technology
Bloomberg claims IBM may buy RIM's enterprise business
Bloomberg is reporting that IBM may bid for Research In Motion's (RIM) enterprise service business including its network infrastructure, Blackberry Internet Service, Blackberry Enterprise Service, device to device encryption, network compression and more. "IBM made an informal approach about possibly acquiring the division, which operates a network of secure servers used to support its BlackBerry devices, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private." This is an interesting departure from Samsung that has had to repeat its position that it is not interested in anything RIM has to offer.
Counterfeit electronics being sold on eBay
My most recent articles have been product reviews and a question I received from 2 readers was related to buying some of these items from online auction sites (eBay being the 800 lb. gorilla). The readers wanted to know : Is it was “safe” to buy higher end electronics on eBay Having spent some time in Asia, I have seen firsthand similar looking replicas made available in the open market. Sure you can find fake sportswear, sunglasses and DVDs but you can also find very convincing Mophie branded battery packs, headphones and even electronics (smartphones, music players, etc).
Review of the FIIO L3 Line Out Dock cable for the iPhone
July 24, I wrote an article entitled “DO I NEED AN AMPLIFIER FOR MY HEADPHONES?” , if you are at all interested in good sound, I recommend you read it. In it I explain that most audio devices are built with cheaper built in headphone amplifiers to reduce device cost and I explain the benefits of a headphone amplifier (headphone amp). The one question is how to connect the headphone amp to your device? This article concentrates on connecting them to iDevices (particularly to an iPhone 4 or 4s).
What is LTE and do you need it?
As a business professional, you want the fastest most reliable wireless connectivity available and have likely heard of LTE. But what is LTE? Is there “read” and “fake” LTE? Is this something you should be looking for? These are some of the questions I will try to answer in this article. LTE is the acronym for Long Term Evolution (whose actual full technical name is 3GPP Long Term Evolution for the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System.) As the name implies, LTE is an ongoing evolutionary standard whose goal is to continuously improve.
Iphone 5 and mini iPad to be released September 12
Most tech blogs have been filled with wild speculation about when Apple would be releasing the next iPhone and possibly the iPad mini. After having read dozens of different dates, most pundits have now settles on September 12 as the magical date Apple will shine the light of its new devices on its followers. It seems the deal was sealed when iMore chose this date. For those that don't know, iMore seems to have an uncanny ability to determine accurate release dates for Apple products so the market tends to believe them.
I have more Facebook friends than you
The most common Facebook question people ask is how many friends does the typical Facebook user have? is 6 degrees of separation real The latest statistics I was able to find where published in November 2011 and provides some interesting insight I wanted to share with my community. I have friends Examining the 721 million active Facebook users (on November 2011), they had built 69 billion friendship relationships amongst them. Beyond the amazing numbers, the researchers discovered that users are actually much closer to each other than the “6 degrees of separation” and that gap is shrinking as the social network grows larger.
Jelly bean safest version of Android yet
Ars Technica is reporting that Google’s new mobile Operating System, Jelly Bean, is the safest version of the Android OS thus far. This new version is the first time Google has implemented address space layout randomization protection which randomizes memory allocations for library, stack, heap and OS data structures. Combine ASLR with data execution prevention and this protects users from memory corruption exploitations. Apple IOS has had these features implemented ASLR and DEP for at leat 16 months. Apple also uses code signing to prevent unauthorized code from running.
Is Google killing SEO and organic search rankings?
Ask 10 people how Google makes the bulk of its money and you can be forgiven for thinking they are in the software business. The reality is the majority of Google’s golden egg comes from paid advertising and research from the online advertising consulting company WordStream shows a worrying trend: Google is flooding organic search with sponsored results. This finding is highlighted when you start looking at the statistics Wordstream highlights. 64.6% of high value commercial search term traffic is directed to sponsored links, compared to 35.
Microsoft Windows 8 will be released October 26 2012
Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows division, finally announced that The next major version of the Windows operating system will be released on October 26 2012. Read More
Test Microsoft Office 2013 Now for free
Microsoft announced Office 2013 last week which will be touch optimized, have added functionality and of course be cloud connected. Some of the coolest new features are: Touch optimization : using Office 2013 via touch is as natural as using the traditional keyboard and mouse. All of your standard gestures are supported. Stylus support: Office 2013 now has built in stylus support which means you can now jot down digital ink notes and send them or have Office convert your written notes to text.
