Following Nick Rutledge‘s divine Ubuntu Laptop Concept comes this Ubuntu Mini PC idea by Lucas Romero Di Benedetto.

The net-top sized PC is small, curvaceous, and encased in Ubuntu colors (I’m not alone in wanting the orange banding to light up, right?)

Much like the Ubuntu Laptop design we wrote about previously, this concept is unlikely to become a physical product – at least not from Canonical.

Ubuntu computer companies such as System76, ZaReason or Clausoft could potentially add a low-powered, low-cost net-top to their inventory based on designs already in existence. It would certainly make an adorable media centre if not aBYODKM PC.

Would you buy it? 

The interface will look very familiar for Unity users, as it appears to simply be an Ubuntu installation running with some custom Unity lenses for browsing movies, TV Shows, music, watching YouTube, and more. It’s more than a simple concept design however, with the installation running on a real television.

There is just one Ubuntu TV on show at CES, but Canonical expects Ubuntu-powered televisions to be on the shelves by the end of this year, however, there are no deals with manufacturers signed.

Canonical CEO Jane Silber told PC Pro that Canonical were in discussions with a number of manufacturers but couldn’t confirm any signed deals. Canonical will be hard pressed to compete with industry giants Google and Apple, who are expected to unveil prominent TV products this year, however Silber remains confident that Canonical can remain competitive.

“OEMs and ODMs are increasingly wary of the walled garden [approach] that certainly Apple takes – and increasingly Google, although it’s much more open than Apple,” she claimed. “We see a lot of demand for a neutral player.”

Canonical hopes to woo manufacturers by offering the Ubuntu TV software free of charge, and plans to target the US and Chinese markets first. Expansion into other markets (including the UK) hinges on Canonical being able to secure content deals. There’s no mention on whether the software will be available for download by regular users to install themselves and tinker with yet.

Silber said that work is continuing on Ubuntu for mobile phones, and she stressed that Canonical’s diversification into other devices shouldn’t be seen as Canonical backing away from the PC market.
“There’s no question the world is moving to a more mobile environment,” she said. “But I wouldn’t characterise it as us giving up on the PC market.”

Opera’s ‘built-in’ mail reader – an oft-overlooked feature of the browser – sports a new ‘two paned’ look, with mail grouped by date, ‘conversation’ threads, and a whole host of other small improvements.

If you’ve ever used Mac mail client Sparrow and longed for something similar on Linux: here it is (albeit not very well integrated).

The full Opera Mail change-log looks like this: -

• Two-lined message list: Opera Mail will now default to “list on the left, message on the right”, with the newest message on top, and showing message threads.
• Mail grouping: Opera will automatically group messages by date. You can also group them by unread status, by pinned status, or not at all.
• Cleaned up look: The mail toolbars are simplified, and icons have been redesigned.
• New settings dialogues: The “View” drop-down menu with all its sub-menus has been replaced by an overlay dialog that can be reached by clicking the “wrench” button.
• Pinning: You can now “pin” messages with one click in the message list or in the message headers, to mark a message for attention. This pinning is mapped to the IMAP \Flagged feature, so it corresponds to “starring” and “flagging” in other IMAP clients, and with Gmail’s starred messages.

The two devices are paired with each other during the setup process, which generates a passkey that can be used to toggle remote access. One Twin will looks for its counterpart over the internet and establishes a secured connection between the two machines to transfer files.

The company is planning to start shipping devices sometime next year, starting with US and then moving on to Europe. iTwin is expected to cost about $99 at the time of its launch.

IBM said the technology promised faster data access speeds than were possible using hard drives or flash disks.However it faces a challenge from other next-generation memory technologies being explored by other companies.

The prototype chip consists of 256 Racetrack cells.Each cell consisted of a single magnetic nanowire, 60-240 nanometres wide and 15-20 nanometres thick.  A nanometre is a billionth of a metre.

Electric pulses are applied to the wires creating “domain walls” with “regions” between them.These regions pass over a magnetic read/write head which faces them in one direction or another, representing the 0s and 1s of computer data. The small magnetic regions can be “raced” at speed along the wires – giving the technique its name.

Advocates of Racetrack claim it could potentially read and write data hundreds of thousands of times faster than is possible on commercial hard disks. That would put access speeds at roughly the rate offered by DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips. These are already used in current PCs to run programs, but “forget” data as soon as the computers’ power supplies are switched off.

“This breakthrough could lead to a new type of data-centric computing that allows massive amounts of stored information to be accessed in less than a billionth of a second,” said a statement from IBM.

Racetrack may also prove more durable. IBM aims to create a device that can be wiped and rewritten millions of times. By contrast many flash memory drives can become unreliable after any single bit has endured about 100,000 writes.

However, the researchers acknowledge that more work needs to be done to optimise their process and improve “cell operation repeatability”.

That means there is still time for Samsung, Hewlett Packard, Micron Technologies and other IBM researchers to complete work on alternative memory storage techniques that they hope will become future standards.

Krishna Kumar and Savita Murthy, a couple working for a financial institution and a telecom service provider respectively in New York, were in Bangalore in November to attend job interviews because of uncertainties in the US job market.

