In the Lab — GigaOM

In the Lab

The VooDoo Envy 133 is the one notebook I have been lusting after since it was first demoed in Germany a while back.  The thin and light VooDoo is enough to make you do bad things to get one.  If you don’t believe me take a … Read More »

Ubiquitious TAB

Firefox users may have seen the blog announcement from Mozilla Labs last month introducing Ubiquity. Ubiquity is an “experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks … Read More »

 
 

I updated iTunes this morning to the brand spanking new version 8.0 which adds a number of features, most notably the Genius SideBar.  While the Genius SideBar feature is no doubt intended to get Apple some additional music sales I am finding it very nice for … Read More »

We recently heard about American Airlines partnering with Aircell to offer inflight WiFi and today the announcement has been made that they are going to offer the same on some Air Canada flights.  Aircell’s Gogo WiFi will be available come spring of next year … Read More »

You have a smartphone with WiFi and 3G connectivity so wouldn’t you like to turn that phone into a hotspot?  Sure there are means to tether the phone to a … Read More »

I saw the new TV ad that Microsoft produced with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.  It made me want to buy a new pair of shoes.  And eat some cake. Read More »

Motion Computing has announced upgrades to the LE1700 slate Tablet PC.  They are now offering the slate with a Core 2 Duo processor and a 64 GB SSD is now an option over a traditional hard drive. (press release) Read More »

iPhone Life is a print magazine launching in early September by the former publishers of Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, Thaddeus Computing. Available by subscription and on newsstands nationwide iPhone Life magazine hits the newsstands on September 9, chock full of  news, reviews, and tips … Read More »

There is no question that the one single device that has stoked my gadget lust more than any other recently is the UrbanMax.  This is the concept notebook/ slate device that Intel rolled out at the IDF to get OEMs interested in making one of … Read More »

With all of the netbook talk these days, it’s no surprise that we’re also talking about various Linux distros. While many netbooks are offered with Windows XP, most are offered in a … Read More »

When I gave SugarSync a review earlier in the year, I was mostly impressed. This online file synchronization service offers cross-platform support and is drop-dead simple … Read More »

The IP Guru at the Energy Biosciences Institute

Compared to his colleagues at the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) — a $500 million academic and industry collaboration to fight carbon emissions with bio-energy — Mitchell Altschuler’s job could sound a little dry. While EBI’s researchers out of the labs of UC Berkeley, … Read More »

More Must Reads

It’s been out for a while but I just got my hands on the Laptop Magazine Ultimate Mobility Special Issue #83 and the banner list of contributing editors has yours … Read More »

Not many folks will need this but those who do will likely really need it.  Reader Dave Beauvais stumbled on the complete service and maintenance manual (PDF) for the HP 2710p.  It’s 134 pages big so be prepared but it looks like it contains everything … Read More »

The California Academy of Sciences, a collection of exhibits including a massive aquarium, a planetarium and a natural history museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, has gotten a new and much greener home. When the academy’s doors reopen in September, they hope for LEED … Read More »

As I catch up on a week’s worth of RSS feeds, I see from Liliputing that the Lenovo Ideapad S10 order page is up and running. I just hit it up and see that you can pre-order a red, white or blue black … Read More »

Using nanorobots to build circuits is so last year’s fantasy. The latest technology of tomorrow uses viruses to construct everything from transistors to tiny batteries to solar cells. Researchers at MIT published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week … Read More »

What could have more green-geek cred than using computer modeling to demonstrate a molecule used to break down plants from which biofuels are made? Winning an award for making the visuals look so dope. National Renewable Energy Labs Senior Scientist Michael Crowley recently … Read More »

Prices for platinum have dropped more than 30 percent in recent weeks, to around $1,478.80 an ounce, off a high of more than $2,100 an ounce earlier this year. It’s part of an overall slide in commodity prices, from corn to precious metals to crude, … Read More »

We haven’t heard if the wind-powered VW Bug Rep. Devin Nunes designed for Democrats last week has moved out of committee yet, but engineers from Stuttgart University are way ahead and say they have successfully tested their wind-powered Ventomobile. The Ventomobile, with its … Read More »

Researchers at MIT say they have delivered a major breakthrough in storing solar energy, inspired by photosynthesis and using a catalyst made up of cobalt metal. In a paper published today in Science, MIT professor of energy, Daniel Nocera, says he’s developed a process that … Read More »

There seems to be a lot more media attention covering “cow power,” than actual viable cow power plants out there. But a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin say that biogas made from manure could provide as much as 3 percent of … Read More »

