Kurt D. Lynn

If Plastic Logic has its way, printed newspapers will be a thing of the past. The company today introduced a new electronic reader focused on handling business and newspaper documents. The reader offers the same highly-readable display created by E ... Ink and offered on Sony and Amazon readers. The primary benefits of the E Ink display are that it does not need to be backlit, content remains on the screen even after power is turned off, and it looks better, not worse, in bright light. The Plastic Logic display, however, is more than twice the size of the Sony and Amazon readers and can store ... (view more)

Ten years ago, Google filed its business incorporation papers. In the decade since, the search company has changed the planet. Without any doubt, it is the most successful business on the Internet landscape and is well-poised to continue in that ... vein. To fully appreciate Google's achievement, one needs only to examine its history in comparison major competitor Microsoft. A decade down the road, Google boasts revenues of just under $20 billion. Microsoft is 33 years old and has revenues of approximately $60 billion. At age 10, Microsoft had revenues of only $140 million. Google's market value ... (view more)

The battle lines have now been drawn clearly. Wide-open Internet usage could easily, and soon, become a thing of the past. On October 1, one of the nation's largest Internet providers will implement a new bandwidth limit policy for its residential ... customers. According to reports, by this time next month Comcast will introduce a 250 gigabyte-per-month limit. (Source: nytimes.com ) The Comcast move follows a recent dispute about its 'throttling' policy where the company limited bandwidth for customers using the BitTorrent file-sharing program. On August 1, the Federal Communications Commission ... (view more)

The United States has long been considered an "innovation nation". But last year, John Kao, an accomplished jazz keyboard player, Yale philosopher, Medical School graduate, and an MBA from Harvard Business school sounded the alarm: America was ... losing its innovative touch. In his book, prepared for the 2008 presidential election candidates (inspired by Hillary Clinton), Kao points out that innovation drives geopolitical position and America is losing it. (Source: businessweek.com ) The main justifications for his position come from the globalization phenomena. He cited several observations in ... (view more)

Delta Airlines is the latest airline to announce plans to offer WiFi Internet service on its domestic flights. The new service will allow laptops, smartphones and other handheld devices to access the Internet while en route. Delta will charge a flat ... $9.95 for short flights of 3 hours or less and $12.95 for longer flights. Internet WiFi service will begin initially with Delta's fleet of MD80-type aircraft and expand throughout its entire fleet by the end of summer 2009. (Source: nytimes.com ) With the pressure of rising fuel costs, new airline revenue opportunities have gained momentum. Delta ... (view more)

Finally, software tools for those that have difficulty remembering things. Both IBM and Microsoft are currently testing software designed to improve individual memory. Let's face it, people today are overwhelmed with information and data -- so much ... so that they can't process it or retrieve it when needed. The new software will help with that by combining pictures, sounds, dates, times, locations, and text that is recorded through some type of everyday mobile electronic device (like a smart cell phone) and indexed for later retrieval. (Source: computerworld.com ) The IBM version of the ... (view more)

Reading, at least in the conventional way of leafing page by page through a book, is at risk and the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of the Internet and (of course) television. The decline of reading has fueled a massive national ... debate not only about 'if' we read but 'how' we read. The debate began in 2002 when the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that the number of non-reading adults had increased by 17 million to 89 million adults, roughly one out of three adults. According to the NEA, only 47% of American adults read 'literature', including poems, plays, ... (view more)

Five years after the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, SPAM still runs rampant across the Internet. According to SpamCop.net for July 24, 2008, there are approximately 3 million SPAM messages milling through the Internet during any given 24 hour period. The ... average active email address will be sent between 300 and 500 spam messages each day. Many, of course, are blocked or filtered, but those numbers are still 5 to 10 times higher than in 2003 when the CAN-SPAM Act first went into effect. The odd thing? According to anti-SPAM activists Spamhaus.org there are 100 known SPAM operators that are responsible ... (view more)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has decided to radically expand the choices of domain names that can be assigned. Two new proposals to the regulatory group were recently considered: a) allowing non-Latin characters (e.g. ... Russian, Chinese, Arabic, etc.) and b) domains that consist of any letter or number combination up to 64 characters in length. (Source: cbc.ca ) The proposal to consider non-Latin characters will be tested before final approval. The proposal to open up domain names was approved. The change was initiated by concerns that all the meaningful domain names ... (view more)

It seems that Intel will soon find themselves displaced by new, low power, high-function chips pioneered by cell phone chip makers. The new generation of chips are lower cost and use half the power of Intel's own "low power" equivalents. How did ... this happen? For almost 30 years, Intel has focused on improving speed, ignoring the power consumption issue. Improving performance was everything. But in the same time period, the cell phone emerged and evolved. Cell phone chips were created using completely different design constraints. Battery life and cost were the driving requirements. Using less ... (view more)