Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the good old days when a gigabyte was considered a lot of space? Improvements in hard disk technology have allowed the humble magnetic drive to reach the dizzying heights of multiple terabytes of storage, but Cisco foresees a future that’s a few orders of magnitude more impressive. Pinpointing 2015 as the commencement of what it calls the zettabyte era, the company has put together a handy infographic to show us just how much data can be fit into one: you can alternatively think of it as the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs, 36 million years of HD video, or the volume of the Great Wall of China if you allow an 11oz cup of coffee to represent a gigabyte of data. So “zetta” must be Greek for one hell of a lot, but what Cisco expects is that we’ll be pushing that much information around the web each year by 2015. Any bets on how many exabytes of it will be to stream videos of cats diving into cardboard boxes?

Visualized: a zettabyte originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia, pre- and post-Elopcalypse. We’ve long wondered how MeeGo, an OS that Stephen Elop himself said “inspires both confidence and excitement” in October 2010, could be cast aside so quickly in favor of Windows Phone, an OS still struggling to find traction in the heated smartphone market. Well, now we know. Bloomberg recounts a January 3rd meeting between Nokia’s Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö and Nokia’s freshman CEO. After Kai expressed his concern with MeeGo’s ability to effectively respond to Apple’s iOS and Android operating systems, the two decided to interview two dozen “influential employees” about MeeGo, ranging from execs to engineers. Here’s how Bloomberg recounts the events that followed:

Before the first interview, Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, their target date for introduction, and the current levels of bugs in each product. Soon the whiteboard was filled with color, and the news was not good: At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014-far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call Oistämö, but his phone battery was dead. “He must have been trying an Android phone that day,” says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, “It was truly an oh-s–t moment-and really, really painful to realize where we were,” says Oistämö. Months later, Oistämö still struggles to hold back tears. “MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company,” he says, “and we’d come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It’s not a nice thing.”

Nokia is now on track to release at least one Windows Phone handset in 2011 with a dozen more in 2012.

The ‘oh sh_t’ moment that Nokia decided to abandon MeeGo originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The aftermath of Microsoft’s announcement that it’ll buy Skype for $8.5 billion was filled with speculation about why the price was so high, who Microsoft was bidding against, and who inside Redmond was the driving force behind such a large expenditure. At least one of those queries has been demystified today, thanks to Bill Gates asserting himself as “a strong proponent at the board level for the deal being done.” Microsoft’s Chairman of the Board expressed his enthusiasm for gobbling up Skype in an interview with the BBC — one which UK residents may see in full at the iPlayer link below — and concluded that “it’s a great purchase that a lot of innovation will come out of.” Adding his support to Steve Ballmer’s already public excitement about the Skype takeover, Bill stresses that “the importance of software is higher today than ever,” while also predicting that video conferencing is set to become much better and bigger than we’ve yet seen. We’ve got our webcams at the ready, Bill!

Bill Gates considers Skype ‘a great purchase’ for Microsoft, helped make it happen originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 May 2011 03:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft Home is a sort of “world of tomorrow” for the computer nerd set where Surface takes the place of video phones and dinner pills. The only difference is that, unlike those World’s Fair staples, Redmond’s vision of the not-so-distant future isn’t open to the public. This is a private testing ground where researchers can try out concepts, like a watch that records health data and syncs it with your home network or a media center that can analyze video and identify products and locations featured on screen. You might not be able to swing by the campus and visit, but you can catch a glimpse of suburban life in 2025 — populated by touchscreen wireless charging trays and interactive walls — in the video after the break. We’ll take it all, except the wallpaper — we don’t need #winning tweets floating overhead while we try to get some shut-eye.

[Thanks, Vygantas]

Continue reading Microsoft’s home of the future lulls teens to sleep with tweets (video)

Microsoft’s home of the future lulls teens to sleep with tweets (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 May 2011 11:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia’s already done quite a bit to cut ties with last year’s big push for Symbian and Qt development, though this is perhaps the biggest step yet. The Finnish company has announced it’s transferring responsibility for Symbian development to consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture, which sounds odd given the latter outfit’s inexperience in delivering mobile OS updates, but the good news is that the 3,000 devs Nokia had working on Symbian will continue their jobs under the new employer. That basically means that Nokia will live up to its unhappy promise that there’ll be “substantial reductions in employment” within its own ranks, while still keeping the men and women responsible for updating Symbian employed. Unfortunately, there will still be a further 4,000 job cuts in the company’s global workforce, primarily in Finland, Denmark and the UK, which will “occur in phases” between the beginning and end of next year. Nokia’s agreement with Accenture also involves continued collaboration on delivering mobility software and services on the Windows Phone platform. You can read more about that in the PR after the break.

Continue reading Nokia transfers Symbian development and 3,000 employees to Accenture, will downsize workforce by further 4,000

Nokia transfers Symbian development and 3,000 employees to Accenture, will downsize workforce by further 4,000 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Apr 2011 04:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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