One-third of 1,200 organizations (33%) plan to convert their application environments away from a traditional, client-server model to one based on virtualization and cloud computing over the next two years, according to a study commissioned by Microsoft and released today. The study sought to broadly determine global IT spending priorities.
The NPD group has done a study into customer satisfaction among netbook buyers, and they came to some surprisingly unsurprising results. As it turns out, people who expected a notebook when they bought a netbook were more likely to be disappointed than buyers who set out to buy a netbook from the get-go. No doodoo, Sherlock.
CUSTOMERS enrolled in National Australia Bank's new voice biometrics system for phone banking may be able to use the same system to authenticate their internet banking activities.
NAB is the first local institution to give customers an opportunity to enrol in a voiceprint recognition system, dispensing with the need to remember PINs and passwords or provide personal information when calling the bank.
A top secret British car unveiled in London today claims to be the world's first low cost, practical hydrogen powered vehicle.
A new type of fuel cell developed by Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies has resulted in a two-seater zero emissions hydrogen-electric city car with an expected fuel consumption equivalent to 360 miles per US gallon, six times better than today's best available hybrid electric vehicles. The company is now planning to build 10 production prototypes and test them in UK cities.
The Toshiba research team, Toshiba Research Europe Limited, Cambridge, UK, have broken the distance record - over 100km of optical fibre - for the only unhackable form of communications called quantum cryptography, proving the broad commercial potential of the technology.
Future development of the system will now be partially funded by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The focus of the DTI initiative, which also involves the University of Cambridge and Imperial College, London, will be to realise a quantum cryptography system that is secure from every type of hacking.
A RIFLE capable of firing explosive bullets that can detonate within a metre of a target could let soldiers fire on snipers hiding in trenches, behind walls or inside buildings.
Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft's new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology.
The battle between LTE and WiMAX is tilting heavily in LTE's favor, with spending on that 4G mobile-broadband technology projected to be nearly five times that of its Intel-championed competitor by 2014.
According to a recent report by the UK's mobile market-watcher, Juniper Research, worldwide revenues from LTE subscribers will exceed $70bn (£43.4bn) by 2014. By contrast, Juniper lowered its forecast of WiMAX revenues to $15bn (£9.3bn) in the same period, down from their 2008 prognosis of $20bn (£12.4bn) by 2013.
The Serial ATA (SATA) Revision 3.0 specification has been released by the Serial ATA International Organization (Sata-IO) and promises double the data speed across the board to 6Gbps.
The new standard will allow data transfers for up to 6GBps between devices on the motherboard, double the speed of SATA 2. The new standard is fully backwards compatible with previous versions of the standard so motherboard manufacturers can introduce it without backwards compatibility issues.
Scientists are reporting an advance toward remedying this situation with a new computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years. Their discovery is scheduled for publication in the June 10 issue of the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters, a monthly journal.
