New network software from Ericsson is designed to make sure mobile users get the best possible connection when there is both a Wi-Fi and a cellular network available.

The software, which Ericsson introduced at the CTIA Wireless trade show on Tuesday, is an enhancement to its platform for mobile operators that use Wi-Fi to supplement their cellular networks. It continuously measures which network will work best for a given subscriber and automatically shifts that user's connection between the two, the company said.

According to Ericsson, this capability can prevent subscribers from being shifted from cellular to Wi-Fi and then kept on the Wi-Fi network even though it's slower than cellular in their current location.

Many carriers are deploying or partnering for Wi-Fi networks in order to offload data traffic from their cellular systems, embracing so-called heterogeneous networks. In addition to conserving cellular spectrum and capacity, this can give subscribers better connections when near the Wi-Fi networks, which most often are deployed in crowded areas.

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Yahoo again ranks as one of the world’s 100 most valuable brands.

The Internet company nabbed the 92nd spot in the annual list of global companies from multiple industries including technology, retail and service, released Tuesday by BrandZ, a brand equity database. The ranking gave Yahoo a “brand value” of $9.83 billion, which is based on the opinions of current and potential users as well as actual financial data.

Apple occupied the number-one position on the list, with a brand value of $185 billion. Google was number two, with a value of roughly $114 billion.

The BrandZ ranking, commissioned by the advertising and marketing services group WPP, incorporates interviews with more than 2 million consumers globally about thousands of brands along with financial performance analysis to compile the list. Yahoo last appeared on the list in 2009 at number 81.

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Even great game franchises fall prey to mergers, acquisitions, and the vagaries of the game business. Such was the fate of FreeSpace 2, a space simulator originally released in 1999 to great critical acclaim, as part of the Descent and FreeSpace franchise. Due to business circumstances, it was the last in the series—but it can still be played today for the price of $10. and its source code, released in 2002, has been adopted by an active community of coders and modders.

The original game remains commercially available to this day through GOG, a service specializing in old-time games. While the original FreeSpace 2 offered very impressive graphics for its time, it can't hope to match modern space-sim games in the visauls department.

Fortunately, it has a lot to offer in terms of gameplay and depth. Cockpit and HUD controls are intricate and well thought out, from subsystem targeting, through automatic speed matching, to smart indicators on your HUD showing a target's distance and bearing even when it's out of your field of view. FreeSpace 2 also makes good use of the keyboard, with an interface that expects you to memorize many keys.

If you enjoy FreeSpace 2's detailed gameplay and only wish for some updated graphics, you're in luck: Open-source, free mods dress FreeSpace 2 in updated graphics from franchises you probably already know, and include new storylines and game mechanics to boot. I tried Diaspora, a mod based on the Battlestar Galactica 2004 remake, and was impressed by its slick graphics. It was nice to find myself in the pilot's seat of a Viper, trying to prove myself as a nugget (and badly failing).

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VMware has launched its long-anticipated public infrastructure as a service (IaaS), touting its virtual networking capabilities as a differentiator from other established hybrid cloud offerings.

VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service will be based on the company’s vCloud architecture, allowing customers to shift their VMware encoded workloads between in-house and the VMware hosted service, a practice known as running a hybrid cloud.

Joab Jackson

“You can write an application and be safe in the knowledge it can be run anywhere,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, in a Web conference announcing the new service, adding that much of the complexity enterprises experience in deploying their workloads in the cloud comes from preparing their in-house applications to run in a new environment.

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Well, that didn’t take long. A mere five days after Brian Krzanich took the reins as the new CEO of Intel, he’s shaking things up at an organizational level.

Krzanich has reorganized key business groups and created a new “New Devices” division to focus on emerging trends, including “ultra-mobile” devices, reports AllThingsD. Mike Bell, who formerly co-ran Intel’s mobile unit—most notably in the push to bring x86 to Android—will take leadership of the new division.

“The group will be tasked with turning cool technology and business model innovations into products that shape and lead markets,” Intel said in a statement to AllThingsD.

Reuters first reported the changes after an anonymous source came forward with the information. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy confirmed to Reuters that Krzanich had sent out an internal email outlining the changes, but didn’t elaborate further on shake-up details.

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Plenty of applications help you show off your photos, and plenty help you show off your videos. But too few tools exist that allows you to show them off together. Enter Fantashow Pro, a $50-per-year application allows you to combine still photos with videos to create a custom video slideshow.

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Microsoft is making a big play for the living room with a new Xbox console that marries games with live TV, Internet browsing, music and Skype.