Updated at the bottom: Unless you’re using Enron math, BT’s new plan to connect 10 million homes — roughly 40 percent of the United Kingdom — with fiber networks at a cost of £1.5 billion doesn’t quite add up. At today’s conversion rate, that’s … Read More »

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said this week that they’ve found a way to etch pattern onto a chip lines less than 25 nanometers apart. This has huge implications for lowering costs across the chip industry, including for photovoltaic cells used in … Read More »

Talk about a fast-paced market. We knew that the Eee PC 900 was getting put out to pasture in favor of other models, but now there’s a $100 incentive to … Read More »

WWD’s Mike Gunderloy covered Mozilla’s Weave project back in December, noting its usefulness in synchronizing bookmarks between a user’s various installations of Firefox…essentially moving a Firefox user profile into the cloud. Monday saw the release of a major update to Weave, bringing in … Read More »

Just got an email that someone was subscribing to my Friendfeed and I went to check them out.  I won’t give any names because it’s a private thing but looking at this person’s subscriptions I found it cool to be in good company: As you can … Read More »

Wow, it’s already 9am and I haven’t posted a blasted thing. Blame FriendFeed, which continues to get more and more of my attention. Actually, I mean that in a positive way as … Read More »

With all the concern over data centers sucking up enormous amounts of power and worries about the many gallons of water required to make semiconductors, one would never think that chips could offer a solution to some of the world’s resource and environmental problems. … Read More »

The new Skype beta we told you about seems to have a lot of people unhappy due to the larger "conversation" window that takes up a lot of screen real estate.  I’ve seen a number of people complain about this including Laptop Magazine’s Joanna Stern … Read More »

Twice a year, the computing world waits to hear whose processors and which vendors will claim the equivalent of a gold medal for building one of the world’s fastest supercomputers as measured by the Top 500 nonprofit. This year it was IBM’s $100 million Roadrunner … Read More »

Amidst the smaller semiconductors and new personal area networking technology breakthroughs showcased by Intel at its Research Day earlier this week were some silicon tools that could help track greenhouse gases and reduce power consumption inside devices. The chipmaker also showed off some of its … Read More »

I read so many ebooks and I do it using the great reader application eReader.  I have over 350 books in my eReader bookshelf and was happy to hear from the Fictionwise founder that they would continue to develop versions of eReader for different platforms.  … Read More »

I may be a little late to the Skitch party, but I just had to try it out after coming across it last month. For anyone not yet in the know, Skitch is a Mac OS … Read More »

We’ve been known to chide Detroit for being slow at innovation, and laud all those Silicon Valley startups out there, but according to data on the number of granted patents in the first quarter of 2008, car companies are actually leading in terms of intellectual property. … Read More »

I’m sitting here in the mega-corporate coffee house with sadness in my heart.  My intention was to be sitting in one of the small neighborhood coffee houses but alas it seems … Read More »

Chalk up another one for Linux. The open-source software was just deemed by Network World as greener than Windows Server 2008 when running as the operating system for servers. The computing magazine found that servers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux ran 12 percent more efficiently … Read More »

IBM showed off a new computing system yesterday that packed layers of semiconductors in a vertical stack and cooled it with water running in hair-thin pipes along the chips themselves. This is more impressive than the water-cooled copper plates that subsequently cool chips, and … Read More »

To the envy of developers everywhere, Google Software Engineers are granted what they call their “20% time.”  As a result, Google coders get 20% of their working time to work on projects that the developers select away from management approval.  Many well-known Google projects have resulted … Read More »

When it comes to semiconductors, everyone in the chip world is thinking green. But let’s face it: It’s a lot sexier to talk about “green” server chips used in data centers consuming 1.5 percent of the nation’s energy than about reducing plug loads with … Read More »

Knowing that nearly of half of our readership is outside the United States, I was glad to stumble upon Dial2Do. Why? Because it offers similar functionality to Jott, but it works in eighteen countries outside of the U.S. (plus here at home), all of … Read More »

Thomas wrote in last night to share the killer deal he got on an HP 2710p Tablet PC from the HP Clearance Center. I … Read More »

We looked at site-specific browsers last year – desktop applications that capture a single web site so that you can interact with it outside the bounds of your browser. A new entrant in this field, Bubbles, is out with … Read More »

While it’s not cold fusion, the latest claimed breakthrough from the laboratories of the nefariously named Blacklight Power does defy some laws of physics. The startup announced this week that they have created a 50,000-watt prototype of a new fuel source by lowering … Read More »

Towards the end of my last post, I talked about some of the potential advantages there could be in web workers getting together online to create local networks. In my view, since we’re still a marginal group in society, nobody’s going to go out of … Read More »

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