The federal government has decided to set a price of $AU900 million on the 700 MHz spectrum that remained unsold after auctions earlier this year, and in the process has closed off any chance that the spectrum would be given to the country's public safety agencies.…
For many of us, our earliest encounters with computing will have involved bending our uncultivated minds around word processing software, either in school or at work, but the days when Clippy and comic sans were novelties are long gone. New software created by Bret Taylor, the former Facebook CTO, and Kevin Gibbs, previously of Google, seems to breathing fresh air into the humdrum world of word processing though.
Quip is a multi-platform cloud-based word processing app that promises to make word processing seamless and efficient across mobile and desktop platforms. The app is optimised for different screen sizes and can adapt the document depending on the device you're viewing or editing on.
By: Katie Collins,
Business people using mobile devices are securing them with easy-to-crack PINs rather than more difficult passwords, a survey has found.…
Instead of being drenched by Amazon's cloud, cloud infrastructure biz ProfitBricks is trying to get out in front of the hardbacks'n'hosting monolith and lower its prices before Bezos & Co initiate another price drop.…
Google Glass wearers will have to get used to privacy-conscious people telling them to get lost - but a new map app from Mercedes for the techno-goggles may make that impossible.…
"Nothing happens. Nothing happens. And then everything happens," says Laura Lewis, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
"Our results are highly preliminary but we have found signatures of layering in the materials we have made." This is significant, she says, because the layering of iron and nickel suggests that the nanomaterial they are trying to make can become a "supermagnet". It is designed to be a synthetic form of tetrataenite, a rare magnetic extra-terrestrial iron-nickel alloy found only in meteorites.
Lewis is leading a $3.3m (£2.2m) fast-track Department of Energy research project to synthesise new supermagnetic materials and then work out how to mass-produce them for a market that is worth $20bn (£13bn) a year.
By: Mark Piesing,
A neighbourhood-watch scheme usually demands boots on the ground, but you could automate things with an ad-hoc notification system based on video cameras. Here's how.
By: James Floyd Kelly,
It can be useful in defending yourself from assailants, but what if you accidentally spray yourself with capsaicin? Fight back the pain with these hot tips.
By: Leila Johnston,
By: Kim Zetter,
Today, the last Freeview transmitters will be relocated out of the bands that were sold off for 4G telephony earlier this year. The whole shift has happened ahead of schedule, which means that by the beginning of autumn, EE's monopoly on next-generation telecoms will come to an end.…
Microsoft has tweaked the Word web app it offers with its SkyDrive cloud storage service, adding developer-friendly tools and the ability to work with JavaScript, CSS and HTML and other code files.…
Internet foghorn Robert Scoble has come out booming against claims that open source cloud project OpenStack should implement features found in major cloud provider Amazon Web Services.…
Dutch regulators have cleared Amazon's cloud for consumption by financial institutions within the country, validating the Amazon Web Services infrastructure for use even in tightly regulated industries.…
A Russian politician is trying to amend an internet censorship law so that it bans swearing on the web.
State Duma Deputy Yelena Mizulina, who is chairperson of Russia's Committee for Family, Women, and Children, has proposed the changes, which would affect social networks, social media and forums. If offending material is not deleted within 24 hours, the page would then be blocked and added to a blacklist.
Just like David Cameron's recent proposals for introducing stricter internet filtering in the UK, the aim of the legislation would be to protect children from encountering unsuitable content. The amendment would be to a law entitled 'On the protection of children from information harmful to their health and development', which came into effect in September 2012 and introduced a huge blacklist of sites covering topics such as drugs, suicide and child pornography.
A similar proposal to Mizulina's was put forward on 25 July by United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov, who wants to tighten controls over social networks and enforce a rule whereby to sign up for a dating site you have to do so using your passport. Milonov is the same politician who last year was behind a bill that banned "promoting sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism to minors".
By: Katie Collins,
Chip designer Qualcomm has taken a share in telecoms gear maker Alcatel-Lucent as the pair collaborate on Small Cells - despite the architectural differences of opinion.…
Chip designer Qualcomm has taken a share in telecoms gear maker Alcatel-Lucent as the pair collaborate on Small Cells - despite the architectural differences of opinion.…
The evolution of channel surfing risks sidelining public service broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV, and has prompted the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (aka the Ministry of Fun) to work out how much a prominent position on our Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) is worth.…
BT's soon-to-be new boss Gavin Patterson made the first big management decision of his reign today - and split the telecom giant's retail division into two distinct wings: consumer and business.…
Emulex has appointed a senior vice-president for operations, signalling new CEO Jeff Benck's intention to have his company survive as a viable business.…
