Category: News

If you’re looking for a smartwatch in the next few years, you likely won’t want for choice. A new report pegs LG as developing its own take on the new category, according to The Korea Times on Friday. LG is supposedly working on a smartwatch as well as a product “similar to Internet giant’s Google Glass,” according to the paper’s sources, as part of a strategy to remain competitive long-term.

The LG smartwatch is in development alongside the Glass-like product as a “non-commercialized” R&D project, which essentially means it isn’t ready to ship. LG, like Samsung and a number of other handset makers, is no stranger to combining mobile phone technology with watch-based designs. The LG-GD910, for instance, was demoed at CES 2009 and featured a touchscreen and built-in 3G.

LG joins Samsung (which confirmed earlier this week that it was working on a smartwatch), Apple (which hasn’t confirmed anything, but which is reported to be working on it from various sources), and now Google (a new FT report claims it’s in on the action just this morning) as companies reportedly developing smartwatches. And of course Sony already actually shipped one, plus there are offerings available from Pebble and MetaWatch, among others.

In short, everyone has or is working on a smartwatch. And while the list is shorter for Google Glass, at this “non-commercialized” stage described in the Korea Times report today, you can bet your britches everyone else is working on that, too. We’ve already seen rumors about Microsoft, Sony and Apple developing Glass-type devices too, and now LG adds to that list.

The thing is this: if you’re a major electronics manufacturer, and at this point you haven’t assigned at least one guy with a lab coat or an engineering degree to look into both wrist- and head-mounted wearable tech, you’re already out of touch. For better or for worse, these wearables are happening, and at this point I’m more surprised not to hear that a company is working on those areas. I’m looking at you HTC and BlackBerry: where are your reports of clandestine research projects? This doesn’t count:

RT @TaylorLorenz: @stevekovach here is exclusive image of BlackBerry #smartwatch cc @evleaks http://t.co/AjgSPTBTDW—
Steve Kovach (@stevekovach) March 22, 2013

Storybird, the Toronto-based website that lets users add text to professionally created art to tell a story, launched a poetry HTML5 app this week.

The idea is somewhat similar to those Magnetic Poetry Kits: Users slide preselected words on top of artwork to create a poem. “The whole process takes less than a minute on your phone or tablet,” Storybird posted on its blog Thursday.

When I spoke with Storybird CEO Mark Ury in January, he told me that many users had requested a poetry feature. On the blog, he outlined the reasons that the company is excited about launching a poetry option:

“1. Fits on a phone, so that our members can use it anywhere. We want visual storytelling everywhere, because people and their stories are everywhere.

2. An even simpler storytelling format. Stories are hard to write and take time! Poetry is short and sweet. We used the same creative constraints for Poetry as we did with books: you can do only one thing, but that one thing is fantastic.

3. Poems are hyper social and look great on Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Your friends, family, and fans can easily read, share, and embed them.

4. They’re stunning. Poetry scales from the phone to the desktop (an AMAZING engineering and aesthetic feat from the team) to ensure the art looks great. It uses the same colour algorithms as our book covers and includes a light transparency on the word vessels, which makes the final compositions elegant and rich.

5. As with books and artwork comments, Poetry is designed to be family friendly. The word sets are fixed and were developed by a seasoned book editor from one of the Big Six publishing houses to enable creative expression without creative maligning.”

Storybird, which launched in 2010, has over two million members. The company has raised $850,000 in seed funding and is advised by former Tumblr exec John Maloney. The site operates on a freemium model, selling memberships to teachers and individuals, and also lets users pay to download stories as PDFs or order print versions of their creations.

Many Storybird customers are schools. The poetry option isn’t rolled out for school accounts yet, but will be available to them soon.

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Last year, President Obama predicted Baylor would win the 2012 NCAA Women's basketball tournament. The Bears lived up to the billing, winning the national championship over Notre Dame.

This year, the President is predicting a rematch.

Joining Baylor and Notre Dame in his Final Four are California and UConn. Check out his full bracket:

For President Obama's predictions in the NCAA men’s tournament, click here.