The Xbox One could considerably expand Microsoft's presence in consumer electronics but is expected to compete with Internet TV devices from companies such as Intel, interactive set-top boxes from cable TV companies, and Sony's PlayStation 4. There's also a possible set-top box from Apple.

It was unveiled during an event at Microsoft's Redmond campus. A launch date was not immediately announced.

"Xbox On," said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft, as he began to demonstrate the device. The Xbox sprang to life and presented Mehdi with a home screen.

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In an effort to streamline the development of wireless charging technology, Duracell subsidiary Powermat Technologies will merge with the Helsinki-based company PowerKiss.  Together, the two companies are responsible for thousands of public stations used to wirelessly charge mobile phones in the United States and Europe.  Until now, the conflicting systems used by each company have eliminated any benefit wireless charging technology might have for overseas travelers who rely on their smartphones.

The statement released today explains that eliminating those “incompatible standards” is the primary motivation of combining under the Powermat umbrella. With their forces joined, the two pioneers will be pushing forward with Powermat’s “PMA” standard, which has already been accepted by global leaders like General Motors, Starbucks, and Duracell.  Adding Powerkiss’ European presence to the PMA standard may well define it as the unofficial international standard for wireless charging.

Powermat has instituted PMA wireless charging stations in more than 1,500 retail locations including Starbucks and AT&T stores.  Likewise, Powerkiss has enabled wireless charging in more than 1,000 European locations, including McDonalds restaurants.  In a remarkable commitment to the future of the technology, the merging of these two companies will ultimately ensure consistency across international borders. 

This is a huge step for the burgeoning industry of wireless charging.  Our smartphones are heavily burdened with improving nearly every detail of our daily lives.  It’s a difficult task, even with vastly improved battery life aided by the efficient performance of processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon.  For international travelers who already face issues with different outlets and service providers when they’re overseas, the introduction of seamless, consistent formats for wireless charging across the globe will be a big relief.

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If you have any expectations about the privacy of your Skype communications, you may want to reassess them.

Microsoft appears to be peeking into Skype messages for security reasons, according to Ars Technica.

The owner of Skype regularly scans the contents of messages sent on the service for signs of fraud, but what’s done with the information from those scans—whether it’s stored indefinitely or destroyed—is unknown.

Similar findings were published by The H Security last week.

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Yoking cognitive computing with customer service, IBM has launched a system that can reference large amounts of unstructured data to help companies better field customer phone calls.

The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor uses IBM’s Watson, the artificial intelligence software the company developed to compete on the Jeopardy game show two years ago.

According to IBM, the field of customer service is in dire need of improvement. Of the 270 billion customer service calls that are handled annually, approximately 50 percent go unresolved. “Many customers engage with a brand through the call center,” and because call centers tend to frustrate customers, the company’s brand suffers as a result, said Craig Hayman, general manager of industry solutions for IBM’s Software Group, during a teleconference announcing the package.

The Engagement Advisor can help answer questions, offer suggestions to aid in the purchasing process, or to help customers troubleshoot issues. Just as it was able, in a few seconds, to scan, review and select the best answer for Jeopardy questions, so too should the Watson technology be able to quickly provide relevant information for customer inquiries, drawing from a large amount of information.

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Donations to WikiLeaks since January have only been enough to cover expenditures in essential infrastructure, such as servers, according to a transparency report.

Donations have been declining substantially over the last two years, the report said. Last year, WikiLeaks had almost €69,000 (US$88,700) in incoming donations while its expenses were a little over €392,000, according to the report, released Monday by the Wau Holland Foundation, a nonprofit foundation in Germany that handles transfers and donations to WikiLeaks.

Wau Holland Stiftung

“Better support for the project will only be possible with increasing donations,” the foundation said.

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The Livescribe Sky pen marries old-school pen-and-ink with the cloud. If paper remains a core part of your workflow, this is the best pen of its kind on the market. You can save notes and audio recordings to your Evernote account via Wi-Fi, or you can plug in a Micro-USB cable and save your work to a PC or Mac.

The pen is fairly bulky, but it's pretty comfortable to hold. It would stick out from inside a pocket but it slips easily into a travel bag. The pen cap is easy to lose and hard to put on, so I usually left it off (and the tip didn't suffer from the exposure). Livescribe makes smart use of its tiny LCD screen, displaying Wi-Fi and battery indicators as well as the time and date. Dive deeper and you can play with the display: Use your handwriting and the interactive "buttons" in its supported paper notebooks to play simple games, run equations on a calculator, and translate words. There's even an ecosystem of apps, including dictionaries.

