When the NASDAQ stock index hit its all-time high of 5,133 on March 10, 2000 – having more than doubled in a year — the now legendary dot-com bubble was already looking like a balloon strapped to the back of a porcupine.

A week later the NASDAQ had fallen 9 percent. … A year later it was under 2,000. And the finger-pointing would last deep into the decade.

Since memories fade – especially memories of such an unpleasant nature – I’ve assembled a few items from various archives that capture the essentials of what transpired – and what was thought about what transpired — in the aftermath of this week’s high-water mark.

Click here to read more.

Dual-screen e-readers have a number of advantages over single-screen e-readers. At least with two screens, you can work on more complex tasks such as browsing websites and write some notes on the color LCD screen while reading e-book on the e-Ink display.

The 1Cross Tech MIDhybrid is another dual-screen e-reader that packs an LCD screen with keypad on the right, an e-Ink display on the left and a hinge in the middle that makes it foldable and look like a book.

The 1Cross Tech MIDhybrid e-reader Marvell-powered and runs Android 1.6, like the Alex e-reader, allows the user to render content from the LCD over the e-Ink display. It’s equipped with 3G, Bluetooth connectivity, and a front-facing webcam. No information on the price or release date yet.

Transonic Combustion, a startup based in Camarillo, CA, has developed a fuel-injection system it says can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent. A test vehicle equipped with the technology gets 64 miles per gallon in highway driving, which is far better than more costly gas-electric hybrids, such as the Prius, which gets 48 miles per gallon on the highway.

The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic’s vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that “activates” it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion.

The technology is one of many being developed to squeeze more efficiency out of existing engines to meet new fuel economy standards and other regulations–without making vehicles more expensive. “It’s a time of renaissance for internal combustion engines,” saysWilliam Green, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT. Improvements include smaller engines boosted with turbocharging, improved valve timing, and direct injection, in which fuel is injected directly into the combustion chamber rather than into an adjacent port. He says Transonic’s approach “may be a promising way to improve on conventional direct injection.”

Read more click here.

Cisco Systems today introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform.

“The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,” Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said during a webcast announcing the product.

At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said.

The CRS-3 will help the Internet evolve from a messaging to an entertainment and media platform, with video emerging as the “killer app,” Chambers said.

To read more click here

For many years, I looked at the TiVo perched atop my television as practically the perfect gadget, changing the way I watched television forever. But then broadband took off, Hulu and Netflix came along, iTunes started telling television shows, and televisions got their own DVR abilities built right into them. Ever since then, my TiVo has really lost a lot of its luster.

I’m apparently not the only customer who feels this way. According to the Wall Street Journal, TiVo has posted a loss for Q4. Despite recently winning an appeal on a patent against the Dish Networkwhich bumped the value of their shares, TiVo is still not doing as well financially as they once did.

TiVo attributes the loss for its fourth quarter ending January 31st, 2010, which amounts to $10.2 million, to a huge burst of subscription cancellations, which probably stem to migration of competing services like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Xbox Live, etc. Additionally, new subscribers have also been slower to come to the service than in the past.

At the end of the day, that $10.2 million loss works out to about nine cents a share, which isn’t a big deal, but it’s only going to get worse from here. There are simply too many competing services and products to TiVo these days, many of which don’t require a subscription. While $10 million isn’t a big deal to a company as large as TiVo, that number’s just going to go up unless they figure out how to evolve.

Smoother Than the Smoothest Thing

The Wacom Intuos 4 was quite a leap from the Intuos 3. It doubled the pressure sensitive levels, and it added multifunction Touch Ring trackpad, on-screen radial menus, and eight user-definable buttons with OLED tags—called ExpressKeys—in a thin, ultralight 2.2-pound package. The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless has all those characteristics, and they work equally as well over the Bluetooth connection.

With a sightly smaller working surface than the Medium model—8 x 5 inches versus the 8.8 x 5.5 inches of the cable-bound model—the wireless tablet is a pure joy to use. The 2048 levels of pressure sensitiveness, requiring only 1 gram of pressure to start painting vs the 10 grams of the previous version, offer the best real drawing simulation of any of the tablets I’ve ever tried. It feels like the real thing, with the slightest touch transferred to the screen as if it was real media. The brushstrokes are as smooth and precise as the real thing, and the tablet never misses a single beat, no matter how fast I try to move its very comfortable stylus—which comes with different tips for different surface feedback.

This performance is not only good for digital painting. It is perfect to retouch in Photoshop, allowing you to mask or clone with absolute precision, down to the last pixel, without having to vary the size of the brush. It makes everyday brush tasks so easy it makes me giddy when I’m using it.

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As part of Google’s master plan to make the web a faster place (read The Google Revenue Equation for details), the search giant is launching a new speed assessment tool for YouTube dubbed the “YouTube Speed Dashboard.”

The YouTube Speed Dashboard is essentially a quick and easy way to find out about your connection speed. This isn’t something new to the web, but the fact that Google is launching it for YouTube and placing resources and emphasis on it is. In fact, members of the Google team were central to building the YouTube Speed Dashboard, led by Product Manager Amit Arawal, who I spoke with earlier today.

The reason for launching the Speed Dashboard is simple: they want to make the web faster. Video specifically suffers from slow load times and buffering issues when you have a slow connection, turning people off from YouTube and forcing them to go elsewhere.

On the Speed Dashboard, you can quickly find out about your connection speed, as well as the speed of the people around you based on ISP and location. Since I’m writing this post via 3G, it’s rather low for example. It’s a simple and fast way to compare your ISP speed across the spectrum and figure out whether you’re getting the bang for your buck or whether you should switch connections.

For now, the YouTube Speed Dashboard remains just an information tool – it will only give you your connection speed and the speeds of others around you. It does not provide tools or suggestions for speeding up your Internet — yet. Mr. Arawal says that adding links to useful tools for speeding up your connection is coming in the near future.

Today’s move comes in the wake of other recent moves by Google to improve the speed of the web, most prominently announcing the creation of an ultra high-speed fiber network.

If you want to try out the Speed Dashboard, you can check it out here.

Tags: Google, Speed Dashboard, youtube

One of the first big “wow” apps for the iPhone was Shazam— hold up your phone to the radio or TV and BAM, find out what song is playing. Likewise, the Last.fm iPhone app was one of the first apps in the App Store for music fans. Today Shazam and Last.fm are partnering to bring features from both services together.

When Shazam launched its premium versions, Shazam Encore and (SHAZAM)RED, last fall, it was unclear if the new features would be worth the $4.99 price tag. The new Last.fm-enhanced features significantly change the value proposition.

Here’s what you can now do with the Shazam Encore and (SHAZAM)RED apps:

- You can listen to Last.fm stations directly from your tagged Shazam tracks.

- You can create new stations from those tracks in Last.fm, provided you have the Last.fm iPhone app installed.

- You can view ticket and tour info for tagged artists with geolocation support to see when your favorite band will be near you.

To us it makes sense to combine a discovery engine like Shazam with a music aggregator like Last.fm. It takes away the need to go the extra step of researching an artist, and also lets you find other artists with similar sounds.

What do you think of the combination of these two services? Let us know!

Security industry analysts and lawmakers will get an unprecedented chance next week to evaluate how the government might respond to a hack attack on critical infrastructure targets.

The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a Washington-based non-profit established in 2007 by several lawmakers, will host a simulated nation-wide cyber-attack next Tuesday for a group of former administration and national security officials, who will be playing the roles of Cabinet members.

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The venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is undergoing a significant transformation. The next major release, version 2.8, will introduce an improved user interface with an optional single-window mode. Although this update is still under heavy development, users can get an early look by compiling the latest source code of the development version from the GIMP’s version control repository.

The GIMP is an open source software application for editing raster graphics. It is intended to serve as a free and open alternative to high-end image editing programs for a professional audience. Although the GIMP still has some limitations relative to industry-leading commercial products like Photoshop, it is becoming an increasingly viable solution for professional artists and photographers.

A general lack of usability is often highlighted as one of the GIMP’s most significant weaknesses. A common grievance is that the program tends to spawn a confusing assortment of windows and floating tool panels that can be difficult to navigate and organize. In an effort to solve such problems and boost ease of use, the program’s developers are rethinking its user interface. This broad effort has involved extensive analysis, expert evaluations, and community brainstorming.

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