technology industry

It's the year 2020. Most people use mobile devices to connect to the Internet; voice-recognition and touch-based user interfaces are in greater use; and notions of privacy will have changed as the differences between personal and work time or physical and virtual reality become fewer.

Those are some of the findings from a new report, The Future of the Internet III, from the Pew Internet and American Life Project with Elon University in North Carolina.

'Universal Standards'

The growing support for Google's Open Handset Alliance includes more research and development dollars from major names in the technology industry.

Earlier this week, the alliance, a group of technology and mobile companies working on the Android mobile operating system, announced 14 new members. They are AKM Semiconductor, ARM, ASUSTek Computer, Atheros Communications, Borqs, Ericsson, Garmin International, Huawei Technologies, Omron Software, Softbank Mobile, Sony Ericsson, Teleca AB, Toshiba and Vodafone.

"The ecosystem is growing larger. The critical names on this announcement are

Microsoft may not have acquired Yahoo's search business, but it has acquired what some may consider the next best thing. The software giant announced Thursday that it has hired Dr. Qi Lu, Yahoo's former vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology, to run its online-services group and focus on search advertising.

Barack Obama's presidency could spell major changes for the technology industry after years of limited White House attention.

According to Ed Black, president and chief executive of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, Tuesday's election outcome is good news for technology companies since the Obama camp has many tech-savvy advisers who understand the sector and its users. That was reflected in the Obama campaign's innovative use of technology and the Internet to organize volunteers, raise money and communicate with voters.

Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken -- putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court.

And Blaise Mouttet, a small inventor in Alexandria, Va., thinks he knows why. The problem, he said, is that "there are too many lawyers and not enough inventors involved with the patent system."

Industry giants Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced Tuesday a joint project to research large-scale cloud computing, the ability to use applications, servers, storage and other computing services on the Internet without hosting, maintaining or configuring them locally. Early cloud applications include desktop office suites, but have rapidly grown to include enterprisewide services such as storage and network management.

Here's a hint for high school graduates or college students still majoring in indecision: Put down that guitar or book of poetry and pick up a laptop. Study computer science or engineering, and plan to move to a big city.

It has been a wild first decade for Mozilla. Despite having had a staff of fewer than 100 for most of its existence, the grassroots organization managed to break Microsoft's lock on the Web browser market. If not for Mozilla's popular Firefox browser, Microsoft's software might have come to dominate the Internet the way it does computers. It's an achievement that demonstrates how an open-standards software project guided by an unusual mix of social and business principles can have a huge impact on the technology industry.

Cloud computing is the flavor of the moment in the technology industry. Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo are just some of the big companies touting the concept, and a bunch of smaller ones are, too.

What, you may be thinking, is cloud computing? Basically, it means obtaining computing resources -- processing, storage, messaging, databases and so on -- from someplace outside your own four walls, and paying only for what you use.

This spring, as the technology industry raised ever-louder complaints about Windows Vista, Bill Gates amped up expectations for the next version of the operating system, referred to simply as Windows 7. Speaking in Miami in April, the Microsoft chairman said, "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version," and then went on to extol the virtues of Windows 7, including "the ability to be lower-power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections."