You may have heard a rumor floating about the internet that the Zune would adopt an incentive-based distribution system. The idea, supposedly, is that each song sent to your Zune-toting buddy that he/she decided to buy at your recommendation would earn you a small reward (think Zune Marketplace Points) for promoting and sharing legal digital [...]

Mapuche Indians in Chile are trying to take Microsoft to court in a legal battle that raises the question of whether anyone can ever “own” the language they speak. The row was sparked by Microsoft’s decision last month to launch its Windows software package in Mapuzugun, a Mapuche tongue spoken by around 400,000 indigenous Chileans, [...]

Current wireless headphones typically use infrared, radio spectrum, or Bluetooth, all of which are prone to casual disruption. Sony aims to change that with their body-wired headphone patent application. Their headphones would basically use your own body to carry the music up to the headphones, via a few millionths of an amp that turns you [...]

Portable audio players keep getting smaller (we’ll soon be able to have them implanted into our fingers). The latest contender for the “world’s smallest…” title is the Kenwood Media Keg HD10GB7, just launched in Japan. It features a 10GB disk drive, probably around 1.8 inches in size, along with a 1.5-inch screen. Total dimensions 62 [...]

Nokia’s president and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is just doing his keynote speech at Nokia World, and he’s just said that the company will bring out WiMAX-enabled handsets in 2008, which would be able to hook into citywide Wi-Fi networks using the technology.

Remember those sci-fi shows back in the 60s and early 70s? Most control panels had switches of all manner as well as blinking LEDs that confound the average human mind. What you see on the right is called the 1000100101, and when translated to English, it means binary as evident by the numbers 0 and [...]

MySQL’s new enterprise-class support option, including a new network monitoring dashboard, is now available, the company said Monday (Nov. 20, 2006). Announced last month, this edition will make it easier for VARs or integrators to keep a watchful eye on database performance to nip problems in the bud, says Sheery Kritzer, founder of the Boston [...]

Hackers are adding virtual machine detection to their worms and Trojans to stymie analysis by anti-virus labs, a security research said Sunday. The tactic is designed to thwart researchers who use virtualization software, notably that made by VMware, to quickly and safely test the impact of malicious code. Researchers will often run malware in a [...]

Sony said on Friday its Cyber-shot compact digital cameras might not work in warm and humid areas and that it would repair any affected cameras free of charge. The liquid crystal displays in eight models that went on sale from September 2003 to January 2005 may not show images correctly or the cameras may not [...]

Sony said on Friday its Cyber-shot compact digital cameras might not work in warm and humid areas and that it would repair any affected cameras free of charge. The liquid crystal displays in eight models that went on sale from September 2003 to January 2005 may not show images correctly or the cameras may not [...]

A government-affiliated research institute in Japan says it has developed a chip that blocks viruses before they enter the computer, thus doing away with the need for conventional anti-virus software. The chip would lead to higher processing speeds and could be used widely in networked appliances and cellphones. The team, led by Eiichi Takahashi, a [...]

Here’s a sweet idea, send your peeps a message using the buildings in Google Maps as letters. I pretty viral idea that’s sure will gain worldwide web attention in no time. Just type your message and it finds the letters, then send your friends the link to geoGreeting so they can receive the message. Neat!

Now this is an interesting invention. The brainchild of Leo Burnett – the rain-sensitive billboard, made exclusively for Max Factor cosmetics. The billboard will change once it rains to give the effect that the mascara is running. And that will hopefully make the ladies buy their rain resistant mascara.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) says it has received the first 10 laptops from Quanta, a Taiwanese manufacturing company building the laptops. Still in a beta, the first 10 “B1″, (previously named CM1 aka Children_s Machine 1) laptops were hand-assembled before a larger 900-unit run will take place, according to the OLPC Wiki. The [...]

A Google senior executive has laid into mobile operators around the world, accusing some of them of blocking access to certain Internet applications (yes, including Google’s own). Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google, said on Monday that certain mobile operators had lobbied the search giant, asking it to stop people accessing Google Mobile [...]