StarMade takes the crafting-centric Minecraft experience out to the final frontier.
Jason Holtman, who previously ran the Steam digital-download business for Valve Software, has joined Microsoft. Holtman (above, far left, in an image from the 2010 Game Developers Conference via Flickr) was one of several employees who were reportedly terminated in February from the games maker, whose hits Portal and Half-Life have gone one to become industry classics. But it's the Steam digital-delivery service that has kept Valve’s name in the spotlight, especially as game development at the software maker can take years. with Gamesindustry.biz, that he has joined Microsoft.
Intel is looking to use light and lasers to shuffle data faster among servers, and is proposing a new optical interconnect, MXC, that could change the way servers are implemented in data centers. The chip maker is pitching MXC as a “next-generation optical connector” that could be a big step in standardizing optical technology and ultimately help bring it to servers faster. Light provides high-bandwidth connections that are much faster than older electrical wiring technology found in most computers today. The optical interconnect “can carry up to 1.6 terabits per second and is smaller than the connectors used today,” Intel said in a brief description of an on its website for the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, slated for Sept. 10 to 12. Optical signals will also be able to go more than 300 meters and provide swift transfer rates, according to the session notes.
One of the compelling reasons to buy AMD graphics cards over the past few years was its “Never Settle” program, where the company bundled a number of the hottest games that took advantage of AMD’s graphics cards. Now AMD has changed that program up, making game selection a bit of a game in itself. Under the new , gamers that buy AMD’s cheaper cards will be able to pick one game to digitally download to their system, while those that select the higher-end cards will be able to pick three. Historically, AMD’s “Never Settle” bundle bunded up to four games with each card, and the “Reloaded” refresh pre-selected two to three of this year’s top games to ship with each card. With “Never Settle Forever,” those that fall into the “Bronze” tier—purchasing the Radeon HD 7790 or the HD 7770 GHz edition—can pick one game, while the “Silver” tier—who purchase the HD 7800 series—can pick two games; users who fall into the “Gold” tier—who buy either the HD 7970 GHz Edition, the HD 7970, or the HD 7950—can choose three games.
IBM hopes to help create the next generation of “big-data” specialists through a series of partnerships with universities around the world, as well as influence the curriculum. Nine new agreements announced Wednesday involve Georgetown University, George Washington University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Missouri, and Northwestern University in the U.S. IBM is also beginning big-data programs at Dublin City University, Mother Teresa Women’s University in India, the National University of Singapore, and the Philippines’ Commission on Higher Education. They will result in a variety of programs, including a master of science degree in the business analytics track at George Washington University; an undergraduate course titled “Big Data Analytics” at the University of Missouri; and a center for business analytics at the National University of Singapore. have been bringing products and services to market that they say customers can use to derive valuable business insights from such information.
Microsoft says the new gaming console has been delayed until 2014 in eight markets, including Russia and Switzerland.
Google is shutting down its Messenger group chatting service as part of an update to its Google+ app for Android-based devices, the company recently announced. Google will also be ditching the service on iOS devices.
Edward Snowden's revelations surrounding the U.S. government's domestic surveillance system known as PRISM continues to create fallout. The latest casualty could be your business. [PDF] from The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has revealed how the domestic spying system could cause the U.S. cloud computing industry to lose between $22 and $35 billion over the next three years. This is a direct result of the PRISM program, an "immediate and lasting" problem that will grow larger and larger "if foreign customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefits." Cloud computing services are red-hot worldwide, and to date the United States has been the leader in these on the global stage. The ITIF reports that $13.5 billion in investments was pumped into U.S. cloud computing companies in 2011 alone, with nearly half of that coming from overseas. Today, about half of all spending on cloud services comes from U.S. sources, with the remainder originating from the non-U.S. market. , PRISM is going to get you one way or another), foreign users are far more suspicious. Will the United States use PRISM to stifle foreign competitors or steal trade secrets? ITIF doesn't call the grand panic over PRISM "paranoia" so much as "nationalistic hyperbole."
A new “trending” box appears on top of users' main timelines and flows to the bottom of the screen as users scroll down. Clicking on it leads to more information about the show, along with links to relevant Twitter accounts and related tweets.
OpenSignal recently announced that its app helped to prove that temperature readings from smartphone batteries correlate strongly to outdoor temperatures. Now it's thinking bigger.
