get recommendations to connect to others that you work with,” she said.

Of course, many people don’t have a problem with being Facebook friends with colleagues, especially those they know well. But for those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate, there are options other than ignoring an unwanted friend request.

One is to accept the invitation and then use Facebook’s privacy settings to limit the flow of information between you and your new “friend.” To do this, you can create a “colleagues” list from the Friends menu and then add to it your new friend. Then navigate to the privacy settings and use the “Profile Information” section to control what information people on the “colleagues” list can see.

An alternative, says workplace etiquette expert Barbara Pachter, is to suggest to the colleague that you connect instead on LinkedIn, a social network for professional relationships.

“You can just go ahead and ask them to join you on LinkedIn and hope they forget they sent you a Facebook friend request,” said Pachter, the author of New Rules @ Work.

“Or you can say, Thanks for asking me. I’m keeping Facebook for my family and friends. I’m asking you to join me on my professional network instead.’”

Pachter said that whatever you do, it’s important not to offend your colleague — and that’s not just because politeness is good etiquette.

“The person you offend might end up being your boss next year,” she said.

Got a question about the etiquette of email, social networks and other workplace technologies? Send them to richard.baum@reuters.com or via Twitter to @rbaum.

(Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

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