China :: Science & Technology

Think mobile data demand is big today, with 94 million smartphone shipped this year and 5 billion mobile subscribers? Well, Cisco ( s csco) says its going to get a lot bigger by 2015, with worldwide mobile data traffic set to increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month. Thats 75 exabytes annually by 2015 [MIGHT WANT TO THROW IN AND/OR LINK TO A DEFINITION OF EXABYTE]. Last year, I called it the mobilpocalypse , but this year, Im going to say its a looming tsunami, driven by everyones favorite bandwidth hog, web video, and the proliferation of mobile devices. In short, we can blame this wave on Netflix on the iPad. Cisco anticipates that in 2015, the average mobile user will consume 1,118 megabytes of traffic per month. For perspective, today the average mobile connection generates 65 megabytes of traffic per month, equivalent to about 15 MP3 music files. While the average growth is impressive, those megabytes will be spread across a wider number of devices,

Source : New York Times By Edward Wong and David Barboza BEIJING In another era, Chinas leaders might have been content to let discussion of the protests in Egypt float around among private citizens, then fizzle out. But challenges in recent years to authoritarian governments around the globe and violent uprisings in parts of China itself have made Chinese officials increasingly wary of leaving such talk unchecked, especially on the Internet, the medium some officials see as central to fanning the flames of unrest. So the arbiters of speech sprang into action over the weekend. Sina.com and Netease.com two of the nations biggest online portals blocked keyword searches of the word Egypt, though the mass protests were being discussed on some Internet chat rooms on Monday. The use of Egypt has also been blocked on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Censoring the Internet is not the only approach. The Chinese government has also tried to get out ahead of the discussion, framing th

Last week when Microsoft reported earnings for its most recent quarter, Peter Klein, chief financial officer with the company waxed eloquent about the success of Kinect, a new kind of controller based on motion sensing gesture technology. [GigaOM.tv Video: Watch Kinect in action .] Kinect, in particular, exceeded our expectation. Kinect is the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history. Its just our first step in delivering on the opportunity to fundamentally change the way people interact with technology. Kinect exceeded all expectations with 8 million stand-alone and bundled sensors sold in just 60 days. ( Microsoft conference call transcript via Seeking Alpha .) The success of Kinect, however, is having a bigger impact on a smaller company, which has been all but forgotten for nearly a decade JDSU . The Milpitas, Calif-based company makes all sort of gear from testing equipment to optical components. It is mostly infamous for being one of the biggest companies of telec

Add to My Stories Users urged to download patch to block any attempts to use it Microsoft has issued a 'critical' security alert that affects 900million people using its Internet Explorer web browser.The computer giant warned of a newly-discovered flaw in Windows that could be exploited by hackers to steal personal details or take over computers.The glitch is so severe it potentially affects every user of Internet Explorer. Security alert: Microsoft has warned of a flaw in Windows that could be exploited by hackers to steal personal details or take over computers. The glitch is so severe it potentially affects every user of Internet Explorer - 900 million peopleFirefox, Google Chrome and Safari browsers are all unaffected by the threat because, unlike Internet Explorer, they don't support MHTML files, where the problem lies.The loophole only seems to affect the way Internet Explorer handles some web pages. More... Sony wins restraining order against PlayStation 3 hacker wh

One of the big issues with the ongoing explosion of social media, whether its blogging or Twitter or Facebook, is a lack of effective ways to filter the signal from the noise in other words, to figure out who we should pay attention to. Facebook relies on your existing social graph, while Twitter uses its own internal algorithms to suggest people you should follow, and LinkedIn uses your professional status and co-workers or contacts as the benchmark. But the race continues to try and measure online reputation in an effective way. Should it be based on activity? Number of followers? A ranking system in which people can vote on you? All of the above? One of the latest to jump into this race is Mixtent, which launched today with a voting-based system that uses data from your LinkedIn profile once you log in with your credentials (and will also pull in your Facebook info if you connect that as well). The company says it is building a professional reputation graph on top of the main so

