News
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Google Public DNS Now Handles 70 Billion Requests Per Day, 70% From Outside U.S.
Google just announced that its public DNS service now handles an average of more than 70 million requests per day. While Google doesn’t often talk about its [...]
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With 5 Million More Euros in the Bank, Pearltrees Gets Ready to Scale and Start Monetizing
The Paris-based social curation platform Pearltrees just announced that it has raised a Series B round of 5 million Euros (about $6.62 million USD). The money is [...]
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Tweet Safer: Twitter Makes HTTPS the Default for All Users
The title really says it all. Last year, Twitter started giving its users the option to use HTTPS to keep their connections safe over unsecured Internet connections. [...]
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Study: Hotmail’s Spam Filters Are Better Than Gmail’s and Yahoo’s
Microsoft's Hotmail has a bit of a reputation for having inadequate spam filters. A new study by Cascade Insight, though, argues that Hotmail actually provides better spam [...]
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The Google Doctor Will See You Now: Google Improves Results for Health Searches
Google search is no substitute for actually visiting a doctor, but millions of people use the search engine to look up symptoms every day. Now, Google is [...]
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Opinion
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3 Biggest Disappointments in Tech of 2010
Lots of great stuff happened in the tech world in 2010, but for every success like the iPad and Roku, there was also a major disappointment along the way. The bigger the hype, the greater the disappointment, of course, so this lists features the top three products and events in 2010 that, in my view, were the biggest letdowns.
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After a Year of Hype, Augmented Reality Finally Gets Useful
Augemented reality was one of the most overused buzzwords of the year, but for the most part, the applications we saw weren’t really augmenting reality. Instead, like Layar and others, they take a phone’s camera picture, GPS coordinates and compass heading and provide users with an overlay of nearby sights and shops. For some apps – especially stargazing apps like Star Walk – this is fine, but for most use cases, it’s not really useful. Another type of augmented reality (AR) app that’s hot right now uses paper markers and replaces them with 3D animation on your phone’s screen – even Hallmark is getting in this business now, but it’s more of a gimmick than a useful application of AR. The real promise of AR reaches far beyond this, however.
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5 Services that Deserved More Attention in 2010
As the year draws to an end, it’s hard not to look back and think about all the cool apps that I looked at over the last 12 months. I’ll talk a little bit about my favorite apps and biggest disappointments in other posts, but I also wanted to highlight some of the coolest apps and Web Services that I use all the time but that didn’t get a lot of mainstream (or even tech blog) coverage in the last year and that deserve another look.
Without further ado, here is my list for 2010.
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Let's Cut the Hype: Facebook's Email Service Won't be a "Gmail Killer"
Facebook is launching an email service on Monday. While that’s only a rumor for now, I think it’s a well substantiated one and there is little doubt in my mind that that’s what we are going to get. But this won’t be a “Gmail killer” as the project is apparently internally known at Facebook. Sadly, though, the meme that this could really be a Gmail killer is already making its rounds and won’t let up until Monday – when exhausted bloggers will likely split into two camps: those who think Facebook just killed Gmail and those who are disappointed that it didn’t.
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