Microsoft’s Outlook.com web mail application and SkyDrive cloud storage service are suffering a partial outage on Wednesday. . The Outlook.com issue is preventing affected users from seeing all their email messages. There is also a related problem with the People contacts application in which address book change notifications may not be properly delivered to Hotmail. This is causing some customers to have out of date contacts on Outlook.com. There are no details on what affected SkyDrive users are experiencing.
The website of The New York Times went offline Wednesday morning owing to an unspecified server issue.
Cybercriminals are controlling malware on Android devices through a Google service that enables developers to send messages to their applications, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab. allows developers to send and receive different types of messages to and from applications installed on Android devices. A developer can, for example, send messages that contain up to 4KB of structured data from a server the developer owns through a Google-run GCM server to all user installations of the developer’s GCM-enabled apps. The applications don’t even have to be running on user devices as the received messages will be broadcast by the Android OS and the targeted apps will be woken up. The GCM message data can include links, text advertisements, or commands, said Roman Unuchek, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, Wednesday in a . Researchers from the antivirus company have already identified multiple Android malware threats that use GCM as a primary or secondary command-and-control channel.
Google wants to give you a sense of what it was like to create its most awe-inspiring Street View collections with a new section in Maps called Treks. . (Treks shares its name with the 40-pound Trekker backpack camera that captures 360-degree Street View images on foot.) that debuted in late July. Views shows off some of the best Street View imagery collections from around the globe, including the Eiffel Tower, Mount Fuji, and Antarctica. The site also lets you explore user-contributed 360-degree images. If you have an Android phone running version 4.2 or higher you can upload your own photo spheres to the site from locations around the world. .
By seemingly admitting that Gmail users should have “no legitimate expectation of privacy,” Google's legal team has created a bit of a PR headache, with terrible timing to boot. The juicy quote fragment above comes from a class action lawsuit in California, which alleges that Gmail violates wiretapping laws when it scans messages for targeted advertising. No one's paying much attention to the case itself. (Google argues that if it wasn't able to scan the contents of messages, it wouldn't be able to perform vital functions such as search.) What has attracted the attention of advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, and of sites like , is a single quote from Google's motion to dismiss:
The longer you run your computer, the more clutter it accumulates. This takes the form of programs you no longer need, bloatware you never wanted in the first place, and/or adware you didn't intend to install. The result: slow booting, slow operation, slow everything. to prevent system-dragging software from running at startup. Ah, but which programs are safe to uninstall and/or block? The last thing you want to do is remove some essential Windows element, which could do more harm than good.
Well, it's official: The classic Gmail composition interface is gone, gone, gone, replaced by the new-look pop-up window that first rolled out way back in March. Don't act surprised. You knew this was going to happen, even though the revamped compose UI was lambasted from the moment it rolled out to the masses. And rightfully so! The classic Gmail composition experience consumed most of the screen, allowing you to focus front-and-center and respond to messages in-thread. The new composition UI, on the other hand, was a small box that popped up in the lower-right corner of your screen. You had to turn your head to peer at it, especially on a large monitor; text quickly disappeared off-screen when you were banging out long emails. , alas.
The U.S. has verbally committed to enter into a no-spying agreement with Germany in the wake of disclosures about the U.S. National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs. The verbal commitment was given in talks with the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND), the sole foreign intelligence service of Germany, the German government said in a news release on Wednesday. This means that there must be no governmental or industrial espionage between the two countries, it said. More common standards for the cooperation of E.U. intelligence services are in progress, the German government added. No further details about the agreement were given. The German Federal Ministry of the Interior reached on Monday could not immediately respond to a request for comment. The no-spying agreement talks were announced as part of a progress report on an eight-point program proposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in July with measures to better protect the privacy of German citizens. The plan was drafted “due to the current discussions about the work of the intelligence services,” the German government said.
In addition to a famously -themed Easter Egg quietly hiding in Google Maps. If you take Google Streetview for a ride down in London, you will come across a Police Telephone Box with a double arrow pointing to it. The box is real; it's been in Earl's Court for years. Click on through and you will find yourself inside an exquisitely detailed explorable panorama of the good Doctor’s TARDIS including control panel. Don’t ever change, bored Google developers! []
A day after hinted at an October release date for the impending Windows 8.1 update, Microsoft has gone ahead and let the cat out of the bag: Windows 8.1 will roll out to users via the Windows Store at 7 A.M. Eastern time on October 17. , giving them time to prepare for the launch. While Windows 8.1 won't win over desktop diehards who loathe the new-look modern UI with a deep and utter hatred, the update is . Not too shabby for an update that's coming out just shy of Windows 8's one-year anniversary on October 26. Microsoft's also tossing business users a bone, with R2 versions of Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 R2, and the latest update to Windows Intune .
