Miscellaneous

Samsung starts after-school software clubs in South Korea

Samsung's Junior Software Academy has kicked off in South Korea, allowing students to use after-school activities to learn about software and engineering.

In a Samsung Village blog post, the South Korea firm said Tuesday that after-school activities and lessons will "help children learn basic software technologies to become fresh sprouts of the software industry."

The Junior Software Academy is for students between 11 and 17. Software classes will be offered at 500 schools throughout South Korea, reaching 10,000 students, according to the company. Lessons will be held mainly after school or during the weekends, starting this … Read more

Training software tracks your eyes to make sure you watch

Recently, smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 have come equipped with optical sensors that track users' eye movements, and scroll or pause text and images accordingly. Now, a similar approach is being employed on tablet-based training software.

Mindflash, which is marketing the online training solution, calls the new capability the "look-away feature." As the company puts it: FocusAssist monitors trainee attention and pauses a training course in the Mindflash application when trainees look away.

"Organizations concerned about trainee distraction and compliance during self-paced remote training can now have greater confidence that critical information is being reviewed and understood," Mindflash says. … Read more

Tag, you're out: Microsoft to nix its bar code variant

Microsoft is killing its proprietary alternative to QR codes.

The company announced the news on Monday, saying that Microsoft Tag will "terminate in two years, on August 19, 2015." Although it might seem odd that Microsoft would announce the closure so far in advance, the company's terms of service require that it provide that much notice to users.

The colorful Microsoft Tag was supposed to be the software giant's answer to bar codes, traditional black-and-white QR codes, and other similar scannable tags. But the service, which Microsoft says was used by some major companies and ad … Read more

Picture overload makes me want to declare 'photo bankruptcy'

Flying back from a trip to the U.K. this week, I took advantage of the flight time to spend about six hours organizing my last year's worth of photos. I still have plenty left to do. But I don't want to. I want to give up. I'm drowning in pictures, and it's just getting worse. Would the answer be to declare "photo bankruptcy" and stop worrying about my photos being organized?

The growing temptation of Google+ I'm tempted, sorely tempted, to do this, with "photo bankruptcy" being something similar to … Read more

When 3D printing goes bad

3D printing! It's the future! We will all have access to a "Star Trek"-style replicator in our homes!

3D printing is doing ever more new and exciting things, opening up a whole brave new world of home manufacturing and cheap, accessible goods -- as well as some amazing things in the lab. It has potential that we've only just begun to tap into -- and it's only going to get better.

What we don't see a lot of, though, is when it fails, which at times, it manages to do spectacularly. From human error through to technical failure, there's a lot that can go wrong, especially with a new technology that we're still learning how to use. … Read more

Flickr founder plans to kill company e-mails with Slack

When Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his team realized that their online game Game Neverending wasn't going to be a hit, they turned the game's photo-sharing tool into a stand alone product -- and got lucky.

Flickr was a hit. It quickly caught the attention of Internet giant Yahoo, which bought the site for a reported $35 million in 2005.

Fast forward 8 years and Butterfield is at it again. His new company Tiny Speck, which employs much of the same team as before, shelved its online game Glitch last year. Now, they've taken the customized communications … Read more

Samsung: No plans to release flat-panel OLED TVs in the U.S.

NEW YORK -- It's official. There will be no flat-panel OLED TVs in the U.S. anytime soon.

Samsung, which launched its first 55-inch OLED TV outside of Korea during an event Tuesday in New York, joins rival LG in only releasing curved versions of the new TVs. As CNET reported earlier this month, LG won't be selling a flat-panel version for the foreseeable future, and neither will Samsung, executives confirmed to CNET on Tuesday.

"Up to now, [we have] no plans," B.K. Kang, senior vice president of Samsung's consumer business division, told CNET … Read more

Hyperloop: Why can't we believe in the big ideas?

I heart the Hyperloop. When I heard that Elon Musk planned to hold a press call to unveil his design and the science behind a radical new form of technology -- a pneumatic-like tube that could shoot passengers at speeds of up to 800 miles per hour between San Francisco and Los Angeles -- I was thrilled.

And I remain thrilled, despite all the Debbie Downer arguments that there are no plans to build the Hyperloop anytime soon, that no company currently exists to build such a thing, and that the usual toxic combination of politics, money, and monopoly will … Read more

Samsung TV event: Join us at 8:45 a.m. PT Tuesday (live blog)

Samsung Electronics is set to unveil "what's next in home entertainment," and you can get all the details right here.

The South Korean company is holding its launch event at 12 p.m. ET/9 a.m. PT Tuesday at Cipriani's 42nd Street restaurant, near Manhattan's Grand Central Station. CNET's David Katzmaier, Ty Pendlebury, Sarah Tew, and I will bring you all the live news, photos, and commentary about 15 minutes before the event.

Join CNET's liveblog of the Samsung Home Entertainment press conference at 12 p.m. ET/9 a.m. PT … Read more