HmD Technology

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

May 28 - New 'Resources | ZDNet' feed email from feed2email.net

03:30 moh21

Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from Resources | ZDNet.

Add feeds@feed2email.net to your contact list to make sure you receive all your emails
Make sure to visit feed2email.net to get more feeds sent to your inbox.
To find out which feeds you are subscribed to, or to get further help, just reply to this email.

Open source and the National Security Agency, together again

May 28, 9:55PM

Open-source software and the National Security Agency go together like peanut-butter and jelly. No, they really do!

Startup targets design-challenged with presentation templates

May 28, 5:58PM

Care more about the message than the medium? Slidevana offers PowerPoint and Keynote templates that spruce up your content.

Dumb ideas? Facebook to buy Opera? Build own smartphone?

May 28, 4:53PM

Rumors have it that Facebook is considering buying the company behind the Opera Web browser and it's working on its own smartphone.

Shifting IT delivery to tablets: The strategic issues

May 28, 4:38PM

Tablets are likely to become the primary computing experience for workers over the next few years. What will it take to successfully shift IT delivery to these devices given the security worries,...

10 essential apps for the iPhone

May 28, 3:57PM

If you're looking to get some good iPhone apps, start your search right here.

Flame: 'Most complex' cyber-attack ever discovered

May 28, 3:11PM

The world's "largest cyberattack" has been uncovered. Business and universities -- and governments -- were the main target of the attack by the data-stealing malware.

Foxconn reportedly begins pilot production of Apple TV set

May 28, 1:53PM

Chinese news sources seem to back up earlier claims made by Foxconn chief executive that the iPhone and iPad maker was preparing the production of an Apple-branded a television set.

Lytro camera: A photographer's analysis

May 28, 12:08PM

The Lytro represents a breakthrough in camera technology. But, is it really useful in practice?

Sapphire 2012: The Softer, Greater SAP...I Hope

May 28, 11:00AM

Let me start this with a strange and seemingly incoherent (but truly more inchoate) statement."If SAP marketed to the rest of the world, the way they produce conferences, they could arguably...

Lenovo eyes Brazil acquisitions, proposes local PC building base

May 28, 10:16AM

Lenovo is looking to acquire companies in Brazil and hire employees for a new PC manufacturing base in order to bring PCs and tablets to one of its priority emerging markets.

Facebook poaches Apple engineers to 'build smartphone': report

May 28, 9:16AM

Will Facebook be 'third-time lucky' in its reported smartphone development? Hiring top talent in smartphone and mobile engineering may bring the dream a little closer.

RIM layoffs: BlackBerry 10 all in, or get out?

May 28, 8:36AM

RIM is looking to cut between 2,000--6,000 jobs in the coming weeks, with all employees affected bar BlackBerry 10 workers. Is RIM shrinking to a 'niche' operation?

Mac, PC solid state drives aren't compatible

May 28, 5:46AM

Apple MacBook Air and PC ultrabooks use new solid state drive (SSD) modules. But don't count on any cross-platform or cross-manufacturer compatibility.

The future of Adobe installers?

May 28, 5:00AM

Adobe has long been known for its terrible installation process, both for its productivity applications such as Flash and for its professional creative products. However, with its Creative Cloud...

iTunes Match is a hidden gem for your music listening pleasure

May 27, 6:23PM

For just $24.99 a year, you can listen to your music on any device and from anywhere

Being more productive with mobile tech

May 27, 12:00PM

Gadgets and the apps that run them have become so powerful it makes me more productive, all of the time.

UK 'cookie law' takes effect: What you need to know

May 26, 8:00PM

Let's be honest: The U.K. has made a right hash-up of implementing the cookie law from start to finish. It came into force on May 26. Here's everything you need to know.

Hurricane Trackers: Survival tools for Smartphone, Tablet and even Desktop users

May 26, 5:00PM

Your tablet and smartphone can be invaluable tools to help you stay out of harm's way during hurricane season.

New York's anonymity ban: Why should the Web be any different?

