More evidence of a speech-to-text feature that Apple is calling ‘Dictation’, at least for now, has surfaced in iOS 5 beta 5. The feature will most likely be using the technology that Apple is licensing from speech company Nuance. As you can see in the screenshot above, once the Dictation feature has been enabled, it will appear next to the global keyboard button, making the Spacebar slightly smaller. The microphone icon can be tapped, allowing you to speak into it....

According toTUAW, voice recognition and processing company Nuance has purchased the note-taking app Noterize. Both Noterize and Nuance have enjoyed some recent press related to Apple, with Nuance features beingrumored for inclusionin iOS 5 and Noterize being featured in Apple’s“Iconic” iPad ad. Noterize is a notes app with a clever markup system that allows people to take notes and add annotations to documents. It’s easy to imagine how Nuance’s voice-to-text technology could make dictating these notes much easier....

A trio of separate research teams from three different continents published individual papers indicating similar quantum computing breakthroughs yesterday. All three were funded in part by the US Army and each paper appears to be a slam dunk for the future of quantum computing. But only one of them heralds the onset of the age ofnuclear quantum computers. It’s about damn time Maybe it’s the whole concept of entanglement, but for a long time it’s felt like we were suspended in a state where functional quantum machines were both “right around the corner” and “decades or more away....

Nudgemailis a rather handy service that can send you reminders by email for tasks you need to do. You just send (for example) an email to 11am@nudgemail.com with what you want reminding about in the subject or body and the email is pinged straight back to you at 11am. Now the service has been improved with the ability to set Google Calendar appointments straight from your email. Unlike the standard Nudgemail service, which has no real set-up required, there are a couple of hoops to jump through to get your Google account hooked up to Nudgemail (explained here)....

If you’re an author and decided to takethe markup stepsthat Google+ announced a while back, your Google+ follower numbers are showing up next to your profile in Google search results. In June, Google explained the new markup language this way: We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page....