Lady Gaga’s camera sunglasses. A voice-activated car stereo that searches for the song you want. A digital photo frame that displays images you finger-slide from your iPhone.
These and other “wow” gadgets are some of the countless new products shown at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While the biggest companies are drawing most of the press for the newest developments in tablets, 3-D TV, and laptops with next-generation processors, many other jaw-dropping gadgets are scoring mindshare with their out-of-the-box innovation.
There may be few stranger pairings of a celebrity with a technology company than Lady Gaga’s alliance with Polaroid. The old-line company, best known for pioneering instant photography back when photography otherwise meant waiting for the film to be developed, has named the self-consciously outrageous singer/performer as its creative director and is unveiling a line of products “co-designed” with her, called Polaroid Grey Label.
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January 9th, 2011 in
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A Sandy Bridge may not seem like the most sure-footed passage to the next level in processors, but Intel has high hopes for the second generation of core processors known by that code name. In time for the opening of the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the giant chipmaker has released 15 laptop and 14 desktops CPUs, now formally known as Core 2011 processors. They offer better performance, an integrated graphics processor, greater efficiency — and a new capability to guard movies.
The chips all utilize the company’s 32nm manufacturing process. For mobile devices, there’s a new Core i7 Extreme Edition, nine i7s, four i5s, and a new i3. Desktops get three i7s, eight i5s, and three i3s. The high-end processor, the Extreme Edition i7 for laptops, features a 2.5-GHz base clock speed for each of four cores, and a price per thousand of $1,000 each.
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Skype is hoping its latest innovation will help customers forget about the worst outage in company history. The VoIP provider just rolled out a new version of its iPhone app — and it brings video calling to millions of mobile users around the world on both 3G and Wi-Fi networks.
With the new Skype for iPhone app, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users can actually see families, friends and colleagues while talking to them. Skype expects video calling to make its app — which is already one of the top five free iPhone apps of 2010 — even more popular.
“With video calling representing approximately 40 percent of all Skype-to-Skype minutes for the first six months of 2010, our users have been eager to get Skype video calling on their mobile phones,” said Neil Stevens, general manager of Skype’s consumer business.
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December 31st, 2010 in
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IBM is developing a new type of ultra-low-cost solid-state memory featuring a storage capacity that vastly exceeds what today’s hard disk drives can provide. Called racetrack memory, the technology may one day replace hard disk drives in PCs, laptops and servers as well as displace flash memory chips in smartphones, digital cameras, and tablets.
The radically new type of storage memory is based on a breakthrough technology known as spintronics, which manipulates the two types of independent electrons found in electrical current — called the “spin-up” and “spin-down” electrons. The goal is to enable computing devices to store bits of information by manipulating the magnetic state of a region within a nanowire that is just a few tens of nanometers wide.
“We discovered that domain walls don’t hit peak acceleration as soon as the current is turned on — it takes them exactly the same time and distance to hit peak acceleration as it does to decelerate and eventually come to a stop,” said IBM Research Fellow Dr. Stuart Parkin on Thursday. “Now we know domain walls can be positioned precisely along the racetrack simply by varying the length of the current pulses, even though the walls have mass.”
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Mozilla launched a new Firefox 4 beta release for PCs and laptops Wednesday featuring expanded support for 3-D graphics, together with a revamped Firefox add-on manager. And on the mobile side, Mozilla introduced several enhancements to the mobile version of Firefox 4 beta for smartphones based on Google’s Android and Nokia’s Maemo platforms.
The popular browser’s new 3-D enhancements are based on WebGL — an open standard for accelerated 3-D graphics rendering on the web that eliminates the need for users to install special plug-ins. As a result, developers will be able to render amazing visual experiences directly within the browser window, noted Firefox Product Manager Mike Beltzner.
“Firefox 4 beta now supports WebGL for most modern built-in graphics cards, making it easier for developers to create interactive 3-D games, vivid graphics, and new visual experiences for the web without the use of third-party plug-ins,” Beltzner wrote in a blog.
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The internet may have made our lives a lot more connected but the problem with that is we have also made ourselves a lot vulnerable by exposing personal information on different websites. We may not know it but we leave a trace every time we do something on our computers which can be dangerous if it falls to the wrong hands.
Let me paint this picture more clearly. In every instance that we visit a website or download a movie, details of that visit gets stored in our computer. Because they are placed in folders that are hidden from us, we really have no way of finding which files are included or how to delete them.
For instance, when we write down application letters containing personal information, we may delete them when we are through with them. We can even go further as to remove them from the recycle bin. But especially when you are sharing the computer with other people, they can still retrieve that file from your hard disk.
I know that these things may be really scary but the solution is quite simple. All that you have to do is to install an evidence eraser software. In a nutshell, what an evidence eraser foes is to scan your computer for unwanted files that you may have accumulated whether consciously or subconsciously.
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