May 26, 4:30PM

New York wants to outlaw anonymous comments to prevent cyberbullying and other online abuse. This criminologist examines why this plan, despite its controversy, may not be such a bad thing.

Anonymous hacks Reliance's Internet filtering server

May 26, 5:22AM

Screenshot claims Reliance Communication's website filtering and blocking server has been hacked by Anonymous to block other websites.

If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to www_zdnet_com_search_t_1_mode_rss+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks

May 27 - New 'TechCrunch' feed email from feed2email.net

03:36 moh21

Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from TechCrunch.

How The Future of Mobile Lies in the Developing World

May 27, 9:26PM

In less than three decades, the mobile phone has gone from being a status symbol to being a ubiquitous technology that facilitates almost every interaction in our daily lives. One month after the world's population topped 7 billion in October 2011, the GSM Association announced that mobile SIM cards had reached 6 billion. A 2009 study in India illustrated that every 10 percent increase in mobile penetration leads to a 1.2 percent increase in GDP. Yet patterns of mobile phone use in developing countries are vastly different from what you see on the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. This is a market underserved by technologists and startups. This is where the majority of future growth lies, and Silicon Valley has yet to realize the huge economic opportunities for network operators, handset developers, and mobile startups. Where are these opportunities?

Video Highlights From Disrupt NY 2012 – Day 2 [TCTV]

May 27, 8:00PM

Continuing our trio of daily video highlights from Disrupt NY, Day 2 of the conference featured talks with Andreesen Horowitz's Jeff Jordan, Sequoia's Roelof Botha, and SV Angel's Ron Conway. We also asked our Aol CEO Tim Armstrong some tough questions. Tuesday's Battlefield competition included a startup trying to disrupt the dry cleaning business, a new way for musicians to collaborate and a neat 3D Modeling program in your browser.

Video Highlights From Disrupt NY 2012 – Day 1 [TCTV]

May 27, 5:00PM

Did you miss some of our NY Disrupt conference this week? Or want to watch it again? TechCrunch Disrupt and our Hackathon provided more than 30 hours of demos, interviews, panel discussions, and Battlefield competition. Sure, you can spend the holiday weekend watching all of it. But, we've also put together daily video highlights that we will be publishing in a trio of posts today. The player below shows some of the favorite moments from Monday, Day 1 of the conference, including some surprises from VC Fred Wilson, Fab.com and Tumblr. Monday's Battlefield presentations included the first public preview from the Disrupt Cup winner and runner-up.

Backstage at Disrupt, America's CTO Todd Park is Giving Away Really Big Data

May 27, 3:00PM

If you feel there's been too much hype about "big data" recently, check this out: the Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America -- Todd Park -- wants developers and entrepreneurs to build new products, services, and companies using free data provided by the federal government. In this brief discussion backstage at Disrupt, Park emphasizes that he, his team, and the President of the United States have all fully endorsed the idea that key datasets be made available to the public, and there have even been examples of entrepreneurs forming companies around free datasets, one that's even hired over 70 employees. (For entrepreneurs interested in health data specifically, Park's group is helping organize an entire symposium on the topic in early June in Washington DC; click here for more details.) For developers interested in big data sets, this brief discussion with Park would be quite relevant.

Digital Chocolate Downsizing? Founder Trip Hawkins Out As CEO; Reports Of Layoffs, Marc Metis As Interim CEO

May 27, 1:29PM

Some significant changes afoot at social and mobile games company Digital Chocolate: founder Trip Hawkins has stepped down as the CEO of the company. And we have also heard a report -- yet to be confirmed directly by the company -- that president Marc Metis has stepped up as interim CEO; and that Digital Chocolate has laid off up to 180 people across offices in India, San Mateo, Russia and elsewhere. Hawkins' news was made public by Trip himself in his company blog, where he notes that he is "transitioning into a consulting and advisory relationship with Digital Chocolate." Without giving away much about the state of affairs at the company, the move, he writes, is being made as the company is "narrowing its focus." "It made sense to get more streamlined," he explains. Hawkins founded the company eight years ago.

Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn: The Once And Future Visual Programming Environment

May 27, 1:00PM

When I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab fifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists from Xerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and their work. But I was young and in a hurry to get where I thought I was going. And it sometimes seemed that every time us young folks talked about our research, or showed a demo, someone would say something like, "oh, that's very nice, when we did that at PARC ...." Fast forward to the present. For the last few years, every time I see a new piece of small, open, hackable, networked hardware, or a new reputation engine, or a generative art piece, or a product built around location tracking plus real-time information push, or — well, you get the idea — I have to bite my tongue and think of the PARC folks to keep myself from saying, "oh, that's very nice, when we did that at the Media Lab ...." All of which just proves that the wheel of history revolves. New work is always new, by definition, even if it's not entirely new (which nothing can ever be).

Mobile Online Shopping Holds The Real Opportunity In Mobile Payments

May 27, 7:00AM

Every day there is a new headline about mobile payments focused on using a mobile phone to pay at retail locations. Paypal, Google and other industry giants are racing to provide new in-store mobile payment solutions. Large merchants, such as Wal-mart and Target have contemplated their own mobile payment solutions. The debate about whether NFC will be the preferred technology to enable mobile payments rages. However, despite all this press and efforts by industry giants, there is stunningly little traction to use a mobile device to pay at retail locations. This is largely because the solutions offered by industry giants thus far don't solve a meaningful problem in the daily lives of consumers or merchants. Few things in life are easier for consumers than swiping a credit card at checkout and in-store payment systems are as easy and ubiquitous as dial-tone for merchants. However, There is a massive mobile commerce opportunity that is a severe pain point for both consumers and merchants, but large industry players are failing to meaningfully address it. That opportunity is e-commerce on the mobile device or m-commerce. M-commerce is ramping up, proving that consumers not only like to shop via their mobile device, but also will purchase. However, the numbers also show that there's significant room for improvement in the mobile device purchasing experience – mainly through optimizing the shopping and payment processes for consumers.

Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric

May 27, 4:12AM

e2v6CycALzBTeV91JK9vOjcagsOlF5TvD-z6b04j_8PUrSxDsCkMQDjJ1BXs95HYDEJ92sSKhpE2xctpeJyvPXPbkYME3FbCINnOngLApjS2ftb3ttw

If you're like me, you've had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That's why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong. Chen calculated Facebook's historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily. As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook's numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year.

Kelora Patent Found Obvious: Are Other "Obvious" Software Patents In Danger?

May 26, 9:23PM

As software patent litigation ramped up over the past few years, software patents have come under the microscope within the technical community. Many investors and technologists believe that software patents should be abolished all together, while others take the less extreme position that many software patents are obvious over known prior art ("prior art" being earlier publications that show a patent is obvious or not new). Courts are increasingly cognizant of these criticisms. Though it is unlikely that software patents are going away any time soon, as the recent summary judgment in eBay v PartsRiver (PartsRiver is now known as Kelora) demonstrates, courts are beginning to do a more thorough job of applying the obviousness standard to software patents.

10 Reasons To Quit Your Job Right Now!

May 26, 7:00PM

The game is over. That game where they get to hire you for 40 years, pay you far less than you create, and then give you a gold watch, and then you get bored, you get depressed, and you die alone. It wasn't that fun of a game anyway. When I had a corporate job I would wake up depressed. I couldn't move out of bed. The sun would be coming in. A cat on the fire escape staring at me through the window. Even it was more excited to be alive than me. And, by the way, I had the best job in the world. I interviewed prostitutes for a living at three in the morning. But they were going to kill me in my cubicle.

The Mysterious Words You Can't Tweet

May 26, 6:44PM

The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's father would relentlessly hound him to "Get better", so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead and try it, the tweet won't go through. But the legend? It's a hoax. Here's the real story...

Devon Steampunk Tread 1 Watch Looks Like Something An Extraordinary Gentleman Would Wear

May 26, 6:18PM

California-based watch maker Devon made a name for themselves a few years ago when they released the Tread 1. The modern looking electro-mechanical timepiece dazzled people with its tread-based system to indicate the time. It was large, highly unorthodox for a high-end timepieces, and a little crazy. A full review of the Devon Tread 1 is here.

