July 5, 2005
Computerworld: Fujitsu pushes limits of data-storage technology. Researchers in Japan have reported success in an advanced data-storage technology that could help yield hard disk drives with seven times more capacity than today's most advanced drives in as soon as five years. Their work is a refinement of perpendicular storage technology, a method of data storage that is only just beginning to come into commercial use in hard disk drives.

New Scientist: Entering a dark age of innovation. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead. His study will be published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

July 6, 2005
NY Times: European Parliament Fails to Agree on Computer Patents. The main political parties in the European Parliament agreed late Tuesday to abandon the proposal rather than risk an inadequate compromise; they are to vote against the proposal at their plenary meeting on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France.

July 7, 2005
IBM developerWorks: My not-so-invisible enemy. At best I want to see that site, and others like it, pruned of the page bloat that made my Web search useless. This month I'll explain the downsides of putting too much information on your Web pages and offer some tips to put a lid on page bloat.

NY Times: Music to Your Cellphone. The cellphone has acquired a host of new features in recent years, from text messaging to video. Now cellphone makers and wireless operators are shifting their attention to music, taking a swipe at the iPod and other stand-alone music players.

July 8, 2005
eWEEK: Industry Looks into Cloudy Future for Authentication. ISPs, large enterprises and e-mail security companies are hoping that an industry meeting in New York this week will breathe life into a flagging effort to thwart spam and e-mail viruses through the adoption of e-mail sender authentication technology.

July 11, 2005
Useit.Com: Scrolling and Scrollbars. If you must make your own scrollbars, stay as close to user expectations as possible. Unless your scrollbars look like scrollbars, users might not notice them. Unless your scrollbars behave like scrollbars, users might not be able to bring the desired content into view.

July 12, 2005
eWEEK: New E-Mail Authentication Spec Submitted to IETF. The specifications for DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM, were submitted to the IETF on Monday for consideration as a new e-mail authentication standard. DKIM has been in development since August and combines technology from Yahoo and Cisco.

July 13, 2005
eWEEK: Speakers at E-Mail Summit Push Authentication, Reputation Tools . Representatives from 37 e-mail technology companies used a one-day Summit in New York on Tuesday to exhort private sector administrators and online marketers to adopt e-mail sender authentication technology that helps block spam and phishing attacks.

News.Com: Reading phone text one word at a time. The technique, known as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP, makes up for the tiny screens on mobile phones by presenting just one word at a time in the center of the screen for a fraction of a second before moving on to the next word.

July 14, 2005
Fast Company: China: The Next Big Bling. Lenovo, which became the world's third-largest PC maker when the deal went through in May, hired Portland, Oregon-based design consultancy ZIBA to study how Chinese consumers use electronics. A team of five U.S.-based designers and researchers won highly unusual access to private homes where they were able to document Chinese attitudes toward the use of technology.

PC World: Fujitsu Shows Flexible LCD. The cholesteric LCD panel, which is the name given to the technology that allows the image to be maintained on-screen, measures 3.8 inches across the diagonal and was on show Thursday at the company's Fujitsu Forum 2005 event in Tokyo.

July 15, 2005
Computerworld: UN panel fails to agree on how to govern Internet. The Working Group on Internet Governance instead came up with four rival models for overseeing the Web and sorting out technical and public policy questions. In a report to be submitted to the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in November, the group also proposed creation of a permanent forum to carry on the debate.

July 18, 2005
Scott Berkun: How to learn from your mistakes. What’s missing in many people’s beliefs about success is the fact that the more challenging the goal, the more frequent and difficult setbacks will be. The larger your ambitions, the more dependent you will be on your ability to overcome and learn from your mistakes.

NY Times: Marrying Maps to Data for a New Web Service. So far the uses have been noncommercial. But Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are creating the services with the expectation that they will become a focal point in one of the next significant growth areas in Internet advertising: contextual advertisements tied to specific locations. Such ads would be embedded in maps generated by a search query or run alongside them.

July 19, 2005
WIRED: The New Face of IBM. This will not be simply a business with far-flung, disparate operations. Success depends on a truly transnational approach to everything from merging cultures to the making and selling of computers, one that brings together worldwide talent and resources and combines them to pursue a larger goal.

July 20, 2005
InfoWorld: Tag mania sweeps the Web. Jon Udell. Is this a fad or a real breakthrough in information management? I say both. Tagging has attained the elusive cachet of coolness. New taggers feel an initial thrill of empowerment. Venture capitalists, sensing the buzz, are looking to amplify it.

PC World: IEEE Starts Weaving Mesh Network Standard. Nortel Networks and other vendors already sell wireless mesh networks, but an access point from one vendor can't necessarily join in a mesh with gear from other makers, he said. A standard would give customers a choice of mesh vendors, ease the work of product developers and lower product prices...

July 21, 2005
First Monday: Emerging VOIP regulation in Europe and the United States. Both the EU and the United States have taken early steps to fit VOIP into existing regulatory classifications, a course that is more advanced and seems somewhat more orderly in the European case. Yet, politics has inevitably intruded, with important implications for the future course of VOIP deployment.

July 22, 2005
Technology Review: Metal-Cooled Computing. One potential solution to this growing problem is more commonly associated with nuclear reactors: liquid metal cooling. Spearheaded by NanoCoolers, a startup in Austin, TX, the technology takes advantage of a unusual compound of metals that remains liquid at room temperature.

July 25, 2005
Useit.Com: Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design. For many years, that one thing in e-commerce design was "Do like Amazon." No more. Amazon has recently changed so much that the average e-commerce site will reduce its usability by emulating its design too closely.

July 26, 2005
Wired News: Privacy Guru Locks Down VOIP. First there was PGP e-mail. Then there was PGPfone for modems. Now Phil Zimmermann, creator of the wildly popular Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption program, is debuting his new project, which he hopes will do for internet phone calls what PGP did for e-mail.

July 27, 2005
Washington Post: Lost a BlackBerry? Data Could Open A Security Breach The ability to carry vast amounts of data in small but easily misplaced items such as computer memory sticks and mobile e-mail devices has transformed the way Americans work, but it has also increased the risk that a forgotten BlackBerry or lost cell phone could amount to a major security breach.

July 28, 2005
NY Times: Reading Between the Lines of Used Book Sales. Hal R. Varian. When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there's another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later.