If you believe the hype, technology is going to help us end global poverty. Advances have indeed made a huge difference in the lives of the poor, but there’s also a healthy amount of skepticism out there. Berkeley researcher Kentaro Toyama has a blog dedicated to calling out naïve or inappropriate uses of information and communication technologies (ICT). Calling himself the ICT4D jester (using the development jargon for “information and communication technologies for development”), he has no shortage of material. We’ve all heard stories of computers that sit unused in African classrooms; on a recent post, the jester takes aim at texting cows.

The organization I’m part of, BRAC, is known for going to scale with solutions that are often radically low-tech. We’re more likely to scale up birthing kits that cost less than 50 cents apiece than mobile apps that might diagnose disease; more likely to open one-room schools in rented spaces or even boats, where children sit on the floor and learn to think creatively, than insist that every pupil have Internet access.

But I’m hardly a naysayer when it comes to tech. I agree with Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, who write in Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think that higher productivity associated with the falling cost of technology is leading us to a world of plenty.

The trick is making sure everyone shares in the coming abundance — or at least has a fair shot at doing so.

To do that, it’s vital that technology be suitable and relevant to the lives of its users. That’s easier said than done in a world where most product innovations are geared toward the rich.

We can take some lessons from Bangladesh, where BRAC is heading full steam into mobile banking with bKash (bikash means “growth” in Bengali), which is now the largest mobile banking provider in the country. BRAC Bank (the commercial bank owned by BRAC) launched the service as a pilot in five branches in November 2011, asking small enterprise borrowers to make repayments via local agents — who would send a receipt via text message — rather than in person at branch offices.

Even though it was designed to save time for hard-working families, asking borrowers to forego their passbooks in favor of SMS confirmations made them extremely uncomfortable. Shameran Abed, who runs BRAC’s microfinance program, explains what happened: “In the first couple months, a lot of our borrowers would send the money through their mobile phones and then physically show up at the branch to check with the accountant that the money had turned up.”

You may chuckle at that, but consider things from the point of view of a Bangladeshi smallholder farmer. “In a country where most people think that the only thing that is irrefutable is hard copy documentation with someone’s signature affixed to it, we were asking our borrowers to take a major leap of faith,” Abed says. “Some of them said to us: ‘If ever there is a dispute and we end up in court, no magistrate or judge will want to see an SMS confirmation. They’ll want to see proof” — meaning a hard-copy passbook.”

BKash is now advertised widely, with 30,000 agents and 2.2 million users. We’re confident in the cautious approach we’ve taken, and more importantly, the clients seem so, too.

But what happens when you ask customers to make a leap of faith and the chasm proves too wide? The consequences can be harmful — often more so for poorer clients than the ones pushing the solution.

BRAC learned this lesson from its foray into community-owned tube wells and irrigation pumps in the 1990s, documented in Ian Smillie’s Freedom From Want. Since water deep in the ground doesn’t belong to anybody, we thought of giving loans to organizations of the landless poor to drill and manage deep tube wells and sell the water to rice farmers, who would in turn benefit from higher yields.

The promise was exciting — the details far less so. The project depended on sufficient demand from farmers, which depended on ensuring they had access to high-yield seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. It also meant gauging demand for irrigation with a certain level of precision, which meant accurately forecasting the sale price of rice.

In the end, the program had far too many moving parts over which BRAC and the borrowers had insufficient control. At the program’s peak, 700 pumps covered 27,000 acres, with the loans constituting 9% of BRAC’s total microfinance portfolio. By the end of 1993, half of the pumps were operating at a loss and many loans were in arrears. The program was shut down in 1996, and although it refunded 100% of the loan repayments, it went down as one of BRAC’s biggest failures.

If details about fertilizers and crop yields seem tedious, that’s part of my point. We need to learn to hang onto the positive energy of the tech-innovation movement — in the words of Steve Jobs, stay hungry and foolish — even when the complexities don’t exactly liven up our cocktail party chatter (or, for that matter, galvanize investors).

In that regard, social entrepreneurs should heed the following:

Invest in local innovation. The poor and marginalized may not have been to school, but that doesn’t mean they’re uneducated. They’re often experts at jugaad, the Hindi word for “frugal innovation.” Piecemeal, low-tech solutions often go further — and are more easily scaled-up — than anything dreamed up by R&D-centric outsiders.