Other smart pens, such as the Adapx Capturx, let you write on any type of paper, but I've found those better for paper-form input versus freehand writing. Livescribe requires special (and pricey) paper, with tiny dots on the page that track your writing with precision.

The Livescribe Sky pen is designed to be paired with Evernote, so it won't be of much interest if you don't use that app. It's a plus, though, if you enjoy Evernote's productivity features (and you get an Evernote Premium account for a year). Use tidy penmanship with your Livescribe pen, and Evernote's optical character recognition can translate that into digital text.

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Sprint Nextel has increased its offer to buy out Clearwire, bidding $3.40 per share, to counter a competing offer by Dish Network.

The new bid marks a significant boost from its earlier offer of $2.97 per share and beats Dish’s $3.30 bid. Clearwire shareholders had been scheduled to vote on Sprint’s offer at a special meeting Tuesday, but that meeting has now been postponed until May 30.

Sprint already owns roughly half of Clearwire, which has been its partner for 4G WiMax service since 2008. After Softbank agreed to invest $20 billion in Sprint and take a 70 percent share in the company, Sprint moved to complete its ownership. It plans to use Clearwire’s spectrum to beef up its new LTE network.

But Dish, a satellite TV and broadband provider, has made offers for both Sprint and Clearwire in an attempt to get into the relatively fast-growing mobile business. On Monday, Sprint announced it had received permission from Softbank to negotiate with Dish on its $25.5 billion offer, though Sprint said it still favored the Softbank deal.

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Windows 8 was rebuilt from the ground up with a finger-friendly focus. That proved to be a problem during the operating system's early days. In the months immediately after launch, touchscreen Windows devices cost an arm and a leg, and that's if you could even find one; during the 2012 holiday season shoppers were hard-pressed to find a touch-based laptop.

Now, however, Microsoft’s touchy-feely thrust is starting to shake up the laptop market, according to a recent report. Nearly 10 percent of all laptops shipped worldwide during the first three months of 2013 were touch enabled, according to IHS DisplayBank (and as reported by DigiTimes).

Even though a push into Windows 8 touch devices was expected, DisplayBank’s numbers are surprising. Other research firms were expecting a much slower adoption rate.

For example, NPD’s DisplaySearch said in April that it expected touch-enabled touchscreen notebooks to surpass 12 percent by the end of 2013. If DisplayBank’s numbers are accurate, notebook touchscreen shipments could be on their way to beating early projections of 15 percent for all of 2013, IDC research director David Daoud told PCWorld. (IDC and PCWorld are both owned by International Data Group.)

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Leap Motion doesn't have to replace your PC's mouse, but it certainly can.

A new video from Leap shows how hand and finger gestures may be used to point, click, zoom, and scroll your way through Windows 8. Although Leap wants developers to create applications specifically for the 3D motion controller, mouse emulation will allow the controller to work across entire Windows operating system, even with legacy software.

However, it's hard to tell from the video exactly how the motion controls work. A simple nudge forward with an outstretched finger appears to simulate a mouse click, and pinch gestures control zooming, but it seems there are some subtle differences between pointing, scrolling and dragging that are tough to discern from the video. (We've reached out to Leap to see if we can find out more about specific gestures.)

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Atlassian has revamped the Jira bug tracking tool with a new user interface, which the company said will offer faster navigation and a simplified workflow.

"We really tried hard to create a whole new, more efficient Jira," said Dan Chuparkoff, Atlassian group manager for Jira marketing. "It should be easier to use and easier to learn."

Jira 6, released Tuesday, also comes with performance improvements and the first interface designed specifically for mobile clients.

First released in 2002, Jira was originally created to provide a way to track bugs during the software development process, allowing a development team to identify issues in the code base they were working on, and then track how these problems are being remedied.

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It appears Canada’s anti-money laundering regulator will leave Bitcoin exchanges in the country alone for now.

LibertyBit, which exchanges the virtual currency Bitcoin for U.S. and Canadian dollars, has been told it does not have to register with Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), said CEO Paul Szczesny, via email on Tuesday.

FINTRAC, which was created in 2000, is responsible for investigating and preventing money-laundering and activities used to fund terrorism.

But concerns have been raised in some quarters that the high degree of anonymity of Bitcoin transactions makes them attractive for criminal purposes such as tax evasion.

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Mobile operators collect huge amounts of data about how their subscribers use mobile data, and that information is starting to go on sale as targeted intelligence that enterprises can use to better reach consumers.

