Wired Geeks

Archive for the ‘Companies’ Category

A new notebook has been introduced by Lenovo called the IdeaPad Y650 notebook which is a slim noteook. It has a light Weight around 2.55 kg, the LCD screen is about 16-inch wide. The body of the notebook is designed with a material called carbon fiber reinforced plastic, which makes it as thin as 1-inch. The notebook is assembled with Nvidia GT105M with CUDA acceleration graphics processor which supports high resolution graphics. The JBL Speakers which comes along with Dolby Home Theater and also with the software called OneKey theater which provides the users with an easy option by which we can switch the display and sound effect of the PC from normal to movie mode. For longer battery life the notebook is embedded with, this reduces the energy consumption and increases battery life. The notebook is capable of supporting Blu-Ray discs and comes along with a built-in TV Tuner card. In addirion to all, the notebook has Touch sensitive controls and ambient light sensor technology,this is a sensor on the PC’s cover that automatically detects changes in the environment’s light to and helps to protect our eyes.

The world’s first carbon neutral cell phone has been launched by Motorola, which tackles the major problem of e-waste. The Renew W233, is the model designed by Motorola, which is a carbon neutral mobile and it is to be the first certified by Carbon free cell phone on the market with 100% recyclable housing made from recycled water bottles. A report say that about 426,000 cell phones are getting retired every single day in the United States, which are mostly dumped in the landfills. That is definitely a huge amount of waste, and this e-wastes kills about thousands of poor residents in developing countries where these e-wastes are being dumped. The features of Motorola Renew W233 cellphone is admirable because of its sustainable features which addresses directly the phone’s carbon footprint and life cycle. In collaboration with Carbonfund.org, Motorola gets the energy to manufacture, distribute, and operate the phone by investing in renewable energy sources and reforestation. Once the life cycle of the phone comes to an end, it is easily recycled by placing it in a prepaid envelope, which is provided along with the box. Moreover, the phone’s packaging consumes 22% less material and the manual is printed on post consumer recycled paper with soy-based inks.The companies should begin to think about, where their products will end up once their conventional usage is completed. After all, how can we as consumers be responsible for properly disposing of such items. It’s very nice, that this phone has a recyclable housing, and it’s commendable step forward for Motorola, but we should start demanding the manufacturers to take entire responsibility for all parts of their products. Otherwise, accumulation of these toxic e-wastes will never come to an end.

Sony has launced a new laptop named as Sony Z48 GD, which is one step ahead than the other company laptops available in the market. This is because of its various functions, small size, design and high quality outputs. The hardware used in this laptop has never been used in laptops which has been launched so far. This main aim of the laptop is to provide a great performance for the users with its highly configured hardware. Apart from design and performance,the price of the laptop is little high because of its compact size and weight. It is something that is very vital as long as ultramini are concerned, it simply weighs just about 1.39 kg, it is very light and portable to carry in your back pack. Like any other laptop, this laptop is  also provided with a 13 inch screen and people those who fly very often will really enjoy it.For the purpose of entertainment and fun, this laptop is provided with many impressive features. It has a inbuilt Intel 4500 MHD graphics, which  is sufficient for running simple applications, but GeForce 9300 M GS GPU provides a substantial value and gives more GPU power, it can be started on by switching from the Stamina mode to the Speed mode when flight, which is there in physical unit itself. It has a  good built-in speakers and 13.1 inch LED backlight display, which provides a  great quality graphics and audio by which most of the  games can be played at its highest resolution without any trouble. By connecting it with a large screen, users will enjoy watching larger screen movies.It has a perfect configuration, which comprises of Intel Core 2 Duo P9700 processor, a 256 GB Hard Disk and 6 GB of DDR3 RAM, which provides a great performance.Based on its performance, i say that it is one step ahead than “Mac book pro”.

In the World of mobile OS, Google Android is a challenger still and plays a vital role, as the amount of devices used for the purpose of running the system are about to come out in the coming months along with the combination with its open approach.The main reason for the success of Apple’s App Store for iPhone/iPod is measured by counting the number of applications that has been developed for the platform, it is around 70,000 applications till now.But Google didn’t disclose the number of applications which are exactly available on Android Market, so it is difficult to compare the two on this particular level.But, I am very thankful to AndroLib,as it provides us a useful website from which we can browse Android applications from our PC.There are more than 10,000 applications and games available on this platform today and above all, majority of the applications are available at free of cost and to be exact atleast 64.2% of applications are for free. The company has to admit first that there are more than 10,000 applications tracked by them, but Google says that there is no way to get an idea of the exact number of applications in Android market.But,the Android market has grown upto 4.4 times in just four months.This is a great achivement for Google.

In the begining of this month a Facebook application for Android was launched, this is a much anticipated Facebook application specially designed for Android. Even though it is a official release ,as said by the company, but a news came out that this application was not released by Facebook, but Google has built this application themselves,as they thought that having a Facebook application was more important to them. In this Facebook application there is no messaging facility, just the news stream is displayed and it has a ability to post status updates and we can take/upload photos to Facebook. The cool stuffs which are available in Facebook 3.0 application for iPhone users are not yet available in Android. But,the application runs fast in Android when compared to iPhone. In iPhone many people goes to Facebook through browser as the application was too slow to use.But the application in Android is more quick as it can do three or four functions quickly without a single problem. Another wonderful feature is that,notifications of new events can be viewed upto date, as Android application has the ability to run in the background,even though you are not actively using the application you can see this stuff in the background.Below there is a video demo about this application.

