Though earnings from some tech vendors brightened up a week of tepid market reports, shares of IT companies broadly declined Friday along with the rest of the market. The Nasdaq Computer Index closed at 1723.96, down 7.52 for the day and 11.93 for the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 72.81 points to close at 15,425.51 and the Standard and Poor’s 500 index declined 6.06 to close at 1601.42. Mediocre quarterly earnings and fears that the U.S. Federal Reserve will wind down its bond-buying strategy, intended to boost the economy, have weighed on markets recently. IT spending and hardware shipment news was disappointing this week. In the second quarter, , which have been the bright spot for hardware as PC sales slump, declined sequentially for the first time ever, according to IDC . Worldwide tablet shipment growth declined by 9.7 percent from the first quarter to 45.1 million units. Since the tablet market is still only a few years old, sequential quarter-to-quarter data is still relatively important. However, tablet shipments were up 59.6 percent from a year earlier.
President Obama announced reforms to the NSA surveillance programs: "We can and must be more transparent."
Breaking Bad is about to reach its meth-addled conclusion, but you still have time to watch the beginning of the end.
Samsung has launched an $1400 ATIV Book 9 Plus laptop (shown above) equipped with Intel’s latest Haswell chip, but analysts said such sustained high prices for laptops and Ultrabooks could hinder the recovery of the PC market. PC shipments are already in a steady decline with the growing adoption of tablets, and buyers are not yet willing to pay a premium for machines with Microsoft’s Windows 8, analysts said. Most of the new laptops with Haswell chips, including Toshiba’s latest Satellite laptops, are priced above $800, and buyers at this point are only willing to pay a premium for Apple products. “The thought that you can sell a $1400 notebook is ridiculous. The mess is partly credited to Windows 8,” said Roger Kay, president and principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. Most of the Haswell laptops are still priced at $800 or more, with a few exceptions, like , which is priced at $599 after a $300 discount. Intel has said it hopes to bring the Ultrabook prices to under $600 by the end of this year, though the processor type in those laptops has not been specified. It is likely that sub-$600 Ultrabooks will have the older Intel Core processors code-named Ivy Bridge, as has happened in the past when other older processors were used in less-expensive Ultrabooks.
Nvidia continues its foray into its own branded hardware with a miniature tablet dubbed the Tegra Tab, if a number of Asian blogs are correct. So far, the strongest proof that Nvidia plans to manufacture a Tegra Tab is that the company . Nvidia generated a flurry of news in the last 24 hours, as it reported , but also forecast revenues to be lower than expected. Nvidia also reported disastrous revenue in its embedded Tegra division, with a 71-percent drop in revenue from a year ago, to $52.6 million.
releases in November. Key news: if you’re a family or have roommates, your life is about to get a lot easier. And cheaper. , Microsoft’s now decade-old subscription multiplayer service, has long been the best online experience for consoles—except for families and other shared-living arrangements. , for instance, had to log in to your account and play, or buy a second copy for the same household. It was all a bit silly.
Using the right gadgets can make your life more efficient, simpler, and more enjoyable. But which ones are right? Before you shop, stop and think: What do I want these devices to do for me? Then, decide which gadgets meet those needs (and which ones you can afford). The good news is that if you do your homework you can find what you need without maxing out your credit cards. (Click any of the headers below for a more thorough guide to that particular class of gadgets.)
Acclaimed German director Werner Herzog teamed up with AT&T to create a gutpunch of a PSA about the consequences of texting while driving.
Apple's lawyer argues that a federal judge made mistakes when she rejected Apple's request for a sales injunction against Samsung Electronics in a multimillion-dollar patent infringement case.
Slenderman's hipster-Frankenstein genesis as a Photoshop contest winner has spawned an unexpectedly popular homebrew horror cottage industry. Slenderman: The Eight Pages explores the self-styled urban legend as a short-form first-person survival game, and the result is a mildly diverting proof-of-concept piece that meets its meager goals, but fails to match the creativity and impact found elsewhere in the Slenderman mythos. For the uninitiated: Slenderman is a distorted, faceless, man in black who stalks people and makes them disappear. For a supernatural entity, Slender is pretty sloppy with his abductions, leaving behind a handy mountain of photo and video evidence for endless posts on places like . Slenderman stories brush aside traditional narrative forms and are told via found footage, snapshots, message board threads, audio recordings and similar interlocking sources using a technique called . Imagine a crowd-sourced Blair Witch, served up as digital performance art, and you're on the right track. It's odd then, to find this risk-taking attitude and creative spirit completely absent in Slender: The Eight Pages. Gameplay is pared down to 3D-engine-bound first-person survival basics, with WASD motion keys and controls for a flashlight and camera zoom. You've got two speeds for motion, slow and slower, the first accompanied by impaired lighting in a failed gambit to add tension.