SAP will introduce a cloud-based service at this week’s CTIA Wireless trade show that will collect information from carriers about what mobile sites and apps their customers use, and even where they are when they use them. Using its own HANA in-memory computing technology, SAP will crunch the big data in near real time and sell it for marketing use. Carriers are already talking to SAP about the service, called SAP Consumer Insight 365, and enterprises may begin using the data within about three months, said John Sims, president of SAP mobile services.

The data won’t tell SAP what specific user did what and where, but the company will be able to break down the information by demographic measures such as country, neighborhood, gender and age group, plus time measures down to the time of day, Sims said. As for location data, it will be up the carriers how specific it gets.

With HANA, SAP’s data centers can work through billions of rows of data per second, Sims said. That’s important because an average medium-sized operator may generate one terabyte per day of information about subscribers’ mobile activity, he said. The most current data will reside in HANA, while the rest will move to a more persistent environment such as a Hadoop cluster or SAP’s SybaseIQ database.

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Toshiba said it will soon begin mass producing a new type of 64Gbit NAND flash that is the smallest and fastest in its class, though it still lags rival Samsung Electronics in the development of an even denser flash technology.

Toshiba said Tuesday that it will begin mass production this month of a 64Gbit chip with an area of 94 square millimeters that can write data at 25MB per second. The new chips, made using a 19-nanometer process, are the fastest and smallest to use 2-bit-per-cell technology, Toshiba said.

Main rival Samsung is already a step ahead. The South Korean company said last month that it began mass-producing a 128Gbit NAND chip with 3-bit-per-cell technology, also using a process smaller than 20 nanometers.

Toshiba said it is also working on 3-bit-per-cell technology, and aims to begin mass production by September. The company said it would first focus on smartphones and tablet memory with the chips, then expand to notebook PCs.

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Amazon Web Services has finally received certification under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which the company said will lower the cost of implementing its cloud services among government organizations and agencies in the U.S.

FedRAMP is a mandatory government-wide program that standardizes security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services. As part of the program, Amazon has been granted two so-called Agency Authorities to Operate (ATOs) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it said.

One ATO covers the GovCloud “region” of AWS infrastructure, and the other the U.S. East/West regions of its cloud infrastructure. Within those boundaries, agencies can use Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). They can also use its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which allows IT staff to create an isolated section of Amazon’s cloud where they can launch resources in a virtual network defined by themselves, including public subnets, private subnets, and hardware VPN access.

In a recent interview, Stephen Schmidt, chief information security officer at Amazon Web Services, talked about how he looked forward to getting a FedRAMP certification.

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A boutique system builder has bucked the industry trend of slumping PC sales by continuing to focus on selling Windows 7 machines.

Auburn, Wash.-based Puget Systems grew sales 20% in 2012, said Jon Bach, president of the independent PC seller, by specializing in high-performance, buit-to-order PCs—primarily desktops.

Puget’s performance is in stark contrast to the global PC market, which contracted 6% in the fourth quarter of last year, and plummeted 14% in the first quarter of 2013, according to research firm IDC.

Puget also went against the grain by selling significantly more Windows 7 PCs than ones equipped with the new Windows 8. That was not a strategy of its own choosing, however, as customers select the operating system for their custom-built machines.

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Vodafone’s revenue dropped 4.2 percent for its fiscal year to March 31, because of tough economic conditions, particularly in Southern Europe.

The operator’s group revenue dropped to £44.4 billion (US$67.8 billion) for the year ended March 31, and net profit fell sharply from £7 billion to £673 million.

Behind those numbers are Vodafone’s problems in Southern Europe where revenue was down by 16 percent. The effects of “severe macroeconomic weakness were intensified by strong competition,” according to Vodafone said. Revenue rose 2.7 percent in Northern and Central Europe but fell 2.9 percent in Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Operators today struggling to balance falling revenue from voice and messaging services with growth in revenue from data. In Vodafone’s case, revenue from the first two decreased by £3.8 billion, while data revenue grew by just £469 million.

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The Pentagon's decision to grant Apple the security clearance required for iOS 6 devices to go head-to-head with BlackBerry 10 and certain Samsung Galaxy S4 devices on secure military networks could have with a cascading effect that spills over into the private sector.

BlackBerry 10 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 received security clearance from the Pentagon earlier this month. The Pentagon has not approved Android in general, or even the Samsung Galaxy S4 in its default state. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is authorized only as long as it uses Samsung’s Knox security software.

The Pentagon uses approximately 600,000 mobile devices. The vast majority of those are BlackBerry, because BlackBerry established itself early on as a secure, manageable mobile platform. Now, BlackBerry will have to fight with Apple and Samsung to maintain that dominance.