With a new biopic about Apple's co-founder about to hit the big screen, Jason Snell talks to director Joshua Michael Stern about his new movie Jobs in this video report.
, the popular online accounting platform for small businesses, added a much-anticipated Android app to its suite of mobile apps today. , the free FreshBooks for Android lets small business owners keep track of expenses while on the go. Taking a client to dinner? You can capture that expense before you even leave the table by snapping a photo of your receipt. Similarly, you can create and email estimates to your clients while you’re meeting with them. And a time tracker makes sure billable minutes are never lost just because you’re away from the office. All your data automatically syncs to your online Freshbooks account. FreshBooks is prized by companies that don’t need or want a complicated accounting solution. Its easy-to-use interface allows you to be up and running in minutes. And you can build out and customize the functionality of FreshBooks with more than 60 add-ons that pull in data from third-party platforms such as Basecamp, Zendesk, Salesforce and PayPal. If you don’t already have a FreshBooks account, you can try it for free for 30 days. After that, plans are $19.95 through $39.95 a month, depending on how many clients you need to manage or if you want to let staff access your account. At the top tier you can let one employee into the account, but you’ll have to pay $10 extra for every additional user.
Saints Row IV, the next entry in Volition's open-world crime franchise, is neither better nor worse than its predecessor. It's simply more.
Microsoft released two optional security updates Tuesday to block digital certificates that use the MD5 hashing algorithm and to improve the network-level authentication for the Remote Desktop Protocol. for Internet Explorer, Windows and Microsoft Exchange Server, and are not yet being pushed through the Windows Update mechanism. The first update, referred to as KB2862973, blocks certificates with MD5 signatures that were signed by Certificate Authority (CA) certificates in the Microsoft root certificate program from being used for server authentication, code signing and time stamping. The MD5 cryptographic hash function has long been considered insecure for use in SSL certificates and digital signatures. In 2008, a team of security researchers demonstrated a practical attack that involved exploiting a known MD5 weakness to generate a rogue CA certificate trusted by all browsers.
Worldwide smartphone sales to end users accounted for nearly 52 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter, surpassing feature phones sales for the first time as a result of growth in Asian countries like China, Gartner said. Smartphone sales grew by 46.5 percent to reach 225 million units, while feature phones sales dropped by 21 percent year-on-year to 210 million, the research firm said Wednesday. "There is one stand out reason for why smartphones surpassed feature phones in the second quarter and that was Asia Pacific where sales grew by 74 percent year-on-year, and within the region countries like China and India were driving the growth," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. In these countries, low-cost smartphones rule. The average cost of a smartphone in China is about $120 without subsidies, while users in countries like India, Indonesia and the Philippines pay a little less, according to Gupta. Users pay closer to $100 or even a little less for their smartphones in these countries, he said.
HP’s Envy product line gives the company’s engineers an opportunity to break from building buttoned-down productivity machines and strut their stuff by crafting something that gamers and media mavens will appreciate. While you’ll never mistake the Envy 700-030qe’s cookie-cutter design for a custom-built rig from a boutique PC builder, this machine features the key components that enable it to run with that crowd, but at a far lower price point. HP planted one of the world’s most powerful CPUs in its Envy 700-030qe: Intel’s Core i7-4770. A boutique vendor, on the other hand, would have sprung for the Core i7-4770K, the completely unlocked variant that begs to be overclocked. Actually, you custom-order your Envy with that processor for an additional $150, but you’ll inevitably want to spend more cash after the machine arrives (no matter which processor you choose) to update its negligible cooling system: The chassis is equipped with just a single fan. Still, the Envy tore through our strenuous Desktop Worldbench 8.1 benchmark suite, producing a very good score of 352. That score not only marks the Envy 700-030qe as more than 3.5 times faster than our baseline system, Acer’s all-in-one, for instance, earned a Worldbench score of 399. A PC needs more than just a fast processor to earn a high Worldbench score. The machine also needs plenty of memory, fast storage, and a strong video card. HP gets most of that right by packing in 12GB of DDR3/1600 memory, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 645 video card, and a 256GB SSD inside the Envy 700. The SSD is generously proportioned for a consumer rig, but that 256GB is all the storage HP provides. I’d recommend either springing for a second drive if you order one (you can order the Envy 700 with a 1TB drive as secondary storage for $90, if you want the entire system to be covered by HP’s two-year warranty), or adding a second drive as soon as you unpack it (you should be able to find a 2TB drive for a few bucks more than what HP is charging, plus tax and shipping).
