New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.APImetricsPricing: APImetrics offers four levels of pricing: Community (free), Developer ($10/month), Professional ($150/month) and Enterprise (custom). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ve tried several speaker systems with my iMac and they have ranged from abysmal through to very good but most lack that audiophile quality. Not so the Griffin 20.
The Twenty is a digital audio amplifier with a 20 watt per channel output and you can switch the input from its S/PDIF optical port to Bluetooth streaming. It's got traditional speaker connectors (for either speaker wires or cables terminated with banana plugs) and there’s an RCA socket to connect a subwoofer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The market for portable battery packs to keep your digital life going on the road has become a huge business over the last couple of years and I just got my hands on one of the more versatile and powerful products in this market: The Cyntur JumperPack mini.
This is a small (6.0” by 3.3” by 1.3”), weatherproof device that weighs just 0.9 pounds but despite its diminutive size contains a whopping 12,000 mAh lithium-ion battery, enough to jumpstart an eight-cylinder engine. Not only that but it's powerful enough, the company claims, to jumpstart 25 engines in a row (a problem I hope to never have).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A handful of benchmark scores for Microsoft's not-yet-released Surface 3 tablet hint that it's between a third and half as fast as the company's older 2-in-1, the more powerful Surface Pro 3.The scores also show that Apple's iPad Air -- which starts at the same $499 price of the Surface 3 -- is between 36% and 93% faster than Microsoft's latest device.Five Surface 3 benchmark scores posted on Primate Labs' Geekbench in the last two days have ranged from 949 to 1009 for single-core, and from 3200 to 3430 for multi-core.The tests may have been run by people who have a review unit; like other hardware makers, Microsoft often seeds media outlets and influential blogs with machines prior to bringing them to retail, giving reviewers hands-on time so that they can publish their takes on or before the sale or ship date.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Drexel University and the Free Library of Philadelphia have introduced a vending machine that doles out Apple iPad tablets for four hours at a time.
The machine's debut follows that of a MacBook vending machine at the disposal of Drexel students around the clock.
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The iPads are accessible to Drexel students and residents of Philly's Manua and Poweton Village neighborhoods. Borrowers must swipe either their student ID or library card to activate the vending machine.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Owners of Hyundai Motor’s upcoming Equus will be able to take their hands off the steering wheel and feet off the brakes as they’re traveling down the highway, and let their car do the driving. The South Korea-based automaker plans to integrate a host of self-driving features into its premium sedan later this year, transforming it into a semiautonomous vehicle.Highway driving assistance features will allow the new Equus to stay in lane, slow down and speed up as necessary to avoid collisions. The price of the new Equus hasn’t been determined but should be similar to Hyundai’s current models, ranging from US $61,500 to $68,750, officials said.The main markets for the new Equus will be South Korea and the U.S., company officials said at a briefing ahead of the Seoul Motor Show, which opened Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's Surface tablet team, fresh off introducing a new lighter and thinner model this week, will take its chances with the Reddit crowd on Friday.Things got a bit rough for the team about a year ago when it dipped its toes into the sometimes dangerous waters of Reddit's Q&A free-for-all, dubbed Ask Me Anything (AMA) following the release of the Surface Pro 3 tablet. Among other things, Microsoft was taken to task for charging separately for the keyboard/cover. However, the Surface Pro 3 has become something of a hit, pulling in a reported $900 million-plus in revenue, according to market watchers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Once considered a lost cause in the tablet market, Microsoft's Windows will take market share from Apple's iOS and Google's Android in the coming years, according to IDC.
Android and iOS are the top two OSes for tablets, with 67.3 percent and 27.6 percent share, respectively, of the 229.7 million units shipped in 2014. Windows had just a 5.1 percent market share, according to research released by IDC on Thursday.
