Author: Brad Reed

Cisco CEO predicts that mobile data prices will ‘come down rapidly’

It’s not often that we hear speculation about wireless carriers actually charging customers less for wireless data services, but Cisco CEO John Chambers seems to think that it’s really going to happen in the near future. AllThingsD reports that Chambers told the D: All Things Digital conference on Wednesday that new developments in wireless transport will let carriers aggressively lower their prices as expansions in Wi-Fi capabilities will help absorb increased traffic from wireless devices over the next several years.

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May 30, 2013
Google’s creepiest idea yet: Password pills

If you think Google Glass is creepy, just wait until you hear about the company’s plans to develop “password pills.” AllThingsD reports that Regina Dugan, the former chief of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the current head of Motorola’s special projects division, revealed this week that she is working on “a pill that can be ingested and then battery-powered with stomach acid to produce an 18-bit internal signal” that transforms “the swallower’s whole body” into a password.

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May 30, 2013
The hard truth for Microsoft: Windows may never work as a tablet OS

Windows-based tablets haven’t been big successes so far, whether they use the desktop-centric Windows 8 or the tablet-centric Windows RT. iMore’s Rene Ritchie does some sharp analysis of Microsoft’s latest marketing campaign and concludes that the company simply does not understand why people are buying tablets in the first place. Essentially, Microsoft doesn’t get that its central criticism of the iPad — that is, that it’s more of a toy that can’t be used for doing serious work — is precisely why consumers are drawn to it in the first place. Simply put, consumers have PCs at their offices if they want to do work. When they’re at home, they want to play around with their tablets instead; they like having toys.

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May 30, 2013
Here’s how Microsoft hopes to reignite interest in Windows

As we learned on Wednesday, Microsoft will indeed be bringing back the Start button for Windows 8.1. But Engadget, which has posted a lengthy preview of Windows 8.1, says that the Start button may not quite be what many users were expecting. According to the site, the new Start button isn’t “a return to fly-out menu trees” of older versions of Windows but instead makes it look “more like the Live Tiles are popping up on top of the desktop” when you click it. While this is sure to disappoint some users who were hoping for a Windows 7-type experience, Microsoft is hoping that it will make for an easier transition between the classic desktop view and the touch-centric Live Tile view on the Metro display.

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May 30, 2013
Android chief not worried about Samsung clout, vows not to forget Motorola

One potentially problematic aspect about Samsung’s rise as the world’s top Android vendor is that it has literally crowded out smaller competitors and is the only company in the world that consistently turns a profit selling Android phones. Sundar Pichai, who heads both the Android and Chrome OS divisions at Google, told the D11 conference on Thursday that he’s not concerned about the overwhelming power that Samsung wields in the Android ecosystem and said that Google and Samsung have a “symbiotic relationship” that benefits both companies.

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May 30, 2013
Facebook plans to push forward with Home despite awful early reviews

Sure, Facebook Home has been flooded with one-star reviews on Google Play and its first flagship phone, the HTC First, will likely go down as one of 2013’s biggest bombs. That doesn’t mean Facebook plans to abandon Home anytime soon, however, and AllThingsD reports that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Wednesday defended the company’s first attempt at creating a Facebook-centric overlay of the Android home screen.

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May 30, 2013
Despite her love of simplicity, Yahoo’s Mayer seen making company ‘more bloated’

When Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo last year there was some hope that she would bring more focus to a company that had long been adrift and without clear goals. Wired’s Ryan Tate, however, notices that Yahoo under her reign has actually become “more bloated” by paying $1.1 billion for blogging service Tumblr and $30 million for news digest app Summly. What’s more, the company has put itself in the mix to buy a stake in Hulu by reportedly bidding between $600 million and $800 million, so it doesn’t seem as though the company exactly has a laser-like focus on one particular area these days.

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May 29, 2013
Google wants to starve pirates of revenue instead of outright blocking them

Google is getting sick and tired of the entertainment industry stamping its feet and demanding that it do more to block pirates from its search results. TorrentFreak reports that Google’s U.K. policy manager Theo Bertram said during a panel on online piracy this week that blocking links from search results is mostly a pointless exercise because there are simply so many other links that pop up in their place. The better solution, he said, would be for advertisers to give the company a list of websites where they did not want their ads to appear and ask Google to make sure that those sites are starved of advertising revenues.

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May 29, 2013
Google Fiber called the potential ‘beginning of the end’ for cable companies

Although the idea of Google Fiber rolling into your neighborhood and obliterating incumbent cable providers may be a pipe dream in the short term, at least one analyst thinks that Google’s fiber-to-the-home network will pose serious challenges for both the cable and telecom industries in the long run. Per MarketWatch, Bernstein analyst Carlos Kirjner has issued a new research note explaining why Google Fiber is “an attractive risk-return profile, with very limited downside and potential for material economic upside” that could disrupt the American Internet service provider landscape.

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May 29, 2013
First leaked Windows 8.1 screenshot clearly shows new Start button

Start button fans, rejoice: Microsoft really seems to have heard your pleas. In addition to the new information we learned today about how Microsoft might implement the Start button in its upcoming Windows 8.1 release, we now have a leaked screenshot of the new operating system that clearly shows the Start button in its traditional home in the lower left-hand corner of the desktop mode screen. Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows posted the screen grab on Wednesday that showed a Windows 8 logo placed on the left side of the task bar, just as ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley had reported earlier. Thurrott also confirms that Windows 8.1 will allow users to boot directly to desktop mode, although he says that Microsoft has turned off that option by default. Thurrott’s Windows 8.1 screenshot is posted below.

