bit

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- The first call from a cell phone was made 40 years ago today.

- The Verge interviews Marty Cooper, father of the cell phone.

- Recalling 1993: Step back 20 years in NYC's past.

- Catching up with the TV show release group responsible for recording, distributing torrents.… Read more

"Game of Thrones," the wildly popular fantasy drama on HBO, has set an all-time record via BitTorrent, according to data collected by Torrent Freak.

The site, which tracks the world of BitTorrent and piracy, was tracking uploads and downloads of the first episode of the latest season of "Game of Thrones." It found that just a few hours after the first torrent was shared on the site, 163,088 people were sharing just one torrent. The so-called "swarm" of people sharing the torrent outpaced the previous titleholder, "Heroes," which had 144,663 … Read more

The publisher of BitByBit for iOS touts it as the "original brain training video," which had us intrigued. But after we spent some time with it, it just left us scratching our heads. All we can say about it is that it's a video-creation tool that takes still images and morphs them into a slowly-moving video.

BitByBit for iOS opens with the main menu, which includes three nondescript buttons. Not sure where to go, we tapped the button that looked like it would contain settings and possibly a help feature. From there, we could select a language … Read more

HANNOVER, Germany--Some vehicles don't fit easily into one category or another.

Organic Transit's Elf -- a battery-boosted, solar-powered, covered tricycle -- is definitely one such device.

The North Carolina startup has begun selling the vehicles through Kickstarter and now directly on its Web site. It's now built 12, and it's showing off the $4,000 machines at the CeBit trade show here.

"This is targeting commuters," said Alix Bowman, director of strategy for the 15-person company. One possibility: People can go to work on battery power so they don't arrive sweaty, then can … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--For those who want to take their music with them, a more convenient option than lugging loudspeakers is now available: fist-sized, battery-powered devices called vibration speakers.

These chunky widgets transform a table, floor, car roof, or even window into a large speaker. One one end is a tweeter for playing higher-frequency pitches, and on the other a driver that moves the surface to which it's attached, converting it into a giant woofer.

The devices were thumping loudly on the CeBIT tech show floor here as manufacturers tried to drum up customers, distributors, retailers, and business partners. … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--Enough with the cutesy little quadcopter drones.

Instead of pint-sized four-rotor aircraft good enough to experiment with swarm dynamics or to carry small cameras, German startup E-volo is building an 18-rotor model that can carry a human passenger. It's the latest attempt to realize the dream of the flying car.

The Karlsruhe-based company plans to begin selling its VC200 in 2015, said Jeromin Schwenk, a student with the Karlsruhe University of Applied Science who's one of about 60 people working on the project.

"It's going to be the personal aircraft for everyone," Schwenk said, … Read more

Quicker than you can turn a page, e-books have gone from a novelty to a publishing mainstay and will soon be the dominant format (perhaps by the time you're reading this). While many book-lovers use handheld e-book devices such as Amazon's Kindle, others read e-books on their tablets or even their smartphones. All you need is a good e-book reader. We tried the 64-bit release of Calibre, the free, open-source reader and library manager. It's a good e-book reader.

Calibre's welcome wizard let us choose from a long list of interface languages. It also prompted us … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--Intel today debuted a technology called display as a service (DAAS) that it hopes will transform how people use their gadgets.

The technology breaks the hard link between a video source and a screen the way virtualization software breaks the hard link between an operating system and a processor. With DAAS, people can view what's on their tablet on a big-screen TV, mirror the same imagery on multiple displays, or link up multiple displays to create a single, bigger display.

Another possibility, which Intel Labs' Divya Kolar described on blog post, is to combine multiple devices' video onto … Read more

HANOVER, Germany -- IBM is trying to advance supercomputing technology in processing, optical communications, and memory in conjunction with an international project to peer at the Big Bang's radio remnants.

The radio telescope, called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), will be built from 2016 to 2024 in southern Africa and Australia. Before that, though, IBM is working to develop the necessary computing technology through a five-year partnership with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron). At the CeBIT show here, the two groups are showing off some of the fruits of the cooperation, called Dome.

The idea is to … Read more