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Intel: Honey I Shrunk the Memory

All of the mobile Internet devices I’ve been ranting about lately utilize some kind of tiny memory; whether that is a small form factor hard drive or flash RAM, depends on the maker. Devices like the iPhone, and its iPod cousins, have traditionally used hard drives to achieve greater storage capacities, but now that Intel is showing off its latest success we might soon see more device makers moving into flash RAM for price and durability considerations.

Intel and Micron have teamed to produce a new NAND flash chip that is on a smaller scale that previous versions, yet still holds 4 GB of memory. Shrinking the chips from 40 nanometers to 34 nanometers might not sound all that impressive to you at first, but realize that any miniaturization typically means less power use and of course, smaller form factor. But, the interesting thing about this chip is that you can stack them to offer devices up to, and over, 64 GB or RAM. Suddenly the power consumption falls, while the available storage space jumps into the range that you need for rich media such as music, video and applications.

Yahoo Introduces BrowserPlus™

Yahoo’s new BrowserPlus™ gives web developers the fire power to compete against desktop developers. With the proliferation of technology like Google Gears and now BrowserPlus™, we are creeping towards a true web operating system, not just ‘web‘ pages, sites or application.

BrowserPlus™ allows for the storage on your local hard drive of data to be used by your browser. Normally the web browser only stores and retrieves small bits of information, like images and cookies, but BrowserPlus™ can store data, manipulate and send data back to the web application that you are using. More than that though, and perhaps more powerful yet, it can update signed applications on the fly without restarting the browser. To me the only issue is that the developer still needs to write these applications for both the Windows and Mac platforms, once we are past that, then the real gains happen.

Copyright Information On The Run

I have been following the Viacom suit against Google and its child company, YouTube. Viacom is claiming that Google is hurting Viacom’s business by allowing clips of Viacom shows to be loaded onto the site. That thought alone made me wonder about copyright infringement on the Internet. Technorati follows 112.8 million blogs on a daily basis, but there are more out there and more popping up daily. Technorati does exactly what a lot of us do, they really only count the ‘known’ blogs. Do we count MySpace and Facebook blogs? Both of them can contain news and information about anything and anyone.

If Viacom’s suit brings about some kind of change in how companies like Google view information then we are in trouble. Google is saying the same thing already, they are telling the courts not to hold them liable for what their users post on YouTube. As an author I understand wanting to control where my words are used and who could perhaps claim them as their own, but as a blogger I also see the threat in a company claiming I cannot utilize some of their information in my post.

Just yesterday, another group announced they are suing Google for republishing information. This time it is a group of Belgian newspapers, suing Google under their umbrella organization, Copiepresse. They are seeking $77 million and a court order that would preclude Google.be and Google News from including their stories. I personally use Google News all day long and I can tell you that I would never have found a tenth of the articles I read daily without the site indexing them for me. In my opinion Copiepresse should be thankful for inclusion on the Google sites, I am sure more readers means better ad sales, at least it used to.

Matt

Interesting Site of the Day: I have been experimenting for about a week with Topicle, a new site that allows your to create your own search engine for free. No, you can’t brand it with your own logo or look and feel, yet, but I like how quickly you get something up and functional. In about three minutes I had added a few URL’s for my search engine to index, I simply allowed in only websites that compliment searching for technology news in the enterprise; Slashdot, Information Week and TechCrunch among them, and then I published it: http://technologystory.topicle.com/

Tags: Facebook, Google, Intel, Internet, iPhone, MySpace, Technorati, Topicle, Viacom, YouTube

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