The number of Android manufacturers who don't license patents from Microsoft is rapidly dwindling and could dwindle faster still as Redmond begins targeting smaller companies. The latest companies to join the the likes of LG, Samsung, HTC, Acer and others are Aluratek and Coby. Both make...
"We are proud of the continued success of our licensing program." Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Intellectual Property Group at Microsoft
Readability has given its iOS reading app its most significant update yet, taking the application to version 1.1. The update brings with it two new article discovery methods: first is Top Reads, a list curated by Readability to highlight the most...
The beginning of Anonymous' quest to hack the Syrian government began back in February, and last Thursday the group announced the results of its efforts: the transfer of over 2.4 million emails from 680 Syrian domains to WikiLeaks, including emails from the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, and Transport and Culture. The hacker collective said in a press...
Worldwide spending on internet advertising increased by 12.1 percent during Q1 of this year, according to the latest Global AdView Pulse report from Nielsen. Over this same period, global ad spending across all platforms increased by 3.1 percent. Television continues to command the largest share of global spending by volume, though it only grew by 2.8 percent compared to Q1 2011; radio ad purchases, by comparison, increased by 7.9 percent over the year. Quarterly expenditures also grew across newspapers (3.1 percent), movie theaters (4.1 percent), and outdoor advertisements (6.4 percent), with only the magazine sector seeing a year-on-year decline of 1.4 percent.
Most notable, however, is the rise in web spending — particularly within the Middle East and Africa, where online ad buys rose by 35.2 percent over the year. Nielsen reports...
the web outpaces the rest
Last month a New Zealand court ruled that the US acted outside of the law with an invalid warrant when searching Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's home, and now we're starting to see the fallout — the extradition hearing has been put off until next year. According to the AP, the hearing has been moved from next month to March 2013 because of the ongoing dispute over evidence legality. Dotcom...
"Dirty delay tactics by the US." Kim Dotcom, Twitter
The Russian version of Wikipedia is going dark this week, in protest of proposed legislation that would create a blacklist of government-banned websites. The site, ru.wikipedia.org, went down Tuesday morning and will remain shuttered through July 10th, when the State Duma is scheduled to vote on an amendment to Russia's "Act for Information." If passed in its current form, the amendment would...
Last year's Sony Tablet S didn't truly really wow us with anything except its ultralight, folded-back-magazine of a frame, but it looks like the company might be building a sequel to the Honeycomb slate. That's because a device with the designation SGPT1211 just appeared in the FCC's database.
In fact, the FCC filing lists six devices in all, three headed to the United States and three for Canada, SGPT121, 122, and 123. If you'll recall, the original Tablet S was SGPT111, 112, and 113, which stood for 16GB of storage, 32GB, and 3G cellular connectivity respectively. As far as the new tablet...
Next Issue, the digital magazine service with a Netflix-style all-you-can-read subscription model, is now available on the iPad. You can get the app from the US App Store right now, bringing the service to a much wider audience — it was previously only available on Android tablets running Honeycomb and above.
There are two subscription plans on offer: $9.99 a month gets you unlimited access to to magazines such as Esquire, GQ, and Wired, and the $14.99 Premium plan throws in weekly magazines such as Time, Sports Illustrated, and People. While the New Yorker is part of that last package, it'll apparently only run on tablets with a 1024 x...
Five years ago, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile business and kicked off a seismic shift in the technology industry that continues today. But the massive success of Apple's phone has overshadowed the grim reality of an American wireless marketplace that has become increasingly hostile to innovation — a market tightly controlled by carriers who capriciously pick winners and losers while raising prices and insisting that their use of...
Is the iPhone's success blinding us to a broken market?
Whether true or false, it's a whopper of a story: After spending three years trying to woo Apple, a company named Noise Free says that the Cupertino firm stole its noise cancellation technology. In a lawsuit filed last week in California court, Noise Free claims that relations were more than...
While Google's Nexus Q is an undeniably attractive piece of hardware, we found the device to be lacking in overall functionality. Enterprising developers are already on the case, however, with the latest Nexus Q hack bringing apps, a launcher, and even Netflix to the spherical streamer. Over at...
Canon's had a bit of a manufacturing screw-up, it seems: a small batch of the company's brand-new EOS Rebel T4i / 650D DSLR cameras have rubber grips that include an unwanted chemical that could change their color from black to white, and...
If you think you have a massive collection of classic video games, think again. eBay user collectors_king is auctioning off a library that consists of every game released for 22 consoles, all in boxes and with instructions. If the listing is legit, over 6,500 titles from every...
The tech start-up and go-to code repository GitHub has announced that it has secured $100 million in funding, 99 percent of which is coming from venture-capital company Andreessen Horowitz. It's the first-ever outside funding for the company, which has already been "profitable for years." GitHub...
The Nokia Lumia 900 may not be getting upgraded to Windows Phone 8, but that doesn't mean AT&T is ignoring it before the transition to Microsoft's latest mobile OS. Yesterday saw the announcement of a pink Lumia 900, and today the carrier has confirmed that the phone will be getting the Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh update "in the coming weeks." There'll also be a usage tracking counter and what AT&T calls a "new...
AT&T has extended its LTE network to seven additional markets, covering a total of 47 markets and over 74 million people across the United States. Starting this week, Wichita, Kansas; Corpus Christi, Texas; Gainesville, Georgia; Buffalo, New York;...
As promised, today Google is releasing the Android 4.1 source cde into the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for everybody to download, examine, and likely attempt to port a a whole host of devices. Writing in the Android Building group, Google's Jean-Baptiste Queru notes that the company has...
Harvesting electricity from vibration, ambient light, and thermal energy sources represent a sizable technical challenge — all three are...
Software updates may be an inconvenience, but with something as dynamic as a web browser, constant upgrades are more of a necessity than an option. Firefox, for example, has recently been subject...
Today's update to Google Chrome Beta brings another HTML5 treat to the browser: it can now access your computer's webcam and microphone without the crutch of a plug-in. The new functionality works...
Apple's released a number of different developer preview builds of OS X Mountain Lion in preparation for its release, and things took a huge step forward today: according to 9to5Mac, Apple has...
Reuters is reporting this afternoon that the FCC is close to approving Verizon's planned acquisition of AWS spectrum from a consortium of cable companies — most notably Comcast and Time Warner...
Anonymous is branching out. This rainy morning in Tokyo, 50 or so masked men and women are converging on Miyashita Park, garbage bags in hand, to join Operation Japan’s Anonymous Cleaning Service — picking up litter in one of the city's busiest districts in equal parts public service, protest, and PR campaign. The event is the Japanese group’s first public demonstration, and it’s using...
Google announced a number of changes and additions to its social services at this year's I/O conference, and its continuing to enhance its offerings, going public today with a new recommendations service for the +1 sharing button. Now when users hover over the Google +1 button on a given site...