Grapple with the human dimensions of the problem. Understand not just the thrill of empowering people in principle, but the challenges in practice. To really know what managing a well means for a group of landless villagers, one needs to understand workaday hassles easily overlooked in the excitement of helping people. One must be sensitive to the stress of uncertainty with new innovations, such as replacing cumbersome microfinance passbooks with digital money.

Immerse yourself in the details. If you find yourself frustrated, bored, or driven to distraction by the nitty-gritty (the financial yields of improved rice varietals, say), that’s a sign you may be on the right track — and safer from the jester’s taunts.

The prospect of billions rising up from poverty with nothing more than gadgets is indeed a fanciful notion — and not a helpful one, either. But the evidence says that when we tether enthusiasm to reality, the reality starts to budge.

Please join the conversation and check back for regular updates. Follow the Scaling Social Impact insight center on Twitter @ScalingSocial and give us feedback.

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It turns out that not even having a U.S. president for a father can guarantee a publishing contract.

This week, Patti Davis, born Patricia Reagan, self-published a novel in the Kindle book store. Titled Till Human Voices Wake Us, the book deals with a woman’s lesbian relationship with her sister-in-law. From the book description on Amazon:

In the empty days after her son’s death, left alone in her grief by her husband, Isabelle Berendon falls in love with the unlikeliest person in the world: her sister-in-law.

Davis has previously written 8 books, including The Long Goodbye, which chronicled her father’s, Ronald Reagan’s, battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Now that she has penned a fictional novel (and one dealing with lesbianism at that), she states in her author biography that she finds herself in the same boat as other authors who can’t get an offer from a publishing house. However, she is also embracing the self-publishing model that ebooks are making more possible:

I’ve written a lot about my famous family, the Reagans — maybe this non-autobiographical novel was too much of a departure for publishers to wrap their heads around. But now there is KDP and the room to publish a book yourself. It’s exciting to me — a new era in publishing. Most writers have books they have labored over for years and long to put out into the world. Till Human Voices Wake Us is one of those books.

While it is six times faster than its predecessor, JuQueen, a new supercomputer recently unveiled at Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Jülich, Germany, uses one-sixth of the energy. The supercomputer is the fastest in Europe and capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second. A group of doctors, computer scientists and others will be embarking on a 10-year-long project to use the computer’s capabilities to map the entire human brain – from individual cells to large areas of the brain. The video runs 2:20 minutes.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Massachusetts education authorities have their eyes trained on Twitter this week, searching for signs of students who are cheating on the state-wide MCAS exams.

According to the Boston Globe Friday: staffers “scour” for MCAS hashtags during the tests. The practice kicked off last June during the science tests. Out of 76,000 students, 10 were caught tweeting and their tests were spiked.

So according to the news kids are cheating on MCAS using #MCAS and talking about it there. How stupid could you be?—
Ross Perry (@Ross368) March 22, 2013

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests are the bane of existence for students from elementary through high school.  All students in public schools — or private schools that take state aid — must take the standardized tests on english, math and science.

A spokesman for the state department of elementary and secondary education told the Globe: “Twitter … is something we need to be aware of.”

You might think that if you or your friends are breaking the rules, you might not want to take to social media and blab about it. But you would be wrong. In the Steubenville, Ohio rape case, the perpetrators were caught (and later convicted) in part based on information that was shared by their buddies on Twitter, Facebook and other social outlets.

For what it’s worth, a quick scan of #MCAS on Twitter mostly turned up students talking about the Globe story or complaining about the tests. So this lesson may have been learned.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Ivy Dawned

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A look at the crystallites of AZT, the first antiviral approved for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Originally, AZT was created to treat cancer — but it failed in tests.

When you pop a pill, do you know how it works? Most modern drugs target specific molecules, interacting with disease at the molecular level. But while we know the molecular causes of roughly 4,000 diseases, a very slim 6 percent of those diseases have a safe and effective drug to treat them. Why? Because of the incredible difficulty and cost of finding a compound that is perfectly shaped to interact with a molecular cause, and that also happens to be safe.

Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, wants to help this process along. Francis Collins: We need better drugs — nowIn yesterday’s talk, given at TEDMED 2012, Collins makes a bold case for translational research to produce better drugs, faster. What does “translational” mean? It means research that takes a particular look at basic scientific discoveries and asks: how can we make an actual medicine from this? To that end he helped launch the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences in 2011. NCATS aims to do away with the costly and time-consuming bottlenecks that prevent new drugs from coming to market.

Collins hopes to encourage pharmaceutical companies to open up their stashes of drugs that have already passed safety tests, but that failed to successfully treat their targeted disease. He also wants to look at how drugs approved for one disease could successfully treat another. We can teach “old drugs new tricks,” Collins says in his talk, by matching them to the molecular pathways of other diseases.

Doing so will require academia, the pharmaceutical industry, government agencies and patient advocacy groups to work together, in conjunction with talented researchers and ample funding. After all, a single drug can cost billions to develop. Still, it’s possible.

In his talk, Dr. Collins mentions two failed cancer drugs that were successfully repurposed: zidovudine (AZT), the first antiviral approved for HIV/AIDS in 1987 and, more recently, farnesyltransferase inhibitor (FTI), which was used to successfully treat children with the rapid-aging disease Progeria in a 2012 clinical trial.

Fascinated, we asked Collins to share more. Below, read his list of seven drugs that have been repurposed. Of them he writes via email, “None of these drugs could have been developed without collaborations between drug developers and researchers with new ideas about applications, based on molecular insights about disease.”

1. Raloxifene: The FDA approved Raloxifene to reduce the risk of invasive breast cancer in postmenopausal women in 2007. It was initially developed to treat osteoporosis.
   .
2. Thalidomide: This drug started out as a sedative in the late fifties, and soon doctors were infamously prescribing it to prevent nausea in pregnant women. It later caused thousands of severe birth defects, most notably phocomelia, which results in malformed arms and legs. In 1998, thalidomide found a new use as a treatment for leprosy and in 2006 it was approved for multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer.
   .
3. Tamoxifen: This hormone therapy treats metastatic breast cancers, or those that have spread to other parts of the body, in both women and men, and it was originally approved in 1977. Thirty years later, researchers discovered that it also helps people with bipolar disorder by blocking the enzyme PKC, which goes into overdrive during the manic phase of the disorder.
   .
4. Rapamycin: This antibiotic, also called sirolimus, was first discovered in bacteria-laced soil from Easter Island in the seventies, and the FDA approved it in 1999 to prevent organ transplant rejection. Since then, researchers have found it effective in treating not one but two diseases: Autoimmune Lymphoproliferative Syndrome (ALPS), in which the body produces too many immune cells called lymphocytes, and lymphangioleiomyomatosis, a rare lung disease.
   .
5. Lomitapide: Intended to lower cholesterol and triglycerides, the FDA approved this drug to treat a rare genetic disorder that causes severe cholesterol problems called homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia last December.
   .
6. Pentostatin: This injectable antibiotic was originally intended as chemotherapy for some types of leukemias. It was later successful against a rare leukemia called hairy cell leukemia.
   .
7. Sodium nitrite: This salt was first developed as an antidote to cyanide poisoning and, unrelated to medicine, it’s also used to cure meat. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute is currently recruiting participants for a sodium nitrite clinical trial, in which the drug will be tested as a treatment for the chronic leg ulcers associated with sickle cell and other blood disorders.

Interested in more thoughts on how we can change the long, clunky process of testing pharmaceuticals? Watch these 5 TED Talks with fascinating ideas for medical research »

Jon Hamm, star of AMC’s Mad Men is currently in the spotlight, not because he’ll be back for two more seasons of Mad Men, but because rumor has it he has a big penis. Clearly, this is top news.

Apparently the Huffington Post is the authority on the subject. Google News lists its piece “Jon Hamm’s Private Parts Allegedly Cause A Frenzy On ‘Mad Men’ Set” as the “in-depth” go to source.

The “in-depth” Huffington Post piece points to the New York Daily News’ Confidential, which appears to be the source of the big Jon Hamm penis rumor (or is that Jon Hamm big penis rumor?), or at least the latest round of discussion about it. The article quotes:

“Mad Men” star Jon Hamm’s private parts are causing a stir. Again.

An AMC insider tells Confidenti@l that during filming of the sixth season of the hit show — when the ’60s-style clothing was a tight fit — Hamm was politely instructed by a staffer at the network to please wear underwear while shooting his scenes.

A source tells Confidential that with the season taking place in the 60s, the pants are “tight and leave very little to the imagination,” and that “Jon’s impressive anatomy is so distracting that they politely insisted on the underwear”.

Now that anatomy is the talk of the web, and it’s making the search trends.

Buzzfeed, “where journalism is heading,” has “15 Hilarious Tweets About Jon Hamm’s Penis“.

Just 15? Surely there are hundreds, if not thousands.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about that amazing Jon Hamm picture above, check this out.

Debenu PDF Tools Pro is a powerful set of PDF tools which can help you to merge and split PDFs, convert them to text or images, edit properties, add or remove passwords and a whole lot more.

Normally $59, the package available for free — but Debenu says this is only for “a few more days”, and the offer could expire at any time, so if you’re interested then we’d grab a copy now.

Need more information? Here’s how it works.

The program doesn’t have a central interface, instead just adding itself to your Explorer context menus. Right-click a PDF, select “Debenu PDF Tools Pro” and you’ll find a menu listing its various options.

A “Convert” menu allows you to convert PDF files to text or images. You can also select multiple images and convert them into a single, or multiple PDFs.

The “Extract” menu can extract text and images from a PDF file. You might use this to grab the embedded images within a PDF, say.

The “Security” menu allows you to add or remove a PDF “Open” password, or apply a digital signature to the file.

There’s a simple PDF viewer, a document properties tool, and an option to extract PDF form data.

And the Edit menu has so many functions that it could be an application all on its own. It can add or remove attachments; extract, remove or edit bookmarks; edit existing document properties, or add custom properties of your own; view, add or remove document JavaScripts; and insert, extract, delete, crop or rotate one or more of the document pages.

There isn’t always a lot of depth to these functions. If you’re converting a document to images, say, you don’t get to choose the image file format, the base file name, or anything else: just specify a file folder, lots of JPEGs are dumped there, and you’re left to organise them yourself.

Debenu PDF Tools Pro does still provide a great deal of power, though, while also being very well presented and generally very easy to use. And it’s certainly worth the download, so go grab a copy immediately, while the offer is still available.

Photo Credit: Mmaxer/Shutterstock

Vice President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the Irish American Hall of Fame luncheon, in New York City, New York, March 21, 2013.

(Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

As he was inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame yesterday, Vice President Biden recalled his family’s past coming to America – and he called on Congress to fix our broken immigration system for a new generation of men and women who dream of a better life in this country.

The Vice President stressed that while we have to find a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here, we also have to fix our legal immigration system.

It’s a system that is well intended, but today it keeps families separated, and actually has the effect of sending talented people away from our country.

We have to change that. As the Vice President said, “We have to fix the system to focus on families.” And we can do that by increasing country caps and visas so families can be reunited.

read more

Amidst Apple iWatch rumors and Google Glass sightings, it would appear that Google is actually working on its own smartwatch to be paired alongside connected Android devices. According to the Financial Times, Google’s Android arm will be the team working on the device, as opposed to the X Lab division, which handled Google Glass development.

The wearable computer market is heating up quite rapidly. Alongside Google’s Glass project, a number of smaller OEMs have launched Bluetooth-connected smart watches to work as a companion to the smartphone.

Fossil has a well-crafted MetaWatch, InPulse has the hot-selling Pebble smartwatch, and there are even a handful of quantified self devices that measure your daily activity. There’s the Nike FuelBand, the Jawbone UP, and the Basis to name a few. Add to that an Apple competitor in the iWatch, and a Samsung smartwatch to boot, and it only makes sense that Google has a watch in the works.

