Apple’s iPad 2 won’t have two key features that some folks have been hoping for, a new report claims.

Citing unnamed sources, Engadget reported late yesterday that the iPad 2 won’t launch with a high-resolution display or with an SD card slot. Apple initially planned on delivering those two features in the updated tablet, Engadget said, but apparently “engineering issues” caused the company to modify its plans at the last minute.

Earlier reports suggested that the iPad 2 could feature the Retina Display, Apple’s high-resolution screen found in the iPhone 4.

As with any Apple-related rumor, it’s important to take Engadget’s claims with a grain of salt. Apple is one of the more secretive companies in the tech industry, and rumors surrounding its products run rampant for months prior to a big announcement.

In fact, Engadget’s report follows several others claiming the tablet will come with a more-powerful processor and a thinner body. Yet other rumors claim the device will feature both front- and rear-facing cameras and won’t be available until June.

For its part, Apple isn’t talking. The company did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment. But we should find out everything we want to know about the iPad 2 at an Apple event on Wednesday.

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Congratulations to Ms. Cindy Mucala of  Yoakum National Bank of Yoakum, Texas. 

She is the WINNER of a new Apple iTouch from the Percento Technologies drawing at the 2011 Texas Bankers Association Technology and Operations Conference in Horseshoe Bay, Texas this week.

Thank you to everyone who joined our drawing.

The FBI said today that it’s not calling for restrictions on encryption without back doors for law enforcement.

FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told a congressional committee that the bureau’s push for expanded Internet wiretapping authority doesn’t mean giving law enforcement a master key to encrypted communications, an apparent retreat from her position last fall.

“No one’s suggesting that Congress should re-enter the encryption battles of the late 1990s,” Caproni said. There’s no need to “talk about encryption keys, escrowed keys, and the like–that’s not what this is all about.”

Instead, she said, discussions should focus on requiring that communication providers and Web sites have legally mandated procedures to divulge unencrypted data in their possession.

As CNET was the first to report yesterday, the FBI says that because of the rise of Web-based e-mail and social networks, it’s “increasingly unable” to conduct certain types of surveillance that would be possible on cellular and traditional telephones. Any solution, it says, should include a way for police armed with wiretap orders to conduct surveillance of “Web-based e-mail, social-networking sites, and peer-to-peer communications technology.”

Caproni tried to distance the FBI from its stance a decade ago, when it was in the forefront of trying to ban secure encryption products that are, in theory, unbreakable by police or intelligence agencies.

“We are very concerned, as this committee is, about the encryption situation, particularly as it relates to fighting crime and fighting terrorism,” then FBI director Louis Freeh told the Senate Judiciary committee in September 1998. “Not just bin Laden, but many other people who work against us in the area of terrorism, are becoming sophisticated enough to equip themselves with encryption devices.”

In response to lobbying from the FBI, a House committee in 1997 approved a bill that would have banned the manufacture, distribution, or import of any encryption product that did not include a back door for the federal government. The full House never voted on that measure. (See related transcript.)

Even after today’s hearing ended, it wasn’t immediately clear whether the members of the House Judiciary crime subcommittee would seek to expand wiretapping laws as a result.

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., said that the panel’s members received a secret briefing last week from the FBI, but that the bureau should make its arguments in public. “It is critical that we discuss this issue in as public a matter as possible,” he said. It’s “ironic to tell the American people that their privacy rights may be jeopardized because of discussions held in secret.”

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said “to me this is a question of building back doors into systems…I believe that legislatively forcing telecommunications providers into building back doors into systems will actually make us less safe and less secure.”

That was echoed by Susan Landau, a computer scientist at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, who said “there aren’t concrete suggestions on the table…I don’t quite understand what the FBI is pushing for.”

Caproni said her appearance before the panel was designed to highlight the problems, not call for specific legislation. But, she added, “it’s something that’s being actively discussed in the administration.”

Under a 1994 federal law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA telecommunications carriers are required to build in back doors into their networks to assist police with authorized interception of conversations and “call-identifying information.”

As CNET was the first to report in 2003, representatives of the FBI’s Electronic Surveillance Technology Section in Chantilly, Va., began quietly lobbying the FCC to force broadband providers to provide more-efficient, standardized surveillance facilities. The Federal Communications Commission approved that requirement a year later, sweeping in Internet phone companies that tie into the existing telecommunications system. It was upheld in 2006 by a federal appeals court.

But the FCC never granted the FBI’s request to rewrite CALEA to cover instant messaging and VoIP programs that are not “managed”–meaning peer-to-peer programs like Apple’s Facetime, iChat/AIM, Gmail’s video chat, and Xbox Live’s in-game chat that do not use the public telephone network.

