Technology

For the second time in a row, U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act(CISPA). Even if Obama threaten to veto CISPA because it could break civil liberties , the legislation passed it with 288-127.

According to TheVerge, Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) said that “our nation is under attack” while Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) went beyond imagination and compared made a connection with Boston Marathon bombings: “In the case of Boston they were real bombs, in this case they’re digital bombs. And these digital bombs are on their way.” How sick is that!

At the beginning of this week Google officially announced the specs of the Glass Explorer Edition. Now that all the rumours about specs have come to an end we can gladly talk about them.

First, we should say that these are just the specs of the first version of Glass, called the Explorer Edition and that will start to be shipped to the backers(explorers) of this project soon.

For start Glass Explorer Edition will come with a display that Google says it’s the equivalent of a 25-inch HD screen from eight feet away(approx 2.4 meters).

Over the past years, we’ve usually wrote articles from Mobile World Congress. The event takes place every year in February at Barcelona and it’s populated with gadgets and announcements. Unfortunately, year-over-year event’ glow started to fade away and it doesn’t have the same interest it had in the past. It’s not a surprise since companies started to announce their products by organizing their own events.

If I remember well, two years ago Samsung was unveiling Galaxy S II smartphone, during a MWC 2011 conference. This year was different. Sure, there were some released, but none of them were very important. I appreciate what LG did this year at MWC, because they had the courage to make some interesting announcements: they bought WebOS from HP and plan to incorporate it in Smart TVs, they brought Optimus F7 and F5 phones and demoed a 4K UltraHD streaming from a phone to a TV.

In other words, not pretty much happened during MWC. Here’s what was interesting:

It’s probably no secret by now that Microsoft has been trying its best to keep down the rumors and Internet chat about their Surface Phone. Whether it actually exists or not is probably lowest on the totem pole now, considering the fact that most techies and bloggers alike believe that the Microsoft Surface phone will definitely debut. It’s just a matter of when and what it will actually look like.

On October 25^th the Microsoft Surface tablet will officially launch. It appears to be part of a holiday program that Microsoft is working on to generate more interest in both their phone market and general hardware market all around. There’s word of a $99 Xbox 360 deal that requires a 2 year Xbox live subscription, as well as the new Windows 8 tablets and phones that are set to be launching soon as well.

In theory, if these deals go well, Microsoft will establish themselves as a serious competitor in both the tablet and phone market. If the Surface Tablet is a success, the Surface phone is the next logical step, right?

As a proud owner of the Nook Color, I was quite excited when I heard that Barnes and Noble was coming out with a new Nook HD tablet. It’s very obviously an attempt to compete with the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, but I was excited to see what it was going to offer anyway. There are two new tablets from Barnes & Noble that we’re going to be taking a look at below: the Nook HD and HD+.

From now until the end of September many of the big powerhouses in mobile technology are preparing to open up their doors to let us have a glance at what they’ve been developing all year. We’re all getting a front row seat to what is about to be released for the holiday season and there are some big changes on the horizon. Once upon a time these announcements were for products that would be available 6 months out or even further but with Apple’s keynotes taking the center stage to success all of these products will be ready to order within 24 hours of the announcement. While most of these will be pre-orders the shipment times are almost never that far out these days and for everyone who is looking forward to a piece of tech from their favorite vendor it’s time to ready your pocketbooks on what may be about to come.

Samsung is kicking off the announcements with the only major event that takes place in August. On August 29th they will be holding their Unpacked event in Berlin which is going to be showcasing “something” from Samsung Mobile. The rumor mill has it as the over sized Galaxy Note II though with the painful lawsuit they just had to go through with Apple I’m unsure if a single product is all that we’ll be seeing from them. They need some positive press so I would expect a few extra hints of things to come.

Technology companies are notorious for not working together, lately due to patent issues, so it is always refreshing when they decide to work together for creating something new. What is even more rare is when you have the likes of Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Mobile sitting down to form a technology alliance to be innovative in an area that has been severely lacking in having a mainstream adoption or standard service. It’s great in that case to see that they have come together with 19 other companies to create the In-Location Alliance.

The full list of companies involved are: Nokia, Samsung, Sony Mobile, Broadcom, CSR, Dialog Semiconductor, Eptisa, Geomobile, Genasys, Indra, Insiteo, Nomadic Solutions, Nordic Semiconductor, Nordic Technology Group, NowOn, Primax Electronics, Qualcomm, RapidBlue Solutions, Seolane Innovation, TamperSeal AB, Team Action Zone and Visioglobe. The main purpose of the group according to their press release is to be able to provide a: “high accuracy, low power consumption, mobility, implementability and usability.”