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Here’s a riddle for all the sports fans who agree that watching sports other than live is just not worth it: what would you do if you wanted to watch Olympic freestyle skiing but you’re stuck at work because it’s Wednesday afternoon?

You watch it on NBCOlympics.com? Wrong.

NBCOlympics.com provides about 400 hours of live streaming from Vancouver. But its new authentication system won’t let you watch this unless you can prove that you subscribe to a cable, satellite or IPTV service provider in partnership with NBC. Continue Reading »

Earlier yesterday during a press conference, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was responding to questions about government computers not being able to access sites like Twitter, which comes to no surprise for me. The conversation drifted on over important privacy notes regarding officials’ use of the micro-messaging site.

As part of the Presidential Records Act, established in 1978, the government keeps tracks of all inbound and outbound electronic messages sent from government machines which brings up several important questions. Are tweets considered to be electronic messages? If so, is the White House archiving all of its staff members’ activity on Twitter under the PRA?

The other question that comes to mind is about Gibbs’s followers and the people he follows. Are their activities also archived? I invite you to watch the video below and tell us what you think about it.

Privacy breaches are always in the news (generally coinciding with the latest Google app or Facebook update), but what’s a little different this week is that the privacy breaches are being very publicly challenged by lawsuits.

In a suit filed in Pennsylvania, Harrington High School is charged with monitoring students at home via school-issued laptops. The suit alleges that the Rosemont, PA, high school watched a student’s at-home activities with a school-issued laptop’s webcam, as it believed that the student “was engaged in improper behavior in his home,” according to Philly.com.

The school did not disclose to the students that the laptops they issued were equipped with remote-control webcams that could be activated at any time. The suit claims that the school violated federal and state wiretapping laws, violated students’ civil rights, and that the school’s acts were an invasion of privacy that could have led to the creation and dissemination of child pornography.

And that wasn’t today’s only lawsuit.

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Brain-wave computing is most likely two or three tech generations down the line but it looks to have other implications beyond just making computing faster and more streamlined.

It might also strengthen your brain signals, believes a team of researchers from the University of Washington. Stronger than day-to-day activities do.

“Bodybuilders get muscles that are larger than normal by lifting weights,” said the study’s lead author Kai Miller, a UW doctoral student in physics, neuroscience and medicine. “We get brain activity that’s larger than normal by interacting with brain-computer interfaces. By using these interfaces, patients create super-active populations of brain cells.”

In experiments in which epilepsy patients were asked to imagine that they were controlling a cursor, scientists found that in less than 10 minutes the brain signals were stronger than if the patients had been doing the actual physical gestures.

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Image by d!zzy via Flickr

While most people are curious about and looking forward to seeing Apple’s iPad launch in March, we bet some people are not as excited.

That would be publishers.

Presently, when readers subscribe to a digital version of their favorite newspaper, it is the newspaper publisher that gets the revenue while their cost of distribution is virtually zero.

With the iPad, it is more complicated. By reading periodicals on the device, not only are users going to give money to the newspapers, but also to Apple. It appears that thirty percent of the revenue would be go to Apple, with what is left going to the publisher. It makes sense for book publishing, but for a newspaper, whose subscriptions must be renewed every year, it is a bitter pill to swallow. Continue Reading »

Editor’s update: ABI Research contacted us. They have adjusted their predictions. “The 2015 forecast figure should be about 407 million, not 244 million.”

The number of mobile banking consumers is doubling every year, and ABI predicts that 244 407 million people worldwide — sixty-six million of them in North America — will be mobile banking customers in 2015.

“The global number of subscribers more than doubled between 2008 and 2009, and is expected to almost double again in 2010. This growth can be seen everywhere, but Asia – led by India – is pushing it particularly hard,” said ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue.

The obstacle to the adoption of mobile banking in North America and Europe is that most banks only offer the service to existing customers. As well, most North American and European consumers have access to computers and are in close proximity to physical branches, so mobile banking is not the necessity it is in other regions.

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Until now, the smartphone market has been divided between the main operators, the most blatant example being the agreement between Apple and AT&T. Each brand has its own app ecosystem. More than 300,000 applications will be accessible in the Apple App Store by the end of 2010, and between 50,000 and 75,000 applications will be provided in the Android Market.

Applications are the symbol of the smartphone, but also one of its main values.

For brands that have invested in the mobile app market or want to do so, the breakup of market forces has caused them to multiply applications across platforms. Strategically speaking, smartphones’ individual OS’s maintain control over the attractive and steadily growing market by forcing developers to adapt to a new format for each ecosystem and seeking the consent of the OS owner before an app can hit the market. Apple, Google, Blackberry and Nokia are engaged in a format war that forgets the consumer and constrains brands. Continue Reading »

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Barely two days after launching Buzz, the social networking feature for Gmail, Google bought the social search engine Aardvark for $50 million on February 11.

This acquisition is part of Google’s strategy of going social in order to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Aardvark is a social search engine founded in July 2007 by former Google employees. The San Francisco startup, which launched its service in private beta in 2008, allows web users to ask questions which are then distributed through their social network and sent to someone who can answer them.

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I count myself among the growing number of people who are dissatisfied with netbooks.

Wrist pain, poorly formatted and slowly loading web pages, sound so low that watching films just doesn’t work, lack of a DVD drive, the “Pez-dispenser” keyboard . . . all work to offset the device’s low price and portability.

Maybe consumers are starting to see this.

Fifty-five percent of consumers don’t view netbooks as viable replacements for a laptop, according to Pricegrabber.com (PDF). The main reason is the cramped computing area: fifty-four percent replied that this is the primary reason they wouldn’t replace their laptop with a netbook. The other major reasons are lack of a CD drive (50 percent) and minimal storage (49 percent).

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PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that 2010 U.S. technology sector deals will increase steadily, following the surge of activity in the second half of 2009.

That said, PwC does not expect a return to 2006-2007 levels.

Deals dropped 53 percent in 2009, valuing just under $36 billion – less than half of 2008’s $77 billion.

Most of last year’s activity occurred in the second half: 64 percent of the year’s volume and 85 percent of its value occurred in the final six months’ activity. Almost 50 percent of that activity happened in November and December.

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