LG Electronics and Motorola Mobility are betting on updated user interfaces on smartphones in a bid to differentiate their latest products, but analysts aren’t convinced that’s enough to break Apple and Samsung’s dominance. As smartphone design and hardware specs grow more similar, vendors are increasingly turning to the user interface as they try to differentiate their products and get people to upgrade in a saturated market. The two latest examples are . The latter has been equipped with buttons on the back, which can be used to control the volume and turn on the phone as well as access some apps. Motorola is betting big on voice control and users can also turn on the camera with “two quick twists of your wrist.”
in a way that benefits local businesses. When a user searches Google Maps, paid content will appear in a purple box, and the icon on the map will be purple instead of red. The user can tap or swipe to get more details, directions, reviews, and other information about the advertised businesses. It’s a great service for Google Maps users and a valuable tool for local businesses. Targeting local customers with the new Google Maps ads enables businesses to reach customers “in the moment.” Rather than advertising broadly to the Internet, Google Maps ads will be presented to users specifically searching in the vicinity of the business. auction as other Google advertising services. The more popular the search criteria, the more the ad costs, and businesses can outbid each other to buy a higher search ranking.
If you're not affiliated with a university or don't have access to its proxy, getting full-text versions of articles is either expensive or impossible. DeepDyve is an innovative service targeted at individuals and companies alike, which makes the game much more affordable by letting you rent articles from . An abstract is not enough to judge an entire paper. A free account with DeepDyve gets you free access to full-text articles for five minutes a day. If you deem an article interesting, you can pay $20 for five 30-day rentals, or $40/month for 40 monthly rentals (or by DeepDyve's odd definition, "virtually unlimited"). DeepDyve's interface is friendly and easy to use, and a browser plugin for Google Scholar tells you which articles in the results list are available for rent. Your DeepDyve personal homepage is an RSS reader of sorts, and can be used to follow your favorite journals . Even if you are affiliated with a university, DeepDyve is a great way to preview full-text articles when you don't have access to the proxy. The Download button takes you to to the vendor's website.
Job candidates seeking employment at consulting firm McKinsey & Company better prepare themselves—it ranked as the toughest company to interview at in a recent report, well ahead of big-name technology players like Google, Microsoft and Facebook. McKinsey was bestowed the title of distinction for the third time in a row, as part of Glassdoor’s third annual of the “top 25 most difficult companies to interview,” released Friday. Rounding out the top five, in order, were ThoughtWorks, a software design company; Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm; technology research company Gartner; and Bain & Company, the management consulting firm once led by Mitt Romney. Google, which has a reputation for leading job candidates through a grueling interview process chock-full of brain-teaser questions with many numbers of managers, placed eighth on the list. Microsoft and Facebook were ranked 16th and 22nd, respectively.
Taiwanese PC maker Asus plans to launch new tablets in its Transformer and MeMO Pad lines of Android tablets later this year as it aims to build up its brand in the tablet space alongside the Google Nexus 7 series. detailing the company's product roadmap. The slides mentioned product names including "MeMO Pad HD 8", "MeMOFone HD 5", and "PadFone mini", suggesting the company is planning new tablets at varying sizes. was unveiled last month and pricing starts at $229. "The goal is our own branded tablet volume will be bigger than the Nexus 7 volume," Shen said. "After a six month effort, I believe in Q3 our own branded products will achieve more than 50 percent of our total tablets."
that is rolling out now. *Cough*) . for Windows Phone, adding to the reports about upcoming 1080p support.
Samsung has bought German organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology developer Novaled, in a bet on the next-generation technology for digital displays. The binding agreement calls for Samsung’s subsidiary Cheil Industries to acquire a participation of about 50 percent in Novaled, while Samsung Electronics will buy a stake of about 40 percent. Samsung Venture Investment will retain its 10 percent stake. Novaled’s technologies and materials are designed to improve the performance of OLEDs and other organic electronics. The Dresden company sells them to manufacturers of display products. OLED technology, in use mostly in smartphones, promises to lower the cost of developing large TV displays while improving their quality.