Open Table was launched on iPhone in November of last year. A very first comment came from a Gentleman named “Chris” saying that “Unless Open Table comes on Android,it’s a useless application”. A very good news came for “Chris” this week that, online restaurant reservation service launched their application onto the Android market with both their web service and the  available on other platforms.We can check for and reserve tables using this Open Table Android application and we need not dial any of the numbers or contact the persons in the restaurants for reservation purpose.Just enter the date,time, and size of the party on the open table, it will provide us a list of restaurants that are applicable for you, just pick one of them and confirm and your name will get on to the list by open table.The applications in Android always takes a step further than the iPhone variant,This makes use of Android ability to tie multiple applications together.Both WHERE and GoodFood are now partners of the Android market,which allows the customers to jump immediately into Open Table and make their reservations.Moreover,this application is easy and works well ,the best and above all, it is for free.Check it out in the Android market.

Recently mant report say that older versions of WordPress are not secure and are exposed to more security threats.Wordpress is one of the most largest blogging engines used world wide about 5,317,360 and counting downloads have been made for its latest version.Most of the blogs in the Web rely on WordPress for the purpose of putting their posts online.Wordpress acts as a backbone for the blog with its user friendly interface and make the work easy for the bloggers.I will tell the 2 clues by which you can find that your site has been attacked:

1. there are strange additions to permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

2. that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

This attack can be prevented by updating the WordPress to its latest version or installing its latest version immediately.It is safe to change all your passwords to a stronger password, even the blog access password of all users including the database,FTP,control panels,etc should be changed.This are the procedures which are highly recommended to prevent your blog from attacks.The parent company of WordPress, Automatic didn’t comment anything on this issue.Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress has mentioned that Automatic is not a parent company of WordPress, and it’s just a company which contributes to WordPress organization like any other companies does.He also published some steps in a blog post to ensure that your WordPress blog is safe.

Health Hiway,a Indian Software company running in Bangalore which helps hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, insurance providers and diagnostic centers by providing web-based software for them.This software helps to maintain their billing, x-rays , patient records and claims.Recently, this company has raised $4 milion in an unattributed round of funding from Apollo Greylock Partners.Health Hiway was launched in the year 2007 by Apollo Hospital Group,which is one of the most largest health care group in India.This company has offered many software products for its clients.The most worthy product of them are Clinic Connect,this product helps to maintain the patients registration and medical records.Claim Exchange is a sytem which helps people to process their claim through online. And Image Connect,this is the most useful software in medical field as it is used to capture and process radio images CTs,MRIs and X-rays which can be shared with by doctors.

Google Listen,latestly a new project that Google has added to Google Labs  and it’s sure to crowd pleaser for Android users..Google Listen,is an Android  application,which lets us to search through a web audio content, as quickly as possible.This application not only allows to search  the audio content ,but it also allows us to download or stream the audio content directly to our phone.This application acts similar to a podcaster by allowing  us to subscribe to audio feeds and new content is downloaded over the air. It is very simple to use this application, just go to the search bar, then you type and enter the thing whatever you are looking for,let it be a more general term or a specific podcast.The most relevant podcast and audio clips which are scattered across the web is pulled up by google ,then you can begin the streaming immediately. If you want to make multiple choices,you can build a queue, the playing of our  subscriptions will be automatically begined by Google Listen,when it has reached the end of the playlist.At this point ,the application is indexing “ thousands” of content sources only in English, But Google intends to expand to other languages.At this time ,Google Listen is available only on Android.This is due to the reason that, application is still under development. A fact that,this application has been omitted from iPhone has created a big issue,because Google has  got  its application approved  for App Store recently.Apple has also rejected a native application of  Google Latitude and it has also banned all the Voice apps of Google in the past few months.For competing with iTunes podcasting functionality, Apple would have smacked the app down well.Whatever the thing is, Google rocks  by supporting the devices it plans.

SEO.com,which is a Online marketing and Search engine optimization company ,is now expanding his service along with acquisition of Graphics.net, by including Web designing/development along with other services.The acquisition of Grahics.net by SEO.com is for an undisclosed amount.Micheal Benson,has joined SEO.com as the Vice president of Web development from Graphics.net.Graphics.net is a Maryland based company,the acquisition of it by SEO.com makes sense,as SEO.com can combine website optimization with design services and social media applications.Its also interesting to note that,in the past,Graphics.net had did some design and other work for SEO.com.So,this makes clear that, there was already a collaboration between them.There may be more connections than this,as both are are portfolio companies of private equity firm WashingtonVC.Moreover ,this might not be an acquisition,as the capitalists may try to melt both of them together.SEO.com says that,after a decade,there was a considerable growth in its business and it has increased its size to five times in last year alone by increasing the number of working employees from 12 employess to more than 50 today and has moved its firm to salt lake county,which is a larger office.But ,it’s not clear for me,as I am not sure,how many employees from Graphis.net has transitioned to SEO.com.