Posted 09/14/09 at 05:54:57 PM by Andy Salisbury

After a long seven years of development and tweaking, the IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard.

The new standard, which is reportedly capable of throughput of 300Mbps, has been changed six times since its first conception. And, according to the IEEE, all existing WiFi certified 802.11 Draft N wireless products will work with the final standard.

No word as to when the standard will make its way to market.

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Posted 08/05/09 at 06:19:46 PM by Andy Salisbury

The new PCI protocol, which has promised to double the data transfer rates of many add-on cards, has been delayed until mid-next year.

According to the PCI Special Interest Group, the protocol (which was due in 2009) will be held back even though most of the work has been done. Apparently, many problems have arisen with backwards compatibility and electrical requirements. But, moreover, the group has “underestimated the sheer amount of work needed” to get it out the door.

PCI 3.0 will reportedly provide speeds of 32GB/second, along with decreasing the amount of power drawn. Motherboards featuring this standard are expected to show up sometime in summer 2011.

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Posted 02/17/09 at 07:18:25 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Sick and tired of trying to find the right charger for your cell phone? Whether you're shopping for a new charger or trying to figure out which of the chargers in your desk drawer matches your phone, the industry's current lack of standards could make you just a little bit crazy - especially when you're staring at a blinking battery level display and you're expecting a very important call.

Thankfully, there's good news - if you can wait a few years. Today, GSMA (the mobile phone trade association) announced an agreement between virtually all of the world's major cell phone makers to stop the insanity and adopt a common charging connector standard: Micro-USB. The announcement, appropriately enough, was made at the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, CNet's 3GSM World blog reports.

To find out who's teaming up, who's snubbing the new standard, and how soon you can expect to see the standard adopted, join us after the jump.

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Posted 01/15/09 at 07:57:04 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Google Apps reached a major milestone in September last year, when it raced past the 1 million enterprise users mark. But the huge lead that its arch rival MS Office enjoys meant that the achievement was just worthy of a perfunctory pat on the back. Now Google has taken a major step that might help popularize Google Apps among business users and help it trim Microsoft’s huge lead to a small extent.

Google has launched an authorized reseller program for Google Apps. Authorized resellers, under this program, will be able to bundle Google Apps along with their own offerings. The company hopes that the reseller program will help it add more medium and large businesses to its expanding user base. Resellers will exercise complete control over customer billing and account management.

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Posted 07/03/08 at 07:34:21 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Just in time for Independence Day, Adobe has unfettered the popular PDF file format. Adobe has abandoned proprietary control over the popular PDF format. Now the International Organization for Standardization will assume developmental responsibilities of the file format, which will be developed as an industry standard.

The ISO 32000-1 Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7 is the official ISO standard that lays down the ground rules for developers of PDF-related applications. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said that this move is in keeping with Adobe’s “commitment to openness.” The release of PDF specifications should lead to a much needed rise in the number of PDF creation and editing tools.

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