Connectivity & Cloud - Page 15

HDMI 2.0 has finally been officially announced, arriving at a perfect time to be baked inside of the 4K TVs flowing out of manufacturers' factories. HDMI Licensing took some time of out of its day to announce the new standard, which is quite powerful.

We'er looking at a bandwidth capacity of 18Gbps, which has enough room to squeeze 3840x1260 at 60fps, which is quite nice. HDMI 2.0 also has support for up to 32 audio channels, "dynamic auto lipsync" and additional CEC extensions. The connector itself remains unchanged, which means we should be all systems go for backwards compatibility.

The cables themselves also won't change, which is refreshing, with the HDMI Licensing group claiming that current high-speed Category 2 cables can handle the increased bandwidth.

Google's super-secretive but super-cool Google X labs have designed some amazing things so far, such as Google Glass and the self-driving cars from Google. Google X have just outdone themselves today by announcing Project Loon, which would see balloon-powered Internet access to parts of the world where Internet access is hard, or impossible to come by.

Google even started testing this new initiative during the week, which would provide users with 3G-like speeds using balloons blasting Internet down to the people below in New Zealand. Google have said that they've found a way to let these balloons "sail freely in the winds" and would steer them by moving them up or down to catch the right winds. Of course, this means that Google still have some work to do, which I can see them creating the technology to at least automate this process.

The Mountain View-based search giant have said that they're solving this problem "with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power." Google would be using wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to give the balloons their flight paths. The search giant are currently using 30 balloons to test the project with around 50 tests in New Zealand who are using the service on the ground.

Computex Taipei 2013 - If we weren't impressed with DisplayLink's technology powering four monitors from a single USB port on an Apple MacBook Air, then you'd better sit down for this one, folks.

The video above shows an ASUS monitor being powered by a single USB cable, from a notebook - impressive. The delay from plugging it in to the monitor working, which is 1920x1080 by the way, its mere seconds. This is such a great idea for people on the go, for someone like myself who would cover an event I can have this in my bag and when I get back to my hotel I can plug it in and have a Full HD monitor ready, all from a single USB port.

DisplayLink, you have impressed me so much today - one of the best technologies shown at Computex hands down.

Computex Taipei 2013 - We had a meeting at the gorgeous W Hotel here in Taipei today with Andy from DisplayLink, and boy did he have some ultra impressive tech to show us. DisplayLink have some output technology that is baked into various products, with the Targus device shown in the video below.

As you can see, it is running four - yes, FOUR monitors from a single USB 3.0 output. This is beyond impressive considering the MacBook Air outputs are usually limited to DisplayPort. The dock used can provide with HDMI or DVI output, with another USB dock daisy-chained in to provide another two monitor outputs for a total of four. We were very impressed with what we saw, and can't wait to get our hands on some of these for review, and general day-to-day use!

Two years ago if you had told me Google would be pushing their own super-fast Internet service around the United States, I would've been hesitant to believe you. Now, they're looking to expand their Fiber service, by cementing that it isn't just an expensive research project, but it is a great and profitable business for the search giant.

Google Fiber head, Milo Medin, talked to CNET, noting that Google had kept the costs down by partnering up with cities that are interested in bringing Google's gigabit fiber network to their residents. These partners have helped Google build a less expensive, and less time-consuming network. The search giant are also keeping the bills from going sky-high by building their own network in select neighborhoods, which are known as "fiberhoods", where the demand for their gigabit Internet access is strong, versus entire cities.

Medin talked about the challenges the company faced when they launched Fiber, where the executive noted that the biggest headache was offering TV service, which is some what of a must when trying to attract new customers away from the usual phone and cable companies. The TV service has cost Google the most money, as they've had to sign programming agreements, build their own set-top-boxes and create an entire system for delivering TV through their fiber network.

I use services like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive every day, and each one has a specific use case for me. Fox example, Box is my personal cloud storage, while Dropbox is used for syncing files to my phone, PC and tablet, and Drive is my place to collaborate on files with co-workers. For personal storage of files that I share with friends regularly, I have begun to rely on Mega, and today things just got better for Kim Dotcom's file hosting service.

This morning Mega announced that it has launched two new features to its cloud based file locker service. First up is Event Notifications, which collects and shares with you "relevant activity" data on what others are doing with the files you shared with them. Up next is maybe my most wanted feature, Zipped Downloads. That's right, now you can zip and share entire folders with your friends - users can simply select "download as zip" when viewing files, and Mega will package everything up and deliver it in a neatly wrapped package.

The company clarified the Event Notifications feature on its blog:

Earlier this week Google announced that it was increasing Drive storage to 15GB and today we are finding out why. At today's Google I/O keynote the company showed off several new and exciting features on how its Google+ social network handles image storage, manipulation and sharing.

In the past, if you uploaded full size images, you had just 5GB of storage, but now with 15GB you can upload all of your images to Google+. Google pointed out that it is the only social network that allows true full resolution image uploads and included a graphic showing the relative resolution of various social networks.