Also not covered by CALEA are e-mail services or social-networking sites, although they must comply with a wiretap order like any other business or face criminal charges. The difference is that those companies don’t have to engineer their systems in advance to make them easily wiretappable.

February 16-18, 2011 | Horseshoe Bay Resort Marriott, Horseshoe Bay. 

Percento Technologies is sponsoring and will have a booth at the Texas Bankers Association Technology & Operations Conference.

 The event will offer IT and Operations officers the latest review of best practices, state-of-the-art technology solutions and a look into the future.  If you plan to attend, feel free to stop by to talk and visit with us.  And don’t forget to throw your buisness card into the bowl for a chance to win an Apple iTouch.

Managed IT Support

BARCELONA, Spain–In a mobile world, size shouldn’t matter, but context should.

That was the message from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz as she demoed the company’s new Livestand service at the Mobile World Congress 2011 here today.

Livestand, announced last week, aggregates and personalizes all types of content for users and optimizes it for every type of device. Dubbed a “digital newsstand,” it serves up stories, information and ads based on a person’s interest and eliminates the need for publishers to create multiple versions of content for different devices.

For mobile devices, where small screen size spoils the display of content created for the PC, relevance is particularly important, Bartz said.

“The screen sizes are going to be all over the place,” she said. “The whole concept is publish once and have it available on any device.”

She demonstrated Livestand on an iPad. In contrast to Yahoo’s regular Web site which is cluttered with text, images and ads, the Livestand interface looked clean and simple. Tailored to a specific Yahoo employee helping with the demo, the site showed modules that included a surfing magazine, surf and weather forecasts, a surfboard buyer’s guide and news about sports.

Livestand automatically personalizes the content based on machine learning and human editorial oversight, which Bartz called the “secret sauce.”

Friends can share content with each other on Livestand and exchange comments on it via Facebook and Twitter.

“We at Yahoo consider that advertising is also great content,” Bartz said as the demo showed a Nike video and a sports watch ad. Later in the demo a friend’s comment popped up in real time related to the ad.

In a question-and-answer session after Bartz and three other technology CEOs gave their vision of the future of mobile computer, Intel’s Paul Otellini said there would be Intel-powered smartphones out later this year.

Meanwhile, Cisco’s John Chambers said video would be a focus for mobile in the near future, requiring service providers to beef up their network performance and management capabilities.

And SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son proudly discussed how his company’s $20 billion purchase of Vodafone Japan in 2006 is paying off now, fueled by data demand over smartphones. But at the time he was called crazy for the move, the share price dropped, and the company lost $1 billion every year for four years, he said. Since then mobile data traffic has grown 30 times, he said.

“People started saying mobile is no longer profitable and so on,” he said. “It was a risky bet…[but] sometimes craziness gives a good return.”

“Mobile carriers are becoming dumb pipes,” he added. “That’s the depressing reality.”

Watching IBM’s Watson supercomputer make its debut tonight on “Jeopardy,” one thought dominated: why, oh, why did they make him sound like Hal’s diffident nephew?

This was the future freaks’ big chance to make themselves acceptable to the human race. This was national television.

Watson had been created by human beings who pride themselves in their ability to teach a machine, rather than a child, to be as smart as they are. So why did they not think about giving Watson a little character? A shock of long, green hair, perhaps. Oversize purple ears would have been a plus.

At the worst, a voice resembling Morgan Freeman with a lisp would have been welcome.

Instead, this technological Trojan Horse presented himself to a nationwide audience with all the presence of boiled soot.

To be fair, it wasn’t even Watson before the cameras. It was an avatar created to represent him, as his vast bulk and din wouldn’t have made this a TV event for the aged, never mind the ages.

I understand that many scientists will have felt entirely giddy at the idea that a computer could compete against two “Jeopardy” superstars: a nice man from Seattle and an equally nice man who used to live in Pennsylvania but is now is hoping to be a TV star in LA.

But if this is the future, some might wish to google details of that elegant euthanasia clinic in Switzerland.

Watson performed very well. If, by performance, you mean getting quite a lot of “Jeopardy” conundrums correct.

Former “Jeopardy” champion Ken Jennings, the man with a preacher’s side parting and the remnants of Conan’s ginger hair, stood transfixed as Watson beat him to question after question, answer after answer.

However, this is a best of three. And Jennings and fellow humanoid competitor Brad Rutter allowed the machine to strut its stuff. They knew he had to falter. This machine had never seen the bright lights before.

Perhaps sweating backstage while his avatar faced the orchestra, Watson suddenly managed to repeat one of Jennings’ wrong answers.

“No, Ken said that,” explained Alex Trebek, the professorial host of “Jeopardy.”

If Watson had wanted to endear himself to the world, his programmers might have given him a line like: “Silly, me. I’m just a stupid ole’ piece of metal.”