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May 29, 2013
New details emerge on how the Start button might work in Windows 8.1

The most-clamored-for feature in the upcoming Windows 8.1 release is undoubtably the return of the Start button, the longtime hub of the Windows experience that Microsoft tried to ditch with the release of the touch-centric Windows 8 last fall. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, who has a long track record of accurate Microsoft scoops, has now given us some new details on just how Microsoft plans to re-implement the Start button in the next version of Windows due to be released this summer.

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May 29, 2013
Google seriously considered researching teleportation

Google’s secretive Google X laboratory is where some of the company’s brightest minds go to work so-called “moonshot” projects such as Google Glass and self-driving cars. A new Businessweek profile on Google X makes it clear that there are limits to what the lab will put resources into researching, however. For example, Businessweek reveals that Google engineers gave serious thought to starting a research project on teleportation but ultimately decided to nix it “in part because any unique item that you would want to teleport… would have to be completely destroyed before it could be reconstituted on the other end.” But just because Google has for now given up on studying teleportation that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other bizarre projects in the works. Among other things, Businessweek says that Google is pondering research on levitation and “inflatable robots” and wind-powered aerial drones.

May 29, 2013
Samsung execs meet to discuss mysterious ‘Design 3.0′ for future products

Given that Samsung likes to compare its devices to “a precious stone glittering in the dark or countless stars sparkling in the night sky,” it’s not surprising that the company is hard at work coming up with ways to make its designs even more magical. The Korea Herald reports that Samsung’s management team met this week to discuss their design strategy for future smartphones and tablets, which is currently being called “Design 3.0.”

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May 29, 2013
PC shipments projected to crater in 2013, keep declining in 2014

The PC market is in rough shape and new projections from IDC show that we’re probably not even close to hitting bottom yet. According to IDC’s latest numbers, PC shipments will decline by 7.8% in 2013 and will continue to fall by another 1.2% in 2014. The firm sees a slower decline in 2014 mostly because companies that still use Windows XP will likely upgrade to Windows 8 machines once Microsoft stops supporting the older operating system next year. The continued fall of the PC market is still being driven by the rise of tablets as portable computing devices that can serve users’ web browsing needs at a much lower cost than traditional PCs.

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May 28, 2013
Researchers set world record for wireless data speeds at 40Gbps

Remember how exciting LTE-Advanced peak speeds of 1Gbps used to be? Well they still sound exciting but they’re nothing compared to what German researchers have just accomplished. TechWeek Europe reports that “researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (FIAF) and the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) have managed to transmit data over the air at a speed of 40 Gbps,” a world record for wireless data speeds that just happens to be “fast enough to send a full DVD in under a second.” Network engineers who worked on the project tell TechWeek Europe that the new wireless technology could be used to offer fiber-like connectivity to rural areas that have been previously unable to get access to high-speed Internet capabilities.

May 28, 2013
Microsoft tries to tamp down worries that new Xbox will follow your every move

Microsoft wants concerned gamers to know that its next-generation console won’t be a Stalk Box. In a statement given to Kotaku, an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson said that the new console’s Kinect sensor will have “simple, easy methods to customize privacy settings” and will “provide clear notifications and meaningful privacy choices for how data will be used, stored and shared.” The representative also said that users have the option to turn off the new Xbox completely and that the Kinect sensor wouldn’t keep tracking you even if you turned the power off.

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May 28, 2013
Apple said to be under pressure to release $200 iPad mini

While much of the concern about Apple’s margins has come from speculation about the company’s plans to release a cheaper version of the iPhone, the company may also be pondering releasing a cheaper version of its popular iPad mini tablet. Barron’s points us to a new research note from Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung, who believes that Apple will be forced to release a cheaper version of the iPad mini by the end of the year to maintain its market share against a flood of cheap Android tablets.

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May 28, 2013
Why HTC may be doomed no matter how good its devices are

Although its HTC One has received across-the-board acclaim as one of the world’s best smartphones, HTC still finds itself in dire straits. Businessweek’s Joshua Brustein has written what amounts to an advice column for HTC that ironically shows all the ways that the company may not be able to compete with rival Samsung no matter how good its devices are.

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May 28, 2013
Facial recognition coming soon to Google Glass

Anyone who already thinks Google Glass is “creepy” will certainly not be pleased to learn that Google’s digital headset may soon have the ability to recognize and identify individuals’ faces. The Telegraph reports that San Francisco-based company Lamda Labs has created a facial recognition application for Google Glass that will be available to Glass developers sometime over the next few days. The development of facial recognition features is particularly important with Glass because Google made a point of not including such technology in its first build of the device’s software, although it never forbade developers from creating their own facial recognition apps. The Telegraph says that initially the software “forces users take photographs, tag them with information on who is in them and then compare any subsequent photographs taken to those previously uploaded” while adding that future versions “may allow real-time recognition of faces.”

May 28, 2013
The Xbox One’s creepy monitoring feature might track how often you sit through commercials

If you don’t want to be creeped out by the Xbox One Kinect sensor’s ability to track your every move in your living room, then don’t read about some of the ideas that Microsoft has been batting around for how to give viewers incentives to sit through commercials. Per Polygon, Microsoft filed a patent application back in 2011 that detailed how Kinect could watch viewers to make sure they’re sitting through commercials and then reward them with special “achievements” for watching a certain number of ads. Polygon says that getting a certain number of achievements might unlock awards that could include digital gifts, avatar enhancements or reward points.

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May 28, 2013