The United States Air Force is eager to jump on the iOS bandwagon. Following in the footsteps of many commercial airlines, the USAF plans to replace bulky flight manuals and flight plans with iPads.

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Mageia has long been what you might call a “best-kept secret” of the Linux world, consistently residing among the top five distributions in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings despite minimal marketing and hoopla.

The distro has only been around since it was forked from Mandriva Linux back in 2010, of course, but after several weeks' delay  the Mageia project on Sunday finally launched the third major version of the free and open source operating system.

Mageia Linux 2 made its debut just about a year ago. Now, Mageia 3 is here, “all grown up and ready to go dancing,” as it was put in the project's weekend announcement.

Mageia 3 is dedicated to the late “Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration,” the team added.

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Welcome to the wacky world of tech patents—a place where you’ll find not just the crazy-sounding ideas that inhabit any category of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but some ideas that seem so minute or so obvious that you wonder how they ever qualified as patentworthy.

Once issued, however, a patent isn’t just a shield. It’s a weapon that companies and individuals can use against their competitors. “Patent trolls” are infamous for acquiring patents and then making the business of filing lawsuits against alleged infringers their core competency.

The technology sector is hardly alone in taking patent-holding to extreme levels of judicial enforcement. But some of the most bizarre tech patents we found suggest that we may need a new idea for protecting ideas—one that can more easily weed out the lawyers and the loonies.

The 'Interactive Web' patent

1998

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The European Union may be trying to protect its telecom equipment industry with its recent threat to investigate China over networking equipment imports. But the move could end up hurting the chances of Western vendors intent on supplying technology to China’s upcoming 4G services launch, according to analysts.

Last week, the EU set off fears of a trade war with China after it said it could resort to probing the nation’s sales of mobile networking gear for anti-competitive practices. In response, China has warned the EU against taking “protectionist” measures that would damage economic relations between the two governments.

“If the EU insists on starting the investigation, China will follow WTO [World Trade Organization] rules and Chinese law to take resolute measures to protect its rights and interests,” said China’s Ministry of Commerce spokesman Shen Danyang last Thursday. “The EU, which started the friction, will have to take full responsibility for the resulting consequences.”

The EU has yet to launch its investigation, and wants to first negotiate with China over a possible resolution. But the trade tensions risk affecting the tendering process to build China’s 4G networks, said Matt Walker, an analyst with research firm Ovum.

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Ready for an unconventional upgrade? How about this: You can turn an old, pokey external hard drive into a blazingly fast one with about 10 minutes of your time and $15 of your money.

See, most modern computers have at least one USB 3.0 port. You can plug an older, USB 2.0 drive into one, but you won't get the faster throughput afforded by the newer technology.

Thankfully, you don't need to get a new drive just to enjoy speedier file transfers; you just need a new drive enclosure.

You can buy one for around $15, give or take $5, and from there it's a fairly simply matter to transplant your old drive. Just unscrew the old enclosure, remove whatever screws are holding the drive in place, then separate the drive. Now install it in the new enclosure using the provided instructions (if you even need them; it's a pretty self-explanatory procedure).

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Google will retire its Checkout payment processing tool on November. 20, and warned retailers they will need to move to a different payment processing platform.

Checkout, which launched in 2006, was merged with Wallet, which is a mobile payments tool, last November. The product was aimed at taking on eBay’s PayPal service, which dominates Web-based payments.

Google said it has partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer discounted options for retailers that have not yet selected an alternative payment processor.

Wallet will now be the company’s focus. Developers for its Play store will be moved to the Google Wallet Merchant Center, Justin Lawyer, senior product manager for Google Wallet, wrote. There will be no changes for consumers using Wallet on sites such as Priceline and Uber, according to Lawyer.

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Windows 8, released to the wild last October, seems stuck in a no-win situation.

On the one hand, it is not catching on with Android- and iOS-loving consumers turned off by the Windows 8 tile-based interface and the Windows App Store, which by Android and Apple standards, is anemic and disorganized. And these days, consumer technology is frequently a precursor to enterprise technology as shown by the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon.

On the other hand, the situation for Windows 8 isn't any better in the enterprise. IT decision-makers interviewed for a new Forrester report don't see the Windows 8 experience as an improvement over the stable and well-liked Windows 7, mostly due to confusing behavior between applications running in the "Metro" touch interface and those running in the traditional desktop mode.

In the report, entitled "IT Will Skip Windows 8 as the Enterprise Standard," IT professionals reveal that a top concern about Windows 8 is the "potential for significant user training and support and the need for application redesign to take advantage of the new Windows 8 interface."

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