What if the world were one giant touchscreen? That’s the promise behind Metaio‘s “Thermal Touch” technology, which combines thermal imaging and augmented reality with spectacular results. Announced today, Thermal Touch uses standard and thermal cameras to track heat signatures people leave when they touch surfaces. The potential applications are enormous: Tap your door to enter a keycode without the keypad; tap your table to play a game of chess without the board; tap a print ad to hit ‘buy’ without a smartphone. “We can now essentially turn every surface into a touchscreen,” Metaio marketing director Trak Lord told VentureBeat. “Someone’s got to do…

Cloud-based applications, also called Software as a Service (SaaS), have become the mainstay of many businesses these days. It makes sense to move many applications to the cloud because of the reduced costs of those applications and the increased speed with which they propagate through the organization, but the convenience of cloud doesn’t come without some risk. One risk that is often overlooked is the risk that is inherently involved with data. In the case of cloud-based apps, the concerns associated with data are usually focused on the security of…

The recent news of layoffs from computing giants provides proof, once again, of an old economic saw. It is not actually big businesses that create jobs, it’s the small and new ones. Our problem is that we’ve a political class (yes, all of it) that doesn’t really quite get this. They would like there to be lots of jobs, of course, but they think that the way to get them is to suck up to – to give privileges to – large extant employers instead of the people who actually…

What in HELL does ‘hit go’ mean?! Something for the Weekend, Sir? “Sorry to bother you. Are you busy?” Instinctively, I look at my watch. Here we go. Bet you he’s going to ask me to fix something trivial. “Don’t worry, Bill,” I reply. “What’s up?” “The computer web isn’t working.” Ah bless, the guy’s long past retirement age but still hangs in there. In fact, he’s a bit of an entrepreneurial demon. It’s just that he can’t conceptualise computers and can’t handle the terminology. “You mean there’s a problem…

Splurges $25k to get a seat at the open-source cloud project’s marketing table SAP is preparing to work with arch-rival Oracle on developing open-source software that will benefit both companies’ products. This perplexing state of affairs was announced by SAP on Tuesday when it said it had become a “Corporate Sponsor” of the OpenStack Foundation to the tune of $25,000 a year. Oracle is also a sponsor, as are tens of other companies including Ubuntu, HP, IBM, Cisco, Yahoo!, and more. OpenStack is a project founded by NASA and Rackspace in 2010…