Gillmor Gang: Adventures in Medication

May 26, 5:00PM

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, and more Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Surprisingly, this one goes on for a record-breaking hour and thirty-nine minutes, proving once again that size doesn't matter. Except in electronic condoms. Also discussed; Why G-Tar didn't win the Techcrunch Disrupt grand prize, why Kevin Marks' Target knockoff doesn't come close, and why Keith Teare is a venture communist. No animals or Wall Street traders were harmed in the making of this film. As John Taschek implied, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Did I mention we talked about Facebook.

Backstage at Disrupt, Greylock's John Lilly on Building Apps for Phones vs Tablets

May 26, 3:00PM

If you're building apps for phones or tablets, here's a must-see discussion for you. We were able to corral Greylock's John Lilly (who recently helped lead an investment in Instagram, right before it was acquired) backstage at Disrupt NYC earlier this week for a more casual conversation about the mobile app ecosystem and hardware. In this short talk, Lilly shared his views about the similarities and differences of building applications for mobile devices, taking care to point out that he sees many great entrepreneurs approaching the phone in a similar manner to how they approach the tablet. While the operating systems are similar on iPhone and other iOS devices (like iPad), for instance, the use cases, usage by time of day, and monetization opportunities are entirely different. Lilly encourages entrepreneurs to ask how to get their ideas on the homescreens of users' phones and tablets.

Selling Software That Kills

May 26, 1:00PM

The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden's Teliasonera allegedly took up the same cudgel in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, back in the USSA, Bain Capital recently bought a Chinese video-surveillance company reportedly "used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents," and Cisco "has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression." You can't help but be impressed by how globalized the oppression-technology industry has become. So what privacy/surveillance story caused an eruption of outrage this week? Yes, you guessed it: SceneTap, a startup that uses facial-recognition software to (anonymously)track demographics at bars and clubs in major American cities in real time. Forget the dissidents risking their lives for democracy: what matters is that the hipsters are creeped out!

Sweating The Small Stuff: Sotheby's Selling Original Steve Jobs Note About Atari Circuit Improvements

May 26, 4:55AM

The auction house Sotheby's is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages - stamped and signed by Jobs himself - describe circuit diagrams and paddle layouts. Delightfully, the stamp says "All-One Farm Design" and features a Buddhist mantra, "gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl." As you do.

Apple Responds To DOJ eBook Lawsuit, Calls it "Fundamentally Flawed" and "Absurd"

May 25, 11:55PM

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Apple and a number of other large U.S. publishers of conspiring to fix eBook prices and filed an antitrust lawsuit. While most of the publishers quickly settled the lawsuit, Apple decided to fight. Earlier this week, as Ars Technica reports today, Apple responded (PDF) to the government's accusations. Apple doesn't mince words in its response. The company's lawyers call the case against Apple "fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law" and say that the idea that Apple tried to reduce competition and fix prices is "absurd."

TinyTap App Lets Kids Create Customized iPad Books & Games

May 25, 8:15PM

TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the "record-your-own-voice" storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.

Gillmor Gang Live 05.25.12 (TCTV)

May 25, 8:00PM

Gillmor Gang - John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

MoPub Launches A "Buy It Now" Private Marketplace For Mobile Advertisers

May 25, 7:43PM

MoPub, an ad serving startup for smartphone apps, is announcing a new way for its publishers to offer their inventory to advertisers — a private marketplace limited to select publishers and advertisers. Basically, the market creates a more direct relationship, where publishers get more control and predictable pricing, while advertisers get early access. Advertisers will get first look a publisher's inventory — MoPub compares the marketplace to a eBay's Buy It Now model, where buyers can skip the auction process and just purchase an item at a set price (in this case, an ad impression). They also get access to special data like demographics, geography, and in-app purchase history.

If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks

May 27 - New 'Resources | ZDNet' feed email from feed2email.net

03:30 moh21

Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from Resources | ZDNet.