Technology Effect

  A new survey shows U.S. consumers are shockingly lax about basic security on their mobile phones. Most of us have no qualms about making purchases via mobile, and the vast majority of us use the same phone for business and personal use — two common vulnerabilities in web security. Yet in spite of these yellow flags, few of us use phone-locking passwords and duplicate the same passwords for mobile apps that we use on our desktops. The survey [PDF] in question comes from security firm AVG and research and consulting firm The Ponemon Institute . One key finding we mentioned was the crossover between business and personal use of the same device. Around 84% of consumers use the same smartphone for both professional and personal tasks. In those cases, if the user’s phone ever becomes lost or compromised, the amount of risk is automatically doubled, since both kinds of private and confidential data could be accessed. When it comes to the kind of data that puts consumers ...

Ecommerce is a booming business in the U.S. and across the globe — and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. This infographic, from online coupon aggregator My Coupon Codes, shows the online buying market, illustrating what, where and just how much people are buying online. The data is based on a 2010 Nielsen survey of more than 27,000 Internet users from North America, South America, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. The study revealed that online reviews are playing an increasingly important role in purchasing decisions; 57% of online respondents consider reviews prior to purchase, particularly for cars, software and consumer electronics; and 40% of participants said they would not even buy electronics without consulting online reviews beforehand. [via My Coupon Codes ]

  Ann Smarty is a search marketer and full-time web entrepreneur. Ann blogs on search and social media tools. Her newest project, My Blog Guest , is a free platform for guest bloggers and blog owners. Follow Ann on Twitter at @seosmarty . Social media search — the ability to tap into thousands of real-time updates — has long been a hot topic. It opens up endless opportunities for market and competitor research, content inspiration and, obviously, network building. In this post, we’ll aim to tackle some more advanced social search functionality so that you can make the most out of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter Background information Twitter search can be accessed from your Twitter home page, as well as from a separate subdomain. Twitter search focuses on real-time results; however, Twitter has introduced important algorithm changes that push particularly hot and “promoted” tweets above the real-time results. Advanced search: The official Twitter search is a powe...

  In the age of micropublishing, how many people are actually reading what you tweet or share on Facebook? And more importantly, how does the click-per-share ratio compare between the two very different social platforms that are utilized by millions of users every day for consuming and sharing content? These are questions that keep social media strategists awake at night (or maybe just me). So at Mashable , we decided to take a look at our own data and see how user behavior compares between Facebook and Twitter, the two social media sites that generate the most referral traffic to Mashable.com. After pulling three months worth of our social data and calculating the click-per-share (CPS), it appears that users on Twitter are more likely to share an article rather than read it, whereas users on Facebook click on more articles than they share. According to our social data, Twitter received roughly 0.38 clicks per tweet, whereas Facebook received 3.31 clicks per engagem...

  The hardware business has had to pay a price for India's success in the field of software exports India may be a world leader in the software export business but it is generally accepted that it lags far behind in the hardware business. This may appear puzzling at first glance, but it is actually quite obvious why this is so. In some sense, the hardware business has had to pay a price for India's success in the field of software exports. Barriers to entry The field of semiconductors and electronics appears to be intensely competitive it actually has very high barriers to entry. For one, the costs are very high, inhibiting the easy entry of firms into the business. Fabricating a chip is not like making potato chips; there are significantly large economies of scale involved, which is what makes the business highly capital intensive. Related to this is the fact that a chip designer cannot act like a commodity supplier, in that he/she is typically making thi...

BERLIN, GERMANY: Many web surfers don't know it, but the introduction of new internet address standards might change the way they get online. Since the supply of usable addresses governed by the IPv4 standard (internet protocol, version 4) has been exhausted, IPv6 has now been introduced. This will allow a previously impossible variety of addresses, says Christoph Meinel, a professor at Germany's Hasso Plattner Institute. But what does this change mean for everyday surfers? Here's an overview. Why are IP addresses necessary? In order for internet-capable devices to share information, they need a unique machine-readable address. These addresses are assigned based on a standard of internet protocols. But, since humans have a hard time remembering these strings of numbers, websites are also labelled with domain names, like www.google.com. When these addresses are typed into browsers, special servers translate them into IP addresses for the benefit of the...

 Bangalore: Intel demonstrated Operating System Meego on a tablet device at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. Meego was formed as a result of merger of the Nokia and Intel's Linux-based platforms Maemo and Moblin. However, Stephen Elop, CEO, Nokia has earlier announced that they have shifted their primary focus from MeeGo to Microsoft's Windows Phone platform.The OS, according to Darren Wilson, MeeGo Design Manager, makes it easier for users to go to applications. Here, the user has to touch a video or a picture for few seconds and the menu appears instantly, providing the users with various options. This is different from other OS where the users have to go to applications to find the options they are looking for. By putting information on the users' homepage, Meego will make information easily accessible. Intel is expected to bring the tablet running on Meego by this year which will be followed by several smartphones. The exact date of the launch ...

