Facebook is holding an invitation-only press event on Wednesday. The brief announcement -- that is, the prelude to the actual event -- has thrown the social media and blogosphere rumor mills into overdrive. What, the burning question is, will Facebook announce? Much of the speculation has centered around the phone that it is allegedly developing. If not a phone, this school of thought says, then a new, deeper level of integration with mobile devices. Whatever the announcement is, it had better be very significant, said Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting.
Toshiba on Monday announced what it claims are the world's first LCD TVs that render three-dimensional images without the need for glasses. The new Glasses-less 3D Regza GL1 series was unveiled at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies in Tokyo. They use technology similar to that employed in the Nintendo 3DS hand-held game console. The larger of the two uses the Cell processor, which is also used in the PlayStation 3, to process images. They will be released in Japan by the end of the year. However, viewers must sit within a specific zone in order to get the 3D effect.
3. I'm in a Google Apps State of Mind
When I graduated from high school in New York, the Internet didn’t exist. Teachers were preparing me and my peers for traditional service or manufacturing careers—jobs that didn’t require advanced technical knowledge. Today’s students are facing a completely different landscape; they’re expected to enter the workplace fully literate in technology, with strong communication and collaboration skills that will allow them to succeed in a connected and global environment.
New York state is making changes to prepare students for this future, implementing a host of initiatives designed to incorporate the development of 21st century skills into the state’s core learning objectives. As a product of the New York state public education system, I couldn’t be more excited to announce one of these endeavors—a new K-12 initiative that will bring powerful communication and collaboration tools to the more than 3.1 million students and hundreds of thousands of teachers throughout New York state.
Today, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), in partnership with the New York State Teacher Centers and associated Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), the New York State teacher unions and New York State professional organizations, will offer Google Apps access, training and support to 697 public school districts, as well as all non-public and charter schools, across New York. We’re excited that NYIT is committed to providing schools the deployment and professional development resources they need to make Google Apps for Education—including Gmail, Docs, Sites and Calendar—a powerful tool for teachers and students across the state.
New York follows Oregon, Iowa, Colorado and Maryland as the fifth and largest state to bring Google Apps access to K-12 classrooms and will join more than 8 million students and teachers that use Google Apps today.
I no longer live in New York, but all of my family is spread out across the great Empire state and I look forward to bringing Google Apps to their local school districts!
4. Here comes Google TV
It’s been almost five months since we introduced Google TV to the world at Google I/O, and today we’re happy to give you an update on our progress. For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Google TV is a new way to think about TV: it’s a platform that combines your current TV programming and the open web into a single, seamless entertainment experience.
One of our goals with Google TV is to finally open up the living room and enable new innovation from content creators, programmers, developers and advertisers. By bringing Google Chrome and access to the entire Internet, you can easily navigate to thousands of websites to watch your favorite web videos, play Flash games, view photos, read movie reviews or chat with friends—all on the big screen.
Since our announcement, we’ve been overwhelmed by interest from partners on how they can use the Google TV platform to personalize, monetize and distribute their content in new ways. Most of these partner sites already work with Google TV, but many are choosing to further enhance their premium web content for viewing on the television. Today, we’re excited to announce several of these content partners.
Turner Broadcasting has been hard at work optimizing some of their most popular websites for viewing on Google TV, including TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, available anytime through Google TV.
I no longer live in New York, but all of my family is spread out across the great Empire state and I look forward to bringing Google Apps to their local school districts!
4. Here comes Google TV
It’s been almost five months since we introduced Google TV to the world at Google I/O, and today we’re happy to give you an update on our progress. For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Google TV is a new way to think about TV: it’s a platform that combines your current TV programming and the open web into a single, seamless entertainment experience.
One of our goals with Google TV is to finally open up the living room and enable new innovation from content creators, programmers, developers and advertisers. By bringing Google Chrome and access to the entire Internet, you can easily navigate to thousands of websites to watch your favorite web videos, play Flash games, view photos, read movie reviews or chat with friends—all on the big screen.
