Microsoft Unveils Hologram Visor

Microsoft Corp surprised the tech world with the unveiling of a prototype hologram visor that can bring the Minecraft video game, Skype calls and even the landscape of Mars to three-dimensional life.

The veteran tech pioneer, which long ago lost the mantle of the world’s most inventive company, is making a bold play to regain that title in the face of stiff competition from Google Inc and Apple Inc.

Virtual or enhanced reality is the next frontier in computing interaction, with Facebook Inc focusing on its Oculus virtual reality headset and Google working on its Glass project.

Microsoft said its wire-free Microsoft HoloLens device will be available around the same time as Windows 10 this autumn. Industry analysts were broadly excited at the prospect, but skeptical that it could produce a working model at a mass-market price that soon.

“That was kind of a ‘Oh wow!’ moment,” said Mike Silver, an analyst at Gartner who tried out the prototype on Wednesday. “You would expect to see a relatively high-priced model this year or next year, then maybe it’ll take another couple of years to bring it down to a more affordable level.”

Microsoft does not have a stellar record of bringing ground-breaking technology to life. Its Kinect motion-sensing game device caused an initial stir but never gripped the popular imagination.

The company showed off a crude test version of the visor – essentially jerry-rigged wires and cameras pulled over the head – to reporters and industry analysts at a gathering at its headquarters near Seattle.

It did not allow any photographs or video of the experience, but put some images on its website.

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Bitcoin Use Growing

Bitcoin is gaing greater acceptance at U.S. online merchants including Overstock.com and Expedia, as customers use a digital currency that just a few years ago was virtually unknown but is now showing some staying power.

Though sales paid for in bitcoin so far at vendors interviewed for this article have been a fraction of one percent, they expect that as acceptance grows, the online currency will one day be as ubiquitous as the internet.

“Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere; it’s here to stay,” said Michael Gulmann, vice president of global products at Expedia Inc. in Seattle, the largest online travel agent. “We want to be there from the beginning.” Expedia started accepting bitcoin payments for hotel bookings on July 11.

Until recently a niche alternative currency touted by a fervent group of followers, bitcoin has evolved into a software-based payment online system. Bitcoins are stored in a wallet with a unique identification number and companies like Coinbase and Blockchain can hold the currency for the user.

When buying an item from a merchant’s website, a customer simply clicks on the bitcoin option and a pop-in window appears where he can type in his wallet ID number.

Still, broad-based adoption of bitcoin is at least five years away because most consumers still prefer to use credit cards, analysts said.

“Bitcoin is a new way of making payments, but it’s not solving a problem that’s broken,” said George Peabody, payments consultant at Glenbrook Partners in Menlo Park, California. “Retail payments aren’t broken.”

There are also worries about bitcoin’s volatility: its price in U.S. dollars changes every day.

That risk is borne by the consumer and the bitcoin payment processor, such as Coinbase or Bitpay, not the retailer. The vendor doesn’t hold the bitcoin and is paid in U.S. dollars. As soon as a customer pays in bitcoin, the digital currency goes to the payment processor and the processor immediately pays the merchant, for a fee of less than 1 percent.

“We don’t have to deal with the actual holding of the bitcoin: it’s the payment processor that takes the currency risk for us,” said Bernie Han, chief operating officer at Dish Network Corp, in Englewood, Colorado. “That’s what makes it appealing for us and I guess for other merchants as well.”

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Was Dropbox Really Hacked?

Dropbox suffered a major outage over the weekend.

In one of the more bizarre recent incidents, after the service went down on Friday evening a group of hackers claimed to have infiltrated the service and compromised its servers.

However, on the Dropbox blog, Dropbox VP of engineering Ardita Ardwarl told users that hackers were not to blame.

Ardwari said, “On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.”

The fault occurred when a bug in an upgrade script caused an operating system upgrade to be triggered on several live machines, rendering them inoperative. Although the fault was rectified in three hours, the knock-on effects led to problems that lasted through the weekend for some users.

Dropbox has assured users that there are no further problems and that all users should now be back online. It said that at no point were files in danger, adding that the affected machines didn’t host any user data. In other words, the “hackers” weren’t hackers at all, but attention seeking trolls.

Dropbox claims to have over 200 million users, many of which it has acquired through strategic partnerships with device manufacturers offering free storage with purchases.

