Week in Review: Nokia Points and Finds
The world’s biggest mobile phone company made us sit up and take notice once again, while the IT industry celebrated April Fools.
Nokia has come out with exciting new technology by releasing Point & Find', a system where mobile phone users can scan images with their inbuilt cameras and search for information.
It's early days for the technology, but if you want to see it in action and you have a compatible phone, you can see it at the Body World exhibition at the O2.
You can already see the possibilities. Imagine scanning barcodes, looking at shop items, and going on tourist trips to places like museums where you can see info simply by looking though your camera.
The IT PRO staff wants to test out this technology, but none of us have a compatible phone. However, we want to know if any of our readers has used the tech successfully, and how you feel about it. Get in touch with us at comments@dennis.co.uk, or send a message to our Twitter feed.
This week also saw April Fools' Day, and we rounded up some of the best April Fool gags that the tech world has offered us in the past, and what we saw this year.
This year IT PRO didn't publish an April Fools' story, but we didn't need to, considering Conficker had pretty much already done the job for us. Media hype suggested computers around the world would melt down on April 1st and nothing very much happened.
Even though the vast majority of security vendors actually did try and play down the threat, it may have caused more harm than good. And the stats do show that the malware and spam threat is still our biggest problem.
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If the GhostNet news was on April 1st it's possible that some would have thought it was a hoax. But indeed it was true there was a worldwide spy network targeting places like embassies, foreign ministries and government offices around the world.
Although the Chinese government was suspected of running the cyber network, IT PRO asked the question of how much evidence there was of state involvement, and whether cybercriminals were capable of using the same technology to create their own spy network, which could be a major business problem.
We also saw the release of the Xeon 5500 processor this week, together with a handy cheat sheet by our tech ed. We also had an exclusive review of Dell's latest ultra-powerful server and the new Apple Mac Pro, which both carry Intel's powerful little CPU.