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Search Results for: "DATA"

10 Major Newspapers that Might Fold Up or Go Online Soon

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Imagine this, Amazon Kindle Store pushing new issues of your daily newspapers right into your Kindle 2 reader. In the commuter train most of the passengers no longer holding the latest issue of their broadsheets but are reading the latest news either on their iPhone, Kindle 2 or even some on their netbooks. Such could be the near future of newspapers and newspaper reading. With the growing popularity of electronic and online copies of newspapers, it seems inevitable that printed newspapers are bound for extinction. Apparently the 24/7 Wall St. also believes so. It even predicted 10 major newspapers which are either bound to stop publishing on print or to go electronic. [Read more…] about 10 Major Newspapers that Might Fold Up or Go Online Soon

Microsoft Spins Social Web Around Hotmail, Messenger and Other Live Services

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In one of the most significant social moves from the Redmond giant, Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and other Live services will include features that make it possible for users to maintain and share notifications across their network of online contacts. What is more interesting is that the services will support notifications from third party web applications too ( e.g. Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, iLike, Yelp, WordPress Blogs among others).

An excerpt from SearchEngineJournal:

The new Microsoft Live Service portal would bring together Windows Live Messenger which is by far one of Microsoft’s most popular web service and infused them with both new and refurbished old online services such as an upgraded Hotmail, Windows Live Group, photo gallery, toolbar, calendar and many more.

All companies with major web properties have been announcing social features to better service and retain their users. Google had announced its single profile for all services which is a step towards greater integration across its umbrella of services. Yahoo had announced its Y!OS initiative to make social data accessible across services.

But real integration means you can have access to your networks from any service. This is where the absence integration with FaceBook and MySpace for the Microsoft initiative matters. But it is hoped that those nitty gritties will be resolved in due course.

Broadband Over Power Line

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The recent news around opening up of White Space spectrum was significant because it allowed introduction of devices that could provide broadband internet access over fairly large distances. These would bring the internet to rural and less accessible areas.

A similar technology that promises to increase access to internet is Broadband over power line. The appeal of broadband over power lines is that rural areas are not commercially attractive areas for companies to create dedicated internet infrastructure. But power companies already have established stretches of power lines. At its core Broadband over Power lines is about sending data over the power lines on a frequency that does not interfere with the frequency of electric current. A modem plugged into the socket at the receiver end decodes the signal and routes the packets to computers.

An excerpt from News.com:

In recent years, new modulation techniques supported by other technological advances have helped BPL evolve. Most services today are capable of delivering between 512Kbps and 3Mbps of throughput, which is comparable to most DSL offerings.

In rural areas in particular, BPL technology could finally bring high-speed Internet access to people who otherwise couldn’t get it. Traditional phone and cable companies often find it too expensive to deploy new infrastructure to provide service to the far reaches of rural America.

The impediments in adoption of Broadband over power lines has been the limited speed as compared to cable or DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and interference with other radio frequencies. Recently IBM bagged a $9 million worth project from International Broadband Electric Communications Inc to install equipment that could potentially provide internet access to 340,000 homes in Alabama, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Latest developments in this field also include technology to detect presence of other signals in a frequency before transmission. Many projects in past years have failed to provide complete implementation of this, but that is no reason to lose hope in a technology that could potentially provide access to a wide majority excluded from Internet as we know it.

VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Move

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We had mentioned mobile virtualization few months back. Now, VMware’s purchase of mobile virtualization company Trango Virtual Processors, based in Grenoble, France seems a definite move into a market that is very promising. The first mobile phones with this technology are expected to be available in 2010. The importance lies in the latest developments in mobile field. Google’s Android initiative, Nokia making the Symbian OS open source are some compelling reasons for companies to try to move from proprietary mobile software to open source ones. And virtualization attempts to address the migration issue.

This is best summarized in VMware’s mobile initiative:

As these capabilities increase, a mobile phone user’s persona—applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank info, credit card information, PIM all put together—is becoming much richer and more valuable than ever before. You want your persona to be portable so that it can transfer seamlessly when you upgrade to a new phone.

Supported OSs include Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.

Virtualization has many advantages on the security front. With mobile devices, users are more isolated from what is happening behind the scene. Unlike PCs where you could have applications running that indicate more memory use or slow down, the limitations bore more threat from malicious applications running in the background. Virtuazation provides tighter control over what resources applications access and hence better control over devices.

The advantages of mobile virtualization are for businesses as well. Companies could develop their mobile applications on software stack that address a virtualized hardware and deploy it across multiple devices. It also allows easy porting of applications and data across devices.

Google Crawlers Now Index Text from Images

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Google announced that its web crawlers are now capable of indexing textual data from images. Google’s interest in Optical Character Recognition had been evident in the past few years. Now, they are one more step closer to making all the information in the world searchable.

Google Blog aptly summarizes the new technology:

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

Early this year Google had made public details on a patent it had filed to read text from images and video. This also implied that text recognized from Google Map View and Street View could also eventually shop up on search results. The applications of this technology are immense. But the next progression is what will make all the difference.

Already technologies exist that index speech spoken in videos. With addition of capability to index the text in videos as well, product oriented search will become all more relevant. This might be great news for the business model driving search engines but raises several privacy issues as well.