Julie Bart
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
One in three college grads said that access to social media sites like Facebook and the ability to choose their own devices was more important to them than salary when considering a job offer. This according to a study of 2,800 college students and young professionals worldwide conducted by Cisco. More than 40% went...
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Oracle revealed on Tuesday plans for its next-generation mobile and embedded development platform, JavaME 7. JavaME is the mobile system upon which the most intelligent phones were based before there were today's crop of smartphones, and it still powers billions of devices. It is also the thing over which Oracle is suing Google, claiming that...
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President Obama presented Congress with the official draft of his jobs bill on Monday, dubbed the American Jobs Act of 2011. Within it's 155 pages is a nearly 29-page section called the National Wireless Initiative (Full text, PDF). Hmm. You may remember the NWI when the President first introduced the idea in his...
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Looks like HTC has quietly slipped its users a spying app that tracks an alarming amount of user behavior and sends that data off to itself and perhaps others via a mysterious service in the cloud. The snooping app came nestled with the 2.3.4 Android update pushed out to some of its smartphones such as the Sensation 4G and EVO 4G. TrevE and...
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There's just got to be a joke that begins, "Two chatbots walk into a bar ..." because when chatbots talk, it's funny. Cornell University researchers wanted to see what would happen when two chatbots talked to one another. So they rigged up two systems that would allow instances of the chatbot Cleverbot to interact. It doesn't take long for...
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The non-profit group Geeks Without Frontiers today released open source software based on an upcoming WiFi standard. It lets Linux machines be their own WiFi network, no hardware required. The software is based on the not-yet-ratified IEEE 802.11s, an extension to the 802.11 WiFi standard. 11s creates wireless "mesh"...
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What do you get when you mix Justin Bieber with a distracted driving campaign? PhoneGuard is hoping you get a whole lot of teens downloading its Drive Safe smartphone app. The app automatically disables texting when the phone is moving 10 miles per hour. Last week, the makers of PhoneGuard started a campaign featuring the teenage heartthrob...
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In a quarter where Apple gleefully sold 9.25 million tablets, some folks are now suggesting that Android tablet makers may have sold less than 1.35 million. That's 21 times more iPad tablets than Android, at least according to one analysis of the numbers. The question is, is the glass half empty or half full for...
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We all know that today's flat-screen TVs weigh far less than old-style CRTs, or they wouldn't be able to hang on the wall. New research from the Consumer Electronics Association finds that this translates into a massive savings of electronics waste. The report found that today’s flat screen TVs are 82% lighter and 75% smaller than cathode...
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Quick ... how many Internet-access devices do you have in your family room? There's the HDTV, the Wii or Xbox or Playstation, the Slingbox or Roku or Boxee, the Blu-ray player and DVR ... probably a few others when you really think about it. Yours is the family room that Cisco was envisioning when it built its...
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The same group of international health researchers who warned the world in May that mobile phones might cause cancer have a bit of good news to share: cell phones apparently don't cause certain non-cancerous brain tumors. As published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers from the International Agency...
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WiFi and fast food seem to go together like a greasy entree washed down with a Coke. Taco Bell is the latest to promise its patrons free WiFi in all of its U.S. restaurants -- that's 5,600 locations. And, if that weren't reason enough to linger in those lovely plastic chairs over a plate of Chalupas, Taco Bell is also throwing in a free side...
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Dangerous Prototypes is a two-year old organization with the stated mission of producing "one new open source project every month." In its nearly two years in existence, DP has created about 30 projects, such as the Flash Destroyer. All are being sold by another interesting company, Seeed Studio. Seeed is a contract...
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Microsoft announced on Monday that it had convinced yet another company to sign a licensing deal to cover Android wares. General Dynamics Itronix will be paying the folks in Redmond an undisclosed sum to ensure "broad coverage" of Microsoft's patent portfolio for future Android devices the company wants to create. General Dynamics...
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A couple of new surveys show that price is first-and-foremost for mobile phone consumers while 4G is barely on the radar. 66 percent of smartphone owners surveyed by Morpace Market Research that do not currently have 4G are not willing to upgrade to get it before their contract expires. The survey queried 490 smartphone owners. More important...
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The GLBT community has suddenly become an outspoken proponent lobbying in favor of AT&T's proposed buy-out of T-Mobile. This merger has become an odd rallying point for organizations that normally have little interest in telecom deals. Until the past couple of weeks, most of the voices speaking up have been the...
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When it comes to the personal computing market, Apple is considered the cream of the crop these days. But a new quarterly report from PC repair firm, RescueCom, shows that increasing numbers of Apple customers are having trouble with their beloved Macs. Lenovo has been crowned as the most reliable, while ASUS, despite losing market share,...
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The U.S. International Trade Commission says that U.S. firms lost at least $48 billion in a single year thanks to Chinese companies stealing their intellectual property designs. U.S. smartphone case manufacturer, OtterBox, has had enough and doesn't want to take it anymore. OtterBox has built a $50 million business designing hard case covers...
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Although we cannot think of a single recent instance where regulators flat-out refused a merger, Sprint is arguing that they should do so with the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile union. On Tuesday, Sprint filed a formal, 130-page request asking the FCC to block the merger, saying that even if AT&T divested itself of key assets, consumers would...
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Start-up BlueStacks has emerged from stealth mode to wow the world with software that lets Windows PCs dual boot with Android. The Campbell, Calif. company was thrown into the spotlight this week when Citrix announced during its Synergy 2011 user conference that it would be embedding BlueStacks into its desktop...
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There's a new non-profit lobbying group in town, the Download Fairness Coalition, and it wants to stop double or triple taxation practices that states charge on digitally downloaded purchases, like music, movies or books. The group has pushed for, and gotten, a new bill dubbed the Digital Goods and Services Tax...
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Start-up Brass Monkey is having a good year. Two games have now been released that use its technology to turn an iPhone/iPod Touch or Android phone into a game controller over any WiFi network. Plus, this week it was selected as a finalist in the Best Customer Engagement Driver category at the Massachusetts...
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