Sergey Brin gets in your head

Analysis Google is on a mission to make web search as fast as the human brain will allow. On Wednesday morning in San Francisco, as she unveiled Google Instant, a radical overhaul of the company's search engine that updates search results as you type, uber-Googler Marissa Mayer called it "search at the speed of thought." We can safely classify that as an exaggeration for effect, but Mayer's bon mot at least gets to the heart of Google's intentions.…

Founders sing a new Songza

Digital music site Amie Street has been bought by Amazon, but the founders of the user-fueled music service aren't abandoning their efforts to bring social networking to music lovers.…

Waledac's 276 domain names seized

A federal magistrate judge has recommended that Microsoft be given ownership of 276 internet addresses used to control “Waledac,” a massive botnet that the software company has been working to bring down.…

Operators are working on ways to handle an impending spectrum shortage.



Sinclair - ZX Spectrum - Business - United States - Federal Communications Commission

Apple announced last week that more than one million users signed up for Ping in the service's first 48 hours of availability. Ping, as apparently a million of...



Apple - Social network - iTunes - Facebook - 48 Hours

Trestles gives Opteron 6100s some love

Appro International, the upstart HPC cluster maker, has got another big order from its biggest customer, the San Diego Supercomputer Center.…

If you own an iPhone 4 and find that you burn too quickly through its battery despite the 16 percent capacity bump, you have a new battery expansion option from...



IPhone - Mophie - Battery - Apple - Smartphones

RF Code uses a combination of radio frequency identification (RFID) and infrared technology to keep tabs on the location of individual IT assets.



Asset tracking - Radio-frequency identification - Business - Business Services - Physical Asset Management

Want an easy way to shoot in 3D without dropping at least $500? The $70 3D Shot Cam lets you create 3D images for less than you think.



Japan - Photography - art - Toy Camera - Asia

While many people didn’t buy an iPhone 4 because of the faulty antenna, many more didn’t buy one because they didn’t want to use AT&T as their carrier, a study says.



IPhone - AT&T - Apple - Handhelds - Smartphones

Google's new Instant feature, which refreshes search results while people type queries, presents big changes for users, publishers and marketers.



Google - search - Search Engines - Companies - Google Instant

"Predictive" search results may be extra useful on mobile devices, but could become a liability with slow wireless speeds.



Google - Search - Search Engines - Mobile device - IPhone

Adobe today warned users that attacks have begun exploiting an unpatched bug in its popular Reader and Acrobat PDF viewing and creation software.



Adobe Acrobat - Document - Data Formats - PDF - Publishing

The mastermind behind the 2008 RBS WorldPay hack has reportedly been sentenced to four years' probation in Russia.



RBS WorldPay - Russia - Royal Bank of Scotland Group - Hacks - Probation

CouchIO no more

NoSQL start-up CouchIO is targeting mobile and clouds after just a year of trying to monetize the company's CouchDB document store.…

Free On-Demand Webcast - Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

Verizon has made no secret of their interest in expanding beyond broadband and eventually becoming a company that offers you, well, everything -- including home automation and security services. To that end, Verizon this week has invested in home automation outfit 4Home, and in January at CES, Verizon and 4Home will be showing off home automation services that will work over Verizon's upcoming LTE wireless broadband network. Of course maybe before Verizon gets into smart refrigerators they can offer FiOS users that 802.11N-capable router they told us was supposed to arrive last month? We've asked for an update on that, but in the mean time you can check out some of what 4Home offers here.
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The signal problems caused by the iPhone 4's antenna design generated a lot of press, but what affect did the issue have on sales? That's the question that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster attempted to answer with a survey that he shared in a recent research note. His conclusion: the "antennagate" problem impacted potential sales as much as 20 percent, but that's nothing compared to sales lost because the iPhone is locked exclusively to AT&T.

The survey was conducted on 258 random cell phone users in Minneapolis. Though limiting responses from just one urban area means there could be some bias towards a particular carrier, the respondents were spread across the four major carriers. Among those surveyed, about 30 percent each already used an iPhone, BlackBerry, or "other" phone, while about 10 percent used an Android phone.

Of those surveyed, 69 percent said they were aware of the problems with the iPhone 4 antenna design. That's not surprising given that the issue was widely publicized immediately after the device launched, eventually necessitating a special press conference from Apple to address the problem. However, only 20 percent of those aware of the problem said it negatively impacted their decision to buy one.

A bigger issue, noted Munster, is three times as many respondents brought up the issue that the iPhone isn't available on Verizon—without prompting from the surveyors. "The antenna issue is removing upside potential for iPhone units, but Verizon is actually the most significant factor limiting demand," he wrote.

Though the survey population is somewhat limited, this jibes with what we have heard in and around the Orbiting HQ. When people see me using my iPhone 4 in public, the most common question is, "What is the reception like? I heard the antenna is bad." After discussing the issue, however, the most common conclusion tends to be, "Yeah, I'll probably end up getting one anyway."

In a recent Ars reader poll about Verizon iPhone availability, more than half the respondents that are current AT&T iPhone users would switch to Verizon if the iPhone was available on that carrier. Nearly half the respondents were current Verizon customers that would get an iPhone if it were available. Clearly, breaking free of AT&T's exclusivity could tap a large potential market for new iPhone users.

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Google Voice in Gmail Offers call recording, screening, and missed call notices. However, business users of Google Apps are missing out on the new features, at least for now.



Google - search - Search Engines - Business - Companies