T-Mobile To Introduce 'G1' Google Android Phone Sept. 23

T-Mobile has made it official: It plans to introduce the first mobile phone running Google 's Android software at a Sept. 23 press conference in New York. T-Mobile's phone, an HTC Dream, is expected to be available to consumers at the end of October. Its arrival after months of anticipation among technophiles promises to reinvigorate the smartphone market and to provide a mobile application platform to rival Apple's iPhone. Last November, Google announced the formation of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 hardware, software, and telecom companies, to promote open standards for mobile devices. The group includes Google, HTC, Intel, Motorola, and T-Mobile. In August, after several rough spots, Android's prospects brightened considerably, thanks to the FCC's approval of the HTC Dream, Google's delivery of the Android 0.9 SDK beta, and T-Mobile's confirmation of its plan to ship an HTC Android-powered phone. The availability of T-Mobile's Android phone and a functioning application store may prompt Apple to re-evaluate its controversial exclusion of certain iPhone apps from its iTunes App Store, behavior that Apple's detractors have characterized as anti-competitive and capricious.

Researchers focus on forestalling 'Digital Dark Age'

Digitization was hailed as the savior of information, able to preserve and make accessible everything from the contents of the Library of Congress to old radio shows. But experts now say much of that information could be lost—or at least impossible to retrieve—due to changing technology and standards.

"Today, we can read and interpret the Dead Sea Scrolls written almost 2000 years ago, but we cannot do the same with information generated 20 years ago and stored on a 5.25 inch floppy disk," said Dalit Naor, manager of Storage Technologies at the IBM Haifa Research Lab. "Ironically, as the world becomes digital, we may be entering a 'Digital Dark Age'. We need to plan for and manage the obsolescence of software and formats, for example by transforming the data to a newer format or ensuring we have the ability to emulate the software."

Researchers at IBM's Haifa, Israel, lab say they've found a way to solve that problem. They're working on the Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR) project, launched as part of the European Union’s program to preserve cultural and scientific resources. The project covers cultural data, scientific data, and contemporary arts.

IBM Research's role in CASPAR will center on a new storage concept called Preservation Datastores. This technology uses open standards and the Open Archival Information System to provide a common storage interface. The IBM approach encapsulates not only the data being preserved, but also metadata with information on context and format, the type of software or operating system required to access the information and other details.

In short, it saves everything needed to interpret the data hundreds of years after it is stored.

Researchers link instant messaging with virtual environments

IBM researchers have linked Lotus Sametime, an instant messaging program, with several virtual environments. Called "Sametime 3-D," the project showcases what virtual environments can bring to the future of unified business communications.

With Sametime 3-D users can instant message a colleague and instead of merely chatting with one another, launch into an immersive 3-D environment directly from within the chat session.

The program creates a virtual meeting space that can include presentation tools, fully functional avatars (virtual stand-ins) and access to 3-D objects in the avatar's inventory. The virtual meetings can also be recorded as text or video.

"The ability to easily integrate existing communication and collaboration tools in 3-D environments will allow businesses to clearly realize the ROI of virtual environments," said Colin Parris, vice president of Digital Convergence. "Extending the real-time connection between people into a 3-D medium enhances the experience and productivity of teams located across the country or the world."

Researchers link instant messaging with virtual environments

IBM researchers have linked Lotus Sametime, an instant messaging program, with several virtual environments. Called "Sametime 3-D," the project showcases what virtual environments can bring to the future of unified business communications.

With Sametime 3-D users can instant message a colleague and instead of merely chatting with one another, launch into an immersive 3-D environment directly from within the chat session.

The program creates a virtual meeting space that can include presentation tools, fully functional avatars (virtual stand-ins) and access to 3-D objects in the avatar's inventory. The virtual meetings can also be recorded as text or video.

"The ability to easily integrate existing communication and collaboration tools in 3-D environments will allow businesses to clearly realize the ROI of virtual environments," said Colin Parris, vice president of Digital Convergence. "Extending the real-time connection between people into a 3-D medium enhances the experience and productivity of teams located across the country or the world."

Oracle Makes Its Seventh Acquisition Of 2008

Oracle acquired Silicon Valley startup ClearApp on Tuesday, a move that compliments both its stated focus on service-oriented architectures and its $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems earlier this year.
ClearApp, founded in 2002, makes software that manages and monitors composite applications that are brought together via a SOA approach. ClearApp will become part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager software family.

As Oracle's seventh acquisition of the year, the ClearApp buy keeps Oracle in tempo with previous years' pace: it acquired 11 companies last year, and 13 companies in both 2006 and 2005.
ClearApp clearly plays into Oracle's BEA Systems strategy, as evidenced by how the ClearApp customer case studies. TransUnion uses ClearApp for the credit services it extends to consumers via Web-based applications that were implemented using SOA and BEA's WebLogic platform, according to ClearApp's Web site, and Accredited Home Lenders uses it for loan processing apps implemented via SOA and BEA's WebLogic integration, portal, and server software.

Google's Chrome Goes For Maximum Speed

Google on Tuesday said it sees its new Chrome Web browser more as a way to improve its search, ads, and apps business than as another horse in the browser race.

The company officially launched its open source browser this week after company engineers accidentally (purposefully) lit up tech blogs with a cartoon explaining its features.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin echoed that point, saying, "Our business does well if there's lots of health internet usage."
Chrome, in other words, is about making Web usage and Web applications more competitive with the desktop application experience. It's the beginning of a transition similar to Apple's migration from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, which included technologies like pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection as a way to make the computing experience better. With Chrome and its new multiprocess architecture, Google hopes to bring the stability of modern operating systems to the browser.
But as much as Chrome is about reliability, it's also about speed.
For Google, speed, rather than time, is money. As Google co-founder Larry Page suggested, faster Web browsing leads to more searches, which shows up on Google's bottom line.

Chrome aims to minimize that wait. In a test of static Web page load times conducted during the press conference, Chrome's average per-page rendering time clocked in at 77.28 milliseconds. Microsoft Internet Explorer averaged 220.64 milliseconds per page. (Google didn't immediately respond to a request to clarify whether IE 7 or IE 8 was used.)

R&D journal focuses on storage of electronic 'stuff'

The electronic storage of data continues to grow exponentially. But as the late George Carlin pointed out, having a lot of "stuff" brings its own set of challenges.

The latest issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, now available online, focuses on hardware and software approaches that help keep these repositories reliable and scalable, as well as ways to manage storage and the energy needed to drive it.

Entitled "Storage Technologies and Systems," the issue describes new storage technologies ranging from ultrahigh density data stored on chips and tape to methods for managing enterprise-scale storage systems.

Researchers also share their belief that many of the technologies and innovations described in the issue will drive the industry in the years to come.