Hasta La Gadget!

Skype has made itself present in many different areas around the globe, but the Microsoft-owned service is now looking to enter (and hopefully be a part of) a more business-oriented field. With the launch of its newfangled, adequately-named In the Workspace platform, Skype says it’s hoping to keep small businesses connected and help them grow by giving them a free platform where they can easily communicate with potential customers, partners and even suppliers. According to Skype, this novel service has been tested in beta form for nearly six months now, and today it’s officially opening its virtual doors to all business owners that are interested in giving it a go — the link to sign up can be found down below.

Continue reading Skype announces new ‘In the Workspace’ platform for small businesses

Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft

Skype announces new ‘In the Workspace’ platform for small businesses originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 15:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We do love quirky iPad apps that help us make music in unusual ways, and this is the first we’ve seen that turns Twitter into part of that process. Melotweet is a promotional app from Evian*, that turns your Tweets into a series of droplets that you can bounce off objects to make the sort of plinky-plonky music that compels you into buying French mineral water. It’s available for free on iOS or Android devices, and you can see the app in action in the video we’ve got for you after the break.

* Other waters are available.

Continue reading Melotweet: Evian makes Twitter musical, encourages you to buy water (video)

Filed under: Internet, Software, Alt

Melotweet: Evian makes Twitter musical, encourages you to buy water (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Prog group of researchers from the School of Electronic Engineering at Bangor University in the UK are working on a plan that could result in broadband Internet speeds up to 2000 times faster than we have today – with little additional cost. Incredibly fast speeds combined with little added cost comes from the fact that the technology uses off-the-shelf components available today. The trick is that data is transferred over fiber-optic connections rather than copper wire.

So far, Professor Jianming Tang and his team have been able to reach speeds of 20 Gbps in testing. That is fast enough to download a full-length HD movie in only 10 seconds – a far cry from the minutes or hours it takes on today’s best broadband connections. The group of researchers are working on a three-year project to make this technology commercially available.

The way the scientists were able to significantly increase the speed of Internet connections is thanks in part to something called Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OOFDM. The hardware allows both coding and decoding of optical signals on-the-fly. The researchers believe that they will be able to hit speeds of around 40 Gbps soon.

[via BBC]

Egyptian web users will find their XXX entertainment cut off, after the Prosecutor General ordered the government to ban all pornographic content on the internet on religious, moral, and patriotic grounds. Adbel Maguid Mahmoud ruled in favor of an initial ruling in the country three years ago, Almogaz reports, which had argued that the potential for restricting “freedom of expression and public rights” was justified by banning the “venemous and vile” content which disturbed “the fundamentals of religion, morality, and patriotism” of Egyptian citizens.

Unsurprisingly, the decision has been met with approval from social conservatives, concern from liberals and free-speech advocates, and confusion by internet experts. The latter are unclear on how the Egyptian authorities will actually clamp down on pornography, with censorship being notoriously difficult to enact with any degree of broad effectiveness.

One possibility, the EFF suggests, is maintaining a list of banned sites, much as is operated in Pakistan. There, government watchdogs periodically add sites in their thousands to a roster of “unsuitable” content, though pornography still proliferates as the censors attempt to corral it.

Alternatively, a full block could be put into place, filtering all internet traffic within Egypt. That, however, would be expensive, technically very demanding, and could well have a negative impact on overall connectivity speeds, leaving other use of the internet at a disadvantage.

As Egyptian web users have previously demonstrated, there’ll always be ways to circumnavigate bans and limits; the government was forced to cut off the internet altogether in order to curtail protests and social unrest back in January 2011. VPNs and other private browsing tools are likely to become the order of the day.

Egypt must ban internet porn orders legal chief is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

When we last checked in on one of Sandvine’s traffic studies, Netflix had just edged past BitTorrent as the largest source of internet traffic in North America while YouTube was still a small-timer. A year has made quite the difference. Netflix is up to 28.8 percent in a new study, while YouTube has moved up to second place with 13.1 percent and demands even more than ordinary web requests. Rivals like Hulu don’t register in the top 10, and YouTube is by far the ruler of mobile with nearly 31 percent of smartphone traffic headed its way. Overall usage is moving up rapidly, no matter what kind of network the continent uses — the typical North American chews up 659MB per month when mobile and a hefty 51GB through a landline. There’s little reason to dispute worries of the impact on bandwidth-strained internet providers, although we suspect most would disagree with Sandvine on what’s to be done. The company naturally sees the study as a chance for business with carriers wanting to curb usage or charge extra through its tools; a generation that grew up with internet access, however, would likely see it as a better excuse to roll out more capacity for all those streaming videos.

Filed under: Networking, Internet, HD

Sandvine: Netflix up to 29 percent of North American internet traffic, YouTube is fast on the rise originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 04:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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