Another couple currently working in Berlin and Paris is moving back to Pune with their 12-year-old daughter. “The wife who works in a French bank has been pink slipped and her term ends on December 31,” said an acquaintance who did not want to be named.

Most recruitment firms TOI spoke to understand the phenomenon said the number of Indians coming home in search of work has risen sharply in the past three months. What is significant is that these Indian-origin executives who are now looking to return home are coming in at salaries similar to what they were getting abroad.

There are, however, certain sectors which have generated more traction than others. For instance retail, FMCG, financial services, IT, mining and power have benefitted from these highly-qualified Indians looking to come home.

Kishore Biyani-led Future Group is the midst of one such recruitment action. “We are improving our systems and processes, an area that as an organization we are focusing a lot on. The expertise brought about by these people at the back-end and supply chain management areas is something we required,” said Sanjay Jog, Chief People Officer, The Future Group, India’s largest retailer which runs stores like Big Bazaar and Pantaloon.

The retailer hired a number of key executives, all of them Indians who have come from international markets, in the last couple of months. While Manoj Agarwal came from Procter & Gamble’s US operations based in Cincinnati who is now heading the project management office at the group, Anurup Pruthi was earlier with Burberry, UK, who is now the chief executive for Digital Services and heads the captive BPO and technology services for retailer.

“It’s not only the slowdown in the economy that is leading senior professionals to come back to India, it’s also the fact that now India businesses have the scale to absorb such global talent. These companies need global best practices to help them grow further,” said K Sudarshan, managing partner-India & Regional VP-Asia, EMA Partners International, a global executive search firm. He has made six C level hires in the last few months-all Indians wanting to come back.

If the name Mozilla rings any bells it’s because they’re the tech boffins who put together Internet Explorer, the browser that Windows defaults to. Mozilla took the leviathan computing company on with its Firefox browser, and today it stands as the second most popular browser worldwide.

Now the company who was underdog to Microsoft looks to be playing the same role, but this time against internet mogul Google.

Announced on the Mozilla discussion forum, Mozilla have begun coding for phones and tablets. The BBC revealed the mobile operating system will draw on Android code, with Mozilla writing as much fresh code as possible. The hybrid-like operating system will be named Boot To Gecko.

It is an unusual name for an OS, until you remember Gecko is the rendering engine employed by the Firefox browser that interprets web page coding and displays it in a screen-friendly format, a homage to its origins.

Even though Android coding will form the operating system’s foundations, Mozilla hope to add a much more open wrapper around it than Google currently do, making it more versatile as an operating system.

Its shared foundations will also make Boot To Gecko compatible with the same phones as Android, competing as a direct alternative to Google.

Often, when you select a link from an application native to the Android or iOS market, the operating system will have to open a new webpage in the browser. Boot To Gecko aims to limit this by making applications much more web-centric.

If the venture proves successful, Mozilla will be waging war against industry giants, with Google, Apple and Microsoft dominating many facets of the technological world.

Mozilla have acknowledged the project is in infancy and have chosen to make the development public in hope it will attract talented enthusiast coders who will contribute to the Boot To Gecko’s cause.

According to their project team, all of the code development will be completed and shared with the public as soon as it is written.

Researcher Andreas Gal, who announced the development, admits the company has set a high target, but wants to do it “the way we think open source should be done.

Gal says his ultimate goal is to break “the stranglehold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world,” implicitly referring to the practices of Apple, Windows Phone and Google.

Entering the region a decade ago in partnership with Dal Al Riyadh in Al Khobar, the company consolidated its presence by forming a joint venture with the well-diversified group to form Wipro Arabia Ltd for serving a large number of clients across the kingdom.

“Our joint venture has emerged as a strategic IT partner in the region with 750 employees servicing over 60 customers. We have also set up a development centre in Al Khobar to support customers and nurture local talent,” Wipro Arabia chairman prince Turki Bin Abdullah Bin Abdulrahaman said in a statement from Riyadh.

The company also contributed in building an IT base in the kingdom by hiring and training a large number of Saudi nationals, who account for 38 percent of the joint venture’s employees.

With the region seeing investments in the public sector, oil and gas and banking and telecom, the company plans to expand its operations by investing in technology and human resources.

“Given the scope of our engagements, we are looking to increase employment opportunities for both men and women in the region. Localisation is a key driver of our growth strategy,” Wipro chairman Azim Premji said on the occasion of the joint venture commencing its 11th year of operations in the Arabian country.

Among the company’s leading clients are Saudi Arabian Airlines, with which it has a five-year transformational deal to build and manage its entire IT infrastructure, including data centres. The joint venture has implemented a turnkey enterprise resource planning-student life cycle management solution for King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

The company also recently bagged a five-year deal to deploy an end-to-end IT solution to Atheeb Telecom, the leading state-run communication services provider in the kingdom.

“The kingdom has proved to be the growth engine for us among emerging markets. In the past four years, our revenue grew at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 80 percent. We are positive about the growth potential in the region,” Wipro vice president for India, Middle East and Africa Anand Sankaran said.