By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, San Francisco
By 2015 more than 12 billion devices will be capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content, says chip giant Intel.
It said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.
“TV is out of the box and off the wall,” Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, told BBC News.
“TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.”
Mr Rattner said: …

The internet giant seeks new ways to foster innovation
FEW companies are as creative as Google, which serves up innovations almost as fast as its popular search-engine serves up results. This week the firm unveiled a new version of its Chrome web browser and launched Fast Flip, which lets users scroll through the contents of an online newspaper in much the same way that they leaf through its pages in print. On September 30th the company will roll out another fledgling product, Google Wave, for a test involving some 100,000 people. …

How a Taiwanese firm became one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers
MOST technology firms fall into one of two brackets: those that sell individual components, such as Intel, a chip giant, and those that offer finished products, such as Apple of iPhone fame. MediaTek sits somewhere in between: it sells most of the innards of mobile phones in a single package, but not the phones themselves—a strategy that has made it one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers. On August 4th it said its second-quarter profits were 80% higher than a year …

ISLAMABAD: Despite the fact that dumping old computers in developing countries has been declared as violation of international law, Pakistan was being used as dumping ground for over 50,000 tons of e-waste that hurts local industry and also creates environmental and health hazards.
Despite being a signatory to the Basel Convention that restricted importing used/old computers, more than 500,000 used computers are finding ways into Pakistani computer market each year.
These concerns were voiced at a discussion ‘Cost effective or technology defective’ held here on Tuesday.
The speakers from both public and private …

Netbooks and the New Open Source Movement Converts
Saad Sarwar Muhammad
The Open Source Movement (OSM) has come a long way since the inception of the concept by computer geeks and programmers as an alternative to proprietary software where intellectual property rights are not impugned with the use and free distribution of the software. The virtual monopolization of system software by Microsoft led these revolutionaries to alter the market space through the introduction of Linux, an Open Source system software. The software also proved more reliable as compared to Microsoft Windows with …

Open-source software has won the argument. Now a new threat to openness looms
“FIRST they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi probably never said these words, despite claims to the contrary, but they perfectly describe the progress of open-source software over the past 15 years or so. Such software, the underlying recipe for which is created by volunteers and distributed free online, was initially dismissed as the plaything of nerdy hobbyists. Big software firms derided the idea that anyone would put …

Open-source software firms are flourishing, but are also becoming less distinctive
MANY technology firms are floundering amid the recession. But many of the ones that offer services tied to open-source software—free programs written by volunteers who collaborate online—are boasting double-digit growth. Sales at Red Hat, the world’s biggest independent open-source firm with annual revenues of $653m, grew by 18% year-on-year in the first quarter. More and more firms, particularly in Europe, seem prepared to embrace open source (see chart). “Budgets are tight and we think that is good for open source,” …

A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric.
The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry.
But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players.
Blu-ray discs, which are used to store high definition movies and games, can currently hold between 25GB and 50GB.
Micro-holographic discs can store more data than DVDs or Blu-ray because they store information on the disc in three dimensions, …

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
The computer company that has in the past taken on the grandmasters of chess is now turning its attention to the famed US trivia quiz show Jeopardy.
In a head-to-head challenge of man versus machine, IBM will pit a supercomputer named Watson against human contestants.
Watson is a new question-answering system based on natural language.
“The aim is to get Watson to think and interact in human terms,” IBM’s Dr David Ferrucci told BBC News.
“It will try to understand a user’s question and …

Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems is a surprise, but fits an industry trend
Illustration by David Simonds
“I AM very surprised. I have to think about it.” That was the initial reaction of Steve Ballmer, the boss of Microsoft, the world’s largest software firm. It was also the response of many in the computer industry to the news on April 20th that Oracle, another software giant, was paying $7.4 billion to buy Sun Microsystems, an embattled computer-maker and Oracle’s neighbour in Silicon Valley.
It was no secret that Sun, which never really recovered …