Technology

Motorola (MOT) on Tuesday showed off its WiMax chipset, which the handset maker plans to include in mobile phones next year.

The chipset, shown at WiMax World in Chicago, is designed to support WiMax wireless wide-area networks, which are under construction in dozens of metropolitan areas across the nation. WiMax is seen as an alternative to Wi-Fi in delivering data and voice services to mobile devices, such as smart phones and handheld computers. WiMax's biggest advantage is a bigger, faster pipe for moving data, and its ability to carry over far greater distances.

Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. has announced the launch of its Large File Download Optimization technology, an integral feature of the Akamai Electronic Software Delivery and Media Delivery solutions that supports the optimisation and delivery of increasingly large files, such as DVD software and high-definition video content.

IBM on Thursday announced two major breakthroughs in nanotechnology that could increase computers' data storage capacity by a factor of 1,000 and decrease the size of computer chips to no larger than a speck of dust.

"On your iPod, if this were turned into a product, it could store about 1,000 times more information," said IBM scientist Cyrus Hirjibehedin. IBM estimates that such a device could store the entire contents of YouTube, about 1,000 trillion bits of data.

GRIFFITH University researchers want to partner with businesses, particularly in the finance sector, to develop commercial real-time, high-speed facial recognition technology for security applications. The team from the Griffith Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems computer vision and image processing lab has published work on a system that takes a front-and-side view of a face shot and fills in the gaps to render what the person would look like from any angle.

Used for shopping, communication, business, and anything else we can imagine, the internet is an indispensable tool for over a billion people worldwide. It is difficult for many to imagine it working differently, but that is exactly what researchers in Europe, the US, and Japan hope to accomplish.

"The internet is reaching its limit," says Yoshihrio Onishi, assistant director at the Japanese Communications Ministry. Though the US and Europe have been working on making a new superhighway a reality for some time, Japan has just recently thrown its hat into the ring.

Just a few weeks after it announced plans to buy data management specialist Princeton Softech Inc., IBM has introduced a service to mask sensitive customer data so it can safely be used for application testing and quality assurance purposes.

But even though the generation of test data is one of Princeton's core strengths, IBM said that the new service is instead based on its own WebSphere business intelligence technology, with the addition of consulting services from its Global Business Services group.

The Internet has made finding a particular piece of music a straightforward process; simply knowing the title, performer, or composer can typically get you to the work you're looking for. But for most people, a key aspect of music appreciation lies in the discovery of the new: a previously unknown work or artist that is both appealing and fresh. Help for those looking for new music may be on the way in the form of a search tool funded by the National Science Foundation that is claimed to identify aesthetic similarities between pieces of music.

In a recent Black Hat demonstration, RFID passport readers were reportedly "crashed" when a manipulated JPEG 2000 photo was included in an RFID-enabled passport. The corrupted image caused a "buffer overflow" fault in the readers by containing more data than was expected and halting the reading process. This has been hyped as a problem with RFID but the truth is that it was a reader programming oversight. The software should have rejected the data (and e-Passport) instead of allowing the buffer overflow to stop the reading program. What's the lesson here?

UK broadband comparison site Top 10 Broadband has released new analysis it claims shows a shift toward triple-play packages away from standalone broadband providers.