Services and applications

Motoblur gets connected with new features

BARCELONA, Spain--With the exception of the European versions of the Droid Pro and Xoom, it looks like Motorola will be light on the hardware announcements here at Mobile World Congress 2011, but there's still some news coming out of good ol' Moto.

Today, the company announced several enhancements to its Motoblur software, all designed to increase connectivity with your contacts and services.

The first feature is called Connected Music and it's a sharing and discovery tool for music. With it, you can share content with your friends and follow what they are listening to as well.

Connected Music … Read more

Network, don't fail me now!

Everything in IT depends on the network.--and not just in an abstract, "need it occasionally" sort of way. The packets must flow for virtually every operation, every job, every transaction. Whenever packets drop, or links go down, we're disconnected and isolated. Information doesn't flow; apps don't work; users don't proceed. We need the network up and running, millisecond by millisecond, every millisecond of every day.

Our utter, urgent dependency won't lessen in the coming years. It will intensify--redoubling and redoubling again. Cisco calls its vision of the future "together." HP … Read more

It's a jungle (gym) out there for fitness network

There's a big question being explored right now about the intersection of health and social media: Does the tracking and sharing of personal fitness and diet data motivate us to get, and stay, healthy?

A host of Web sites and mobile apps are banking on the answer being yes. FitDay provides a free diet journal; Daily Burn offers logs to track diet, exercise, and weight; an Awareness app promises to upgrade one's mental software; and dozens of other sites and apps cater to specific types of diets, exercises, and desired outcomes.

So the just-launched Humana fit social network, designed to help users live healthier, more active lives, is going to have to offer some pretty stellar features to stand out.… Read more

Mobile World Congress preview

Though it feels like we just left CES, the next gadget extravaganza is upon us. With 50,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors, Mobile World Congress is the biggest wireless trade show of the year. The fun begins Sunday night in Barcelona, Spain, and CNET will be there to bring you the latest news in handsets, operating systems, accessories, and applications.

So what will happen this year in Barcelona? As usual, we expect quite a bit, including the long-rumored PlayStation phone, a few tablets, and more Samsung Galaxy S devices. Read on for the full scoop on what's (probably) … Read more

Shared storage in a 'shared nothing' environment

The computing industry is seeing dramatic growth in the use of "shared nothing" database architectures where each node functions independently of one another and is self-sufficient (Hadoop Distributed File System for example). For the sake of performance, contention among nodes for shared disk resources (SAN and NAS) is one of the things these architectures avoid by dedicating storage resources to each node, i.e. no shared disk.

While these computing architectures are best-known in the context of Web-based applications and development activities, they are no longer confined to the Web. EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza, and ParAccel are all … Read more

FDA approves first radiology diagnostics app

There is no shortage of health-related apps. Some 1,500 cater to professional caregivers and laypersons alike for a range of purposes, from counting calories to learning anatomy or pulling up drug dosage recommendations.

But Mobile MIM is the first mobile app to be cleared (just last week) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that allows physicians to make medical diagnoses using images transmitted to their iPhones or iPads.

The app transmits several image types, including those from computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and nuclear medicine technology such as positron emission tomography (PET). Using software developed by Cleveland-based MIM Software, Mobile MIM allows for not just viewing of medical images, but also displaying measurement lines, annotations, and areas of interest.

While the app is indicated for use only in the absence of a workstation, it's pretty clear that the ability to view radiology images on the go could result in, shall we say, dusty workstations.… Read more

What should Nokia do?

It's hard to know what to make of Nokia these days. Though it still holds a huge worldwide market share and sells more phones than its competitors, it doesn't quite capture the buzz it once had, and its presence in the United States has dwindled.

Sure, the Finns maintain a healthy business selling low-end handsets in emerging markets, but over the last three years, smartphones are where the action is. And though Nokia still succeeds in that space occasionally--we quite liked the Nokia N8, for example--its strategy has been rather unclear.

To its credit, Nokia is aware of … Read more

Avoiding the cost of entanglement

Modern IT is very focused on economics. We talk endlessly about cost. We debate capital costs vs. operational costs--CAPEX vs. OPEX, in the lingo. We look at Total Cost of Operations (TCO) and we try to calculate our projects' Return On Investment (ROI). But even with all of these economic metrics, we miss an enormous source of costs: Our long-term entanglement with the products, technologies, and approaches we choose.

Long ago, we had a bright idea. "We could represent the year portion of dates with just two digits--that would save space!" We happily did that for a few … Read more

AT&T announces Mobile Hotspot App pricing

Just a couple of days ago, we reported that the HTC Inspire 4G for AT&T would launch on February 13. Aside from being the carrier's first 4G smartphone, it's also the first device to feature AT&T's Mobile Hotspot application. No pricing information was available for the service at first, but we have it now.

AT&T announced today that the feature will cost $45 per month for 4GB of data when bundled with the Data Pro data plan, which is required on all smartphones. Broken down, the Data Pro data plan costs $… Read more