Skyhook announced today that its location engine will power the location information for Pricelines Hotel Negotiator Android app . In the grand scheme of things, the announcement is minor, but it illustrates the work Skyhook has done recently to get around an impasse with Google that limited the reach of Skyhook on mobile apps. Skyhook, if you recall, sued Google last year alleging that Google pressured Motorola and other device manufacturers to drop Skyhooks location engine in favor of Googles technology. The case is moving through the courts but it has disrupted Skyhooks work to some degree. The Boston company has responded by going back to its roots and appealing directly to app makers to get them to try the location information, which uses a variety of technologies to better identify a users whereabouts. Priceline is just the latest company to agree to pay for Skyhooks technology instead of using Googles free service. Others like Kayak, Shopsavvy, Gowalla, Flixter and more have al

Add to My Stories Microsoft has issued a 'critical' security alert that affects 900million people using its Internet Explorer web browser.The computer giant warned of a newly-discovered flaw in Windows that could be exploited by hackers to steal personal details or take over computers.The glitch is so severe it potentially affects every user of Internet Explorer. Security alert: Microsoft has warned of a flaw in Windows that could be exploited by hackers to steal personal details or take over computers. The glitch is so severe it potentially affects every user of Internet Explorer - 900 million peopleFirefox, Google Chrome and Safari browsers are all unaffected by the threat because, unlike Internet Explorer, they don't support MHTML files, where the problem lies.The loophole only seems to affect the way Internet Explorer handles some web pages.Microsoft just said that the bug is inside Windows, presumably because they don't want users to migrate to other browsers.The

Demand Media may have announced a successful IPO , but that didnt quite dispel the air of controversy surrounding the company. After all, Demand has never been profitable as a business. The company and its content farm brethren are blamed for diluting search results , and its content is damned as being filler produced at near-slave wages. But the controversy is overstated: Demands business model may be a little shaky, but its worth monitoringfor lessons in creating content efficiently and targeting content, as well as for potential partnership opportunities. Demand produces low-cost content to order based on its analysis of search trends, advertising rates, competitive content and the contents long-term value in terms of ad sales. It suggests topics based on that algorithmic analysis to a network of 13,000 freelancers. Those freelancers then write articles or make videos that Demand shows on its own highly search-optimized sites eHow, Answerbag, Livestrong.com and Trails.com or sy

The White House today announced The Startup America Partnership , an effort to boost innovation and entrepreneurship in the U.S. through a program that encourages private companies to offer mentorship and possibly funding for entrepreneurs but it mostly looks like an opportunity to get a lot of press, with low returns for actual startups . The goal of the program is to continue to marshal private-sector resources to spur entrepreneurship in the U.S., something Id argue is already happening at most of the levels the program plans to concern itself with. It will focus on replicating successful accelerator programs such as Denvers TechStars, expand entrepreneurship education and boost the commercialization of new technologies out of colleges. The program has $200 million in funding from Intel, $150 million from IBM and at least $4 million from Hewlett-Packard, as well as partnerships with organizations such as The Kaufmann Foundation and existing accelerators such as TechStars. Faceboo

2010 was the year of Android when it comes to smartphones. Thats according to research firm Canalys which reports Googles operating system eclipsed Symbian in the fourth quarter to become the top smartphone OS in the world by shipments. Androids share of the smartphone market jumped from 8.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 32.9 percent in the fourth quarter last year, nudging past Symbian, which slipped from 44.4 percent to 30.6 percent over the same period. The numbers confirm Androids ascendency and are somewhat predictable considering the fast growth of Android, which weve followed since last year . But overall, the entire smartphone market grew by 89 percent year over year, with all the major players except Microsoft growing their shipment numbers. The explosion of smartphones Canalys said just under 300 million units were shipped last year means opportunities across the industry and potentially more shifts to come. Still, the latest Canalys numbers represent a major m