Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for USD 44.6bn in cash and shares. The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday. Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional USD 300m this year trying to revive the company. It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.
The present day USB 2.0 delivers a transfer speed of upto 480 Mbps, whereas USB 3.0 promises 10 times of this speed taking the transfer rate to 4.8 Gbps.
Moreover, It will be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0, which is backwards-compatible with the first USB 1.1 definition.
Intel stated that the USB 3.0 specification would be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency. The USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed with both copper and optical cable capabilities, meaning even higher speeds will be possible in the future. “USB 3.0 is the next logical step for the PC’s most popular wired connectivity,” said Jeff Ravencraft, technology strategist with Intel and president of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). “The digital era requires high-speed performance and reliable connectivity to move the enormous amounts of digital content now present in everyday life. USB 3.0 will meet this challenge while maintaining the ease-of-use experience that users have come to love and expect from any USB technology.”
He further said : “If the USB 3.0 Promoter’s group meets its objective of spec completion in the first half of 2008, then we should see the first silicon solutions on the market in 2009, followed by end products in late 2009 or early 2010.”
A Surface computer is able to recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.
The new product is aimed directly at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues and should be commercially available towards the end of the year.
It’s an interesting product in that it’s completely out of left field. Microsoft gives examples of ordering a beverage during a meal with just the tap of a finger and quickly browsing through music and dragging favorite songs onto a personal playlist by moving a finger across the screen. Build this into a bar and you’d get one-touch beer service although I’m not sure if they’ve found a way to work out when your beer glass is empty so replenishment becomes automatic, maybe in a later version.
The practical uses for Surface at the point of sale are broad. This is touch screen point of sale technology at a new level.
Currently there is a rush in all technology quarters to change the way that we use productivity applications. The main goal of this movement is to supplement or even replace outright classic office suites. Not surprisingly pretty much all of the major technology companies are involved, including Microsoft and Google.
However, one classic application has been left behind in this movement, namely the database, and those online databases that have appeared have been really just spreadsheets on steroids.
Zoho is One of the smaller vendors in the online office suite market but also has one of the more mature offerings. So it’s no surprise that they are one of the first to try to bring true database capabilities to an online suite offering.
Zoho DB is designed to be a full database that can step in for database systems such as Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.
Notebook PC disk storage leaps into the stratosphere , hitting the half-terabyte mark with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’ announcement of a 500GB 2.5-inch mobile hard drive.
Due out in February 2008, the $400 Travelstar 5K500 drive will dramatically expand the capacity possible in today’s notebook PC designs.
Hitachi’s announcement makes it the largest capacity mobile 2.5-inch hard drive. Previous high-water capacity marks for 2.5-inch drives included Fujitsu’s 300GB drive and Toshiba’s 320GB drive. Hitachi’s jump to 500GB represents a whopping 36 percent increase in a single bound. (Hitachi also announced a 400GB version for $350.)