Google Glass takes wearable computing a step beyond the basic wrist watch. However, the rate of adoption will almost certainly be lower than that of a watch or a smartphone since the experience is such a huge change in the way we interact with digital content and our world. A smart watch, on the other hand, would feel a lot more like using a really small smartphone, and that familiarity makes the watch a great bridge between smartphones and computational headsets.

Google didn’t comment on the speculation.

However, there’s a patent owned by Google and filed in 2011 for a “smart watch” with a “flip-up display.” It would appear that the patent also provides for a touchscreen experience.

The question isn’t really if Google will build a smart watch. As small OEMs and big competitors around it flood the market with wearable smartwatches, Google will likely need to join the fight. However, it’s unclear what exactly that will look like? Does a flip-up display look like a flip phone?

From the patent filing, the “flip-up display” seems to work like a digital pocket watch, showing two displays when open and a single display on top when closed.

However, just because Google filed this patent, it doesn’t mean that Google’s Android smartwatch will look anything like it.

On the software side, Google has already proven that it can develop for new forms of computing, such as Google Glass. Even some of its already-released apps like Google Now and Field Trip seem like they would fit in swimmingly with a smart watch. Plus, we can’t forget that the acquisition of Motorola has left Google with a rather sizable hardware team.

It was last October when we first heard rumors that Google could be working on a smartwatch. At that time, a patent based on a smartwatch with a flip up display was awarded to Google.  Of course many companies are awarded patents for products that never actually come to market. However, with Samsung and Apple now working on watches of their own, it certainly isn’t out of the question that Google will definitely come out with one, hopefully Nexus branded. Don’t forget, Motorola has some experience in this area with the MOTOACTV.

The Financial Times is reporting that not only is Google working on a watch, but it’s an Android unit project, not an X Lab project like Google Glass. It makes perfect sense for Android to be part of the watch since it’s more of a mobile device than Glass. Unfortunately no timeframe was mentioned, but hopefully we will see something this year.

source: Financial Times
via: TheVerge

Come comment on this article: Google’s upcoming smartwatch is an Android project not X Lab

I am sharing the following email we received with permission from author Shauna Kreger…

I would like to say thank you for fighting for use in these small communities in rural Minnesota on Broadband. I am a college student on-line and have trouble doing my school work because I do not have broadband and cannot afford satellite. Satellite is not much better than dial-up ( but you probably already know that). I have tried for past four years to get broadband installed in my area with no luck. I am a quarter of a mile from the cut off of a broadband box. I wrote a letter to Qwest’s board three years ago explaining the benefits of broadband services for the rural communities and the benefits it would have on their company ethics. I also sent them detailed research on when North Western Bell put phone lines in around my area and how it paid for itself. To my disbelief I received an e-mail back from a female on the board stating “putting broadband services in at this time would not benefit Qwest”. I contact the company monthly asking for broadband and I am told I can not get it and there is no future plans for broadband installation in my area. School children need broadband these days to do their homework and their grades are suffering because there is no option. The phone company seems to be monopolizing the rural area of Pine, Kanebec, and other Northern Counties.

I thought about blocking out name of the provider but I figured there have been enough changes at Qwest to provide some distance. And Comcast’s Duane Ring said something very similar at an MHTA meeting in January…

How can we convince providers to expand their service? What prevents growth?

DR: All providers want more customers. It’s what we think about. How do you get a ROI? There’s nothing available now that makes a compelling business case in some areas. We’ve looked at various technologies. We will need a hybrid solution to reach unserved areas.

I heard similar frustration from users while I was touring communities across the state last month. So, while research I posted earlier this week indicates that adoption is where it’s at for closing the broadband gap I’d like to remind folks that access is still an issue too. Adoption is a goal that everyone loves – providers, users, community leaders… It feels good all the way around. The apple pie of broadband! And I wholeheartedly support adoption too.

Access is another issue because there is a gap between the goals based on perspective: most providers want to make money while customers (and community-oriented leaders) want to see service in areas even where the business case isn’t strong. Broadband proponents see broadband as an investment in the community. Many providers see it as an investment for stakeholders. (Note: there are local independent, coops and community providers that see investment in the community too!)

Addressing tough issues of access could be where the policymakers can have the greatest impact. It seems like encouragement (via tax incentives, public-private partnership or other options) is worth trying but at some point we may need to see stronger measures that require providers to address universal service and/or support community/municipal efforts to get the job.

Some people say that we don’t choose our cars, but that our cars choose us, a philosophy that I agree with wholeheartedly. Steven Ruiz, owner of this one-year-only 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, knows this all too well, as this is the relationship he has with his little bug. Everyday for 10 years Ruiz drove by the home where the Beetle was parked, and everyday he knew that one day, he would have to own it. Thankfully his dream came true when the owner decided to sell, and now, because of this, Ruiz has a car that he hopes to hold on to forever.

Source: Petrolicous.com

The 2013 GPU Technology Conference is underway in San Jose this week, and NVIDIA shared how it is taking on the top trends in IT with GPU-powered big data analysis, accelerated virtual desktops, and a visual computing appliance. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #GTC13.

Keynoting at the beginning of the conference, NVIDIA (NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun presented about breakthroughs in computer graphics and the NVIDIA GPU roadmap. He shared GPU computing examples and updated participants on remote graphics and product announcements. Jen-Hsun talked about the next two GPUs coming from NVIDIA: the Maxwell – with unified virtual memory for GPU operations to see the CPU memory and vice versa, and the Volta, which is energy efficient and has a new technology called stacked DRAM. Volta will address the problem of access to memory bandwidth. It will have DRAM on same silica sub-strate, and achieve one terabyte per second of bandwidth.

GPU-Powered Big Data Analytics

NVIDIA demonstrated several case studies for how GPUs are being used to tackle big data analytics and advanced search for both consumer and commercial applications. Companies such as Shazam, Salesforce.com and Cortexica use GPUs to process massive data sets and complex algorithms for audio search, big data analytics and image recognition. Top music application Shazam uses GPU accelerators to rapidly search and identify songs from its 27 million track database. Shazam is growing rapidly, with 10 million song searches a day and 2 million new users joining the service every week and its database doubling over the last year.

“GPUs enable us to handle our tremendous processing needs at a substantial cost savings, delivering twice the performance per dollar compared to a CPU-based system,” said Jason Titus, chief technology officer of Shazam Entertainment. “We are adding millions of video and foreign language audio tracks to our existing services, and GPU accelerators give us a way to achieve scalable growth.”

Visual Computing Appliance

NVIDIA introduced a visual computing appliance, enabling businesses to deliver ultra-fast GPU performance to any Windows, Linux or Mac client on their network. The GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) is a GPU-based system runs complex applications like those from Adobe and Autodesk, sending their graphics over the network to be displayed on a client computer. With the click of an icon a virtual machine, called a workspace, can be created for a dedicated, high-performance GPU-based system. These workspaces can be added, deleted or reallocated as needed.

“NVIDIA GRID VCA is the first product to provide businesses with convenient, on-demand visual computing,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer, NVIDIA. “Design firms, film studios and other businesses can now give their creative teams access to graphics-intensive applications with un-compromised performance, flexibility and simplicity.”

The 4U GRID VCA appliance houses 16 NVIDIA GPUs and GRID VGX software, providing NVDIA Quadro-class graphics performance for up to 16 concurrent users, with low-latency, high-resolution and maximum interactivity. The appliance will be available in the United States in May.

“We’ve had enormous success using remote GPU acceleration on our content-creation applications,” said James Fox, chief executive officer at Dawnrunner, a San Francisco-based film production company. “Thanks to NVIDIA GRID VCA, we don’t spend weeks configuring workstations and transcoding files and projects. Instead, we have more time to deliver a higher quality product for our customers. And we can take on new projects with tighter deadlines.”

Companies embrace NVIDIA GRID

NVIDIA announced that enterprises can deliver GPU-accelerated virtual desktops and professional graphics applications from the cloud to any device, anytime, anywhere. Dell, HP and IBM are offering NVIDIA GRID-based servers. Citrix, Microsoft and VMware are offering NVIDIA GRID-enabled software. The Dell PowerEdge R720, HP ProLiant WS460c and SL250, and IBM iDataPlex dx350 MR server contain the NVIDIA GRID K1 and K2 boards.

“Enterprises want to take advantage of the growing trends towards globalization and mobility by virtualizing desktops and applications so users can work from anywhere, anytime on any device — while enabling the company to secure its core IP,” said Bob Schultz, group vice president and general manager, Desktops and Apps at Citrix. “By leveraging NVIDIA GRID K1 and K2, combined with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp with HDX technology, enterprises can deliver the most graphics-intensive applications to users who require rich, interactive experiences from any device.”

NVIDIA GRID enterprise solutions uses NVIDIA GRID VGX software, which unlocks the virtualization and remoting capabilities of NVIDIA GRID GPUs and is licensed by Citrix for use in XenDesktop, XenApp and XenServer; VMware for use in vSphere and Horizon View; and Microsoft for use in RemoteFX. The GRID K1 boards use four Kepler GPUs and 16GB of memory, and K2 boards use two higher-end Kepler GPUs and 8GB of memory.

“Enabling customers to virtualize their multiple workloads is a challenge Dell is committed to, and the NVIDIA GRID technology enables our solutions to be more powerful for design and graphics-intensive applications,” said Sally Stevens, vice president of Dell PowerEdge marketing. “Starting with the PowerEdge R720 server this month, and later including Dell Precision workstations and end-to-end Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) Enterprise stacks, Dell will offer a range of robust graphics-virtualized solutions, enabling new customer mobility and data security opportunities that accommodate a wide range of graphics performance requirements.”

To keep up with Big Data news, bookmark DCK’s Big Data Channel. To stay updated on virtualization, check out our Virtualization Channel.

In early January, Microsoft announced that starting from March 15, users would no longer be able to sign into the aging, but still popular Messenger service, because Skype would be replacing it. And, to give users an incentive to embrace its replacement, Microsoft is giving away a “free welcome gift”.

This gift can be redeemed by Messenger users who sign into Skype with their Microsoft account details and promises “calls to landlines and mobiles around the world, group video calling, group screen sharing (and more) absolutely free for a month”. Or at least that’s what the text says.

The fine-print, however, might dampen any enthusiasm you have for the offer. After the free one-month period ends, Microsoft automatically sets up a recurring payment system which will charge users $9.99 per month, unless they manually cancel the trial within the first 27 days.

The offer is “available while supplies last” and, in order to qualify, users “must provide valid payment details”. Of course, there are other details in the fine-print such as the implementation of a “fair use policy“, worldwide calls in just 40 countries for landlines and an abysmal seven countries for cell phone calls, etc.

Microsoft also states that “April 8th is the first day that you may be required to upgrade to Skype”. The use of the word “may” is not particularly reassuring, giving the impression that Messenger may live longer than expected.

Photo Credit: moneymaker11/Shutterstock

If you are looking for a high-end Samsung Galaxy Tab device, you may not need to wait too long. The gang at SamMobile reports that Samsung is diligently working on a specialized tablet to compete against the likes of the iPad and Sony’s Xperia Z tablet. I know you’re all thinking wait a minute— Samsung’s existing tablets are already established competitors to the iPad and Xperia Z tablet, right? Well, there’s one thing that the Xperia Z and iPad has the existing Galaxy Tabs don’t: a superior display. Knowing this, Samsung will incorporate a full Super AMOLED FULL HD Display which would rival other brands’ offerings. Moreover— the displays are rumored to come in at 10.1 or 11.6-inches. Complimenting the HD display will be the new Exynos 5 chip running the show.

Considering Samsung already has its fingerprints over a certain tablet with an awesome display that is currently unrivaled by the competiton, it’s pretty safe to say that its new line of premium tablets are going to be amazing. Well— if that’s true that is…

source: SamMobile

Come comment on this article: Samsung rumored to be developing a premium Galaxy Tab with a full Super AMOLED FULL HD display

Angry Birds Star Wars will soon get a Cloud City episode. Rovio teased the episode on YouTube:

No release date for the episode is given, but Rovio says to stay tuned for the official Cloud City gameplay trailer, coming to MTV and GameTrailers on Monday.

Fans recently saw the release of 22 “Escape From Hoth” levels.