News about what is happening in technology today!

Logitech has jumped into the universal remote control market lately with a line of Harmony controllers. So far these remotes have received mostly praise, except for their generally high price tags. Logitech used the launch of the Xbox 360 as an excuse to produce another excellent remote that supports the media-savvy 360. The remote can control nearly all units of your home theater setup along with the 360, it has a built-in memory to keep track of all of your commonly-used components and power them on and off all together. It has an integrated backlit monochrome screen (boo at no color, but it probably helped the price tag) and retails for around $130.

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Sanger Institute is reporting that their Genetic Record Database has hit one billion entries, making it the world’s largest. The Trace Archive is a store of all the sequence data produced and published by the world scientific community, including the Sanger Institute’s own prodigious output as a world-leading genomics institution. To grasp how much data is in the Archive, if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest. The Archive is 22 Terabytes in size and doubling every ten months.

ZDNet is reporting that, according to the most recent set of statistics from Web monitoring firm XiTi, Mozilla’s most popular brower is now the browser of choice for one in five of Europe’s surfers, at least at home. The fact that all the measurements were taken on a Sunday means that the figure isn’t accurate for the whole market, though, since business PCs tend to have lower Firefox usage rates.” From the article: “Other Web metrics companies produce more conservative estimates of Firefox’ market share. In November, OneStat.com reported that Firefox had achieved a global market share of 11.5 percent, although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK.

ZDNet has a feature on The Essence of Geek, which looks at the rise of the geek (and the fact that everyone’s turning into one), in the years post .com boom. For a few years, an interest in computers and technology became inextricable linked with wealth and power — geek became chic. Technology companies suddenly became the focus of the kind of attention that had been reserved for the music or fashion industries. In the UK TV makers even went so far as to create a hip series, Attachments, based around the antics of a tech start-up.

According to the BBC Google is buying US radio advertising firm dMarc Broadcasting for an upfront payment of $102m (£58m), rising to a possible $1.14bn by 2009. Interestingly it comes soon after Robert X. Cringely’s prediction that Google will soon expand into targetted TV adverts. It looks we are finally beginning to see Google’s transition to mainstream media.