Instead, he stood there like a nerd who’s been looking for the local chess club and has stumbled into the Playboy mansion.

This first show was a little stunted, as Trebek spent considerable minutes explaining to the audience why the less familiar contestant was less expressive than some but more expensive than all.

It was a fine ad for the forthcoming IBM empire, though those with eyes for these things would have been more warmed by the footage of IBM’s engineers preparing for Watson’s big day. Most of them had PCs, but one was definitely stroking a Mac.

Watson’s dilemma, which became increasingly clear as the show went on, was that he has to have a certain level of probability before pressing his button. Machines don’t guess. That would be far too blessedly human.

The mean-spirited (i.e. excessively human) might have rejoiced on one particular exchange.

The contestants were asked to find the question to: “From the Latin for end, this is where trains can also originate.”

Watson, still impassive, but allegedly 97 percent confident (his confidence levels were shown on screen when the clues were given), replied: “What is finis?” He should have considered terminus.

This was only the beginning. Tomorrow is Double and Finis Jeopardy. Wednesday, there’s more. Even now, Watson is tied with Rutter on $5,000 and $3,000 ahead of the mesmerizing Jennings.

Can this possibly end well?

What do you get if you pile up all those USB thumb drives, CDs, chip-enabled credit cards, moldering videocassettes, library books, and Babylonian clay tablets?

About 295 exabytes of storage capacity, that’s what. So conclude Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez, researchers at the University of Southern California, who today published in the journal Science their estimate of just how much information humans can store at present.

That number is, of course, big. An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, and a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is about what you’d get in a desktop PC hard drive these days.

And that number is, of course, getting bigger. General-purpose computing storage capacity is growing at about 58 percent per year, according to the study.

But here’s an even bigger number: the amount of data that vanishes into the ether. The researchers say humanity broadcast about 1.9 zettabytes of information from sources such as TV shows and GPS satellite location data in 2007. A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes.

And although humanity has an impressive collective hard drive, it’s peanuts compared to what nature has accomplished. Humanity’s manufactured storage capacity is just a hundredth of the information capacity of humanity’s DNA, the researchers said.

Hewlett-Packard today took the wraps off its long-anticipated tablet, a 9.7-inch device it’s calling the TouchPad, along with the bombshell that its WebOS is headed to PCs.

The TouchPad will run the company’s WebOS, which it acquired along with Palm as part of a $1.2 billion deal in April. Among its list of features are: a 1024×768 pixel display, a weight of 1.5 pounds, 13mm thickness, front-facing cameras for video chat, 16GB or 32GB of built-in memory, support for Adobe’s Flash, Beats by Dre speakers, and a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor.

Initially the TouchPad will be offered as a Wi-Fi only device, though HP said it plans to release a version with 3G/4G mobile connectivity later on down the line.

But the TouchPad will not be the largest device to run HP’s WebOS. At the very end of the company’s unveiling, HP Executive Vice President Todd Bradley said that the company plans to tweak the OS to work on personal computers as well. That includes both laptops and PCs. Timing on that was not announced, but considering HP’s top spot in the world of PC makers, the news is likely to have a dramatic effect on the PC landscape.

New phones
Along with the TouchPad, and news of bringing WebOS to PCs, HP announced two new smartphones that will run on the company’s WebOS platform. The first being a third-generation version of the Pre, which in mid-2009 was the first device to ship with the WebOS operating system.

The new version of the Pre doubles the display resolution of the previous model, adds HD video recording, and a front-facing camera, along with squeezing in a 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor. HP is offering two versions of the Pre 3, one that’s HSPA plus, and another that’s an EVDO Rev A World phone. Either can be had with 8GB or 16GB of memory, and will ship out “this summer.”

The other new phone is called the Veer, which HP is positioning as an alternative to what the company called “jumbo phones” during its presentation. The Veer is akin to a scaled-down version of the Pre in terms of its size, packing a similar slide-down keyboard form factor, HSPA plus, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, 8GB of storage, and an 800Mhz Snapdragon processor.

Similar to HP’s other WebOS phones, the Veer can also function as a Wi-Fi hot spot to provide connectivity with other electronics. HP says it will begin shipping the Veer to customers in the spring, though the company did not specify the price.

Names and preliminary specifications for all three of HP’s new devices were leaked ahead of the company’s event earlier today on HP’s own sales site.

Web OS updates, future
As part of the new device launch, HP also detailed WebOS 2.1, which the company says adds 50 new features, including things like voice dialing and improved multitasking. That will be arriving in all three new devices, and will be going out to older devices like the Pre 2 as a software update.

WebOS 2.1′s big new feature is that it adds inter-connectivity between WebOS devices to let users share information between tablets and their WebOS smartphones. This includes application notifications, as well as things like Web browser history using a new feature called “Touch to Share” that begins that data transfer once users get two WebOS devices within near proximity to one another:

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UNCG will begin offering a graduate certificate in health information technology that will allow students to master the competencies needed for jobs in one of the nation’s fastest growing professions.

“Depending on who you ask, there is a shortage of between 50,000 and 100,000 trained health care information technology professionals in the United States that needs to be filled over the next five years,” said Dr. Eric W. Ford, the Forsyth Medical Center Distinguished Professor at UNCG. “In addition, it’s one of the fastest growing professions, not just in the U.S. but around the world.”

The online certificate program in the Bryan School of Business and Economics is designed to meet the needs of two groups: people with clinical experience seeking to move into other aspects of health care delivery, and individuals without clinical training who want to make the transition into the health care industry. For example, there is great need for nurses knowledgeable about health care information technology in order to implement the electronic health records requirements mandated by the federal government. Having health care information technology competencies and experience will be an essential skill set for effective managers in both hospital and clinical settings.

“It’s an opportunity to work in a sector of the economy where you make other people’s lives better,” Ford said, noting it’s also a sector that is recession resistant. “The hospital never closes, so there are always jobs available.”

“Health care organizations often provide tuition support for educational programs such as the certificate to fill the need for HIT expertise,” added Dr. Lakshmi Iyer, director of graduate programs for the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management. “In addition, certificate holders can apply some of the credits earned to a master’s degree in business, information technology or nursing offered by UNCG. It is a great way to advance one’s education and create future opportunities.”

The 12-credit hour certificate, which will launch in the fall of 2011, is a flexible, online program that could be completed in one calendar year. Applicants are not required to have taken the GMAT or the GRE for acceptance into the program. Students interested in pursuing a master’s degree in information technology management can apply the certificate credits.

For more information, visit http://www.uncg.edu/bae/online/certificates.html or contact Dr. Eric Ford at ewford@uncg.edu.

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IT Management

ARLINGTON, Texas–NFL teams including the Dallas Cowboys could soon be abandoning their traditional paper playbooks and game-day printouts of plays in favor of iPads or other tablets.

Pete Walsh, head of technology for the Cowboys, said his team and at least a “couple” of others are currently considering abandoning their playbooks in favor of iPads, a move they feel could save them as much as 5,000 pages of paper printouts per game.

Walsh explained this potential philosophical and technological shift to CNET during a discussion about Cowboys Stadium technology at Super Bowl Media Day here Tuesday. The stadium will play host on Sunday to Super Bowl XLV between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers.

For tech-friendly sports fans, it’s an appealing image–coaches and players sitting on the sidelines of the giant Cowboys Stadium, iPads in hand, studying likely plays for the next few series, or sifting through overhead photos of the last plays in order to assess their performance, or that of their opponents.

In a lot of ways, this is exactly what tablets are meant for: easy access to data via wireless networks, high-quality photos, and portability. And from a coach’s or player’s perspective, imagine being able to quickly sort through a large set of plays, look at them in a stylish graphical presentation, see animations of them in action, and more–or to download a photo of the last play seconds later.

Still, it’s also a bit difficult to imagine old-school NFL coaches agreeing to carry around a shiny gadget like an iPad instead of their trusty playbooks–or reviewing glossy color photos on the 9.7-inch screen rather than shuffling through paper printouts of the last passing play. One can imagine such coaches agreeing to hand over their playbooks only through tightly gritted teeth.

But Walsh suggested that this migration could well be coming, though he didn’t say how long it would be before we see football pros stalking the sidelines with tablets.

On the up side, there’s the potential savings of paper. For another, Walsh indicated, there’s the feeling that if a tablet could be remotely wiped, it means that a lost iPad wouldn’t necessarily result in all the plays for the next Sunday’s game potentially falling into enemy hands.

However, Walsh said that one delay in the implementation of the shift is that the iPad isn’t seen in the NFL’s technology circles as being secure enough yet. That’s why tablets, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, or others running the Android operating system could end up being selected if teams, or the NFL, decide they’re more secure.

Walsh did not say which other teams were considering the move to tablets, but did say that “right now, all my counterparts [in the] league are discussing” the issue of how to secure the devices. Presumably, there’s concern about whether hostile parties could break into them wirelessly and about whether a lost tablet could be remotely locked down or erased.

For Walsh, who reports to famous Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, the mandate is clearly to protect the Cowboys’ intellectual property, and so he seemed prepared to wait to make the switch until he and his peers feel that devices like the iPad or its competitors can be used without causing anyone to lose sleep over how they might expose a team’s plans.

“I’ve got that responsibility to the Jones family,” Walsh said, “to make sure those [football] assets don’t get out there.”