GigaOM

HP Labs is asking academic and research institutions for research proposals that focus on cloud computing, sustainable IT, transferring data seamlessly across a variety of media, dealing with the information explosion and dynamic computing. The computer company will offer $50,000 or $75,000 for selected proposals — primarily to pay a graduate student to help. While [...]

MySpace today launched announced a data availability initiative that will allow users to opt in to sharing their MySpace information on a variety of partner sites. While not exactly complete data portability (the social networking company also said it was joining the Data Portability Project), it’s a start.
MySpace is launching its data availability efforts with [...]

AT&T, after months of waiting, is finally launching its MediaFLO mobile broadcast television service. The Vu service, which is based on Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology, will roll out May 4th in 58 cities across the country. Much like Verizon’s V-Cast service, which is based on the same technology, AT&T’s service will require new handsets capable of [...]

As Ruby on Rails rose to prominence in the last few years, the platform has faced derision from some programmers over its inability to scale for enterprise applications. Ruby on Rails might be good for making interactive web pages, but it was no C or Java. Benchmark Capital aims to change that with an investment [...]

The LG Secret launched today with a touch screen powered by Synaptics touch capacitors, a technology whose star has risen in the consumer devices universe in the wake of the iPhone. The iPhone uses a grid layout of capacitive sensors to enable multi-finger gestures, something that wouldn’t be possible with resistive sensors. Sensing capacitors are [...]

Hewlett-Packard has come up with a new type of circuit called a memristor — a conflation of the words memory and resistance — in the form of a chip capable of storing data and processing it without being limited to the binary zeros and ones. The technology was theorized almost 40 years ago, but [...]