Since our announcement, we’ve been overwhelmed by interest from partners on how they can use the Google TV platform to personalize, monetize and distribute their content in new ways. Most of these partner sites already work with Google TV, but many are choosing to further enhance their premium web content for viewing on the television. Today, we’re excited to announce several of these content partners.
Turner Broadcasting has been hard at work optimizing some of their most popular websites for viewing on Google TV, including TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, available anytime through Google TV.
NBC Universal has collaborated with Google TV to bring CNBC Real-Time, an application that allows you to track your favorite stocks and access news feeds while enjoying the best financial news from CNBC directly on the TV screen.
HBO will bring access to hundreds of hours of programming to Google TV with HBO GO. Authenticated subscribers will soon be able to access all of their favorite HBO content on-demand in an enhanced website for Google TV.
NBA has built NBA Game Time, an application that lets you follow game scores in real-time and catch up on the latest highlights from your favorite team in HD.In addition, we’ve partnered with some of the leading premium content providers to bring thousands of movie and TV titles, on-demand, directly to your television. Amazon Video On Demand offers access to over 75,000 titles for rental or purchase, and Netflix will offer the ability to instantly watch unlimited movies and TV shows, anytime, streaming directly to the TV.
We have also been working with some leading technology and media companies to optimize their content for Google TV, including news sites like The New York Times and USA Today; music sites like VEVO, Pandora andNapster; information networks like Twitter; and online networks like blip.tv. And with YouTube Leanback, we can offer the best experience for you to watch your favorite viral videos and personalized channels on the television.
You can get a sneak peek of some of these apps in the video below:
Today we also launched a new website that provides more information about these apps and all of the other great features of Google TV. And if you want to stay up to speed on the latest developments from the Google TV team,check out our new blog.
We’re really excited about the enthusiasm surrounding the platform and can’t wait for it to reach your living room. Devices powered by Google TV will launch this month, so look out for more information in the next few weeks from Sony on its Internet TV and Blu-Ray player, and Logitech on its companion box.
5. Distant Planet May Have the Right Stuff
Planet Gliese 581g, the so-called Goldilocks planet whose discovery was announced earlier this week, may help prove Earth is not the only habitable planet in the universe. One reason for that is because it was so readily discovered -- scientists found it after looking at only nine nearby stars. "Planets in the habitable zone seem to be amazingly common based on the fact that we found this one in such a short period of time," Gillian Wilson, an associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of California Riverside, told TechNewsWorld.
6. New WebP Image Format Could Send JPEG Packing
Google has introduced a new image format to help speed up the performance of websites. WebP (pronounced "weppy") reduces the file size of images by 40 percent, the company claims. Images make up 65 percent of the bytes transmitted per Web page, according to Google. WebP was designed to improve the compression offered by the widely used lossy JPEG format. The result is the lossy WebP. It comes at a time when Google has warned the Web developer community that it has started to factor loading speed as part of its criteria in ranking sites in search results.
6. New WebP Image Format Could Send JPEG Packing
Google has introduced a new image format to help speed up the performance of websites. WebP (pronounced "weppy") reduces the file size of images by 40 percent, the company claims. Images make up 65 percent of the bytes transmitted per Web page, according to Google. WebP was designed to improve the compression offered by the widely used lossy JPEG format. The result is the lossy WebP. It comes at a time when Google has warned the Web developer community that it has started to factor loading speed as part of its criteria in ranking sites in search results.
7. Portable Linux Apps: Not Always an Easy Schlep
One of the best productivity tools I had when I used Microsoft Windows was a collection of portable applications. I missed those tools when I migrated to Linux. Now several open source projects could make portable apps available to mainstream Linux users. Three websites are trying to create that functionality. But the efforts might need more work before they all perform well out of the box. I found that being able to get these portable apps to run is largely hit and miss. Sadly, my testing showed that it is mostly miss.
No comments:
Post a Comment