It started with a simple idea—an online version of the classic arcade game Asteroids, but on a massively multiplayer scale.
It would support hundreds of players at once, thanks to a scalable network backend. It would be real-time, meaning that every player would see every shot and every movement simultaneously without delay.
Online education is witnessing its own Avengers-like uniting of superhero forces as Harvard University and MIT recently announced “edX”, a combined $60 million joint initiative to offer their college-level courses online for free. Launching in the fall of 2012, edX is a not-for-profit organization formed by the two universities to bring each institution’s free online course offerings to a broader global audience.
How the internet can read your mind
Netgear is poised to be the first networking company with a next-generation router on the market—one that has been shown to reach speeds of up to 1.3Gbps in the 5GHz band. The company’s new router is based on the as-yet-unratified 802.11ac standard, which is theoretically three times faster than the preceding 802.11n standard.
A paradigm shift may be coming to the digital lifestyle. Instead of the PC being the center of the personal computing universe, consumers will be opting for tablets as their primary computing device and relying on cloud storage to access their content across their devices, according to a new report.
“This burgeoning market is set to disrupt the personal computing device and OS markets,” says the report from Forrester Research on the future of computing.
The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG); the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG); The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew); and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) have announced plans to develop the World Flora—the first modern, online catalog of the world’s plants—by the year 2020. This massive undertaking will include the compilation of information on up to 400,000 plant species worldwide. It will also achieve a primary target of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, an ambitious effort first adopted by the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity in 2002, to halt the continuing loss of plant biodiversity around the globe. Representatives of the four botanical gardens recently met to organize a framework to guide their efforts and respond to this need for a baseline survey of the plants of the world that has been called for by the international community. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) detailing plans to create the World Flora was recently signed into effect by the four institutions.
Do you know what happens in one minute on the Internet? In just one minute, more than 204 million emails are sent. Amazon rings up about $83,000 in sales. Around 20 million photos are viewed and 3,000 uploaded on Flickr. At least 6 million Facebook pages are viewed around the world. And more than 61,000 hours of music are played on Pandora while more than 1.3 million video clips are watched on YouTube.
Across Silicon Valley, companies like Google and Facebook are waking up and realizing that the future of the Internet is no longer taking place on the desktop or laptop - it is taking place on the tablet and smartphone. As a result, there has been a huge land grab in 2012 to control the future evolution of the mobile Internet. Facebook’s recent $1 billion acquisition of Instagram is just the latest sign that the social networking paradigm that we’ve learned to “like” is nearly over. The jig is up. You can look at nearly every significant tech deal of the past 60 days through this prism - the Instagram acquisition, the Path deal, Microsoft’s billion-dollar patent deal with AOL, the Google-Oracle legal dust-up over the Android operating system - as a desperate attempt to monetize those tiny screens in the palm of your hand.
Much like the future of media itself, the future of television is more than social. Social is a fabric; it connects the individual nodes that make up the human network. But, social is also not a means to an end. And the same is true about the working theories driving Social TV. Understanding the role social plays in how viewers connect with programs, and other people watching those programs, is essential to defining the future of television.
In the quest to build networks that can carry information reliably and with absolute security over long distances, scientists are now a big step closer, according to research in this week’s issue of Nature.
Stephan Ritter and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, in Garching, Germany, have constructed an elementary quantum network with two nodes. They say it is a proof of concept that could one day be extended to create large-scale quantum information networks that guarantee the security of message transmission by encoding data using the quantum state of photons.
In a poll published last week by the American magazine Consumer Reports, 71% of adults polled confessed to being very concerned about Internet companies abusing their personal information. But what this poll failed to ask was whether we fear governmental abuse of our online data as much as abuse from private companies.
Last year, YouTube rolled out a beta feature that let users convert standard 2D videos to 3D with one click. While the feature is still in beta, YouTube is feeling confident enough in it to roll things out on a wider scale — now, every “short form” 1080p video uploaded to YouTube will automatically be converted to 3D. If you want to watch in 3D, there’s now an option in the quality menu — just remember to bust out your 3D glasses.
Brazil offers so much to those who visit: samba music, beautiful beaches, a rich culture and free mobile Internet access from a Coca-Cola machine. The soda company has a machine named the “Happiness Refill,” which it installed at one of its stores on the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. The machine dispenses Internet access when users tap their phones to a pad.
A few weeks ago, Fox News breathlessly reported that the embattled WikiLeaks operation was looking to start a new life under on the sea. WikiLeaks, the article speculated, might try to escape its legal troubles by putting its servers on Sealand, a World War II anti-aircraft platform seven miles off the English coast in the North Sea, a place that calls itself an independent nation. It sounds perfect for WikiLeaks: a friendly, legally unassailable host with an anything-goes attitude.
If you miss the days when being a kid gave you a license to bang away incessantly at every piano you could find, Multiplayer Piano might just be the social music experiment you’ve been waiting for. The dead simple website offers a communal piano that users can play away at with their mouse cursors or keyboards. If the particular room you’re in gets overly crowded — or if someone comes in a spams A sharp — you can switch between available rooms or make your own.
