LIVE Coverage from CES 2011!

We will be receiving LIVE coverage from Techpodcasts.com! As part of the Techpodcasts Network, we can take advantage of great “perks” like this… and even though I can’t go to the Consumer Electronics Show, at least we can carry the news from there LIVE, right here on the Blog! I am looking forward to it!

So, watch the box at the top of the sidebar on the Blog’s Main Page! CES 2011 sounds like it will have a lot of news on tablets, smartphones, and other way cool electronic doohickeys… my cup o’ tea!

20% of Windows Users Now Using Windows 7!

Windows 7Let me say that this is a good thing! I have been very impressed with Windows 7, and you know, I haven’t downed the Microsoft Kool-Aid! In fact, I am an Open Source dewd! But, after the disaster that was Vista, Windows 7 is a case of “finally getting it right!” It is nice to see that 20% of Windows users have moved on!

20% of users now on Windows 7

“Windows 7 has been steadily stealing share from Windows Vista and Windows XP ever since it was first released. It is now installed on one in five computers. Its predecessor Vista never managed to achieve that feat. In the 12 months since release, Microsoft sold 240 million licenses of Windows 7; by now that number is surely approaching 300 million.

Between January and December 2010, Windows XP fell almost 10 percentage points to 56.72 percent market share. In the same period, Windows Vista lost over five percentage points to 12.11 percent. Windows 7 meanwhile has gained over 13 percentage points, pushing it to 20.87 percent.”

Geek Software of the Week: FreeOCR!

FreeOCREvery so often I do a GSotW that is just TOO good to be true! This is one of them! I used to have an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application called “Omnipage” that was VERY expensive, but worked very well. It was version 12. The latest version for that product is now version 17. But upgrading was going to be EXPENSIVE! So, as usual, I looked for a free, and/or Open Source version! WOW! Did I find a gem! It is TOTALLY FREE, yet works great, is easy to use, and will even do OCR directly from PDFs without printing the document and then scanning it on my scanner! ZOWIE! This rocks!

FreeOCR 3.0

FreeOCR is a Windows OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine. It includes a Windows installer and It is very simple to use and supports multi-page tiff’s, fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff’s which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read .It now has Twain scanning. It can also open PDF’s Free OCR uses the Tesseract OCR engine (see below)

Tesseract – The Tesseract free OCR engine is an open source product released by Google. It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995. In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The Tesseract engine source code is now maintained by Google.”

41% of New Smartphone Users are Choosing Android!

Android LogoSmart folks! I love my Android (Droid X) phone! And, so do a lot of other folks, it seems!

41% of new smartphone buyers choose Android

“‘The race for the lead in US. smartphone operating system (OS) consumer market share is tighter than it has ever been,” begins a blog post today on Nielsen Wire. The winner is? No one yet. Apple’s iPhone leads in total US consumer market share, while most people who recently bought a smartphone chose Android. I’m among them. “This race might still be too close to call,’ Nielsen asserts.

Perhaps the more important data point is about the broader smartphone category. ‘In November, 45 percent of recent acquirers chose a smartphone over a feature phone,’ according to the Nielsen post. That’s up from 34 percent in June. Apple and Research in motion are ‘statistically tied’ with respect to US smartphone OS market share — 28.6 percent and 26.1 percent, respectively. Android’s share is 25.8 percent.”