CES 2015 Las Vegas, NV – SanDisk Impromptu meeting   
Occasionally when you are at CES you run into some interesting people. This happened yesterday when we were hanging out with the guys from eteknix.com. We had the chance to catch up with the SanDisk gang and talk about storage for a few minutes in the Lobby Bar at the Palazzo. Although SanDisk did not have much new to show they did have some cool products that we are looking forward to get into the lab in the near future.

The dire warnings of manipulation through mass media are usually seen as the arena of the paranoid. Most will label anyone that claims we are being controlled in this manner as part of the tin foil hat club. Now that it we find that Facebook itself might have participated in an event designed to manipulate people’s emotions through their news feeds these claims do not sound too crazy any more.

Backblaze company, specialized in storage solutions on the Internet , has conducted a study which concluded that hard disk drives designed for professional use are not more reliable than equivalent models designed for home users. Backblaze measured the reliability according to the number of failures per drive per year, which a disc-year represents, for example, the work of one disk for a period of one year or four disks working four years.

Adblock Plus, a popular application for blocking various advertising content that lavishes users on the Internet, is launching a new option to block unwanted content on popular social networks. Through special additives that can be found on the website YouTube Customizer, it is possible to block YouTube features that are not desirable.

Winamp is one of the most famous and longest-running multimedia player that will cease to exist on 20th December. After that date, the website Winamp.com nor other related sites will no longer be available, nor will it be possible to download the application itself.

Taiwanese company MediaTek plans to invest more than $1 billion in development of more than 20 new chips in 2014 that will be built into smart phones, tablets, TVs, DVD players, and wireless devices. MediaTek usually spends about 20% of the annual amount collected from the sale on the research and development department.

Samsung TV box runs on dual-core processor clocked at 1.7 GHz, while the 1GB of RAM ensures that all running applications work smoothly. To save your files Samsung has provided 8GB of flash memory and hard disk with 1TB of capacity.

Two companies joined forces, and this week demonstrated wireless streaming of visual content in Ultra HDTV or 4K resolution from the laptop to the presentation screen. Wilocity is a manufacturer of wireless chips with multi-gigabit speeds at a frequency of 60 GHz, while the company DisplayLink is responsible for development of the "USB graphics technology'" which includes a combination of smooth display of video, low latency and ease of USB technology.

There is no doubt that the mobile market has gotten huge. Everyone is building devices to enable, extend, accessorize, and maximize the mobile experience. Mobile data usage (which really means media consumption) has gone through the roof. What is interesting about the usage numbers is that they are not all 3/4G in most cases the data is flying over public or private Wi-Fi networks. This has opened up a market for a new class of device and as you might imagine manufacturers have stepping into fill this need. The first generation was all about getting the media to your device, but was limited in a couple of ways; you could not expand the memory and also there was no way to prevent battery drain on the device you were using to access the media. This is where the second generation comes in; devices with media ports instead of fixed memory and also the ability to charge your mobile device. Today we are taking a look at the ADATA DashDrive Air AE400; let’s see what it brings to the table.

Apple has no intention, at least not in the near future, to release a version of iTunes for the Modern UI  (Metro interface) of Windows 8. The information was confirmed in a CNN interview with Tami Reller, Microsoft CFO of Windows department, noting that the most popular applications from the iTunes store will be available for Windows 8 by the end of this year.