News and comment on what's happening in the technology industry, and the direction it's heading.
Jack Schofield spent the 1970s editing photography magazines before becoming editor of an early UK computer magazine, Practical Computing. In 1983, he started writing a weekly computer column for the Guardian, and joined the staff to launch the newspaper's weekly computer supplement in 1985. This section launched the Guardian’s first website and, in 2001, its first real blog. When the printed section was dropped after 25 years and a couple of reincarnations, he felt it was a time for a change....
Nokia-watcher Eldar Murtazin reckons that Nokia is talking to Microsoft about using Windows Phone 7. His post in the Russian-language Mobile Review says, roughly (ie via Google Translate):In the last month behind closed doors is a discussion of expanded cooperation Nokia and Microsoft (two-way discussion, initiated by the new leadership of Nokia).
QuestVisual has just released Word Lens, a standalone £2.99/$4.
As we approach the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, America's Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has released the results of a poll of its members on what they expect consumers to buy next year. Tablet computers will apparently be the hot product -- and 46% is a higher rating than I'd have expected -- followed by "streaming content boxes" (20%) and mobile phones (11%).
It looks as though a dozen or so American businesses will be giving Google's new attempt at the network computer a serious trial. Taiwan-based DigiTimes reports that Inventec has "already shipped about 60,000 Chrome OS-based netbooks to Google" for the pilot programme announced yesterday (see Google: Chrome OS netbooks coming in mid 2011).
Prepare to dump your powerful Windows notebook or Apple MacBook in the middle of next year. Today, Google announced that PC manufacturers led by Acer and Samsung will start selling diskless Intel Atom-powered netbooks that will have web apps as their native apps.
Many companies are compiling personal data and selling it for marketing purposes, and this trend is likely to increase as people start mining the data that's publicly available via social networking sites. That was the topic of yesterday's post, Profiling means Facebook posts could cost you money.
Today I had a call from LBC's James Max programme following up a Sunday Times article that is, amusingly, behind its paywall. However, you can now get the story from a Daily Mail piece with a five-deck headline: Could your Facebook profile lead to higher insurance premium?
It's never fun writing obituaries, for obvious reasons, but it's also rewarding in that you can do your best to make sure someone gets the credit they deserve. Not that that was really a problem with Sir Maurice Wilkes, who died on Monday at the age of 97.
When I did a round-up of Dell's new consumer products, the Vostro V130 laptop was missing because it was a business laptop and I was under a non-disclosure agreement, which lifted today. I'm not sure why secrecy was a factor since the V130 is basically an upgraded version of the V13 launched a year ago.
Gartner has reduced its estimate for this year's PC sales to 352.4 million units, which represents 14.