ReadWriteWeb

It is no surprise to anyone who has covered either the computing or telecommunications markets for any length of time that manufacturers' visions of the future are centered around the ubiquity of the products they create. The 2007 vision of ubiquitous communications among carriers revolved around a kind of flip-phone with a detachable antenna you might wear on your head or in your pocket. When the iPhone happened, it was called "disruption," but really in the sense that a bad dream was disrupted by a better reality.

The 1995 vision of ubiquitous computing from Microsoft revolved around a universal acceptance of the role of packaged software; the word "Internet" was surgically inserted into a later draft of Bill Gates' The Road Ahead. So when you look carefully at concepts of an "Internet of Things" (IoT), if you're a veteran, you might want to focus on what these things are supposed to be. KORE Telematics President and COO Alex Brisbourne (whose business is machine-to-machine communication, or M2M) has done precisely that, and shares his thoughts with us in part 2 of his three-part discussion with ReadWriteWeb.

Apple sold over 500,000 iPads in its first week, but that trend doesn't have execs at Intel convinced that the iPad is at all ushering in a new era of tablet computing. Speaking to the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, David Perlmutter, co-general manager of Intel's Architecture Group, seemed a bit down about the whole touch-based computing thing. "These new categories are hard to predict," he said, and then went on to talk about how well netbooks were doing.

What has us confused about this negative sentiment isn't the fact that Intel downplayed the tablet market - after all, its chips aren't present in a good many of the tablets emerging now on the market. It's that they came at the same time as a rather important announcement from the chip giant: Intel has ported Google's Android operating system to its Atom microprocessor.

According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly "real-time," using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future - the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.