Technology

Small Silicone Valley start-up company "Sezmi" plans to give couch potatoes yet another option to watch their favorite shows. The company hopes to form a growing partnership between many local phone companies and television stations across the ... United States with this ultimate plan: go behind the backs of the leading cable and satellite systems to offer the most efficient television experience for consumers. (Source: dallasnews.com ) The evolution of the television as an entertainment medium can perhaps best be described as a blessing and a curse. While viewers now have literally thousands of ... (view more)

Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope (WWT) uses Microsoft's Virtual Experience Engine to combine images from various telescopes and observatories into a seamless panorama of the night sky. Launched Monday, the brainchild of Microsoft's research ... department is a downloadable desktop application that brings the universe to your home computer. (Source microsoft.com ) Forget Google Earth, the WWT combines images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the Two Micron All Sky Survey. Users can investigate the night sky in several different ... (view more)

Microsoft is launching an online service giving users access to images from space telescopes. It could mean yet another battle with Google, which has its own service, Google Sky. Bill Gates says the WorldWide Telescope project should be online by ... the end of the month. The free service is based on Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, the same technology which runs the Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping software. By combining this software with thousands of images taken from space cameras, the service effectively acts as an interactive telescope. Where appropriate there will also be links to ... (view more)

Adobe, Inc. is dropping most restrictions on the use of its Flash technology on mobile devices. The firm hopes the move will help boost the technology's appeal on cellphones, handheld PCs and set-top television boxes. Flash, which allows developers ... to produce interactive content and animations that appear the same way on all computers, is already widely popular on the web: around 98% of desktop computers with an Internet connection have the software installed. There's already a cut-down edition called Flash Lite for mobile devices, but licensing restrictions mean the full-scale Flash software ... (view more)

If you are a Microsoft Outlook user and let your emails build up by the dozens (like me), going back to locate an important message in a sea of junk mail can be an arduous task. Even if you are meticulous about storing and filing your emails, saving ... hundreds of "important" messages and having to locate a specific one can have the same effect. Xobni is here to help. Xobni -- "inbox" spelled backwards -- is a small Internet start-up company based in San Francisco and is introducing a new application that works together with Outlook to give users a better emailing experience. The software ... (view more)

For more than half a century, digital electronic devices have been based on a binary paradigm -- that is, electronic switching of a signal either 'on' (1) or 'off' (0). Everything we know about computing is based on this simple concept. Now that's ... about to change. As first reported this week by our own John Lister , scientists at Hewlett-Packard's Information and Quantum Systems Lab have discovered a new type of electrical resistor: one that has memory properties. The so-called "memristor" exploits the curious memory-like properties of a thin coat of titanium dioxide when a current is passed ... (view more)

Hewlett Packard has uncovered a new form of electrical circuit which could allow them to make even smaller memory chips that consume less power than existing chips. The discovery could allow cell phones to run for weeks on a single charge, or give ... PCs the chance to start-up in an instant. Though the chips would be smaller, they will be able to store information once the power is turned off, similar to the Flash system used in camera memory cards or USB sticks. The advancement is tied to the way an electrical circuit works. Scientists have always known a circuit involves three basic components ... (view more)

Microsoft has reportedly developed a small plug-in device that can be used by investigators to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes. The Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) is a USB "thumb ... drive" that Microsoft quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. The COFEE device contains 150 commands that dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity and data stored in the computer. COFEE lets the investigator scan for evidence on ... (view more)

Indian auction centers have been peddling tea the old fashioned way since 1861, selling it in crowded halls filled with traders and auctioneers. A good auctioneer can usually sell up to three lots in one minute, making tea trading a quick, but ... time-consuming process. But low tea prices, high government sanctions, and evolving times have led to online trading becoming an acceptable medium in India. The high-tech shift is much more economy-driven than it is fashionable. Electronic trading promises fairer prices and lower transaction costs for farmers. (Source: nytimes.com ) The advantage of ... (view more)

Microsoft has joined the revolution, creating their own version of a data storage and web software system called "Live Mesh". Microsoft aims to further blur the distinction between software running on the Windows operating system and a number of ... other services that will be offered to all sorts of present and future electronic devices. Located through a web browser, Live Mesh will not be so much an online operating system as it will be a control page for document files. What is unique about the documents stored on Live Mesh is that they will have no specific location, allowing them to be sent ... (view more)