All the rage in the mobile payment space has centered around NFC, but there's a new game in town, now. Well, at least in Utah. Isis, which is described as a mobile commerce joint venture between AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, has just announced plans to pilot a payment program in Salt Lake City in early-to-mid 2012....Read more...
There's a new growing menace in the world, something becoming known as ebook fraud. It comes in two forms, says security guru Bruce Schneier: books quickly created from automatically gathered content crawled from the Web, and books generated from stealing legit printed books, scanned and sold by someone that doesn't own the copyright. The...Read more...
Call it a passing fad, a worthless technology designed to drive up movie theater ticket prices, or the greatest thing to happen to entertainment since the Two and a Half Geeks podcast, but whatever your view on the recent 3D frenzy, we can all agree that the dorky looking glasses need to go. Nintendo proved it could be done with the successful...Read more...
Another week, another update for Google on the Android front. iOS' major competitor just keeps the hits coming, this time with a point release to Google Maps. The company has just released GMaps 5.3 into the Android Market, which lets you see your Google Location History dashboard, check in at “home,” and add your own aspects for...Read more...
Are Blu-ray Discs blossoming up in size? That's the latest word on the street! We have heard of BD discs getting theoretical boosts in laboratories, but it's still a 50GB maximum when it comes time to find one in the store. But now, a report from Japan stated that Panasonic is planning to release a 100GB rewritable Blu-ray Disc that's actually...Read more...
Fusion-io just stepped up in a major way earlier in the year, and now it's looking like more and more PCIe SSDs are hitting the airwaves. Is it finally time for enterprise storage to make the move to the consumer realm? Virident isn't a company that most average consumers are familiar with, but as hard-hitting flash-based storage solutions...Read more...
Slim is in! Seagate has just announced a rediculously skinny new hard drive, with razer-thin 2.5" GoFlex Slim Drive. It's an external HDD, and it'll be easy to lose in your briefcase. The 9mm drive is slimmer than a pencil, and it ships with 320GB of capacity and a USB 3.0 port. The GoFlex addition means that it's capable of interfacing with...Read more...
AMD has revised its purchase agreement with Global Foundries in a move that will allow the CPU design firm to recognize a $492 million non-cash gain in Q1. Instead of purchasing 45nm and 32nm wafers on a "cost-plus" basis, Sunnyvale will pay GlobalFoundries a fixed price for products through the end of the year. Reactions to the change have...Read more...
Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that the new processors will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It's been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural...Read more...
Pandora Media Inc. said on Monday that it has been subpoenaed as part of a federal grand-jury probe into the methods smartphone software handles personal data. Pandora disclosed the subpoena in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, but emphasized that it is "not a specific target of the investigation."...Read more...
Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that the new processors will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It's been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural...Read more...
We don't know what AT&T did to lose its exclusivity grip on Apple's iPhone devices, but one thing's for sure, the wireless carrier isn't doing itself any favors by jacking up the price of early iPhone upgrades by $50. It may generate some additional revenue in the short term, but once the contract is up, does AT&T really want to give...Read more...
They say everything's bigger in Texas, and maybe that includes acquisitions too. How else do you explain Texas Instruments (which is located in Texas) spending a staggering $6.5 billion acquiring National Semiconductor? That breaks down to $25 per share in what amounts to an all-cash transaction. Here's what TI had to...Read more...
There comes a time in each parent's life when they have to have "the talk" with their children. Sometimes, this video shows, the talk it not necessarily about the facts of life. In this case, the video below shows "the talk" about desktop video cards. The foolish son is looking at an NVIDIA card when the video begins, but the father wants...Read more...
We have never really viewed a router as a fashion icon. It's a useful tool, period. Most of them aren't very pretty, but then again, most of them are well-hidden. So why bother with a stylish router? Well, if you've nowhere else to hide one, you might as well get one that you aren't afraid to leave sitting around. In recent years, Cisco's...Read more...
A few years ago, "the cloud" was only known within nerdy enterprise circles. Now, it's showing up in Microsoft's Windows 7 ads. It's pretty clear that we're transitioning to a world where always-on connectivity will be essential, and with the cloud playing an ever more important role in our digital lives, the IEEE is stepping in to launch...Read more...
Nikon has been fairly slow to update some of their higher-end cameras (like the D700, for example), but they're refreshing the lower-end models quite hastily. This morning, the D5100 was revealed to replace the aging D5000, and it's looking to be a great mid-range option for those looking to step up from their entry-level cam. It's a good...Read more...
If it's not one cable company, it's another. While Big Cable in general has been skiddish when it comes to giving Internet-only subscribers access to certain online content portals, one thing that they've seemed to embrace is Apple's iPad. It's hard to truly pinpoint why that's the case, but it's proving true. Time Warner Cable recently released...Read more...
When AMD and NVIDIA release a new batch of next-generation graphics processors, gaps typically form in their respective product stacks as the entire top-to-bottom line-up of new products is fleshed out over time. When new GPUs are introduced, they usually offer increased performance at a given price point, which drives the cost of comparable...Read more...
When AMD and NVIDIA release a new batch of next-generation graphics processors, gaps typically form in their respective product stacks as the entire top-to-bottom line-up of new products is fleshed out over time. When new GPUs are introduced, they usually offer increased performance at a given price point, which drives the cost of comparable...Read more...
Earlier this year, we gave you a taste or two of what AMD's new Fusion APU-based Brazos platform has in store for notebooks and netbooks. We've since then followed-up with a review of retail shipping product and as we reported, we were genuinely impressed yet at again at what AMD's budding Fusion line-up had to offer. These low...Read more...
One of Google's 2011 April Fools' Day pranks was the so-called Gmail Motion feature, whereby you could control Gmail using full-body gestures. Many noted at the time that this could probably be done using Kinect, and viola: it's done. Built by the In fact, it was done by the same crew that developed a way to control World of Warcraft using...Read more...