The eventual retail cost of Glass could be one-fifth of what early adopters ponied up for the augmented eyewear, one analyst claims.
People interested in learning about in-memory database technology will be able to so later this month under the virtual tutelage of SAP chairman and co-founder Hasso Plattner. Platter will teach a six-week online course through OpenHPI, the of his Institute for Software Systems Engineering, the organization announced Friday. “[The] latest hardware and software trends led to the development of a new revolutionary technology that enables flexible and lightning-fast analysis of massive amounts of enterprise data,” according to the course description. “Unbelievable things are possible and you will understand why this is true using an in-memory column-oriented database instead of a traditional row-oriented disk-based one.” While OpenHPI’s announcement didn’t mention it by name, the course description clearly alludes to HANA, SAP’s commercial in-memory database platform that now lies at the core of its product development efforts.
The Lync unified communications (UC) server belongs to that long list of Microsoft enterprise software products that began as a modest offering dismissed by competitors and years later evolved into a solid option for IT departments. Largely dismissed as a nonthreat by competitors when it first arrived in 2003 with the name Office Communicator, Lync today has positioned itself as a product that demands attention from enterprises looking to upgrade or adopt a UC platform. “In the UC landscape, Lync is absolutely a real competitor. It has a full feature set, a customer base, channel partners,” says Henry Dewing, a Forrester Research analyst. “Microsoft can deliver the UC services that businesses want today with Lync.” The product, whose latest version is Lync 2013, includes presence, instant messaging, Web meetings, audio chat, video conferencing and IP telephony.
Silent Circle also shuttered its encrypted email service a few hours after citing an ongoing legal battle. “We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” Silent Circle wrote in on Friday in reference to the closure by Lavabit. The company, with U.S. headquarters in Maryland, said it had not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else from any government, and “this is why we are acting now.” The closure of Lavabit and Silent Circle reflect concern among email providers about government orders for customer data under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Most of these come in the form of “gag orders” that prohibit the service providers from discussing in public the orders for disclosure of customer data.
Within a few years, you'll likely be carrying a smartphone, tablet or laptop with hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of hyper fast, non-volatile memory, thanks to two memory developments unveiled this week. First, Samsung announced it is now . Three-dimensional NAND takes today's flash, which is built on a horizontal plane, and turns it sideways. Then, like microscopic memory skyscrapers, it stacks them side-by-side to create a vastly more dense chip with twice the write performance and 10 times the reliability of today's 2D, or planar, NAND. The most-dense process for creating silicon flash memory cells to store data on planar NAND is between 10 nanometer (nm) and 19nm in size. To give some idea of how small that is, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter -- a human hair is 3,000 times thicker than NAND flash made with 25nm process technology. There are 25 million nanometers in an inch.
was better than winning an Emmy. No, you didn’t slip into some kind of bizarro world while you were sleeping. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes actually gave piracy a big thumbs up in response to an analyst question during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday. “If you go around the world, I think you're right, that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world,” Bewkes said. “Now that's better than an Emmy.” At least for now it is. You see, Bewkes’ approach to piracy is that digital freeloaders actually lead to more subscribers for HBO down the road. In other words, piracy eventually brings in more revenue. “We've been dealing with this issue for years at HBO…people have always been running wires down the back of apartment buildings and sharing with their neighbors,” Bewkes, who served as HBO’s chief from 1995-2002, said on Wednesday. “Our experience is, it all leads to more penetration, more paying subs [subscribers] and more health for HBO.”
Classic games are great, but they have a tendency to get stale over the years. Enter the gaming makeover—these three classic games get a makeover and refresh the way they're played.
Salesforce.com is raising the cost of an initial security review for paid applications in its AppExchange store from US$300 to $2,700, saying the hike will allow it to deliver the reviews much faster. “At Salesforce.com, trust is our number one value,” Salesforce.com senior vice president Ron Huddleston wrote in an . “The high standards that we set for ourselves, and that our customers absolutely expect, extend to our thriving partner ecosystem through the mandatory enterprise-grade security review for all AppExchange apps.” Beginning Sept. 1, the price hike will kick in for all new paid applications, Huddleston wrote. It will still cost $150 per year to list an application on the AppExchange and those offered free of charge won’t be affected by the price change, he added. The fee for applications already in the review queue will remain at $300. In addition, “all of the revenue from the price change will be reinvested back into the review process,” Huddleston said.
