Murphy’s Law: 98 Percent of Companies Use Open-Source, 29 Percent Contribute Back. What?

A recent survey hit my radar this weekend and, I must say, I’m not that surprised by the results. Contrary to my usual columns, I won’t bury the lede: Accenture polled 300 large organizations in both the public and private sectors and—surprise!—found that half of them are “fully committed”...

August 17th, 2010 | Software | Read More

Making the Case for an Upgradeable Smartphone

Every once in awhile I head over to Yanko Design, a Web magazine filled with conceptual designs running the gamut from technology to interior design. Most of the concepts will never make it past the rendered image stage, but every so often, I stumble upon a gem that I hope to see become an actual...

July 7th, 2010 | Hardware | Read More

Android Powered Garminfone Steers into T-Mobile

Rolling out of T-Mobile this week is the Garminfone, which as you might have guessed is both a smartphone and GPS. Asus had a hand in building the device, opting to stuff a Qualcomm MSM7227 processor (600MHz) into the 4.57 inch x 0.5 inch by 2.46 inch smarthpone rather than the far sexier Snapdragon...

June 11th, 2010 | Hardware | Read More

Concrete USB Drive Doubles as a Blackjack

Yanko Design is known for conceptual products that represent outside-the-box thinking, some of which are brilliant while others are downright outlandish. We’ll let you be the judge of which category the Concrete USB thumb drive falls under. Crafted from cemet, the capacity also represents the...

May 26th, 2010 | Hardware | Read More

New NEC Cooler Design Promises Big Energy Savings

Taking a page from conventional refrigeration techniques, NEC has developed a new cooling system the company claims uses 60 percent less energy than a water cooling loop, and up to 80 percent less than an air cooling system. NEC’s cooler is built around a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) substitute. The...

May 3rd, 2010 | Hardware | Read More

Palm’s browser-based webOS development tool leaves beta

By Tim Conneally, Betanews In addition to its more traditional Mojo software development kit for WebOS, Palm introduced a novel browser-based development environment for webOS last December called Project Ares. Users can drag-and-drop to create apps in Ares, and then hit “launch” in the...

April 20th, 2010 | Software | Read More

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 packs in tons of new features

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Adobe today celebrated the global launch of Creative Suite 5 (CS5), the first new version of the company’s suite of digital art, design, and development tools in nearly two years. Creative Suite 5 includes 15 of Adobe’s products: Photoshop CS5, Illustrator CS5,...

April 13th, 2010 | Software | Read More