The SD Association announced a new interface for flash memory cards today that triples data transfer speeds.

The faster SD card specification was expected since the group started previewing it in September. But more unusually for the consortium, the SD Association also announced an e-book specification at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

"Our new e-Book application...opens broad consumer access to e-book content, and turns billions of existing SD mobile phones and devices into e-readers," Norm Frentz, chairman of the SD Association, said in a statement. "SD continues to evolve its capabilities to support voracious consumer demand for portable movies, television broadcasts, high-definition home videos, and now full-color books."

It's not yet clear who among e-book reader makers, publishers, or other companies are on board with the new specification, but two partners showing eBook support at CES are Toshiba and Sharp, the association said. Such partnerships will be important to its success, though, and there already are other e-book formats, such as ePub.

But eBook won't live in isolation. "The association plans to support popular external formats like ePublish, CPS, XMDF and ".book" formats in the near future," said SD Association communications director Kevin Schader. And to keep content publishers happy, it's free to use and supports copy protection. … Read more

Graphics chipmaker Nvidia, eager to hasten the arrival of the 3D graphics era and spur demand for new 3D hardware, today unveiled a site for content called 3DVisionLive.

At the site, people can share their own 3D photos and see more from professional photographers; watch short videos, trailers, and sports; and rate the content they see. The site supports Nvidia's 3D Vision technology and old-school anaglyph technology with the blue and red glasses.

3D is a theme at CES this year--and not for the first time. Moving the industry is a massive undertaking that involves content creation, content distribution, … Read more

There's a new reason to take note of a Russian programmer who rose to modest fame with his detainment in the United States in 2001: his work to help crack encryption used in Canon cameras.

The programmer and encryption expert is Dmitry Sklyarov, and his company, Elcomsoft, has found a vulnerability in Canon's OSK-E3 system for ensuring that photos such as those used in police evidence-gathering haven't been tampered with.

The result is that the company can create doctored photos that the technology thinks are authentic. To illustrate its point, it released a few doctored photos that it says passes the Canon integrity checks.

"The vulnerability discovered by ElcomSoft questions the authenticity of all Canon signed photographic evidence and published photos and effectively proves the entire Canon Original Data Security system useless," the company said in a statement. Sklyarov presented the findings at the Confidence 2.0 conference last week.

Canon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. … Read more

Monotype Imaging, showing further signs of adapting the old-school world of typographic design to the new era of technology, has acquired privately owned Ascender for $10.2 million.

The Woburn, Mass.-based company has been ramping up its effort to adapt to new media where fonts are used, launching its Web-based font service in September. The Ascender acquisition--for $7 million in cash and $3.2 million in stock--gives them a foothold in the smartphone world.

That's because Ascender designed typefaces including Droid for Google's Android operating system and Segoe WP for Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. The company … Read more

IBM has achieved a major milestone in making the dream of silicon photonics, in which computer chips send signals of light rather than electricity, into reality.

At the semiconductor industry conference Semicon in Tokyo today, IBM photonics leader Yurii Vlasov is detailing how IBM has created a chip that integrates many of the necessary elements of optical communication between a processor and other devices. Significantly, the design uses conventional rather than exotic chip manufacturing technology, involves very small components, and essentially permits a fiber-optic communication line to be attached directly to a processor.

And more significantly, it's headed for … Read more

In items like camera memory cards, flash memory is a ho-hum commodity. But when it comes to building flash directly into a computer, the disruption is probably just beginning.

That's why I find Fusion-io an intriguing company.

Fusion-io builds flash memory onto PCI Express cards that plug into server expansion slots, letting customers move beyond hard drives' physical enclosures and SATA interface. That means data can be written and read faster overall, in part because SATA has worse overhead--in other words, bandwidth that must be used to run the communication protocol rather than for the actual data being read or written.

The Salt Lake City start-up isn't the only PCIe storage maker in the market--Texas Memory Solutions' RamSan-10 and the RamSan-20 and OCZ Technology's Z-Drive products are competitors. But Fusion-io has clout: in addition to sales partnerships with IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, and more than 50 patent applications filed, it's got an investment from flash memory maker Samsung.

Flash crashes the party For all the change in the computer industry, it's actually pretty rare that a hardware difference comes along that actually is more than an evolutionary tweak to the existing setup.

Flash memory, which has displaced the hard drive in corners of the market such as iPods and high-end laptops and has the potential to do so elsewhere, is one of those changes. It combines the world of conventional computer memory--dynamic random access memory, or DRAM--with the world of hard drives.

DRAM needs a constant supply of electrical power to remember its data, but it can read and write data quickly; hard drives store data even when the power is switched off, and can store much larger amounts of data, but they're relatively slow. Intermediate between the two is flash memory, in terms of data transfer speeds and cost per gigabyte, and like a hard drive it can store data when the computer is switched off.

The first large-scale arrival of flash memory in computers took the form of solid-state drives, or SSDs. They packed flash memory into the type of enclosure that in the past housed a hard drive, and they communicated with the rest of the computer system with the standard hard drive interface, called SATA. Advatages of SSDs include faster data transfer, better ruggedness because of the absence of moving parts, and lower power consumption because the physical platters of hard drives don't need to be rotated all the time. … Read more

With a single new feature added to its online word processor yesterday, Google has diminished many concerns I had about taking the cloud-computing plunge a few months ago.

That feature, autocorrect in Google Docs, fixes common typos such as converting "teh" into "the." In and of itself, it's not a game-changer.

But it carried outsized importance for me because it was one of the things I missed most about Microsoft Word and because it gives me faith that Google Docs is headed in the right direction.

As if to validate my new optimism, Google today announced an improvement that's much larger than a single feature: the ability to edit Google Docs from Android phones, iPhones, and iPads. Google Spreadsheets already were editable with some mobile phone browsers.

Google Docs, which has grown considerably since Google's 2006 acquisition of Writely, consists mainly of word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation modules that compete with Microsoft Office's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It's become a standard-bearer for the Web applications movement and, with Google selling it in premium form along with Gmail for $50 per user per year in the form of Google Apps, Google's next billion-dollar revenue stream after advertising. … Read more

Wolfram Research has released Mathematica 8, bringing some rudimentary human-language skills to the mathematics and scientific software by building in some abilities of the Wolfram Alpha search engine.

It's an unusual combination. Mathematica can produce stunning graphical displays and dig into the murkiest data sets, but only for those who learn its control language.

"Free-form linguistics understands human language and translates it into syntax--a breakthrough in usability," said Chief Executive Stephen Wolfram in a statement.

Well, the Alpha language can't exactly give Mathematica the ability to chat at cocktail parties. But it can understand the command "pi 200 digits" … Read more

If at first, second, and third you don't succeed, try, try again.

Google is taking another crack at a social service, this time with Hotpot, a tool designed to capture local knowledge and recommend establishments such as restaurants or stores you might want to visit. Google unveiled an early version of Hotpot in a blog post yesterday, and I think Hotpot has some attributes that could help it achieve modest success.

"With Hotpot, we're making local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant, and trustworthy," product manager Lior Ron said in the post, calling … Read more