Google also unveiled a sort of intelligent image sorting process that is aimed at reducing the time it takes for a photographer or individual to sort through large image albums. Google can now take your entire vacation photo album and automatically highlight the best. Say there is 600 photos total, it will filter out duplicates, analyze for bad exposure and automatically identify major landmarks. Then it will look for people, and for photos of people smiling.

I'm not even enjoying 4G yet, and all I keep hearing is talk of a 5G network being deployed within the next decade. Samsung are behind the new talks, with an under-development wireless network to be capable of giving users the speed to stream data faster than ever dreamed before, even from current wired networks.

You might want to sit down to hear this, but Samsung's 5G network will be capable of 10 gigabits per second, giving users download speeds of around 1.25GB/sec. Considering 4G LTE provides around 75 megabits per second, or around 9.375MB/sec, it is a gigantic leap that can't be frowned upon. We're talking about downloading a Blu-ray movie in under one minute over your mobile Internet connection.

Google seems to be expanding their push to roll out Google Fiber. Just days after announcing that Austin, Texas would be Google's second Fiber city, ArsTechnica is reporting that Google is working to acquire iProvo, a fiber-based ISP owned by the city of Provo, Utah.

Provo has a lot to gain from this. Not only would the city no longer have to finance the build-out of the network, Google is offering the same free 5Mbps/1Mbps connection as they have in Kansas and Austin. Google is also offering up free Gigabit connections to 25 different local public institutions, including schools, hospitals, and libraries.

According to a Google study, the mobile internet pipes are getting faster. Google used their Site Speed reports from Google Analytics and opted-in web publishers to get an idea of the speed of websites around the world. Google has again aggregated that data into the following graph:

As you can see, on the desktop side of things, not much has improved from 2012 to 2013. Speeds are just slightly better, but not by enough to really have much significance. On the mobile side of things, however, the mean time to load has decreased by about two seconds. The median time has decreased by about one.

Google credits most of these speed increases to LTE/4G roll outs as well as increased processing power in mobile devices. Read the full Google report.

It has been confirmed that Austin, Texas will be getting the elusive Google Fiber. Austin, TX will be just the second city to get access to Google's super-fast 1Gbps fiber internet connection and TV service. Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri is the other city to have access to Google's fiber ISP.

It's probably not enough to draw most people to move to Austin, but it could certainly help the start-up scene. Austin, Texas is already home to the South by Southwest conference and start-ups wouldn't have to travel if they were already based in Austin.

AMD are striking while the iron is hot with GPU news today, first we just heard about the dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990, and now we're hearing that AMD are entering the cloud gaming business.

They'll be entering this business with a new range of graphics cards, the Radeon Sky series. These cards will come in three flavors, the Radeon Sky 900, Radeon Sky 700 and Radeon Sky 500. They'll come with varying amounts of stream processors, RAM, and memory bandwidth. These new GPUs are designed to power servers for cloud gaming.

The Radeon Sky 900 will feature two Radeon GPUs, providing it with 3584 stream processors, and 3GB of GDDR5 RAM for each GPU. Its siblings, the Radeon Sky 700 and Radeon Sky 500 will feature 1792 and 1280 stream processors, respectively, as well as 6GB of GDDR5 and 4GB of GDDR5, respectively.

RapidShare will likely upset some of its customers with its latest move. As of March 20, the unlimited storage option will disappear, even for those who have pre-paid for unlimited storage for longer periods. In exchange, RapidShare is expanding its options provided to free users.

Current customers will now be able to pick from a 250GB plan for 10 euros per month and a 500GB plan for 20 euros per month. Unfortunately for some, RapidShare's Terms of Service allow them to change the contents of RapidPro services at anytime. RapidShare had the following to say:

Earlier today here in Taipei we attended the yearly Intel Computing Technology Demo which is tour held by Intel folks from the headquarters in US where they give Asian press a look into some fairly exciting tech that it's working on and stuff that we may see in the future.

At the event at the Sherwood Hotel today, Intel showed off a lot of its new Ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones, which of course are all powered by Intel chips. A lot of those products have been seen at events prior to this one, but what took our interest was Intel's take on perceptual computing and where it sees it going in the future.

At the front of the room was an Acer Aspire S7 Ultrabook running Windows 8, some may get excited for that fact alone. Besides just multitouch where we are now with such Windows 8 based machines, Intel showed off various demos which makes uses of the computer's web camera to produce some rather interesting results.

Mega man himself Kim Dotcom has announced that Mega now has Bitcoin support, and has also unleashed some future nuggets that Mega will support in the near future. Dotcom reiterated his company's position to privacy, while also saying that his cloud storage is uniquely positioned in New Zealand to keep users' data more safe.

