Welcome to News About Tech from all around the world

Advocacy groups and legal experts told Congress that it was unreasonable for federal officials to search the laptops of United States citizens when they re-enter the country from traveling abroad.

Cooliris' PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it 'nifty' and 'gorgeous.' Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.

A Wall of Pictures

At its most basic level, PicLens, which is now at version 1.7, allows you to quickly browse through images from photo and video sharing sites on a full-screen 3D wall. This wall looks a lot like Apple's Cover Flow and the screen-shots here really don't do it justice.

One thing that might come as a disappointment to users is that PicLens doesn't work with every site. However, PicLens does support a wide range of photo sharing sites, social networks, and image search services, including Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, Smugmug, MySpace, Facebook, and Google Images. In its newest version, PicLens now also supports searching for videos in YouTube. PicLens should also work on any other site that has a Media RSS feed enabled.

Cooliris has also made a plugin available that allows owners of self-hosted WordPress sites to enable PicLens' functionality for their blogs.

As for browsers, PicLens supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Window Shopping in 3D

One interesting function PicLens has added, is the ability to do a visual search through Amazon's online store. Scrolling through the covers of books, CDs, and videos, or even browsing the apparel section is surprisingly fast and actually turns out to be quite a lot of fun. Clicking on an item enlarges it and brings up the price and a short description. One limitation of this search is that you can't specify anything else but keywords. Items can't be organized by price or any other filter normally available on Amazon such as brand or seller. This is even more limiting because you can't do a search on Amazon and then have PicLens display the results of your search, making the feature quite a bit less useful.

It's Pretty, But Is it Useful?

Whenever a piece of software looks as good as PicLens does, the question that comes up pretty quickly is how useful it can actually be.

The Amazon integration is most useful when you are searching for a specific look or just browsing through books for the sake of it, but otherwise, it feels more like a gimmick than a useful feature.

PicLens is at its best when displaying objects from photo and video sites. Having the ability to visually browse through a large number of items gives it a clear heads-up over the functionality of these web services themselves, and, at the end of the day, it's also plain fun to use.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Anheuser-Busch Cos Inc plans to reject InBev NV's unsolicited $46.3 billion takeover offer, saying it undervalues the company, a source familiar with the situation said on Wednesday.

Oracle sounded a warning bell that growth was likely to slow in the first quarter as the company absorbed its latest major acquisition, BEA Systems.

AP - Oracle Corp. finished its fiscal year with an impressive flourish, then pulled out a wet blanket.

As expected, Yahoo will announce its reorg tomorrow, along the same lines as BoomTown outlined in detail last week.

The only issue that arose was over the appointment of Ash Patel to head the new Global Products Group. His appointment was greeted with internal dissent, but Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was said to have insisted that Patel remain on as planned.

More to come…

AP - China's fast-growing number of mobile phone accounts has risen more than 8 percent since the start of the year to 592 million, while demand for traditional fixed-line service is falling, a state news agency reported Thursday.

Apparently Chrysler is looking to turn your car into a rolling WiFi hotspot, allowing you to connect to the internet both for the sake of accessing information, but also for providing it (such as traffic info). Of course, automakers have talked about internet access in cars before, but it hasn't gone very far -- so unless you brought your own EVDO card, you weren't doing much. But is there really a strong demand for such things? As some analysts note, it seems like the automakers may be "leapfrogging the market," when they should be focused on making cars work better with the gadgets we already have. This is a problem that has come up before. Automakers love to build new technology into their cars in order to control the experience, but that's not what consumers want. Having an MP3 player is nice, but it's easier if you can just use your iPod. Having a built in GPS system is cool, but the new Garmin has a lot more features. Working with consumer electronics devices that people buy seems like it may be a lot more sensible than trying to recreate the wheel. And, then, of course putting WiFi connectivity in cars may eventually lead to xkcd-style scenarios:

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Apparently Chrysler is looking to turn your car into a rolling WiFi hotspot, allowing you to connect to the internet both for the sake of accessing information, but also for providing it (such as traffic info). Of course, automakers have talked about internet access in cars before, but it hasn't gone very far -- so unless you brought your own EVDO card, you weren't doing much. But is there really a strong demand for such things? As some analysts note, it seems like the automakers may be "leapfrogging the market," when they should be focused on making cars work better with the gadgets we already have. This is a problem that has come up before. Automakers love to build new technology into their cars in order to control the experience, but that's not what consumers want. Having an MP3 player is nice, but it's easier if you can just use your iPod. Having a built in GPS system is cool, but the new Garmin has a lot more features. Working with consumer electronics devices that people buy seems like it may be a lot more sensible than trying to recreate the wheel. And, then, of course putting WiFi connectivity in cars may eventually lead to xkcd-style scenarios:

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Filed under: Cellphones

As expected, T-Mobile has taken the wraps off its very own version of Motorola's ROKR E8, a glossy black candybar offering a 2 megapixel camera, 2GB of internal storage (plus a microSD slot that'll swallow up to 8GB more), stereo Bluetooth, 3.5mm headphone jack, FM radio, and that so-called "morphing" keypad that selectively renders keys invisible depending on the mode you're using. It's missing 3G, but that's one feature T-Mobile customers are all too well acquainted to missing out on -- and considering that the just-announced flagship ZN5 doesn't even do any WCDMA, it shouldn't come as any surprise. Subscribers and would-be subscribers will be able to nab the E8 come July 7 for $199.99 on contract.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments