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For years, industry leaders have predicted the Year of Mobile -- but that was back when those in the know thought of mobile in terms of a trend. Trends have peaks. Those crests are marked by a "Year Of" label that largely heralds a forthcoming decline. Mobile will have no peak, despite its growing...
It may be an increasingly digital, electronic and paperless world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't use a lot of energy. In particular, data centers -- those places that store, maintain, and manage all the bits and bytes that keep things humming -- use tremendous amounts of energy. Greening these ce...
With every passing day, smartphones are melding into our personal lives -- almost without our notice. One of the most striking changes in how the ever-tinier handhelds are augmenting our lives is through mobile apps -- most especially healthcare apps. At first, healthcare apps seemed mainly a novelt...
Europe is becoming increasingly nervous as Android and Apple's iOS continue to dominate the smartphone market worldwide. "There's a concerted effort on three different fronts where European carriers and manufacturers, mainly carriers, are sounding alarms about not wanting an Apple-Google duopoly," s...
When collaborating with others in the workplace, physically being there is nice. The fact is, though, that one's physical presence almost always leaves an unavoidable carbon footprint. As an answer to this dilemma, new and emerging collaborative technologies offer a way to be there in spirit, voice ...
It seems that every time we turn around, another major security breach has occurred. The latest was the data breach at Epsilon, which manages customer databases and provides third-party email marketing services to 2,500 corporate clients, including some of America's biggest firms. That breach has l...
The downer in buying a new gadget is in ditching the old gizmo. The mental gymnastics set in almost immediately. Sell it? Donate it? Trash it? To make matters worse, the ditching dilemma appears to get harder to solve with every passing year. eBay, the old standby for profitable disposal of just abo...
A few years ago, several Google employees got together and asked a fateful question: What if they extended Google's technologies of gathering and archiving information into the world of visual art? The recently launched Google Art Project is the answer to that question, taking one of the broadest s...
It used to be that if you wanted a work of art, you either had to get an original or settle for a less-than-perfect reproduction. Now, however, digital technologies, new printing processes, and the online world have converged to create a whole new world of collectible and affordable prints and repro...
Trends have always come and gone, but when it comes to all-things-tech, the speed of change is faster than an Internet minute. It isn't that tech users are all that fickle; it's that the environment around them is constantly changing. Take the "smartphones vs. laptops war" for example. It isn't that...
As if scripted for a "Star Trek" episode, news of a real-life, real-time hologram instantly projected images of holodecks in many a sci-fi fan's head, only to be dashed and challenged and revived again. The action opened with an announcement that a technological breakthrough by researchers at The Un...
Google TV and Apple TV would have you believe "...we are now controlling the transmission ... the horizontal and the vertical..." in a pitch scraped straight from the intro to "The Outer Limits." But controlling the transmission, they're not. At least not yet. What viewers have now is an extremely f...
Google's wow factor is still at large -- this time in a self-driving car that's tootling about California in a series of test runs. It's easy to get carried away with the dream of a personal (albeit automated) chauffeur and the implied robotic "get out of jail free card." The inebriated and textholi...
Biometric security -- which employs systems that read people's fingerprints or compare their voiceprint or retina scans to information in data banks in order to authenticate them -- is being heavily used in some of the United States' most critical installations. How reliable are biometric systems? W...
Competition in the keenly contested smartphone market is driving massive change in user interfaces. Mice and keyboards are so yesterday; touch, multitouch and gestures form the core of UIs today. Now, we have Google TV with apps on the TV set. The media of television, streaming video and the Interne...