Search toolbars from HotBot, Dogpile make their debut
This week, we get two new toolbars that aim to push the search envelope a little farther.

Where "Think Different" Is Taking Apple
Rather than accept being a niche PC maker, Steve Jobs is transforming his baby into a high-end consumer-electronics and services company

Like It or Not, RFID Is Coming
Scott McGregor of Philips Semiconductor, the leader in radio frequency ID chips, says they'll change the world -- and not threaten privacy


The Next Big Thing For Wireless?
WiMax is a lot faster than Wi-Fi and has a bigger range -- but success isn't assured

The Perfect iPod
Admiring the iPod mini, Leander Kahney writes in Wired News, “The previous three generations of the iPod, each smaller and silkier than the last, were merely prototypes for the mini. The mini is the perfect iPod: sleek, easy to use and easy to carry around. And it plays music — beautiful, beautiful music — what could be better?”

Check out the ultimate guide to mobile and wireless applications.

Intel Joins Liberty Alliance
The Liberty Alliance Project said chipmaker Intel Corp. has joined the industry coalition building specifications for web authentication.

Web Access at 75 Percent
Three quarters of the American population now have Internet access, with women slightly more likely than men to spend time surfing, a new survey says.

Nokia Edges Toward Phone Blogging
Nokia unveils Lifeblog, software designed to integrate and organize words, audio, pictures and even video from your mobile phone. Uploading your life to a weblog may be the next step.

Microsoft prepares 'iPod killer' for Europe
The gadgets will run Microsoft's yet-to-be-unveiled Portable Media Center software and represent a direct assault on Apple’s hot-selling digital music player.

Decoding humanity, down to the last atom
Glyn Moody's "Digital Code of Life" tells the story of the bioinformatic revolution: The merging of computers and molecular biology.

Burning Backup DVDs Ruled Illegal
Commentary: Judge's ruling against DVD-copying software is another erosion of consumers' rights.

New software tames Web searches
Onfolio allows collection, editing and annotation of various type of documents. For additional information go to Onfolio's web site.

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) --
Gathering for the world's biggest high-tech fair, computer and
telecommunications executives can sniff something new in the air:
significant economic growth.

Starbucks Corp on Tuesday unveiled a new kind of coffee shop serving up custom music CDs along with foamy coffee drinks.

Sun reluctant to make Java open source
During a press briefing here Tuesday, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, indicated that the company is not inclined to take up IBM's offer to work with Sun to make Java technology open source because of concerns over compatibility.

Catch the latest information on Webloggers, Tob Weblogs, etc. at O'Reilly Developer Weblogs.

Microsoft Corp is about to stir the speech recognition market with the launch of its Speech Server products next week. The vendor promises speech recognition for the masses, but analysts warn that speech-enabling applications is not easy.

XML guru Tim Bray has joined Sun Microsystems' software group to work on XML-based syndication technologies and advanced search. Here is some additional information on Tim Bray.

Sun's Not-So-Secret Weapon Sun Microsystems is about to begin a beta program for perhaps its most important development tool release in years. Java Studio Creator -- formerly Project Rave -- is Sun's attempt at corralling departmental-level developers who are looking for alternatives to Microsoft's .NET framework.

Introducing MSNBC Wireless Traveler
MSNBC Wireless Traveler makes the benefits of wireless even better. Designed with the “Unwired” mobile professional in mind, MSNBC Wireless Traveler provides the latest breaking news and top story coverage “on the go” while you are between Wireless LAN (WLAN) hotspots.

From cell phones to automobiles, movie making to music sharing, a new digitial revolution is upon us.

And they're off!
The first of 15 driverless robots began trundling across the Mojave Desert on Saturday in an unprecedented race for $1 million in government-funded prize money.

Welcome to the java.blogs community!

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. At WWDC 2004, you’ll connect face-to-face with Apple engineers and your colleagues from around the world — hardware and software developers, IT managers, scientists, researchers, systems administrators, web designers, and content creators — for a week of education and inspiration.

Review of TED 2004
The recent TED conference in Monterey, California was an unusually good experience and thus merits a review here.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and was a major source of inspiration for my own Gel conference (which stands for Good Experience Live). Like Gel, TED features a very diverse speaker list, with speakers rotating onto the stage every 15 minutes or so.

Law ISPs sue over spam e-mailsWASHINGTON (AP) -- Some of the nation's largest Internet providers, in an unusual joint effort, said Wednesday they filed six lawsuits against hundreds of people who were accused of sending millions of unwanted e-mails in violation of the new U.S. law against "spam."


Robotic legs could lead to super troopers

BERKELEY, California (AP) -- Move over Bionic Man and make room for BLEEX -- the Berkeley Lower Extremities Exoskeleton, with strap-on robotic legs designed to turn an ordinary human into a super strider.

Hughes Electronics swallowed a bitter pill last year when it ended an ambitious partnership with America Online to deliver high-speed Internet access over the Hughes satellite network.

Search upstarts storm Google's gates

As speculation of a Google public offering hits a fever pitch, would-be rivals are combing over the company's business and technology for signs of weakness that could cut short its reign as the king of Web search.

Risks of Quantitative Studies Number fetishism leads usability studies astray by focusing on statistical analyses that are often false, biased, misleading, or overly narrow. Better to emphasize insights and qualitative research.

Page Titles That Attract Readers A MarketingProfs story shows how important page titles can be, being prominently used in search engines, bookmarks and other important places that will later attract visitors. Also included are seven tips for more effective title choices.

China's search engines take on Google BEIJING--China's homegrown Internet search companies said on Wednesday that they were upgrading technology in a bid to take on Google just weeks after the search giant's foray into a market seen worth some $100 million in 2004.

