);
//]]>// >By John P. Mello Jr.
Jan 13, 2021 5:23 AM PT
Smart devices, the cornerstone of the home of the future, can t seem to capture the imagination or open the wallets of a large number of Americans.
Some 46.7 million broadband households aren t ready to buy a smart home device, according to a survey released this week by Parks Associates, a market research and consulting company specializing in consumer technology products, in Addison, Texas.
The households gave a number of reasons from staying away from smart home devices:
44 percent (20.5 million households) said the devices are too expensive.
38 percent (17.7 million) can t see the benefits of the gadgets.
Dec 16, 2020 8:52 AM PT
A demand for a massive amount of data from nine technology companies including Facebook and Twitter has been made by the Federal Trade Commission in what could be a prelude to regulation on the handling data by the industry.
The demand made Monday by the FTC seeks to obtain information on how many users the companies have, how active the users are, what the companies know about them, how they got that information, and what steps the companies take to continue to engage users.
The agency also wants to know how social media and video streaming companies process the data they collect and what kinds of inferences they are able to make about user attributes, interest and interactions.
Jan 20, 2021 4:00 AM PT
A strategic partnership with Microsoft was announced Tuesday by General Motors and Cruise aimed at speeding up the commercialization of shared self-driving vehicles.
In addition, Microsoft will be joining GM, Honda and some institutional investors in adding US$2 billion to Cruise s coffers, bringing the value of the shared self-driving vehicle company to $30 billion. The companies in this sector are going to need a long runway before they generate enough revenues to be self-sustaining so another $2 billion in the bank for Cruise is the single most important aspect of this, Sam Abuelsamid,
principal analyst for e-mobility at Guidehouse Insights, a market intelligence company in Detroit, told TechNewsWorld.
);
//]]>// >By John P. Mello Jr.
Jan 12, 2021 4:15 AM PT
The PC market ended 2020 with a big bang, as shipments during the final quarter rose 25 percent over the same period in 2019, according to a report by research firm Canalys.
Shipments of desktops, notebooks and workstations reached a record 90.3 million units during the period, the report noted.
PC shipments jumped for the third consecutive quarter during the year, with the fourth quarter showing a 13 percent increase over the previous quarter.
For the entire year, Canalys reported, PC shipments grew 11 percent, the highest full-year growth since 2010, and reached 297 million units, the highest shipment volume since 2014.
);
//]]>// >By John P. Mello Jr.
Feb 3, 2021 4:33 AM PT
A step toward engineering a new generation of powerful quantum computers has been made by a team of scientists and engineers at the University of Sydney, Microsoft and EQUS, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems.
The team, which published their findings in the Jan. 25 issue of Nature Electronics, invented a cryogenic computer chip capable of functioning at temperatures near absolute zero, which could enable a new crop of high performance quantum computers capable of performing calculations with thousands of qubits, or more.
Qubits are the quantum equivalent of the bits used by traditional computers. Because qubits aren t binary they don t process information using zeroes and ones they re capable of much faster performance. For a variety of reasons, however, quantum computers, up to now, could only accommodate a few dozen qubits. That s why the new cryo chip, called Gooseb