Articles by Richard Adhikari

This story was originally published on Nov. 2, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed technology that could help fight blindness. It's aimed at the millions of people impacted by two of the major causes of blindness: age-related macular degeneration (A...

More shoppers went online to retailers' Web sites this holiday season, and overall they were happier with their visits than they were in 2008, a survey by ForeSee Results found. For the second straight year, Amazon.com led ForeSee's pack of top 40 U.S. e-retailers in terms of customer satisfaction. Netflix and QVC took second and third places, res...

Hackers have once again demonstrated that the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard, the most widely used mobile phone standard in the world, can be hacked. The GSM Association (GSMA) has acknowledged the technology's flaw, but it said the weakness is not a serious threat and that hackers have not been able to create a practical a...

As netbook sales continue to grow, hardware and software vendors are battling to exploit this relatively new market. Intel released a beta software development kit (SDK) in early December for developers who create applications for netbooks based on its Atom chip. These apps will run in the Microsoft Windows and Moblin operating systems. Meanwhile,...

When Google opened up the source code for its Chrome operating system last month, third-party hardware manufacturers lined up plans to build Chrome-based netbooks, with availability expected in late 2010. Could Google also be cooking up plans to sell its own, Google-branded Chrome netbook at around the same time? The blogosphere's rumor mill is hum...

This story was originally published on Dec. 2, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. In wanting to give peace a chance, the Dalai Lama and John Lennon don't have much company; fighting and causing trouble seem to be the preference of most of the world....

The mad rush for e-readers this holiday season has led Barnes & Noble to offer in-store certificates worth US$100 to customers who won't get its device, called the "Nook," by Christmas Eve as promised B&N has said that demand is so strong it can't keep up with the orders....

The mad rush for e-readers this holiday season has led Barnes & Noble to offer in-store certificates worth US$100 to customers who won't get its device, called the "Nook," by Christmas Eve as promised B&N has said that demand is so strong it can't keep up with the orders....

The mad rush for e-readers this holiday season has led Barnes & Noble to offer in-store certificates worth US$100 to customers who won't get its device, called the "Nook," by Christmas Eve as promised B&N has said that demand is so strong it can't keep up with the orders....

Intel unveiled several new Atom processors on Monday. The chips are smaller and more energy-efficient than their predecessors. They also integrate graphics processors (GPUs) and memory controllers into the CPUs. Two of them are single-core processors and the third is a dual-core CPU. All run at 1.66 GHz. Computers based on these new processors wil...

Twitter had a service outage Friday morning because its DNS servers were compromised. It was done by a hacker or group of hackers self-identified as the "Iranian Cyber Army." The group also took over the Iranian opposition Web site mowjcamp.org, the official Web site of the Green Movement. The Green Movement's opposition to the outcome of Iran's p...

The Blu-ray Disc Association released the specifications for 3-D Blu-ray on Thursday, just over a year after Panasonic first publicly demonstrated its application of 3-D Blu-ray technology. The specifications are backward-compatible with standard 2-D Blu-ray players, and disks and will run on Sony PlayStation 3 consoles.

Google is looking at quantum computing to help it sort through the millions of searches it conducts daily, and it's working with processors from Canadian company D-Wave Quantum computing will help Google with the sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and pattern recognition that its services are based on.

The war in the search engine market has evolved from a contest of speed and scale to one of innovation. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all tied in with Twitter for real-time search.

Home entertainment systems could soon see much higher wireless transmission speeds -- possibly of up to 7 gigabits per second (Gbps) -- if the plans of the Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance continue on course The Alliance, members of which include companies in the chip, mobile phone and telecommunications industries, announced the completion of its...

Wednesday announcements from Twitter and MySpace further indicated that social networking is now part of mainstream computing. At LeWeb, the European Internet event held in Paris, Twitter announced that it is opening up its data stream to all developers.

With the release of beta versions of its Chrome browser for the Mac and Linux platforms, Google looks to be laying the groundwork for becoming a major player in the next wave of computing. The Web browser one uses is being increasingly viewed as the next application platform, and getting the Chrome browser on more desktops could give Google strong...

Five leading American publishers, including Time and Conde Nast, officially unveiled what is, effectively, an online digital newsstand on Tuesday. The announcement ended months of speculation about the project. The five will offer a service from which readers can buy subscriptions to their publications.

Google on Monday announced expansions to its search service that will provide real-time content to update search results. Google also demonstrated Google Goggles, a visual search application that calls up information from Google's databases when people take a photo of objects with their Android phones.

Just one month after setting a new processing speed record with its Larrabee project, Intel has shelved plans to put out a new graphics chip based on that technology. Instead, it will use the technology as a software development platform for internal and external use in high-performance computing.