Your smartphone has problems too
Fanboys aside, most smartphone users have some complaints about their chosen product. Whether the screen size is too small, the screen resolution is not enough, the battery drains too quickly or a certain feature just doesn’t seem to work. As social creatures, we want to know what problems others are having and now FixYa has the answer. They analyzed data from their 15 million user reports tocompile a list of the most common complaints against the best selling smartphones. Samsung Galaxy S3 Iphone 4s Nokia Lumia 900 HTC Titan II Galaxy Nexus Blackberry Curve You can find the summary of their findings in the below press release.
Microsoft Windows 8 upgrade priced at $39.99
Apple customers have had fantastic upgrade pricing for the last couple of years. While they were paying less than $30 (Lion was $29.99 and the new Mountain Lion will be $19.99) for their OS upgrades, most Windows users ended up shelling close to $100 to upgrade to Windows7. Many of us anxiously waited to see if Microsoft would respond. We can all sleep easy, knowing that the next major Microsoft OS upgrade (Pro version) will cost $39.99 in 131 markets. Anyone who buys a new PC starting now until February 2013, will be eligible to buy Windows 8 Pro for $15.
Apple iPad Mini may launch in October
This rumor simply won't go away but when two reputable news organizations pick it up, we should sit and take notice. Bloomberg and the WSJ are both reporting that Apple is working on a 7.85 inch (Sharp IGZO screen) iPad mini that will retail between $250 - $299. Google's Nexus tablet will try to break Apple's stronghold on the tablet market by offering an extremely well equipped consumption tablet (made to consume not create content) for less than $300. Analysts saw this as a competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire but many new would be tablet buyers may be swayed by the competitive price and nice featureset.
Apple may launch new Retina iMac in October
Digitimes is reporting that Apple will launch a new Retina display equipped iMac in October. Their source said Apple is bringing the Retina display to all of its products so this is a natural extension. Apple may use the fall launch of the Iphone 5 as the platform to announce the new iMacs. Some have even speculated that the rest of the Macbook line (air and pro) may also get a Retina display makeover before holiday shopping starts. This is Apple so we’ll have to wait and see if this turns out to be true.
When buying cloud, think redundancy
Last Thursday, Amazon Web Services (U.S. East data center in Virginia which is one of its oldest and largest data centers) experienced a major outage which impacted some large name brand internet sites for several hours. As expected competitors were quick to jump on social media sites to announce that their services remained available and some enterprise pessimists may use this to justify not moving some of their enterprise services to the cloud. The reality is that outages happen whether your apps run in the cloud or your own datacenter.
Microsoft tablet "surface" won't dent the tablet market
Microsoft announced its new self-made tablet called Surface on Monday. The product looks like it could be interesting but none of the reviewers were allowed to really test the device, it performance or feature set. We don’t even know the cost. After the presentation, we saw dozens of articles about why this product is a failure even before it hits the market and research firm ABI Research is no exception. On Wednesday, they declared that Windows based tablets will have “little impact” on the tablet market for 2012 (they estimate it will account for no more than 1.
A good video intro to Evernote
I love Evernote and I have written about it many times. For those who are more visual, here is a neat video done by Dotto Tech.
DVDs and blu-ray discs to get new piracy notice
If you have watched a DVD or Blue-ray movie, you have surely seen that government notice about piracy and copyright. Well the US government announced that it will now require 2 copyright notices. The first notice is a warning to pirates and the second one is aimed at educating the general viewing audience. All major studios have agreed to the new notices and it should start showing up on new discs in the next couple of weeks. Each notice will last 10 seconds and you will not be able to skip them.
Apple to ditch Google Maps in IOS 6
At the launch of the iPhone, Apple and Google were best of friends and it wasn’t unusual that many Google apps found their way into the base IOS image (Youtube, Maps, etc). A short while after this lovefest (aka the release of Android), their relationship hit an all time low and Steeve vowed to use every last cent to squash Android. 9to5mac is now reporting that IOS version 6 will now replace the maps application with an in house Apple built product derived from their purchase of Placebase, C3 Technologies and Poly9.
The promise of unlimited cloud storage - A review of Bitcasa
Everyone was excited when Google finally launches Google Drive. This is the search king’s response to dropbox, box.net and Skydrive. But there is a little known startup called Bitcasa which you may want to know about. BitCasa is promising unlimited online storage for $10 a month. The service claims that as soon as you upload your first file, your OS will show you 500TB of available space remaining (and they say this limit is set by Windows and Mac which cannot show a larger number).