Apple has surpassed Microsoft, IBM, Walmart and GE in brand value within the past year, according to Brand Finance. The London-based consulting firm estimates the monetary value of Apple’s brand at $39.3 billion, up from $29.5 billion earlier this year and $19.8 billion last year.

Apple is just behind Google, which is now listed with abrand value of $48.3 billion, up from $44.3 billion earlier this year. Microsoft lost almost $4 billion to $39.0 billion, IBM dropped slightly to $36.0 billion, Walmart dropped to $35.0 billion and GE to $29.1 billion. Other tech companies among the Top 30 brands are AT&T in 7th place with $28.3 billion, HP (#11) with $25.0 billion, Intel (#14) with $23.5 billion), Amazon (#15) with $20.9 billion and Comcast (#30) with $11.8 billion.

Overall the value of the Top 100 brands have fallen by about 2.4 percent, Brand Finance said. However, brand valuations carry a great deal of perception value as well. For example, BrandZ estimated Apple’s brand value at $153.3 billion earlier this year.

SOURCE via Fortune

Researchers at the University of Michigan suggest that a reduction of the Wi-Fi clock during idle listening could give users more time with their phone.

Engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang said that smartphones, including the iPhone, spend up to 80 percent of their power-saving mode in idle listening state, which checks the network for incoming data. However, they also found that this idle listening mode often consumes just as much power as when the phones are fully awake.

At the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Las Vegas, the scientists will present their idea for E-MiLi, which stands for Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening: The technology scales the Wi-Fi clock to only 1/16 of its usual clock to save power. To still be able to recognize incoming messages, they tweaked their smartphones to be focused to detect only message headers. As a result, they found that E-MiLi can reduce energy consumption by around 44 percent for 92 percent of mobile devices “in real-world wireless networks.”

The technology requires smartphones to be equipped with processor-slowing software, as well as new firmware for phones and computers that are sending messages. The University of Michigan said it is “pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.”

SOURCE via UOM

Friday Corsair made two separate announcements concerning its new line of Vengeance gaming accessories: one regarding keyboards and laser mice, and one regarding gaming headsets. The company also announced a $10,000 Vengeance Cup Online PC Gaming Tournament featuring Call of Duty 4 which can be accessed here.

Breaking away from its typical hardware lineup, Corsair is dipping into the peripheral business with the upcoming release of two Vengeance gaming keyboard (“K”) and laser mouse (“M”) groups. These address two types of gamers: the FPS player (Vengeance K60 and M60) and the RTS player (Vengeance K90 and M90). All four are expected to hit store shelves sometime in October 2011, ranging from $69 to $129. Read more…

At IDF, Intel demonstrated a chip that will come after Ivy Bridge, the next “tick” in Intel’s release schedule. That chip is codenamed Haswell, and it will bring architectural improvements to the 22 nm process that will first be introduced in Ivy Bridge.

Intel sees Haswell as the goal for its multi-phase Ultrabook initiative. Looking into its future plan for the platform, Intel CEO Paul Otellini described a new class of platform power management in development for the 2013 Haswell products for Ultrabooks.

Intel said that advances in silicon technology and platform engineering are expected to reduce idle platform power by more than 20 times over current designs without compromising computing performance. Otellini said he expects that this design change, combined with industry collaboration, will lead to more than 10 days of connected standby battery life by the time the products hit in 2013.

The connected standby battery life means that notebooks could operate like today’s smartphones, which can be in a sleep mode but still stay connected, keeping the e-mail, social media and digital content up-to-date.

Well, since Samsung couldn’t get an early peek at the iPhone 5 and iPad 3, the company has simply decided to take a page from Apple’s playbook. A senior exec told The Korea Times it plans to file a request to block the sale of the upcoming iOS handset in its Korean homeland the moment the device is announced. According to the Times, the anonymous exec said it would leverage its wireless technology patents and demand that Apple either remove the telecommunications features — turning the iPhone into an iPod touch — or simply be banished from the Korean market. The knock-down-drag-out war between the two companies has only seemed to escalate in recent weeks, as Sammy has taken a much more combative and offensive approach. We can only hope the two get tired of divvying up the globe and declare a draw in this game of patent Risk.

SOURCE via The Korea Times

The cost of deploying solar power systems has dropped by 18 percent in 2010 and by 11 percent during the first six months of 2011, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) reports. The decline in overall installation cost is especially due to the decrease of photovoltaic module cost.

“Wholesale PV module prices have fallen precipitously since about 2008, and those upstream cost reductions have made their way through to consumers,” said Galen Barbose of Berkeley Lab. However, a drop in secondary, non-module cost in industrial applications are also seen as critical as “those are the costs that can be most readily influenced by solar policies aimed at accelerating deployment and removing market barriers,” stated Berkeley Lab scientist Ryan Wiser.

Large-scale solar system cost with projects that are greater than 5000 kW came in at $2.90 to $6.20 per watt in 2010, depending on the size and project type. The 2011 number seems to be in the range of $3.80/watt to $4.40/watt, Berkeley Lab said. Utility scale systems with a size of greater than 1000 kW cost an average of $5.20 in 2010, while the cost in 2011 appears to have fallen into the $3/watt to $4/watt range. Residential solar system with a size of up to 2 kW cost about $9.80/watt, according the Berkeley Lab.

However, the reduction of federal, state, and utility incentives in 2010 somewhat offset the decline in installed costs. The decline in post-incentive installed costs fell by $0.40/watt for residential solar systems and by $0.80/watt for commercial solar systems, Berkeley Lab said.

SOURCE via Berkeley Lab

It seemed that Windows 8 will have NFC support. Microsoft has confirmed during its Build keynote last week that Windows 8 devices equipped with an NFC chip will be able to use a tap-to-share feature to either send content from one device to another, or simply receive content from something like an NFC-equipped card.

NXP Semiconductors, a manufacturer of NFC chips, has also confirmed that it “worked closely” with Microsoft to develop an NFC driver for Windows 8, and that it’s also supplied the NFC solution used in the Windows 8 tablets given out at Build. According to the company, the NFC support in Windows 8 includes things like device pairing (simply tapping to pair a Bluetooth headset, for example), data sharing, and the ability to transfer control from one device to another (such as during a video call).

And that’s all to say nothing of the usual fare like interacting with an NFC-enhanced advertisement, not to mention other applications that will surely follow once it’s actually put into practice.

SOURCE via Engadget

Google’s Chrome browser has the ability to keep itself updated, so if you’re a regular user (who also restarts the browser regularly), then you should be updated – even if you weren’t aware of it.

In either case, you may be pleased to know that Google has officially released the stable version of Chrome 14.

Google says that this release contains two significant technologies which allow developers to create even more powerful web apps and games:

• The Web Audio API enables developers to add fancy audio effects such as room simulation and spatialization.
• Native Client is an open-source technology which allows C and C++ code to be seamlessly and securely executed inside the browser. Currently, Native Client only supports applications listed in the Chrome Web Store, but we are working to remove this limitation as soon as possible.

Mac users running Chrome will also appreciate some of the Mac OS X Lion-specific additions, such as overlay scrollbars, which appear only while you’re scrolling and natively supported full-screen mode.