Computers
IBM’s Watson supercomputer has been riding high for the past couple of years. It won a game of Jeopardy, went to university and did a stint at a cancer lab. But now it’s taking what might seem like a step down with a job in customer service. According to IBM, the current avalanche of information is provoking an oncoming crisis in customer service and the company sees Watson’s advanced learning and data crunching abilities as a solution. Read More
Leap Motion is on its way. With the clock ticking down to the PC gesture controller’s July 22 launch, Leap has a brand new teaser video that showcases the device’s interaction with Windows. If you'd forgotten how exciting Leap was when we first got the chance to play with it, this might be enough to get your blood pumping again. Read More
Most cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive give users storage space at a premium, but the actual data is stored in a data center in some remote location. A new product called Space Monkey aims to take the storage out of the data center and put it back in the hands of the user. This allows it to offer more data than traditional cloud storage solutions for a much lower price. Read More
Gmail lets you send all kinds of files as attachments. And Google Wallet lets you pay for just about anything. Why not combine the two? That could have been the thinking by someone at Google, as the search giant is set to launch a payment system that’s the love child of Gmail and Google Wallet. Read More
As search technology advances, it’s going to become more and more like human interaction. Apple’s Siri might have popularized conversational search, but many of us feel that Google Now quickly surpassed it – with its faster and more accurate results. Soon much of Google Now’s functionality will be arriving on PCs, by way of the Chrome OS and web browser. Not stopping there, Google also added some improvements to Android’s Google Now. Read More
While waiting anxiously for the release of a 5-megapixel camera module might sound a bit crazy, for owners of a Raspberry Pi, it couldn't come soon enough. For those in the UK, the wait is finally over as retailers opened up their virtual doors today and Pi camera boards started flying off the warehouse shelves. Read More
If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for the long-rumored Windows 8 “Blue” update, you might be able to exhale soon. Microsoft still hasn’t officially broken down the new features in the update, but it does now have a name and a price: "Windows 8.1," and "free." Read More
There have been years of controversy about whether the superconducting quantum annealing computers manufactured by D-Wave are a) quantum computers; and b) fast enough for a) to matter. Now a test of the 512-qubit Vesuvius chip establishes at least that computing based on quantum annealing is, in the words of a computer science professor at Amherst College, "in some cases, really, really fast." Read More
ARM is currently king of the hill when it comes to mobile devices, with ARM architecture the basis of processors and systems on a chip (SoC) including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, NVIDIA’s Tegra, Texas Instruments’ OMAP, the CORTEX series and Apple System on Chips found in iPhones and iPads. It’s obviously not a situation Intel is happy with and the company has high hopes that its new Atom chip design called Silvermont will help change the mobile silicon landscape. Read More
The pro versions of Photoshop (and the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite) have always had a steep admission fee. In some cases, we’re talking thousands of dollars. Makes sense for big companies, but those costs put a bigger strain on self-employed pros and smaller indie operations. So it makes sense that Adobe’s Creative Cloud – which lets you rent these apps for a monthly fee – has been such a big hit. In fact, it’s done well enough that Adobe is closing the door on its retail Creative Suite apps, putting its full weight behind subscriptions. Read More
