Midwest Technology News

Among the aerospace luminaries gathered in Paul Allen’s Seattle aerie for the announcement of his giant space cargo plane was his friend and former co-worker Charles Simonyi. Simonyi reported to Allen in the early days at Microsoft, when Simonyi was developing the company’s productivity suite, and the two shared a passion for space travel. On a last minute whim, they traveled to Florida together to watch the launch of the…

NASA vows $8.8 bn space telescope on track for 2018 WASHINGTON — After a series of delays and billions spent over budget, the potent James Webb Space Telescope is on track to launch in 2018 at a total project cost of $8.8 billion, NASA vowed on Tuesday. The project, which aims to build the world’s most powerful telescope, 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble space telescope, has been riddled…

It’s customary at this time of the year for TechCentral to publish its lists of who it considers the newsmakers of the year, both internationally and in SA. We kick off, as always, with the five people we thought were the biggest newsmakers in the technology space in 2011 worldwide. Later this week, we’ll publish our newsmakers of the year in SA in two parts, so do check back for…

Azerbaijan’s second largest mobile operator in terms of subscribers, Bakcell, has reportedly launched its 3G services in 62 cities under the brand ‘sur@’. The operator which received the 3G licence from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) earlier this month reportedly plans to extend its 3G services to the country’s rural areas during the next year. As per sources, the mobile broadband service provides users access to a…

Updating drivers is one of those tasks you know you should be doing, but it’s sometimes hard to make the time. It can be a whole lot easier with DriverScanner 2012, a $30 utility (free demo) that automates the process, saving you the time and hassle of doing it yourself. DriverScanner’s dashboard makes it easy to gauge the overall health of your PC.DriverScanner 2012 works very much like its rivals…

two days after the public release of Android 4.0.1 (Ice Cream Sandwich), NVIDIA had it up and running on ASUS' announced but not-yet-released Eee Pad Transformer Prime. NVIDIA sent along a video as proof. The usual big-company red tape kept the video from being released until now. There's not too much we can learn from the video other than the OS is up and running on Tegra 3, and the UI…

SEATTLE

Buzz about “the cloud” in general has been building up for a few years now, but 2011 was the year that we saw our music collections begin to make their way toward Web-based repositories. first, there was the rise of all-you-can-stream music services like Rdio and Mog. That particular space was lit afire by the July U.S. launch of Spotify, which did not go unnoticed by its competitors, most of…

A tale of Two Homecomings – part 2 Oct. 12, 2011 Last week, Andrey Borisenko, Sasha Samokutyaev and I were given a wonderful welcome at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, just outside of Moscow. Our day began with an official debriefing of our mission to the International Space Station that began with a launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on April 4, 2011, followed by docking to…

While it’s always best to show off an item at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Intel’s launch of the Ivy Bridge CPU might not be there. new reports believe the next generation CPU will be released Springtime, 2012. This is the CPU that will be in their forcasted Ultrabook they announced earlier this year. Due to some unexpected company delays that are still remained not elaborated, Intel admitted the schedule…