A really innovative green technology product called “Reverse Vending Machines” have been launched in South Australia by Wincor Nixdorf, one of the world’s leading providers of IT solutions to retail banks and retailers. The machines will aid in reducing littering and promote recycling. RVM is actually a multifunctional system that does identification, collecting, sorting and processing of used/empty bottles and cans.

Opera Software has planned to increase its performance by drastically reducing power consumption by more than 25%. Opera has taken the decision of becoming more eco friendly following the announcement of their Icelandic data center. With 120 million active users for Opera Mini and Opera Turbo Services, the firm’s power consumption has started grown rapidly. Currently, the company has six server parks spread across the globe. Dell is Opera’s choice for hardware solutions for all of their data centers.  Other than the recently opened Icelandic data center, Opera has data centers in Norway, Poland, Korea, China and the United States.

Smartphones are awesome. They are futuristic and reminiscent of our imagined future where we all carry our personal computers in our pockets. Robots are also awesome, and for very similar reasons. If only there were some way to combine the two into something so future-tastic that it would make us nostalgic for a time that hasn’t even happened yet. Well, late this August, in Las Vegas there will be. At the annual Appcon event this year, they will be holding a fantastic competition known as the Cellbot Hackathon. Yes, the premise is just as epic as the name makes it sound.

Apple is again going toe to toe with HTC. This time Apple has sued the Taiwanese smartphone maker for breaching a total of four patents related to software and technologies used by in the smartphone manufacturing.

Take Youtube, change the language, fill it with even more competent hackers, and give it carte-blanche permission from the most powerful country in the world to infringe on whatever copyrights they want.  That will give you an idea of what the Chines video site Tudou is like.  Naturally, the site has been a major force in Chinese social media and in global media piracy.  There isn’t a TV/Movie link farm out there that doesn’t have half of its links ending up there; not to mention it’s the Youtube of the most populous nation in the world.  Well, they just joined forces with Chines search giant Soso to create a comprehensive video search engine for Tudou.  How does this effect people outside of China you ask?  Well, for starters, media piracy is about to get a lot more pervasive worldwide.

Cloud Computing is a big topic in today’s technology market. Structure 2010 is an event to recognize and promote cloud technology. The 2 day event, which takes place in San Francisco, aims to look “at the whole picture and predict the directions the industry will take.” The event’s official website says, “Whether you’re in a corporation looking to learn about infrastructure best practices or an entrepreneur looking for your next venture, Structure 2010 is a must-attend event that can provide you with the best ideas, contacts and thinkers.”

The case didn’t look to be a particularly big deal when it was going on, but Youtube just won a rather important precedent setting case in the realm of digital content and copyrights.  They were recently involved in a case with Viacom involving the procedures necessary to deal with copyright infringement in cyberspace.  The ruling in favor of Youtube means that, from this point on, it is going to be a good bit harder to get media taken down from the internet… or at least harder to make it legally necessary for someone else to have to.

Microsoft has announced some new features to Bing search engine on a blog post published yesterday, calling them a “Spring wave of features.” Microsoft has enhanced the site design and experience by moving the Quick Tabs from the left plane to directly below the search box. It has also added a new design aesthetic to the site. The newly introduced Bing updates focus greatly on the entertainment areas of music, movies, TV and gaming.

LinkedIn has introduced some new features for LinkedIn Groups. Groups helps users create an open forum based on a specific subject or profession and allows users to comment and share information. LinkedIn has updated Groups and the changes are considered to be major.  Before you could not find any wall between onsite comments and offsite content like shared news articles. The new design has made it easy to know about the recent updates of a discussion or comment. 

Yes, after more than a year of speculation, Google Voice has resurfaced again and this time it will be open to the public. Initially, Google Voice was available by invite only. More recently, it was made available to students with valid school email addresses. Now that the service is open to the public (and still free), it’s defiantly worth a second look.

Ok, so by now we are all aware of the mountain of feature upgrades that Google has been piling onto Google Docs.  They’re trying to prove to the world that they are the superior method of putting Office documents in the cloud, and some of these features are even enough to make you think twice.  However, today Google has really outdone themselves with the release of this new feature: scanned character recognition.  Yes, that is as in “scan a printed document, and have it digitally converted to a editable Google Doc” character recognition.

You know this story all too well.  You are surfing the internet intently; both business and pleasure simultaneously.  Every now and then you come across something interesting/useful enough that you want to look at it later that day, but not enough that you want to bookmark it. What do you do? Leave the window active and minimize.  Rinse, lather and repeat for an hour or so, and you’ve got a lot of windows open using up a lot of internet mo-jo.  Eventually, one of the applications in one of the windows crashes.  Unfortunately, this sets into motion a chain of events that makes the entire program crash.  Every window closes in a glorious explosion in web-failure, and you lose every bit of progress on every site.  Well, Mozilla has just shown why they are the#1 browser by fixing this problem in beta through new crash protection protocols.

Ever since Google bought that former branch of Microsoft that allowed them to make cloud MS office options, they’ve been doing surprisingly well at providing a decent alternative to standard MS office cloud.  It’s actually surprising, given how utterly dominant/streamlined office currently is.  They even did well enough that Microsoft had to make their cloud-based office free to continue to compete.  However, it looks as though Google may be ruining their “no idiotic marketing decisions with MSO Google Docs” streak.  They are seriously pushing the Chrome extensions/applications of using the new Google docs, and by extension trying to push Chrome.

According to Symantec Corp’s Global SMB Information Protection Survey 2010, small and medium-sized businesses are now aware of the importance of data security. They consider information protection as the most important factor in business. This is quite contradictory to the situation that existed just 15 months ago when most of the same respondents didn’t even have the most basic protection. Symantec has analyzed the reasons for the sudden change.

Switching to Verizon FiOS for your cable needs is now more convenient as Verizon is now offering month to month plans. Its few and fore between that service providers of any type provide anything without a contract. This will greatly benefit consumers and could be the first of many more month to month type plans. Added benefits include price protection for one year, no early termination fee, and 24/7 technical support.