Dotcom also stated that Mega will eventually expand itself into email, chat, voice, video and mobile services "in the coming years". For details on Bitcoin-enabled Mega goodness, you can check out bitvoucher.co, where there's no less than six different ways to buy mega services with Bitcoin. Three monthly options are given, as well as three yearly options - all options cannot be refunded or exchanged. The options include:

Now we'll tackle the extra services that Mega will introduce over the next few years, first up we have chat, voice and video services. Dotcom isn't happy with the current services from Google, Microsoft and Apple, which are Gmail, Skype and iCloud, respectively. Dotcom states that these services don't offer enough privacy because they're based in the US, where the US government can demand access to users' data under specific circumstances.

We have been hearing rumors of Microsoft's plans to transition users of its MSN / Live Messenger service over to Skype for a while now, and today it appears that we have an official date. The transition will begin taking place on April 8th of this year.

The upgrade will target English users first and then trickle down to the rest of the world, over the rest of the month. This news comes shortly after a confusing email which alluded to all Live Messenger services shutting down on April 15th, which is not true.

"The upgrade process itself has been going really well, we've had millions of customers move over", said Skype's Parri Munsell. The transition process begins when existing Live Messenger users are greeted with an upgrade notification. The upgrade will prevent users from signing in to the messaging service using the existing Live Messenger application. Microsoft is pre-caching existing machines with the Skype installer so that the upgrade will appear seamless.

We'll put this in the bin of 'how the hell did that happen', but a 67-year-old woman has driven for 900 miles over a two-day period thanks to a GPS error, as well as her total lack of attention. The kicker? Her destination was just 90 miles away.

Sabine Moreau had planned to pick up her friend at a train station in Brussels, with her first step of the trip leaving her home town of Hainaut, Erquelinnes, Belgium. The train station was 93 miles north of her home town, so the GPS gets flicked on and directs her... south, instead of north. She listened to the GPS and started her turn-by-turn navigation trip down to Zagreb, Croatia.

What should've been a couple of hours in the car turned into a multi-day trip including gas stops, sleeping on the side of the road for a couple of hours and even a minor car accident. This all happened while she was none the wiser, where she has said:

Marvell, a fabless semiconductor company, makes a plethora of wireless chipsets and other integrated electronics. Today, they are touting that they have the industry's first 802.11ac 4x4 wireless solution. Marvell says that it is "built to improve the throughput of enterprise and retail access points (APs) and the robustness of wireless video distribution."

"I believe that with Marvell's new breakthrough 802.11ac 4x4 Wi-Fi solution, we are positioned to change the landscape for enterprise-class network infrastructure and carrier grade video applications, further empowering the entire spectrum of always-on devices. The new era of the digital lifestyle requires superior wireless connectivity which serves as a critical pillar for delivering live content across all screen sizes and 'Smart Furnishings' for connected consumers," said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell. "I am very proud to see our dedicated team of engineers continue to build ground-breaking wireless technologies that support the latest industry standards, significantly improving network capacity, performance and reliability for Wi-Fi devices accessing the cloud infrastructure. Working with the industry's largest and most innovative global carriers and OEMs over the last decade, Marvell has established a successful track record of delivering world class wireless solutions for enterprise, consumer and mobile applications."

The new chipset, the 88W8864 SoC comes with the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac, which is the fastest wireless so far. It provides throughput up to 1.3Gbps. Beamforming is also supported by the 88W8864, which allows a stronger link to be formed by directing the beam in the direction of the device. The highlights are as follows:

Google's cloud computing services have seen a price drop ahead of Amazon's first big event that takes place this week in Las Vegas. The new prices are roughly 20 percent lower and Google has gone ahead and offered a new service to compliment the price drop. The new feature is like Amazon's Glacier service in that it provides large amounts of storage for cheaper prices. These cheaper prices come at the cost of slower access.

Google's new Durable Reduced Availability Storage is an ideal option for data archiving and backup. If you have data that you're required to keep and don't need to access it very often, if at all, this new cloud storage option by Google could be just the thing for you. The archiving pricing, as seen in the chart above, is $.015 to $0.02 cheaper than the new pricing for the standard cloud storage offering by Google.

Google has also introduced a new feature called Object Versioning, which does exactly what it sounds like it does. It allows users of Google's cloud storage to keep a list of updates so that files can be reverted to earlier states or be resurrected after an accidental deletion. This is an experimental feature, which means that updates to it make not be backwards-compatible and that the feature may be removed in its entirety.

Most of our readers will know about the service Dropbox, which provides 2GB of free cloud storage, with ways to earn more and options to pay for more. The service was started roughly five years ago after the creator forgot his USB stick at home. Since then, Dropbox has grown by leaps and bounds and has had to fight off competition from larger tech companies, such as Microsoft and Google.

Today, the Dropbox blog announced that they have 100 million users, "100 million [different] reasons" for needing cloud storage, but a general place to join together. The blog post goes on to share some stories of people who use the service and how they use it to advance whatever worthy cause they are championing.

For instance, Coach Stringfellow: