Infotrade

As the Big Three—Google, Bing, and Yahoo—make subtle changes to their search algorithms, a new crop of search engine upstarts are rethinking what it means to search altogether, with the hopes of transforming your relationship to information: 1.  Recorded Future  - Search is about scanning through information about the past and present, right? Not if Recorded Future has anything to do about it. Compiling all recorded information about future events, this revolutionary "temporal analytics engine" helps you visualize, in text or infographics, everything that has been written about future events, like companies' plans to expand into a new market or tech product releases. But all of this comes with a hefty fee; individual plans start at $149 per month.  2.  Qwiki  - The goal of this radical new search tool is to deliver information in a quintessentially human way—via storytelling. Rather than an information dump of text factoids, Qwiki combines Wikipedia, Google, an...

Mobile hardware is progressing at a blistering pace. Displays continue to increase in size, color quality and resolution, while advancements such as glasses-free 3-D offer the promise of novel user experiences. Processors are adding cores and clock speed faster than ever before, and 4G radios have brought broadband data speeds to mobile devices. These unprecedented hardware innovations have set the stage for a brave new world of mobile computing in which nearly anything is possible on hand-held devices. However, they account for only part of the equation. In order to deliver the type of user experiences enabled by these innovations software must keep pace – otherwise we will fall painfully short of capitalizing on the opportunities presented by these hardware achievements. This goes beyond the need for innovations in OSes and applications, to the underlying software that ties everything together. It’s the next great challenge faced by the mobile industry. Software as the Connective Ti...

IBM's Watson computer system, best known for defeating the world's best "Jeopardy!" players, now delivers rapid-fire answers to questions about diseases and medicines. The company says it could be suggesting diagnoses and treatments to doctors right at a patient's bedside in the next couple of years. A recent demonstration showed how Watson's suggested diagnoses evolved as the computer was given more information about a patient, including where the patient lived. When told a patient was pregnant, it altered its treatment suggestion. Watson is being fed a diet of medical textbooks and journals and taking training questions in plain language from medical students. A doctor who is helping IBM says its database might soon include entries from blogs. In the Server Room of Jeopardy Challenger 'Watson'  Watch Video Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine  Watch Video

When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they're not worried. "I've got nothing to hide," they declare. "Only if you're doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don't deserve to keep it private." The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates." The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as an "all-too-common refrain." In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for security. The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government d...

Arrested development: currently, if you transfer a legally purchased CD to your iPod you are breaking the law. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys' representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron's first party conference as leader. Given that, it's only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on. Cameron's worship of Google did, however, have one tangi...

Computex  trade show is still a week away, but some manufacturers have already started leaking little bits of info about the devices they plan to present there. Case in point: Asus, which launched a little Facebook campaign called “Break the Rules: Pad or Phone”, sporting only a very mystical image of a new tablet device. Luckily, more images have leaked out over at  Tech in Style , showing bits and pieces of the smooth, grey-and-black tablet that obviously wants to capture the hearts of customers who care about the design of their gadgets. No other details about the device have emerged, so we’ll just have to wait for more clues from Asus, but the mystery tablet definitely caught our attention.

Now that  Sony’s PlayStation Network  is  back online again , analysts are beginning to assess the real-world cost of the  network breach and shutdown  of the giant gaming establishment. Even as recently as this past week, Sony was still having trouble with the PlayStation Network, taking down its password resetting facility because of  another Sony oversight : not realizing that hackers might be able to re-exploit any of the 77 million hacked accounts because of the information they obtained. Here’s an infographic retracing the steps of Sony’s fiasco, and then assessing the financial damage using independent research data from the  Ponemon Institute .