Tag Archives: Business/Finance

News: RFID Tags’ Dirty Secret

 A story from Reuters that says one of the biggest hurdles facing RFID tags — the widgets that store information about products — is that they still aren’t very good. “The tags fall far below the 99 percent reliability rate of UPC tags because of the difficulty of transmitting clean radio signals,” the piece says.… Read More »

News: China Awash With Viruses

 I’m sure this is true in other part of Asia: The majority of Chinese computers are infected by viruses, according to a survey conducted by the public information network security supervision bureau of the Ministry of Public Security. CyberAtlas says 85 percent of computers in China were affected by viruses in 2003 – 1.59 percentage… Read More »

New: Gator Changes Name, But That’s All

 A rose by any other name? CNET reports that Gator, the controversial advertising software and e-wallet company, has “changed its name to better reflect its business in behavioral marketing”. The change, CNET says, distances the company from a name that has become synonymous with “spyware”–that is, ad-tracking software that can be installed surreptitiously.   Despite… Read More »

News: Tiny Drives Get Bigger

 Hitachi today is now shipping one-inch diameter drives storing 4 gigabytes with a a data transfer rate that is 70 percent faster than the previous-generation Microdrive. Hitachi reckons it’s the “world’s smallest hard disk drive“, weighing just over a half an ounce and equivalent in size to a matchbook. Hitachi will continue to offer its… Read More »

News: The Death Of The PDA

 Interesting article by Reuters’ Franklin Paul on the death of the PDA (no link available, I’m afraid). “The truth is, the PDA as it was first envisioned – as nothing more than a fancy digital pocket organizer – may be nearly extinct,” he writes. Three years ago, consumers rushed to buy PDAs, but “today, its… Read More »