research

Me ditching Motorola phone is the least of the company's worries

My first cell phone was made by Motorola. It will probably be my last.

The dilemma Motorola faces is that my experience is multiplied over and over, to the point where (rightly or not) millions of people just don't believe the company's still on the hip edge of technology. That may not reflect the entire story--I'm sure Motorola's got cool stuff in the labs--but perceptions matter even when they're not always true. Motorola has a history of having a hit phone and then going through a terrible drought. And right now, it's suffering through … Read more

Mozilla celebrates 10th anniversary

Ten years ago Monday, Mozilla was launched and its source code was first made available to the public.

Out of Mozilla came such projects as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Bugzilla (close to the heart of many a CNET News.com editor, er, or maybe just a few).

Mozilla is summed up this way in a post by Mitchell Baker, "chief lizard wrangler":

At its inception, Mozilla was:

An open source codebase for the software we call the browser

A group of people to build and lead an open source development effort--the Mozilla Organization (also known as "… Read more

Intel: Small devices with big screens

Intel is working on technology that would allow handheld Internet devices to wirelessly use big screens.

All technology is a problem looking for a solution (or the converse). Intel is working on technology that would mitigate one of the inherent problems with ultra-small devices: ultra-small screens. Vic Lortz, a research scientist and senior architect at Intel's Communications Technology Lab in Hillsboro, Ore., discussed a technology that would include a wireless display feature on big-screen digital TVs allowing Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, to wirelessly use the display on a big screen.

"Imagine if digital TVs included a wireless … Read more

NASA, Etsy partner on 'space craft' contest

This post was updated at 11:51 AM PT in order to correct a misstatement that was made in the announcement. The winning artwork from the Etsy-NASA contest, not the artists, will make a trip into space. Read the correction post here.

NEW YORK--What does a marketplace for handmade crafts have to do with a NASA project in virtual world Second Life?

A lot, apparently, according to a panel at Thursday's PSFK Conference that paired Robert Kalin, founder of the Brooklyn-based handmade goods site Etsy, and Andrew Hoppin, co-founder of NASA Co-Labs at the NASA Ames Research Center. The … Read more

Proof of six degrees of separation

In a research paper from June 2007, titled "Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network (PDF)," Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people using Microsoft Instant Messenger in June 2006. It turned out that the average path length, or degree of separation, among the anonymized users probed was 6.6.

Six degrees of separation posits that a person is a step away from people they know and two steps distant from people known by the people they know--thus the magic number six.

Following is … Read more

Need some data to support your cause? Hire an analyst

CIO.com raises an important issue about the integrity of research being done by industry analysts. Namely, if a sponsor pays for the research, do they get favorable treatment in that research?

But do you ever wonder about the research's integrity? Do you care enough to go to the next page of that document or website and see just who was so interested in this topic or trend that they shelled out big bucks to enable this research project to take place?

The answer is, "No." Most people don't check. They see the headline, look at the pretty charts, and forget about the fine print.

Analysts, to a person, will scream "No!" they're not biased by the money. But it's human nature to be influenced by a paycheck. Very few people/analysts have the clout of Walt Mossberg to be able to nakedly diss a product or company. … Read more

DARPA funds mechanical nanocomputer

DARPA-funded researchers are racing to develop an energy-efficient, heat-resistant mechanical nanocomputer that could be used in everything from cars and toys to dishwashers and machine guns.

Mechanical computers depend on millions of microscopic moving parts instead of solid-state transistors and other components to push the electrons to perform calculations. Gates, pillars, levers, and pistons create the binary switches, which compute the ones and zeroes that drive modern computers, explains the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Because they are more rugged and can perform at much higher temperatures than conventional silicon chips, scientists … Read more

Music download service for BlackBerry

BlackBerry owners may be feeling like they have nothing to brag about now that the iPhone has added connectivity to Exchange e-mail systems--the BlackBerry's bread-and-butter feature.

Not to worry. By April, Blackberry owners will have something the iPhone still lacks--the ability to download songs over the air from any location with cellular access. Canadian company Puretracks, which has licensed more than two million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies, announced plans to launch a mobile store for the BlackBerry family of devices in April.

The files will be in the AAC format used by … Read more

Workshop exposes deficiencies of electronic encryption

On Monday, Cryptography Research Inc. (CRI) opened a three-day workshop in San Francisco on the security of embedded system cryptography. The workshop is intended for developers and architects of secure embedded systems. Participants will be given smart cards and challenged to crack passwords using various demonstrated techniques.

"These are not theoretical attacks," Benjamin Jun, vice president of technology at CRI, noting that his company published the first white paper on monitoring attacks during the 1990s.

The workshop's primary focus will be on attacks to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), a cryptographic algorithm that is now used to protect … Read more

Quick reaction by companies to ricin and other health scares

What happens in Vegas could be contagious; but don't worry, despite the recent ricin scare on the Strip, your chances of dying from exotic poison or a bio-engineered infection are pretty slim - even at the buffet.

Still, companies are betting their R&D budgets that the government will ante up to protect you from the toxin de jour. Their odds are good. Universal Detection Technology received a rush of orders for its ricin detection kit after a man was found in critical condition in a Las Vegas motel room with a case of suspected ricin poisoning.

"… Read more