SUN DEVELOPER COMMUNITY GROWS AS JAVA USER GROUPS TOP 600

The battle between Windows and Linux has extended to the cash register--literally.

Yahoo! has launched SmartView on Yahoo! Maps Tuesday, giving users an interactive and visual way to search for local content, a move with implications for the giant portal's involvement in local paid search.

Pocket PC iPod imitator gets Apple's attention.

Shares of Sun Microsystems (SUNW:Nasdaq - news - research) were recently down 6.4% Tuesday after Banc of America downgraded the shares to neutral, saying it's doubtful that the company will be able to stabilize its core server business this year.

Warning: Blogs Can Be InfectiousThe most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.

Read the various ways Apple has helped those in areas of Photo, Design, Video...

Windows could lose Media Player in EU tangle

Adobe adds bar codes to PDF forms
Adobe Systems is set to expand its electronic forms with new capabilities for adding bar codes to forms based on the company's portable document format.

The Complete Guide to Googlemania!

They named their new search engine Google, for the biggest number they could imagine. But it wasn't big enough. Today Google's a library, an almanac, a settler of bets. It's a parlor game, a dating service, a shopping mall. It's a Microsoft rival. It's a verb. At more than 200 million requests a day, it is, by far, the world's biggest search engine. And now, on the eve of a very public stock offering, it's cast as savior, a harbinger of rebirth in the Valley. How can it be so many things? It's Goooooooooogle.

inCode and frog design to Collaborate on Designing and Building the World’s First “Wireless Workspace of the Future”

Announced earlier this year, Apple is having a hard time keeping their colorful iPod mini on store shelves. Where the device is nothing new, its insides and idea is based on their popular iPod, the size and price make it much more appealing to consumers-- I'm sure the colors do too.

"Online search engine Ask Jeeves Inc is paying $343 million for a family of popular Web sites that includes Excite.com and iWon.com, bulking up the company as it vies to wrest market share away from industry leaders Google Inc and Yahoo! Inc," reports AP.

Lindows half price via BitTorrent
"LindowsOS [a version of GNU/Linux] is now available for $25 over P-to-P, instead of the normal $50, Lindows says. The company has established a P-to-P system, based on open source software called BitTorrent, that it says is ideal for transferring large applications with high-demand peaks," reports the IDG News Service

MP3 to get digital rights management add-on
"The venerable MP3 music format, the technology most widely associated with unrestricted file swapping, is getting a makeover aimed at blocking unauthorized copying. Thomson and Fraunhofer, the companies that license and own the patents behind the MP3 digital music technology, are in the midst of creating a new digital rights management add-on for the popular format, a Thomson executive said Tuesday," reports CNet.


Esther Dyson on Internet privacy
Back in the heyday of the Internet in the late 1990s, Esther Dyson was often referred to as the chief guru of the tech world, a reputation enhanced by the publication of her 1997 book, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.

Java rolls on Mars
The same piece of software that lets people around the world play video games on their cell phones is now letting scientists drive the ultimate remote-controlled car across the surface of Mars.

Everyone wants in on game of tags
Tech companies lay out their RFID and other inventory-tracking wares at a retail industry show in New York. But is a boom in the technology really in store for them?

Thin is in
When it comes to televisions, bigger is better. But for most other gadgets, thin is in.

Thinking outside the browser
Net titans Microsoft, Yahoo and EarthLink are all considering broadening their lucrative search businesses by providing access to online searches through a "taskbar" displayed to the side or at the bottom of a PC screen, according to people familiar with the plans.

Wired: Nextfest/2004
In the future, hardware will outperform steroids.

How fast is fast enough?
Fastest Wi-Fi You Can Actually Buy

Glaser: Bull in a china shop
When his net worth reached a stunning $5 billion in early 2000, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser could savor the thought that he had finally proved something to Bill Gates.

Andy Leaves Cisco
So what is Kealia?

RollingStone
Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview He changed the computer industry. Now he's after the music business
By Jeff Goodell

Bill Joy Interview [Aug./2004]
Why the future doesn't need us. Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

Macromedia boosts Flash for video
Macromedia announced a hosting partnership Tuesday and several other developments intended to popularize the use of its Flash format for delivering streaming video.

Open-Source may be the winning stratgey for Sun
Catching a wave.

Insider Shopping Secrets
James Cury provides some helpful tips on shopping for high-tech deals.

Talks See Global Internet Ground rules
GENEVA - Negotiators from 192 countries have narrowed differences on setting the global ground rules for expanding use of the Internet, but remain undecided on whether rich nations should help their poor counterparts pay for the increase.

Sun sets up RFID in Europe
BERLIN--Sun Microsystems will open a facility in Europe where companies can test their radio frequency identification systems.

No need for a browser here
Macromedia announced the debut of Central, a new application development environment that takes advantage of Macromedia’s flagship Flash technology to deliver a new set of rich Internet-based applications. More details here at Macromedia.

802.11a, 802.11b(Wi-Fi),...
The current crop of wireless technologies is an alphabet soup of acronyms and technological jargon. To help sort out the confusion, check out this chart to compare some of the key wireless technologies used by computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

Apple is now on the Ginza
TOKYO—November 27, 2003—Apple's first retail store in Japan will open in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district this Sunday, November 30 at 10:00 a.m. JST. The five-floor Apple® Store Ginza is Apple’s first retail store outside the U.S.

Microsoft software in every car?
The Microsoft platform already is in 23 different car models, including the BMW 7 series, Citroen, Daimler, Fiat, Volvo, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Subaru and Toyota.