Although only 13 percent of Internet users have chosen Google Chrome thus far, Digital Trends makes a compelling argument why the browser may be a step above competitors such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.
The author believes Chrome is a leader in speed, compatibility and Web page rendering — and credits the V8 JavaScript engine for the browser’s superior performance.
“Chrome remains the unchallenged performance leader. Peacekeeper browser benchmark scores for Chrome are much higher than they are for other browsers — in fact, when compared to IE9, the latest version can almost double Internet Explorer’s score.”
The post includes tips for installing Chrome, understanding the interface, helpful shortcuts, bookmarking and downloads, security and privacy settings and more.
“It’s an impressive suite, and generally better than what other browsers offer by default,” suggests Digital Trends. “But some of its biggest advantages — such as its speed — are only apparent after using the browser for a few minutes.”
Multiple screens are being used while people are watching TV. According to Nielsen, some 70 percent of tablet and 68 percent of smartphone owners are using their devices while watching TV. Checking email and looking for related content or checking social connections are the most common activities.
This dynamic is starting to have a wide-reaching effect. Advertisers, for example, want to use multiple screens to more efficiently reach audiences; networks are incorporating Twitter and Facebook to increase viewer engagement and participation; and TV OEMs are starting to package TVs with tablets.
Startups are targeting TV with apps like Yahoo’s IntoNow, which can identify a show and bring up relevant information and social opportunities. Peel is an innovative recommendation engine and universal remote.
TVs will be able to recognize users and recommend content based on preferences. They will also be able to incorporate your tablet and smartphone choices. And, of course, cloud-based apps will allow us to buy and watch TV anywhere on any device.
Kobo announced it will release its $99 Kobo Touch with Offers in time for the holiday season.
The 6-inch e-reader is the same as the company’s $130 offering, but “the screen will display ads when it is in sleep mode or turned off, as well as in what the company mysteriously refers to as ‘discreet places,'” reports VentureBeat.
The device “will be a direct competitor to Amazon’s Kindle Touch with Special Offers and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch,” suggests the article.
Although not widely known in the U.S., Kobo hopes to change that with unique features such as support for HTML, RTF and various image files.
According to the article: “Just last week, the Canada-based e-reader manufacturer was acquired for $315 million in cash by Rakuten, the largest online shopping mall operator in Japan, which may help the reader become an international hit. As for this season’s e-reader wars in the U.S., it’s still a scrappy underdog.”
Skype has released new versions for Mac and Windows that features the ability to connect to social networker Facebook.
“After installing Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac or Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, users can click the Facebook icon on the left side of the screen and authorize Skype to access Facebook data through the Facebook Connect button,” reports Digital Trends.
Facebook Connect includes text and video chat functionality. “When a call is placed through the Skype software, the user on Facebook can accept the call and a video chat window pops-up on the Facebook screen,” explains the post. “Ideally, this will eventually allow Facebook users to place calls to anyone running an active version of Skype rather than being logged into Facebook at the time.”
Microsoft, which recently acquired Skype for $8.5 billion, is expected to integrate the Windows Phone platform with Skype and possibly include Skype in its upcoming social network called “Soci.”
Soci is expected to include a video chatting “party” feature for friends.
“A new take on the search engine called Trap.it uses the same AI technology that Siri does courtesy of the CALO project (which was funded by DARPA), and has launched its public beta,” reports Digital Trends.
Described as something similar to a hybrid of Pandora and Qwiki in its approach to an “information experience,” Trap.it uses Facebook and Twitter accounts to help curate the Web for individual users.
“Via the ‘discover’ bar, you ‘trap’ information that comes up in visual-heavy icons with short text summaries. Hovering over these images lets you vote up or down if this is what you were looking for, share the information, or bookmark it for later,” explains the post. “Your feedback on these ‘traps’ is how the search engine learns and gets smarter, so eventually you’re receiving more and more spot-on results.”
“It’s yet another signal we’re moving from search to discovery,” suggests Digital Trends.
Some 47 years ago, author and inventor Arthur C. Clarke predicted the modern reality of “a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don’t know their actual, physical location.”
In this 3-minute video clip from a 1964 episode of the long-running BBC series “Horizon,” Clarke also predicted that “it will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.”
He emphasized the importance of advancements in communications technologies, including the transistor and satellite.
Clarke suggested that “the whole world would have shrunk to a point,” when cities would no longer serve as traditional meeting centers while executive, administrative and even physical skills could be made independent of distance. He concluded: “Men will no longer commute, they will communicate. They won’t have to travel for business anymore; they will only travel for pleasure.”
