The folks at Facebook don't seem to be taking much downtime this summer. After announcing a revamped approach to user privacy control this week, the Facebook team is now preparing to launch a new and improved Facebook application for the iPhone.

All the changes come as Facebook makes big gains in the social media world. The site just recently overtook MySpace for the first time as America's most popular social network. Add onto that the company's upcoming Xbox integration and recent high-profile personalized URL addition, and things certainly seem to be going Facebook's way.

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Japanese television technology that will give viewers access to high-speed broadcasts over the internet could render conventional television obsolete and transform the media landscape within years, analysts have predicted.

The country's electronics and telecommunications industries are developing a technological standard for a new "internet television" set, which will let users browse websites and watch streaming programs at the touch of a remote control.

Japanese media reports say the new television, which is likely to run on the open source Linux operating system rather than Microsoft Windows to save boot-up time, could be on sale locally by next March.

The TV Portal Service Corp syndicate, comprising Sony, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba, is expected to announce the standard as early as next month. With the backing of telecommunications giant NTT, it will lobby the International Telecommunications Union to adopt it for global use.

In pronouncements that will trouble television proprietors around the world, commentators are already declaring that the new technology will break the oligopoly enjoyed by Japan's fiercely protective free-to-air networks by giving anyone the chance to broadcast to the national audience.

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It was a prosecutorial Hail Mary.That is how authorities are describing a move - less than two months before the first trial - to go fishing into the memory banks and call logs of 11 cellular phones seized more than two years ago in the torture slayings of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

"It's basically a double check, crossing our Is and dotting our Ts," said John Gill, special counsel to Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols. "We just wanted to be sure nothing was overlooked."

The News Sentinel revealed Tuesday that Knoxville Police Department Investigator Todd Childress on June 17 sought permission from General Sessions Judge Chuck Cerny to mine cell phones for information. The phones were seized from various locations in the days following the January 2007 fatal carjacking.

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Ever feel nostalgic for some old technology from your past? My very first computer was a Timex Sinclair that I upgraded to 16K of memory. I fondly remember pushing on that flat-keyed keyboard. It's kind of fun to think about past computers and devices; it's even more fun to read about them.

We've collected a majority of the PC Magazine articles from 1992 to 1999 and created a utility that enables you to search for some of the gems from that period. Take this one from Dvorak's Inside Track column from 1992:

"Microsoft Corp. has shipped MS-DOS 6.0 to beta testers. DOS 6.0 is not going to see any major code changes, say observers, but will include a slew of new utilities, such as built-in antivirus scanning, disk defragmenting, elaborate backup systems, and data compression! The makers of utility software are grousing that this will put them out of business. DOS 6.0 is scheduled to ship in early 1993. Bankruptcy filings will appear elsewhere shortly thereafter."

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Nokia Siemens Networks has announced an agreement to acquire key assets from Canada-based Nortel Networks Corp. to step up its leadership in Long Term Evolution (LTE) next-generation wireless technology.

Last June 19, the financially strapped Nortel announced a bid from Nokia Siemens Networks to purchase its CDMA and LTE assets for $650 million.The planned $650-million acquisition, which will bring together the highly complementary assets of the two companies in the field of mobile radio access, adds further key talent and resources to enhance Nokia Siemens Networks’ existing strength and momentum in LTE.

The acquisition of Nortel’s profitable CDMA business would significantly improve Nokia Siemens Networks’ presence in North America and make it a leading supplier of wireless infrastructure products in the region.

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Though its ramifications and impact will not be clear for some time, Google (News - Alert) Wave, now under development at Google, could reshape "publishing" as much as it aims to refashion communications and collaborations.These days, people use email, instant messaging, blos, wikis, tweets to communicate. But many of us also use those same tools for research and publishing.
 
In fact, one of the questions Google Wave developers asked themselves was "why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication: email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?"

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New Zealand companies can now get "up close and personal" with customers online through an innovative tool that can direct people around websites using a real person.

Live Ambassador is a live interactive tool which includes a real person who walks and talks visitors through a company’s website, directs them around it, making it easier to do business.The tool was developed by New Zealand IT company Genesis Interactive.

It says Live Ambassador helps companies take a more personal approach to their websites to draw in customers using high definition, broadcast quality video technology.

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At the InfoComm in Orlando/USA beyerdynamic will present two other microphones with Revoluto technology. The new, elegant design of the MPR 210 and MPR 211 is very compact. The microphones can be connected to a mixing console, amplifier or DSP matrix. The MPR 210 is a pure desktop microphone while the MPR 211 microphone unit provides a programmable microphone button and connections for an external logical control.
 
Microphones with the patented Revoluto technology from beyerdynamic include a number of microphone capsules which are arranged in a line array. The resulting corridor characteristic allows more freedom of movement compared to gooseneck microphones. While speaking the speaker can lean backwards, turn his head or even stand up. Due to the Revoluto technology the audio quality and intelligibility of speech always remain the same. 
Applications of the new Revoluto microphones include tele and video conferences, lecterns, podiums and press conferences.Go to www.beyerdynamic.com/revoluto and watch the video about miking and video conferences to find out how Revoluto sounds compared to gooseneck or acoustical boundary microphones.

By all accounts, Palm’s new Pre smartphone is elegant and powerful. On sale for just a few weeks, it has a crisp touch screen, a pull-out keyboard aimed at e-mail devotees and a new operating system that can manage multiple applications at the same time.But in a world crowded with iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones, success for the Pre — and possibly the survival of Palm itself — is going to take a lot more than a well-designed device.These days, it is all about the apps.Industry experts and programmers say that the company needs to cultivate a system of developers eager to write and publish small useful programs, or applications, for the Pre and its core software, WebOS. Palm also needs to provide an easy way for Pre users to download, pay for and install those apps, similar to Apple’s App Store.

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HP on Monday introduced the HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web, believed to be the world's first Web-connected printer with a touch screen. I had a chance to get an exclusive look at the new device, and I'm really impressed with HP's effort to reinvigorate the printer as the central hub in the digital home.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web is poised to become HP's flagship printer when it's released in September. It's got all the common features we now expect to find in an HP Photosmart All-in-One, including printer/fax/copier/scanner, USB 2.0, 802.11b/g/n wireless, Ethernet, Bluetooth connectivity, HP's paper feed technology that automatically senses the size of media needed to a complete a job, five individual ink cartridges, and the ability to print screenshots directly from a PlayStation 3.

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