But by 2019, Windows will have 14.1 percent market share, and the share of Android and iOS will gradually fall to 62.9 percent and 23 percent respectively. Tablet shipments in 2019 will total 269.4 million, indicating slow growth over the coming years, IDC said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a move that could yield even more automated suggestions and tips for LinkedIn users, the professional network has acquired California startup Refresh, the maker of an app that gathers news and insights about participants in meetings.Launched three years ago, Refresh is designed to be a “digital briefing book” that can call up online information related to people that users are scheduled to meet. The information can be anything from blog posts, news articles or Facebook posts to personal notes or favorite sports teams.The Refresh mobile and desktop app is aimed at helping people relate to one another more quickly, but it can also be used to refresh one’s memory when running into acquaintances unexpectedly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although it started off as a smartphone app to connect passengers with drivers, Uber Technologies is encountering the same real-world security issues as the taxi industry, includng the need for driver background checks and local regulatory compliance.On top of this there are the risks involved in handling masses of customer and driver data, which became evident earlier this year when the company admitted driver data had been compromised.On Thursday, Uber moved a step forward in its bid to fend off criticism of its security practices by appointing as its first chief security officer Joe Sullivan, a former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor and, more recently, Facebook’s security chief.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For years we've been obsessed with increasing chip processing power. Intel's i386, launched in 1985, followed by the i486 in 1989, introduced economical multitasking and number crunching to the enterprise.In the following years, the chips got more powerful still, culminating with today's hundred-dollar smartphone threatening the PC.It could be argued that we've reached an acceptable level of multitasking and personal computing power for cost. We've found it in small-form-factor smartphones, and it may be all we really need now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In just under six months, a behind-the-scenes switch in the payments industry will change the way U.S. consumers shop and could bring wider acceptance for Apple Pay and its competitors.Beginning in October, liability for transactions with fraudulent credit and debit cards will shift from the card companies to retailers, if the retailers haven’t invested in terminals that don’t accept chip-based cards. The chip cards are already being sent from banks to customers, and some stores have them in place, but much is still up in the air.At this week’s Transact 15 expo in San Francisco, a gathering of companies in the electronic payments industry, everyone has questions and there are few answers. Could the shift be delayed, will banks mandate PIN numbers instead of signatures for purchases with the new cards, and will cybercriminals just shift their attention online?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel today unveiled its first consumer-class solid-state drive (SSD) with a PCI Express 3.0 bus and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) high-speed host controller interface.The new 750 Series SSD's performance tops out with sequential read/write speeds of up to 2,400MBps and 1,200MBps, respectively.Unlike previous Intel consumer flash products that used a serial-ATA (SATA) computer bus interface, the new SSDs will be directly attached to a motherboard via NVMe or through PCIe interconnect. Intel
The 750 Series SSD in a 2.5-in (15mm z-height) form factor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
April 3, 2010Image by REUTERS/Robert GalbraithTablets had always flopped so there was no shortage of naysayers pooh-poohing Apple’s new iPad when the first model was delivered to homes and made available in stores on April 3, 2010. While sales growth has slowed recently, the naysayers could not possibly have been more wrong. Here are some images from the iPad’s debut day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The dispute between U.S. states and RadioShack over the sale of customer information continues, with the state of Texas requesting a bankruptcy court to ask RadioShack to specify in any motion for sale what information would be included and the number of people likely to be affected.Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is concerned that although the personally identifiable information (PII) was not sold in a recently concluded auction, in argument and testimony during the sale hearing, RadioShack “has indicated that PII remains available for sale and will likely be sold in the future, attendant to the sale of trademarks and/or intellectual property,” according to a filing Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce.com has acquired Toopher, the developer of a mobile two-factor authentication app that uses location-awareness.Toopher in Austin, Texas, said on its website that it will no longer sell its current products, but is “thrilled to join Salesforce, where we’ll work on delivering the Toopher vision on a much larger scale as part of the world’s #1 Cloud Platform.”It did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.Salesforce spokeswoman Karly Bolton confirmed the purchase but did not provide further details. Toopher’s website is now inaccessible, except for the notice announcing the acquisition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The corporate world is serious businessThe annual scramble for momentary flashes of attention in the public eye has become an undignified, childish reversion to the mean, and a symptom of the terrible harm the Internet has done to the business world and to the media. It is with regret that we begrudgingly direct still more of your dwindling attention span to the following unedifying “pranks,” of which we hereby express our disapproval, our tongues far from our cheeks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An enterprise mobility partnership between Apple and IBM has yielded more iPhone and iPad apps, including the first ones for the health care industry and industrial production management.Under an agreement announced last July, the two companies develop enterprises mobile apps together, and IBM sells and supports Apple hardware. The first 10 mobile apps debuted in late December and a second batch was released in March. The apps released this week bring the total offered to 22.The four new health care apps are for nurses who work in hospitals and provide home care. Hospital RN replaces a nurse’s pager and phone with an iPhone, and allows them to access a patient’s records. The app uses iBeacon technology to identify patients and displays notifications including status updates on hospital equipment that is offline, backups at the lab and patient requests.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Super substanceThe question is becoming what can't graphene do? The material, which is a form of carbon (what’s known as an allotrope of carbon), was recently described by the National Physical Laboratory as having many extraordinary properties including superior mechanical stiffness, strength and elasticity, electrical and thermal conductivity while being optically active, chemically inert and impermeable to gases. The possession of all of these properties in a single material makes graphene a potentially disruptive technology in sectors like optoelectronics, flexible electronics, bioelectric devices, energy storage and ultrafiltration, the lab stated. Indeed, take a look at just some of the recent applications being ascribed to the material.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you want a Raspberry Pi 2 laptop? A new hardware kit coming from Pi-Top will help you build one at home in a matter of minutes.The popular US$35 Raspberry Pi 2 is an uncased computer that is already being used in drones, robots, gadgets, tablets and even desktops. The otherwise stationary computer can be transformed into a laptop even by beginners with no hardware assembly experience.The full Pi-Top kit includes a 13.3-inch screen, battery, trackpad, mousepad, laptop casings and Raspberry Pi 2, which would serve as the main motherboard. Users will be able to run a full Linux-based operating system and surf the Web, check email and run productivity software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here