There’s a vampire-slayer stalking the halls at Cebit.With SensyBee, a curvy little box that plugs into the back of a PC between the power supply and the wall outlet, turning the PC off when it is unused, Ideovitra hopes to eliminate PCs’ vampire power consumption.A typical desktop PC consumes around 200 watts when running—but still as much as 50W when in Windows 8’s “sleep” mode. Even when “turned off,” it can consume up to 20W, as the power supply and some other components remain powered up to perform functions such as wake-on-LAN, said Ideovitra’s sales manager David Chedotal.In the 6,500 hours a year that the average office PC lies unused, that vampire power consumption can add between 130 and 325 kilowatt-hours to the energy bill. At German electricity prices, that’s anywhere from €30 (US$32) to €90 wasted each year, according to Ideovitra.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
So you want to track your water, electricity or gas consumption, but you still don’t have a smart meter on your supply? Pixolus has a mobile app that makes it easier to keep track of meter readings, even with dumb meters.
Just tell the Pixometer app which meter you’re going to read, point the phone’s camera at it, and let the optical character recognition software do the work. Once the app gets a lock on the numbers, it speaks the reading out loud and stores it, and the date, in that meter’s file.
You can even enter the price per kilowatt-hour, for electricity, or per cubic meter, for water, and the app will show you the expenditure since the last meter reading, and what that works out to per month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Space walkImage by REUTERS/NASA/Handout via ReutersIt had to be quite the rush. The first spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA) happened March 18, 1965, when cosmonaut Alexei Leonov first departed the Soviet Union's Voskhod 2 spacecraft to test the idea – he stayed out about 10 minutes. American Edward White II took the US’ first spacewalk that year in June stepping out of the Gemini IV spacecraft. Since that time many have taken the plunge outside the their spacecraft to fix problems, make adjustments and even hit a golf ball, as one NASA astronaut did in 2006 – he shanked it. Take a look at some of the milestones of spacewalking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has replaced its top computing executive.Paul Perez, vice president and general manager, Computing Systems at Cisco, left the company this month for undisclosed reasons. He is being replaced by Satinder Sethi, vice president of UCS Product Management & Solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oh, that Elon Musk. Always saying the most provocative things, such as yesterday when he addressed attendees at a Nvidea conference and suggested that driverless cars will someday bring about a ban on the human-driven kind.“It’s too dangerous,” he said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle expects to generate more than $1 billion in new SaaS and PaaS business in 2015, putting it toe-to-toe in the cloud market with Salesforce.com, Oracle’s top executives said Tuesday.“It’s going to be close, but you won’t have to wait very long to find out who’s going to win this,” Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison told financial analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call.Oracle’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenue grew by 30 percent to $372 million in the quarter ended Feb. 28, the third of Oracle’s fiscal year. Adjusting for strong currency fluctuations, the growth would have been 34 percent, Oracle said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.“The whole Web architecture is giving way to an emerging mobile architecture,” said Cathal McGloin, Red Hat vice president of mobile platforms.Like IBM and Oracle, Red Hat has been working to extend its enterprise software portfolio so it can support mobile applications as well, particularly those that its customers develop in house.The company said Tuesday that it has completed integrating into its own software portfolio the mobile platform it acquired when it purchased FeedHenry last October. It has outlined how enterprises could use these technologies to build mobile applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As thousands of dashcam videos on YouTube vividly demonstrate, drivers see the craziest things. Be it an angry bear, a low-flying aircraft or even a guy riding a shopping cart on the freeway, the videos make for entertaining viewing but also illustrate a problem facing developers of self-driving cars: how can you program a computer to make sense of all this?On Tuesday, chip maker Nvidia introduced a $10,000 computer that it says will allow cars to learn the right and wrong reactions to different situations, essentially figuring out what to do from experience rather than a rigid set of pre-defined situations.“Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior,” said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a presentation at the company’s GTC 2015 conference in San Jose.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After releasing a fitness smartband, China’s Xiaomi is helping to bring the technology to smart shoes.Chinese athletic footwear maker Li-Ning is tapping into Xiaomi’s ecosystem by using the smartphone company’s mobile exercise app on two of its running shoe products. Li-Ning is also working with Huami Technology, a Xiaomi-invested company that designed its fitness smartband, to develop the shoes.Unveiled back in July, the “Mi Band” can synch with Android phones, and tracks exercise stats, such as steps taken, calories burnt, and hours slept. But perhaps its major draw is its cheap price, at about US$13.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel wants wearable device technology to be inconspicuous, so it’s making its Curie wearable computer available through a button-sized board or as part of a chip package.
The Curie, slated to ship in the second half of the year, was first shown at CES in the form of a button-sized computer on Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s suit. The almost invisible Curie had technology that could read heart rates, and transfer the data wirelessly using Bluetooth. Blending technology discreetly into wearables is Intel’s goal with Curie, which will go into a wide range of tiny coin battery devices that can run for days and months without a recharge.