Beijing: China has blocked the searches on microblogs so as to restrict any searches on the 'Jasmine Revolution' that was to be staged in Chinese city. It started with blocking any online searches for the word 'Jasmine'. However, later Sina suspended searches for all content on the microblogs. It allowed queries only on screen names, events and other criteria. Following this, another microblog operated by Tencent also blocked searches relating to the word 'Jasmine' and 'Jasmine Revolution'. On searching for the word Jasmine Revolution online, users were asked to participate in demonstration in 13 cities, across China which included the capital Beijing. The detail of the group or the person who has started this is still unknown. However, recent protests in Egypt and Tunisia seem to have inspired the call. According to sources, Boxun.com, a Chinese site was the first to publish the protest call. The blocking extended to other social network...

Bangalore: Apple with their innovative and diplomatic approach has come ahead to set aside glass capacitive touch panel to acquire 60 percent of the world's population through prepaying by 2011. This in turn will churn other companies fighting for the remaining 40 percent. Business of these companies will grow similar to the tactics followed by Apple. Gigaom explains, " Prepaying for a bulk, long-term contract allows Apple to control pricing, causing scarcity in the market, which raises the prices of remaining component stock. Apple's pre-bought parts then give it a price advantage when it comes to production costs, and one that could grow as the contract progresses. It's something Apple's been known to do in the past, specifically with NAND flash memory in 2005." Speaking about the business strata of Apple, it has suppliers Wintek and TPK, and is making a huge sum of $3.9 billion for long-term contracts, enough money to cover 136 million iPhone...

   Governments in many parts of the world have been aggressively adopting a new generation of controls aimed at filtering and controlling information flow on the Internet, citing concerns such as cyber security, crime and terrorism, according to the OpenNet Initiative. The OpenNet Initiative, which says it “investigates and analyses Internet filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion,” in its updated study released last year titled, “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace,” said that it was fast becoming the global norm to control information flow on the Internet. The OpenNet is a collaborative partnership between the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the Ottawa-based SecDev Group. Asked whether the trend was likely to become more pronounced, given the recent developments in the Mi...

 THE US army is planning to field "rubber bullets" for machine guns. Military officials claim the ammunition will allow them to more effectively quell violent protests without loss of life, but human rights campaigners are alarmed by the new weapon. The final design for the XM1044 round has not been selected, according to an order placed on the Federal Business Opportunities website last month, but the army's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has been working on a ring aerofoil projectile for some years. The round is a hollow plastic cylinder 40 millimetres across, looking something like a short toilet-paper roll. In flight its shape generates lift, giving it a longer range. The army's existing crowd-control rounds are single shots fired from handheld grenade launchers with a range of about 50 metres - the XM1044 would double this range. It would be supplied in belts for the Mk19 grenade launcher, a truck-mounted weapon that can fire almost si...

 Bangalore: HTC and Qualcomm announced a new partnership on multi-core processors at the Mobile World Congress (MWC). With this alliance, they will bring multi-core processors to HTC forthcoming line of devices. According to Dr Paul Jacobs, Chairman and CEO of Qualcomm, HTC and Qualcomm are working together so as to bring next-gen platform for HTC's smartphones and tablets. As of now, HTC's new smartphones and its tablet-Flyer have single-core chips. With this deal, it is likely that HTC and Qualcomm will come up with new range of devices featuring dual-core or quad-core processor. Qualcomm has already announced that its Snapdragon SOCs (System on Chips) will come up with different chips sets-singe, dual and quad. These new chip sets will be based on a 28nm scale. It is likely to increase the speed up to 2.5GHz per core and improves the energy efficiency by 75 percent. There are also expectations that the performance will be 12 times better.

The upgrade, which human-rights groups have hailed as a step forward for the LGBT community, will be available to users in U.S., Canada, France, U.K. and Australia. Facebook has added two relationship statuses - ‘civil union’ and ‘in a domestic partnership’ - to help homosexual couples in defining their romantic arrangements on the social networking site. These new options will be available to users in U.S., Canada, France, U.K. and Australia. The Facebook, which has 600 million users worldwide, made the change after consulting with various rights groups, according to the NY Daily News. These two options augment the site’s existing relationship statuses, which include single, in a relationship, in an open relationship, engaged, married, divorced, widowed, and separated. Meanwhile, Human-rights groups have hailed this as significant step forward for the greater equality of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community and of same sex unions. “I th...

Bangalore: NVIDIA officially announced first quad-core mobile processor, Kal-EI. Also termed as Tegra 3, the chip has two extra processor cores along with 12-core graphic engine. This will help in getting better resolution in mobiles. The chip will support a better display resolution. The media hardware is a 32-bit LPDDR2 controller. The 12-core GPU will not be a unified shader architecture design unlike Tegra 2. If we look at the pure processing, its overall performance is expected to be double of Tegra 2's performance. For visuals, it will be faster by three times. According to sources, NVIDIA claimed it is capable of outperforming 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 in some of the areas and be at par with notebook processors. The chip is expected to be good when it comes to mobile gaming. Game lovers are up for a treat if rumors of Sony using the chip for its upcoming media/gaming tablet are true. The production of the chips is likely to begin by August. Though, NVIDA has anno...