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The company is looking forward to an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market, so the timing of such a major outage could not be worse. Dropbox, which includes Bono and The Edge from U2 amongst its investors, has recently enhanced its business offering to appeal to enterprise clients, and such a loss of uptime could affect its ability to attract customers.

Amazon Looking For Investors

Amazon has issued its first bonds in nearly 15 years as it looks to borrow money while interest rates are low.

Amazon’s position as the undisputed king of online retail has put the company in a good position to take advantage of cheap borrowing rates. Amazon issued three, five and 10-year bonds at 0.38, 0.63 and 0.93 percent above US Treasury rates with investors clamouring to get a ride on the firm’s coattails.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon’s $3bn bond issue has attracted more than $10bn in investor interest. According to ratings agency Moody’s, the firm will use the cash generated in the bond sale to make investments such as buying its corporate headquarters.

Standard and Poor’s rated Amazon’s debt as AA- and said there was minimal financial risk with Amazon. While Moody’s rated the bonds at Baa1, the agency also forecast strong growth in sales for Amazon in the coming years. It seems that Amazon, given that it hasn’t got any other bonds, is proving popular with bond investors despite reporting low profits and recently having been grilled in the UK Parliament over allegations of tax avoidance.

Amazon has been diversifying the ways it generates cash, and while it long ago moved away from simply selling books, the firm is a big player in cloud services through its Amazon Web Services division and is aggressively marketing its own brand of electronics devices in the Kindle range of ebook readers and tablets.

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Data Center Emissions Concerns Citizens

Some residents of Quincy, Washington, the location of massive data centers operated by Microsoft, Yahoo and others, are growing concerned about pollution from backup diesel generators at the data centers, and on Wednesday they’ll have the chance to discuss the issue.

The Washington State Department of Ecology is conducting a public meeting on Wednesday evening in Quincy for residents to voice their concerns over on an application from Dell for permission to use 28 generators powered by diesel engines.

Quincy, a town of around 6,000 people, will have 141 back-up generators once those belonging to Dell, and others that have been permitted or are in line for permission, are put in place. While the generators are designed to be used only in the rare case of an electricity outage, the data center operators turn them on regularly for testing.

On average, the companies are permitted to turn on each generator for 103 hours per year. If they use that maximum running time, data center generators in Quincy would run for the equivalent of 40 hours per day on average.

The Department of Ecology says diesel emissions, when breathed in, have been known to create or worsen a variety of health problems, including heart disease, asthma and
lung cancer.

Some residents, including former mayor Patty Martin, wonder about the health impact of the diesel emissions on the community. She thinks the generators should use the same types of devices to reduce emissions that are required by other Washington cities such as Olympia and Moses Lake.

Such devices aren’t necessary in Quincy, said Karen Wood, section supervisor for air quality in Eastern Washington for the Department of Ecology. Because Olympia is a much bigger city it already has high diesel emissions from other sources, so a new data center there was required to reduce its emissions, she said.

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AT&T’s iPhone 4 Beats Verizon’s

In the phone wars between the two big carriers, it looks like AT&T wins this round. The iPhone 4 on AT&T’s network downloaded data twice as fast, on average, as the iPhone on Verizon Wireless, according to thousands of recent field tests in five U.S. cities performed by Metrico Wireless, an independent mobile device performance evaluation firm.

Metrico’s tests looked at several other variables, however, and found the average Web page load time was nearly the same on iPhone 4 on both networks, a Metrico official said.

Also, when the iPhone 4 was in a moving vehicle, the AT&T model successfully finished about 10% more download session than Verizon’s. But when the iPhones were stationary, the Verizon iPhone had a 10% better success rate in uploading data than the AT&T iPhone, Metrico said.

Metrico did not reveal actual time measurements for any of its results, including the data downloads and uploads or Web page loading times, prior to publication of its full study.

Some of Metrico’s findings are at odds with several smaller spot reports conducted last month that found Verizon’s iPhone performed better on several criteria. But a Metrico official noted that those quick studies were based on only a handful of test samples, often in a single city, including San Francisco, where AT&T’s coverage for the iPhone has been consistently criticized.

AT&T admitted more than a year ago that it had network problems in downtown San Francisco and Manhattan and had begun infrastructure updates.  Read More….