Technology posts

The Nokia/Apple patent lawsuits just got a little more real today when Nokia filed a second federal patent lawsuit alleging that the iPhone 3G and 3GS infringe on five Nokia-held patents. In addition, Nokia filed the suit in Wisconsin, a state which is known to bring a conclusion to these kinds of cases in a year or less. Nokia fired the first salvo last year, alleging several patent infractions on the part of the iPhone. Apple then launched a countersuit, and the two tech cos have been in negotiations ever since to try to hash out the issue. Additionally, Nokia has filed a complaint with the US International…

Do you have a Wikipedia page that you keep on returning to over and over again? Why not turn it into a book? A company called Pediapress lets you do just that. Just fire in the URL, pay, and a few weeks later a book will show up at your door with your favorite topic all bound up and ready to go. While this may seem a bit counterintuitive with the breakout of tablet computers, it is a concept that may get some play just through its sheer novelty. Get your favorite WOW geek a printout of the World of Warcraft page. The gifting possibilities alone are endless. As a bonus, part of the purchase price is donated to Wikipedia….

.CO is Here The new .co web extension is arguably the most attractive new extension available on the internet, and a huge win for companies who are looking to grab better domain names for themselves without outlaying huge amounts of cash to get the ones they want on .com. Starting June 21st, Landrush will allow anyone to apply for domain names of high commercial value, and on July 20th, .co registration will be open to all. .CO $50,000 Contest The people behind the new .co domain and Network Solutions are running a contest where you can win $50,000 for pitching an idea for a new business, blog or website….

Straight outta the Enterprise’s engineering lab comes the newly-launched Google Goggles for mobile platforms, which can translate text from photographs in English, Italian, French, German and Spanish. No word on Klingon, yet. But seriously, this is for real – just snap a photo of the desired text and Goggles will translate it into your language… or another one, if you don’t feel like making any sensible use of the app. Any way you slice it, this is possibly the biggest boon to prolific world travelers in decades, as it renders obsolete the awkward practice of thumbing through a translation…

In the event you’re suffering from Star Wars Day withdrawal, here’s a cute segue back into real life – the Star Wars trilogy (no, not that Star Wars trilogy) summed up in two minutes, narrated by a child, presented in stop-motion Lego. I was skeptical at the film’s ability to sum up three films inside of 120 seconds, but it actually manages to hit on every major plot point, several minor ones, and even tosses in a few SW geek in-jokes. Masterful pacing. Masterful, indeed. [Via CrunchGear]…

Recently two Silicon Valley giants made big investments in their future. But while HP’s purchase of Palm got all the headlines and page views, Apple’s acquisition of Siri, an iPhone “personal assistant”, is the real story. Palm Meet HP After pioneering the PDA market with fantastic products like the Pilot, Palm allowed itself to be lapped first by Handspring, a company formed by former Palm employees, and then by practically everyone else. RIM outpaced them on smartphones, then Apple revolutionized the entire industry with the iPhone. The Palm Pre was a decent enough phone, but the…

Today the Internet Archive announced a new service that will provide over a million books for the blind and visually impaired. I was so excited, I practically broke the New Post button to tell you all about this awesome new service, before stopping cold to ponder how exactly Internet Archive planned to bring braille to the internet. Seriously. But my idiocy aside, this is a great initiative. The IA folks have been hard at work scanning hundreds of thousands of books to be digitized into DAISY (a text-to-speech format) for consumption by the print-disabled population, at no cost. Their plan is to…

The news that Google will be launching their own Google Editions cloud bookstore this summer promises a welcome shake-up for the world of ebooks. Because, while it’s true the nascent technology has gotten a lot of attention recently, especially with the launch of the iPad, it’s not exactly setting the world on fire either. In fact, even diehard readers are yawning at it a bit. Sure, Google’s new service that will allow you to read a book from anywhere you can log into your account sounds promising – but more needs to be done. Here are 5 things that the ebook world needs if it wants to really excite people…

This isn’t the first Rubik’s-cube-solving Lego robot that’s been viral in the last few months, nor is it the fastest (25 seconds), nor is it the most intimidating. But this one’s special for another reason entirely – this one’s powered by the Motorola Droid. Designed as a promotional vid for chip manufacturer ARM, builder David Gilday must be crying himself to sleep for missing his chance at YouTube kingship by a mere two months. You’re still number one in our hearts, Dave. [Via Make]…

Ah, the interwebs: the technology that brings us all together so that people of all stripes and shades can share photographs of cats. But holed-up in our comfortable North American lives, we can sometimes forget that some web technology still caters to the countries in which it was first developed. Case in point: web addresses have historically always been written in latin script – ya’ know, the letters you’re reading right now. But not anymore! Today ICANN, the body that regulates top-level domains like .com or .org, switched on a system that allows countries to create web addresses in non-latin…