Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing. Continue »

MindTouch, an open-source provider of enterprise collaboration software, announced today that its platform is now available in the cloud. You can find a video on how the platform, dubbed MindTouch Cloud, creates “a federated collaboration network” here.  MindTouch competes with Microsoft’s SharePoint, but can eliminate many of the inflexibilities of proprietary collaboration software, and MindTouch Cloud’s prices are being kept low. A 10-user group can use it for $10 per month per user, 30 users can for $8 a month per user, and 50 users can for $7 a month per user, with lower costs for larger businesses. Continue »

Fring, the mobile messaging and social communication tool that works on many smartphone platforms, is now available on the Android platform. Users of Android phones can get the client software from the Android Market or from Fring’s WAP site.

Fring for Android works over 3G, GPRS or Wi-Fi connections. According to the company’s blog announcement:
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Rumors have been swirling for days about the possible delivery of a beta version of Google’s much-discussed Chrome OS this week, as we noted last Friday. I pinged a few people at Google to get some clarity, and while they didn’t provide me with a specific answer as to whether the download will arrive this week, they did send me an invitation to a press event at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday morning, billed as “an update on our progress with Google Chrome OS.” In other words, it sounds like we’ll get to try it very soon. Continue »

The Pirate Bay is shutting down its tracker technology, its crew announced in a blog post that only accentuated the positive, in a move that follows a multiyear hailstorm of legal machinations, jail sentences thrown at founders, and constant public scrutiny. The positive spin in the blog post is reminiscent of the founders’ claims that their jail sentences represented “an epic win.”  But now that the site will switch to decentralized distributed hash table (DHT) technology for pointing to torrent sources, what is the likely impact on downloaders and freeloaders? They will have to turn to new alternatives, but those choices will take shape. Continue »

China Unicom is continuing to trumpet the iPhone’s prospects in China — despite widespread conviction that it’s too expensive there. As Stacey recently noted, Daniel Amir, director and senior research analyst of semiconductors at Lazard Capital Markets, has cited China Unicom officials as saying they’d sold some 30,000 iPhones in the country since its launch there on Oct. 30.

And the company’s chairman, Chang Xiaobing, says he expects the device to become the best-selling smartphone in the country, Bloomberg is reporting. So should we buy all this iPhone love from China Unicom? Continue »

Could your smartphone one day notify you that you are in the early stages of a life-threatening disease — long before a doctor does? Strong signs indicate that mobile phones will become capable of that and many more types of medical diagnostic tasks. The race is on at UCLA, UC Berkeley and other organizations to imbue cell phones with imaging and microscope-like functionality that could turn them into lifesavers on a grand scale. Commercial companies offering $10 hardware parts aimed at these applications and more are starting to take shape. Here are more details on the escalating and exciting development of the pocket doctor. Continue »