Photo Ninja, a new Raw converter and photo-processing app, makes a very good first impression. Should serious photographers take notice?
An email provider reportedly used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shut down on Thursday, citing an ongoing court battle that it could not discuss. , which launched in 2004, specialized in providing a high-security email service that employed advanced encryption. It was designed to thwart the kind of surveillance techniques that Snowden revealed in June were used by the U.S. government. from the international wire service Global Post. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison wrote that he couldn’t describe the legal machinations under way. “As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests,” he wrote in a front-page notice on his website.
Benchmarks are the best way to gauge a notebook’s prowess with applications such as office suites, photo and video editors, video players, games, and the like. Aesthetics are another important consideration, because you'll likely be staring at the thing for the next several years. By those measures, Samsung’s $1060 Ativ Book 7 Ultrabook (model NP740U3E-K01UB) is a fine machine. But a notebook must also feel good in your hands—unless you rely on dictation software, you have no other way to use it. And on that score, I found this laptop a major disappointment. The Ativ Book 7 has a gorgeous brushed-aluminum finish. But if you wear a watch with a metal wristband, take it off before you lay hands on this computer’s keyboard. The noise produced as one metal scrapes the other is enough to curdle a glass of milk into cottage cheese. After my ears recovered from the horror, I once again laid my hands on the home row of the Chiclet-style keyboard. Such shallow-travel keyboards are common among Ultrabooks—they’re practically a necessity to achieve the required thinness—and I’ve touch-typed on more than my fair share of them. But the keys on the Ativ Book 7 travel such a short distance and deliver so little tactile feedback that I found myself constantly making typos.
School is right around the corner, and you’ll need a solid laptop to get you through those long study hours. Well, that and a lot of coffee. Whether you’re a first-time buyer or you’re ready to cut your old boat anchor loose, I’m here to help you separate your nice-to-have wants from your essential needs, so you can get the most bang for your back-to-school buck. No matter how carefully you plan your class schedule, there will be days when you’ll be on campus from morning ’til night—and using your laptop nonstop, which can be hazardous to its battery life. Models with Intel’s fourth-generation Core processor (aka Haswell) cost a little more, but they’re extremely frugal when it comes to power consumption. You can identify these processors by their 4000-series part numbers, such as the Core i3-4010U.
The history of games hardware is sordid and complicated affair, filled with financial disasters.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Reports They Receive Hundreds Of Thousands Of DMCA Complaints Every Month Because of their share of the search market, Google is most frequently targeted by...
Because of its share of the search market, Google is most frequently targeted by copyright holders filing DMCA complaints, but the search giant is not the only one managing requests to remove unlawful links from search results. TorrentFreak reports Bing not only receives a great number of takedown...
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google’s DooglePlex: Source: Google+ Stick ‘Em Up! Baby Panda!...
Google News is now showing the top web search result listing in the news results when the query has navigational intent. For example, if you search Google News for [ask.fm] at the top of the search results page, you will see a search snippet and link to their web site. Clicking on the link takes...
When you set up bidding in paid search, it’s important you put a strategy in place prior to implementation. The most relevant questions that need to be addressed when developing this strategy are as follows: How many bidding strategies do I need? What cookie window should I use? Should I use...
One second. That’s about how long it took you to read the two words above, and it’s also the focus of Google’s latest advice for webmasters when it comes to developing mobile websites. The company has published new guidelines that emphasize why sites should deliver above-the-fold...
Earlier today, Google launched manual spam actions to Google Webmaster Tools where you can see if your site currently has a manual spam action. To help those who have received some of these manual action notifications, Google created seven videos for the most common manual action notifications. The...
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: New Local Ad View (And AdWords Click Type) Comes To Google Maps App Google is following up on the recent roll-out of its updated Google Maps app for Android and...
Google is following up on the recent roll-out of its updated Google Maps app for Android and iOS devices with a new local ad view and click type. The ads appear at the bottom of the screen. In addition to the standard title and ad text, the ads include the car icon link to get [...]