The wearable computer is for non-technical customers, such as companies outside of the IT industry, that want to plug and play technology into devices, clothes and accessories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This past weekend, at the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, BlackBerry announced its next tablet computer ... sort of. The Secusmart SecuTABLET is a customized version of Samsung's popular Galaxy Tab S 10.5 Wi-Fi + LTE tablet, with secure software from Secusmart and IBM. BlackBerry acquired Secusmart, a company that makes software and services for secure communications, last July.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Networking hardware and spontaneous applause don’t often go together, but Facebook’s Omar Baldonado set off a round of cheering this week when he told engineers there’s finally an open-source hardware design that they can use to build switches.It was a goal the Open Compute Project had been working toward since mid-2013, and though the breakthrough happened late last year, Baldonado’s speech at the organization’s summit in San Jose, California, was a occasion for line-rate, no-packets-barred celebration.OCP had done the same thing for networking that it did for computing: Make hardware designs openly available, so vendors can build lots of different boxes easily and cheaply, and promote open software development to give IT teams a choice of what to deploy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, made his first visit to the Cebit trade show 14 years ago, pitching Chinese products to Westerners from a small booth that attracted few visitors.Eight years ago, he returned, that time hoping to interest European companies in an online marketplace. That didn’t work out, because people saw the Internet and trade fairs as competitors.Now, though, Ma has it made. China’s tech industry, of which his company is one of the leaders, is a guest of honor at this year’s show, and Ma was the industry star of Sunday night’s Cebit opening ceremony, where he told the story of his previous visits.Feted during the opening ceremony, Ma would have been jeered on Monday morning had he been among the first through the gates. Two groups of protestors greeted visitors, one from Amnesty International, the other from Germany’s Society for Threatened Peoples. Both were unhappy about how the Chinese government orders companies to censor the Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Surface Pro 4Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 has become a surprise hit, bringing in more than $900 million in revenue, according to industry analysts, and generating such enthusiasm that fans are looking forward to the next version. The Surface Pro 3 was designed to present Windows 8.1 at its best, so it’s expected that its successor will serve as a showcase for Windows 10, which could come out as early as this summer. Perhaps a “Surface Pro 4” will debut at the same time or soon after Windows 10 launches. Here’s what we’d like to see in the Surface Pro 4.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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. Allworx ConnectPricing: Connect 320: $1,230; Connect 324: $1,355; Connect 530: $1,665; Connect 536: $1,875; Connect 731: $3,250To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Internet speeds of 50Mbps are nothing but a pipe dream for most inhabitants of Britain, while even 5Mbps would be a welcome boost for many living in remote areas.Yet by 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants all Germans, even those in rural communities, to have access to 50Mbps broadband connections, she said at the opening ceremony of the Cebit trade show on Sunday.This ambitious goal, if attained, could revolutionize many aspects of farming and forestry, allowing a transition from practices based on intuition and tradition to those based on big data and analytics.And German businesses, including century-old agricultural machinery maker Claas, enterprise software specialist SAP, and a new generation of mobile app developers, are ready to take advantage of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT spending is forecast to rise faster than previously expected in Germany, a bellwether for European industry, while IT sector jobs there will total almost one million by year-end. However, forthcoming legislation could have a chilling effect, industry association Bitkom warned.The news will put a smile on the faces of exhibitors and visitors at the giant Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, which opens Monday.Last year, 26,000 new jobs were created in the German IT industry, more than the 10,000 expected, Bitkom said. It expects 21,000 more will find employment in the industry by year end, taking the total to 990,000.The faster-than-expected rise in employment last year has prompted the association to raise its forecast for German IT spending on IT, telecommunications and consumer electronics this year to €155.5 billion (US$163 billion), up 1.5 percent year on year compared to an earlier growth forecast of 0.6 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook has acquired The Find, a nine-year-old company with a search engine that indexes products across thousands of e-commerce sites.The deal, the value of which was not disclosed, was announced in a post on The Find’s website.“Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you,” the company said.That probably means the ads Facebook users see will be more relevant to products they’ve been browsing and buying online, perhaps highlighting local retailers. One of The Find’s features is that it attempts to mix online and local stores and says its results are based on “your social profile.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The new MacBook is supposed to usher in a wire-free future for laptops, but Apple left out technologies that could have saved road warriors a few ungainly wires.“The only intelligent vision for the future of the notebook is one without wires, where you don’t have to plug up cables to connect to things,” Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said as he introduced the MacBook on Monday.But while he crowed about the IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 built into the laptop, Schiller never mentioned that Apple passed on emerging technologies to make a USB connection over the air or wirelessly link peripherals at 7Gbps (bits per second).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel will start offering custom chips based on the Xeon D starting in the second half of this year, making it easier to tailor servers to process specific workloads.Intel this week announced Xeon D chips for servers, storage and networking, but the four- and eight-core chips have a fixed set of components and features. The built-to-order chips later this year will be tailored to customer specifications, and to needs in storage, networking and web serving.For example, Intel will be able to customize chips to include components such as FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips used for specific tasks. For example, Microsoft uses FPGAs in servers to boost the accuracy of search results in Bing. Bringing FPGAs inside Xeon D could make the chip more versatile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here