The Microsoft Kinect 3D camera was a hot seller last holiday season, but now it seems that the buzz has subsided.
According to PC Magazine writer John C. Dvorak, the Kinect is in phase 10 of an 11-phase process that most high-tech products go through…
Phases 1-3: A hot product generates rumors, there’s a pre-announcement to either downplay or exaggerate the product, followed by media speculation, which is drawn out until the product arrives.
Phases 4-6: The product is rolled out and a shipping date is set, followed by shipment of the first batch ship and afterwards, a shortage announcement.
Phases 7-9: The black market, described by Dvorak as “a short-term black market for the device emerges, sometimes arranged by the company itself,” followed by the product’s complete release and then a PR effort to sustain interest.
Phase 10: New uses. “Out-of-the-blue, new uses are ascribed to the device if possible. These supposed new uses should have been planned from the beginning.”
And finally, Phase 11: an analysis determined by long-term public reception of product, leading to three options: do it all over, make routine minor adjustments/improvements, or let it sell until it runs out and call it quits after that.
“The Kinect is now in phase ten and new uses are being ascribed, mainly 3D telecommunications,” writes Dvorak. “You can spot the hand of the PR folks involved by the repetitious and redundant messages seen in far too many of the stories. In this case, it’s that 3D Kinect is ‘now cooler than Skype.'”
Canada distributed the first of its new plastic money (polymer banknotes) in the form of $100 bills last week. A similar $50 bill will be available in four months and more plastic money is expected by the end of 2013.
“There’s no other currency like it anywhere in the world,” said Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.
The new bills are said to last at least 2.5 times longer than traditional paper money and will eventually be recycled when taken out of circulation. They are more durable, less likely to tear or crumple, and can be run through the clothes washer.
However, the main objective is to avoid counterfeiting. Featuring a transparent window with double-sided holograph and hidden text, each bill contains a “unique combination of transparency, holography and other sophisticated security elements,” explained Carney.
He further noted that many people still use cash over credit or debit for transactions, suggesting: “Our research shows that cash is used for more than half of all shopping transactions and Canadians, as a consequence, need a currency that they can trust.”
The article includes a video featuring Canadian news reports about the design and production of the polymer bills.
CenturyLink has released an infographic illustrating that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created this year — and by 2015, that number will be 7.9 (equal to 18 million times the digital assets in the Library of Congress).
By the end of 2012, 50 percent of consumer Internet traffic will be devoted to video, making the largest contribution to the data boom. However, in 2015, most of the traffic will come from wireless devices.
Much of the data produced by consumers is “shadow data,” things like search history.
The infographic also details resource growth and notes “even as IT costs are dropping, capital expenditures are rising.”
“Naturally, enterprises hold most of the data, whether it’s created by consumers or by knowledge workers on company time,” reports ReadWriteWeb. “That’s a lot of responsibility for managing data: What’s your company’s data strategy to handle the incoming deluge of data?”
The Surface 2.0 SDK, demonstrated at last year’s CES, will be released sometime early next year. Pre-orders can be placed with Samsung resellers in 23 countries (including the United States).
The $8,400 table-sized tablet, also wall-mountable, is four inches thick and recognizes hands, fingers and objects placed on the screen. It is currently known as the “Surface” or “Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface.”
“Running Windows 7 and Surface 2.0 software, SUR40 has a 40-inch screen measured diagonally, 1,920×1,080 resolution, a contrast ratio of 2,000:1, an AMD GPU along with 2.9GHz Athlon X2 dual-core processors, 320GB of storage, and 4GB of memory,” reports Ars Technica. “Ports include Ethernet, HDMI, and 4 USB 2.0 ports.”
Microsoft targets the Surface for professional use and envisions it being used in a number of industries including automotive, education, finance, healthcare, hospitality and retail.
The original Surface is already in use by the Hard Rock Cafes, Microsoft retail stores, MSNBC, Disney, Sheraton hotels and others.
Nine Internet giants (Google, eBay, AOL, Facebook, Yahoo, Zynga, LinkedIn, Mozilla and Twitter) have joined forces to place full page ads in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and The Washington Times expressing their objection to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act.
The measures protect against copyright infringement by requiring “technology companies and Internet service providers to block access to any website that the entertainment industry believes ‘engages in, enables or facilitates’ copyright infringement,” reports Digital Trends.
The proposed pieces of legislation “have strong bipartisan support in Congress, as well as backing from the Motion Picture Association of America, a variety of Hollywood union organizations, and even Master Card and Pfizer.”
In a related post, The Next Web reports that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) supports SOPA and commends Congress for “curb[ing] the growing rash of software piracy and other forms of intellectual property theft that are being perpetrated by illicit websites.”
Member of BSA include Adobe, Apple, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and 24 other tech companies.
Are touchscreens the ultimate expression for us to manipulate computing devices? (See the Microsoft video included in the post.)
In “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interactive Design,” former Apple human-interface inventor Bret Victor opts not to address human needs or technology, but what he sees as the “neglected third factor, human capabilities. What people can do. Because if a tool isn’t designed to be used by a person, it can’t be a very good tool, right?”
Victor sees our hands as the central component of our interactive future. If one looks at the range of expression and control for our hands, one realizes how much more is possible.
Victor describes touchscreens, for example, as “pictures under glass” which ignore the fact that our “hands feel things” and “manipulate things.” “Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade,” he writes.
“Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness,” he adds. “It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.”
Victor doesn’t have a solution or a prediction for our interactive future, but suggests we start thinking differently in order to achieve it. “Pictures Under Glass is old news. Let’s start using our hands.”
The promise of super-thin and colorful OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology for TVs has yet to be realized, even though the industry has been regularly impressed with prototypes and limited editions.
According to Electronic House, “OLED TVs are poised to make a comeback, or a debut, or a comeback debut.” Researchers predict that AMOLED (Active Matrix OLED) will appear in a number of devices, including TVs.
LG, for example, is planning a 55-inch OLED TV in 2012, and one of the larger Asian manufacturers has a deal with DuPont to use the company’s “printing-based process that it says will reduce manufacturing costs for large-display AMOLED TVs.”
“Current manufacturing technology doesn’t scale up to TVs,” says Bill Feehery, global business director for DuPont Electronics & Communications. “Today OLED material is heated up and evaporated, then they use a screen to create the pixels on the display. Our goal was to use an ink-jet printer-like technology to print it.”
Feehery suggests the hefty premiums of early units will come down in cost once mass manufacturing of AMOLED TVs begins in 2014.
“AMOLED is already used in mobile phones and can deliver vivid colors, higher contrast, faster response and a wider viewing angle than traditional LCDs, while consuming less power,” reports Electronic House.
PCWorld offers its take on the Amazon’s new Kindle Fire and, overall, the review is not kind.
“The Kindle Fire is best considered a relatively inexpensive, hassle-free but flawed way to consume books, music, and videos purchased at Amazon,” indicates the article. “As a tablet, though, the Fire can’t hold a candle to the best tablets available today: It has subpar specs, a limited interface, and a surprisingly messy app store.”
The review praises the device’s integration with Amazon’s media storefronts as its strongest feature, especially in regards to consolidating the user experience: “The Newsstand, Books, Music, and Apps tabs all take you to your personal library first, and then offer a prominent but not offensive option to go to the store for that category.”
However, the write-up details problems with what the reviewer sees as several design flaws, app behavior that was “all over the map,” skimpy specs and occasionally “glitchy” software issues.
Bottom Line: “The Amazon Kindle Fire makes trade-offs to achieve a $200 price. It’s easy to dismiss some of the compromises and weaknesses of the Kindle Fire as the sacrifices necessary to achieve a price point, but the reality is that the Fire may not meet your expectations if you’re looking for an Apple iPad 2-like tablet. For those people who go in knowing what they’re getting, and who want an inexpensive tablet that capably — though not spectacularly — handles their Amazon books, music, and video, the Kindle Fire’s limitations may be acceptable. However, the Fire falls far short of providing a full and satisfying tablet experience.”
Facebook suffered one of its largest ever security breaches this week when hackers found a way to spread violent and explicit images to some users’ profiles.
Hackers reportedly tricked users into copying and pasting malicious Javascript code onto their browsers, thus providing attackers access to personal profiles.
“The ‘self-XSS’ exploit refers to the fact that social engineering techniques were employed to trick users into entering the code necessary to execute the attacks, as opposed to other types of XSS-based attacks where the perpetrators inject the code on to the Website,” reports eWeek.
Facebook reported yesterday that it had identified those responsible for the attack, was taking control of the spam and making plans for preventing such a future attack.
“Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us, and we are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms,” said a Facebook spokesperson, adding that no user accounts or data were compromised.
