CNN is reporting that Apple is in talks with the music industry to offer improved quality 24-bit audio tracks, but an increase in sampling rate was not mentioned in the article.  The 24-bit format has been around since the late 1990s among professional musicians and it’s been readily available to consumers since the early 2000s, [...]

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) grilled FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski about the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules, and whether the rules would cover disputes like the one between Level 3 and Comcast. Genachowski evaded the question and even misrepresented his own rules to preserve the flexibility for future FCC intervention and overreach.

A 57% majority of the US House of Representatives has voted to block funding for the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules passed by a slim FCC majority last December. The vote now heads to the Senate and then the President’s desk. We found the FCC rules to be incoherent because the FCC ignored the record and overreached when it outlawed Paid Prioritization.

It appears that average wireless service nationwide have reached new highs rising above 16% as politicians look for something to maintain state and local coffers in a down economy.  This is more than twice as high as the average rate of other consumption taxes and states like Nebraska, Washington, and New York top the list [...]

IBM has given us a peek into the future of computing technology with their demonstration of Watson on the Jeopardy TV show. It’s only a matter of time before the technology is shrunk in size and cost to practical levels and the world will be radically different for today’s children when they reach adulthood.

Smartphones are already a large source of images posted on photo sharing sites like Flickr because of their ubiquitous mobile Internet connectivity. New image array cameras could make smartphones even more dominant, even against higher end compact point-n-shoot cameras.

Consumers Union is acting more like the professional whiner’s association. What next, refunds on new cars when next year’s model comes out? It’s also strange that they’re complaining about CDMA and GSM interoperability now when the entire industry is moving towards GSM.

Google’s Gmail service has added a two-factor authentication mode for users who want a little more security in their Gmail account.  Gmail users can now have Google send them an SMS text message with a numeric code that would be used as a secondary pin in addition to the normal Gmail account password.  Gmail users [...]

With every millimeter shaved off the thickness of laptops and smartphones over the years, the cameras on those devices got substantially worse in quality because of the required shrinkage of the lens optics. Pelican Imaging aims to fix all this with their new image array sensor.

Via Fortune Magazine, IDC reports that Smartphone sales has exceeded Personal Computers (PCs) for the first time in Q4-2010. IDC also projects that Smartphones will expand its lead within the next few years with smartphone prices dropping rapidly and this has huge ramifications for several industries. What we think of as “computers” and “broadband” will have to undergo some radical revisions.