Considering a mere five percent of U.S. consumers wear activity trackers, will wearables ever cross-over to the mainstream? Even the experts in this field have trouble agreeing. Steven Pierce, of IBM’s global business development, said we’ll have ten devices on our bodies very soon. “Wearables will be the key source of information in five years,” he said, listing implantables and injectables as future wearables. But Sonny Vu, founder of Misfit Wearables, disagreed. “Five years isn’t that far away,” he said. “I don’t think science will advance that fast.” Continue reading Wearables Waiting For a Killer App to Take Them Mainstream

Technicolor demonstrated a high dynamic range (HDR) imaging technology at CES this week that intends to improve the consumer viewing experience. The company has plans to propose its imaging tech to the Moving Picture Experts Group in hopes of including it in the HEVC compression scheme for streaming 4K content. Technicolor is also demonstrating developments targeting the Internet of Things, in addition to connected cars and Ultra HD delivery. Continue reading Technicolor Demos New High Dynamic Range Imaging System

IBM’s Watson technology, known for beating out human competitors on the game show “Jeopardy!,” is playing a big role in a number of apps coming out next year. The first three known apps will come from IBM business partners Fluid, MD Buyline and Welltok. Each respective app uses Watson’s access to Big Data to provide users with information that will allow them to make informed decisions about their purchases and even their health needs. Continue reading IBM’s Watson Tech Behind Three New Apps Coming in 2014

For years Google has been evasive about plans for its public cloud for computing and data storage. However, the company is soon to announce pricing, features, and performance guarantees for both startup and multinational companies. Google’s efforts are part of an escalating battle amongst technology companies to control government and corporate computing through public clouds. This battle includes such companies as Microsoft, IBM and Amazon. Continue reading Google to Announce Plan for Cloud Computing and Data Storage

During the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013 in Orlando, Florida, the IT leaders at Gartner identified the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends expected for 2014: mobile device diversity and management, mobile apps and applications, the Internet of Everything, hybrid cloud and IT as service broker, cloud/client architecture, the era of the personal cloud, software-defined anything (SDx), Web-scale IT, smart machines, and 3D printing. Continue reading Gartner Outlines the Top Ten Strategic Tech Trends for 2014

Amazon’s Web Services went down on Sunday due to a technical issue at a North Virginia data center. The outage was caused by a problem with a single networking device, and reveals that many companies do not distribute their Web services in different locations for service redundancy. This comes as Amazon is bidding on a CIA contract to manage their data services, and competitors are critical of whether Amazon can manage the demands of government data. Continue reading Amazon Web Services: Outage During Bid for CIA Contract

As consumers buy less personal computers and more tablets and mobile devices, China’s Lenovo has overtaken HP, becoming the largest seller of PCs. On Wednesday, research firms Gartner and IDC estimated that worldwide PC shipments have fallen 11 percent in Q2 2013. The two firms say that sales have decreased for the past five quarters, the industry’s longest decline. But they have hope that new PC hardware will provide some recovery. Continue reading Lenovo Becomes the Top PC Seller as Industry Sales Decline

Many cars made today are embedded with new technologies, which are leading to partnerships between auto manufacturers and wireless companies. These agreements are resulting in vehicles with always-on, fast wireless connectivity, providing the groundwork for new services, such as smartphones integrating with cars, and perhaps car-to-car communication. But with new forms of connectivity come new distractions and potential dangers. Continue reading Smartphones Merging with Cars Creating Connected Vehicles

Humans and machines have evolved together over time. Within the past 200 years, technology, and human use of it, has significantly improved beyond most expectations. But the Internet, digital technologies and the mass number of mobile devices, offers massive amounts of data that require new ways of analyzing it. Irving Wladawsky-Berger suggests that cognitive systems can perform the task, and help make new determinations on a much larger scale. Continue reading Advancement of Human Intelligence and Cognitive Systems

IBM Research now claims the world’s smallest movie with “A Boy and His Atom.” The 60-second movie — certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s smallest stop-motion film — shows the story of a boy comprised of individual atoms who befriends an atom and interacts with it while playing on a trampoline made of atoms. It illustrates how scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab can precisely move and manipulate individual atoms. Continue reading IBM Releases Smallest Stop-Motion Film in Cinema History

Hewlett-Packard’s “Generation 2” Project Moonshot server is now available, based on the Intel Atom Series 1200 chip — also known as the Intel 64-bit Centerton chip. Project Moonshot’s overarching goal is to create compact, energy-efficient servers able to run workloads at a mere fraction of the cost of currently available hardware. Other versions that run chips from Calxeda, AMD, Applied Micro and Texas Instruments will follow. Continue reading Project Moonshot Intends to Create Energy Efficient Servers

According to Raymie Stata, former chief technology officer at Yahoo, deciding to change the way a network operates can lead to cases where you have to physically rearrange hardware. But here’s the problem: networking gear is often old and outdated. While developers are constantly creating and updating software for computers and smartphones, hardware development remains relatively stagnant. Continue reading Tech Giants Developing Open Source Networking Project

As an April Fool’s Day joke, Google posted information about a new service called Google Nose, which supposedly provides consumers with olfactory experiences through their computers. While it may have been a joke, it’s not that far from potential reality. In fact, last December IBM revealed that technologies in development related to human senses were on the cusp of reality and could one day soon reach widespread adoption. Continue reading Google Nose May Have Been a Joke, But the Tech is Not

In our current digital age, modern computer code is comprised of the precise ones and zeroes that make up bits. But there’s a new computer on the horizon, developed by a major American military contractor, which is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics, in which a one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time. Continue reading Is Quantum Computing Ready to Supercharge Industries?

The symbiotic ideas of controlling your online personal data and the value of big data analytics to companies were major themes during the March 19-20 New Digital Economics conference produced by STL Partners. Thought leaders addressed personal privacy concerns that could lead to a social movement and industry self-regulation as well as changes to how companies manage strong relationships with their customers. Continue reading New Digital Economics Conference: Big Data Versus Privacy