| With Full PlayStation Network Restoration, Has Sony's Nightmare Finally Ended? Has the nightmare finally ended for the Sony PlayStation Network? It has been more than five weeks since the service was brought down in a hack that crippled game play and potentially exposed the personal data of 70 million users. In a press release, Sony announced that it is bringing full functionality back to PSN and music service Qriocity. This is the second, and hopefully final, phase of bringing the PlayStation Network back online. The first was rolled out May 15 that restored partial services including game play, account management and chat. The full restoration will bring full functionality back to the PlayStation Store, in-game commerce, and the ability to redeem vouchers. Is this the end of the saga that could be the most significant network hack ever?
Continue reading »
 
Apple's Cloud Officially to Be Called iCloud, What Will It Entail? In a press release today, Apple set the agenda for its World Wide Developers Conference, set to start next week in San Francisco. In a bit of a surprise move, Apple said that their new cloud initiative would be part of the topics of discussion and that it would indeed be named iCloud. We speculated at the end of April that iCloud was to be the name of the Apple's cloud service after it bought the domain name from Swedish cloud service XCerion for $4.5 million, according to Om Malik. iCloud.com is still redirecting to CloudMe, what XCerion rebranded iCloud ahead of Apple's domain purchase. The question becomes now: what is this iCloud going to look like?
Continue reading »
Sync: Why is it Still Not Solved? The current Internet era is characterized by multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets, Internet TVs, netbooks, laptops, and of course the good old PC. One of the key services needed in this multi-device online world is reliable synchronization. Yet faulty or not-quite-optimal sync is one of the problems I experience the most these days. Just before I started writing this, I was attempting to sync data from the online note-taking app Evernote. I had made some notes on my iPad Evernote app while in a cafe, where I didn't have Internet connectivity (I'm a premium subscriber to Evernote, so I have offline access to my data). When I attempted to sync up that content to my Evernote desktop app in my home office, it didn't immediately update. I refreshed... then again... no sync. Perplexed, I moved onto another activity and then checked again 5 minutes later. By then the changes had synced up, but the delay was disconcerting.
Continue reading »
iChromy: Bookmarking Service Diigo Releases A Chrome-like iPad Browser I doubt that Google has plans to bring its Chrome browser to the iPad anytime soon, but for fans of Chrome, there's a new app you might want to consider: iChromy. The app has some of the look and feel of the Chrome browser. There are tabs at the top of the screen and an omnibox that'll let you perform searches as well as type URLs. There's also a little star on the side of the omnibox, just like Chrome, that lets you bookmark pages.
Continue reading »
Who Should Digitize (And Who Should Profit from) a Nation's Newspaper Archives? Google announced last week that it was shutting down its News Archive Project. Akin to the massive Google Books project, this was a plan to digitize the world's newspaper archives and make them searchable online. But if you're worried about the digitization and preservation of British newspapers, fear not. As The Guardian reports today, the British Library is moving forward with its plans to digitize some 40 million newspaper pages from its vast 750 million collection. Some 500,000 pages have been digitized thus far, and beginning this fall, this material will be available online. By then, the British Library hopes to have over 1.5 million newspaper pages available.
Continue reading »
Largest Telescope in the World to Rely on Crowdsourced Computing Power The largest telescope ever to exist (on this planet anyway) is going to be the Square Kilometre Array. The SKA will cost about $2.1 billion to construct. Australia and South Africa are bidding on the project. What may give Australia an edge is the way they intend to handle the massive computer processing and storage demands of the array. Crowdsourcing. The crowdsourced computing initiative which those behind the Australia bid have put together will leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.
Continue reading »
Unbound Aims to Be the Kickstarter for Book Publishing The incredible success of Kickstarter has demonstrated that alternative crowdfunding platforms can help fund a number of creative projects (over 7,000 projects in the case of Kickstarter). Now a new startup from the U.K. aims to take that model and apply it to the book publishing industry. Unbound is both a crowdfunding platform and a publisher. Authors pitch an idea and if enough readers support it, the book will be published. Like Kickstarter, if a book doesn't get sufficient backing, then supporters' pledges are refunded.
Continue reading »
Would You Trust Twitter to Store Your Photos? Feature May Launch Soon Twitter will launch its own photo sharing feature very soon, according to a purported scoop by Alexia Tsotsis today at TechCrunch. (Similarly loose lips confirmed the same to AllThingsD's Liz Gannes later today.) After years of struggles to stay online and apparently giving up any hope of retrieving archival messages in text for its users, a move into photo hosting and sharing would be another show of confidence by Twitter in its newfound architectural stability. But would you trust Twitter to host your photos? Twitter, the network for fleeting thoughts, in short form? The service that has let so much history pass through its fingers with so little agony voiced over its barely accessible archives and shallow search? I don't know if I, or others, will trust Twitter to host photos. I want mine cross-posted to Flickr, just for safety's sake. I asked, on Twitter, if other people would trust Twitter with their photos and got a resounding No. Tweets are Tweets, but photos are something special.
Continue reading »
Pew Research Finds Popularity of Internet Phone Calls Has Jumped Dramatically Maybe Microsoft's multi-billion dollar deal for Skype wasn't such an outlandish deal after all. Because according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the popularity of Internet phone calls has jumped dramatically, with 5% of Internet users placing a VOIP phone call on any given day. The survey found that almost a quarter of American adult Internet users (24%) have placed a phone call online. That's 19% of all American adults.
Continue reading »
Next Century's Winners Will Master Machine-to-Object Communication, Leading Observer Says Machine to machine (M2M) communication, from automobile monitoring systems to card-swiping dongles to Web-connected home appliances, something many people have been excited about for years, is finally hitting mainstream markets in a big way. But connected devices could be surpassed in importance by passive tracking of connected objects, due to cost and scaling constraints. Mark Roberti, founding editor of the publication RFID Journal, writes in an editorial this month that while M2M communication has great potential, the "real value" for sensor technology lies in machine-to-object communication. The costs associated with requiring machine devices to actively transmit data about their status back to another machine (power, broadcast, etc.) will likely limit the deployment of that type of communication to contexts where fluctuations in data are extremely valuable in-and-of themselves. Using low-cost transponders to passively monitor changes in the status of objects will become far more common and important, Roberti argues.
Continue reading »
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment