TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

LAS VEGAS — Pop star Taylor Swift kicked off Sony’s press conference Wednesday night, loosely establishing the theme of the event: 3-D video.

“I feel like my fans are all very cutting edge, so when it comes to technology I’m very interested in what’s the newest and best,” Swift said on stage. “My tour starts next month in Australia and Japan and I’m looking forward to documenting all that footage using 3-D.”

After Swift played a song with her band and her silver, glitter-adorned guitar, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer took the mic to close her performance with a surprisingly self-deprecating (and honest) statement.

LAS VEGAS — Two touch pads are better than one! Wait, what?

That’s a main feature on Asus’s quirky NX90J, an all-in-one notebook with a polished aluminum finish, a high-definition 18-inch display, a Core i7 processor, a Blu-ray drive, surround sound and support for dual hard drives among other dreamy features.

Who knows why we would want two touch pads, though. Asus will begin shipping the NX90J in fall 2010. The notebook starts at $2,500.

LinkedIn, a social networking site for professionals, recently issued a major upgrade to its iPhone app. It’s darn gorgeous.

The app’s user interface mimics the large, bubbly buttons of the iPhone’s home screen. Each button directs you to a different part of LinkedIn: status updates, profiles, connections, inbox and so on. The app is fast and smooth, although it encountered a bug that also appears on the LinkedIn website: connection invitations that never seem to go away, even after you approve or reject them.

The most interesting addition to the LinkedIn app is a feature called “In Person.” It enables LinkedIn iPhone users to swap contact information by simply bumping their phones together; the connection is made over Bluetooth. It’s very similar to an iPhone app called Bump, which does practically the same thing.

The LinkedIn app’s massive makeover is similar to the one Facebook received with its 3.0 update.

Pedal Brain is a kind of Nike+ for cyclists, an iPhone accessory and application that, despite looking quite excellent, could possibly nickel and dime itself out of existence.

Pedal brain comes in three parts: a handlebar-mounted iPhone (or iPod Touch) case (called the Pedal Brain Synapse), an iPhone application and a web-app. The case (plastic initially, with a carbon-fiber version to follow) communicates with your bike monitoring devices using the ANT+ wireless protocol, a standard utilized by power-meters, heart-rate monitors and speed and cadence sensors.

Juice is an all-in-one power-pack, a battery-chargin’, USB-powerin’ box which actually looks good enough to take outside the house (those leafy decorations are thankfully on a pair of charging AAs).

Unlike most designs featured on Yanko’s hallowed concept pages, the Juice, by Hiroaki Tanaka, will actually be in shops early in 2010 (in Japan and Taiwan) and coming to the US soon after, made by a company called Nobil.

The plastic box has a pair of adjustable side-slots to charge both double and triple-A cells, and a USB slot on the top will charge just about anything else. The power comes in from a wall outlets and the Juice itself has an internal battery pack which can be used to top of anything you plug or slot into it while on the go.

A new survey from Comscore shows that the iPhone has jumped ahead of the ailing Windows Mobile in the US. Comscore measured actual ownership instead of sales figures (as in “What phone do you use?”). RIM’s Blackberry still comes out on top, but in October  Apple jumped ahead of Microsoft, with almost nine million users to Windows’ 7 million.

And remember, Apple has just the three generations of the iPhone and the iPod Touch, while Windows Mobile has been shipping on a whole range of devices for several years.

US citizen Lily Sussman took a vacation in Israel, to visit extended family there and see the sights — all the usual tourist things. On the way in, though, the security forces got rather serious.

After pulling her aside for questioning, reading her journal and even flicking through her camera to check the photos (hint: don’t take snaps of “graffiti, which read “Fuck” scrawled next to the Jewish star of David”), she was left alone. An announcement was made over the airport speakers, which Lily remembers as something like “do not to be alarmed by gunshots because the Israeli security needs to blow up suspicious passenger luggage.”

In fact they didn’t blow anything up.

Asus’ Eee brand was once strong and so much a part of the early netbook market that the words “Eee” and “netbook” were almost interchangeable. Now, Asus sprays the name around like a tomcat sprays… well, you get the idea.

The latest will be called the Eee Pad and will, according to Digitimes, have a four-to-seven-inch touch-screen display. This is, you’ll notice, a rather vague description and we think it more likely that Asustek will actually bust out a range of tiny touch-screen devices.

Verizon’s Motorola Droid is a brand-new phone today. Like many smartphones before it, the Droid has been rooted so that owners of the Android 2.0-based smartphone can install multitouch support (including pinch-to-zoom gestures), enhanced themes and other previously forbidden goodies.

Cyanogen, a well-known Android modder, tweeted this afternoon “Droid does … ROOT” and linked to an Android message board where the exploit is posted.

Apple could be knocking on the door of Lala, an online music service, with plans to buy out the Palo Alto-based startup.

Two anonymous sources told Bloomberg they could not be identified because talks are still in progress. The terms of the deal are unknown. However, if the rumor is true, it suggests Apple is thinking about its next competitive move in digital music, with the emergence of cloud-based audio services such as Pandora and Last.fm.

Lala allows customers to listen to songs on their site once for free.