Full HD displays are last season. Asus’s new ET2702 is the company’s first 27-inch all-in-one to sport a quad HD display—that is, a display with a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, instead of the usual 1920 by 1080 pixels. That higher pixel density makes a big difference when you’re sitting merely 20 to 40 inches away from a 27-inch screen. But there’s more to the Asus ET2702 than just its screen. Our review model, which costs around $1899 as configured (as of August 14, 2013), sports a quad-core Intel Core i7-4770 processor (a member of the new Haswell family), 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory, a discrete graphics card (AMD’s Radeon HD 8890A), a Blu-ray player, and a 2TB, 7200-rpm hard drive. In pricing, the ET2702 is on a par with comparable systems: It’s more expensive than the $1440 , which has a lower-voltage version of the Core i7 processor (the Core i7-4770S). Although the ET2702 boasts some impressive specs, it disappointed somewhat in benchmark performance. For instance, it earned a score of 174 in our Desktop WorldBench 8.1 benchmark tests. That’s good—it means the ET2702 is 75 percent faster than our baseline model, the —but it’s not fantastic, especially compared with the scores of other 27-inch all-in-ones we’ve reviewed recently. The Vizio CA27T-B1, which has an older third-generation Intel Core i7 processor, scored 179 on WorldBench 8.1. The Dell XPS 27 Touch, meanwhile, blew both the ET2702 and the CA27T-B1 out of the water with its mark of 262. Those results don’t mean that the ET2702 is a lousy computer. It actually delivers superior graphics compared to what Dell and Vizio are providing with their AIOs, and thus it is the best choice of the three if you’re looking to play games. Whereas Dell uses Nvidia’s GeForce GT 750M card, and Vizio relies on integrated graphics, Asus splurges on an AMD Radeon HD 8890A. In our Dirt Showdown test (resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels, with low visual-quality settings), the ET2702 managed an impressive frame rate of 131.7 frames per second. By comparison, Dell’s XPS 27 Touch delivered 125.7 fps and the Vizio CA27T-B1 chugged along at a rate of just 54.4 fps on the same test.
xAd has released its Q2 2013 Mobile-Location Insights Report, which showed “geo-conquesting” – a way for mobile advertisers to grab attention away from local competition – is on the rise and businesses are seeing success with the strategy.
Oklahoma's Tourism and Recreation Department, using only 20 percent of its marketing budget on YouTube TrueView ads, increased website visits by 486 percent year over year. TrueView ads accounted for 44 percent of all their site traffic.
If you're a big fan of "Doctor Who", then you'll love the new Google Maps Easter egg. When you go to the address of the Police Telephone Box – a.k.a., TARDIS - you can actually "look inside" to see exactly how it appears on "Doctor Who".
This post will focus on the two main methods of managing the redirection of a single page on your website – the 301 redirect and the rel="canonical" attribute – to conquer duplicate content issues, sustain your rankings, and improve user experience.
Boring is in the eye of the beholder. Any industry, no matter how boring on the surface, has interesting stories just waiting to be exploited by a creative link builder. Here's how to find opportunities for tremendous coverage and editorial links.
Someone going through a difficult time, such as rebuilding after a major Google update, will go through a basic, universal grieving process – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Then you'll be ready to start over with your SEO.
A new study by online advertising company Chitika maps Google search engine usage by state and its correlation to variables like median age, job growth and income and education level. California, New York, and Massachusetts are top Google users.
The concept of “groupthink” is alive and well in social situations and rating sites online, according to the findings in a new study, which seems to confirm that more shares and more engagement tends to spur more shares and more engagement online.
If you're creating infographics, or other pieces of embeddable code for things such as widgets, counters, and badges, how should you link those things for best SEO practices according to Google? Google's Matt Cutts offers his advice.
Google Analytics provides invaluable tools that help us make sense of data. But multiple non-Google platforms provide opportunities to gain important insights. Here are three tools to help you make sense of data and develop responsive strategies.
SEO in the digital marketing mix is here to stay. Standardizing a definition of SEO will help buyers better understand the importance of it, the reason for committing to it, and the short- and long-term impact an SEO strategy has on a web presence.
What does Jay Z's new album have to do with paid search? Two things: It brought light to how much songs can influence search behavior, and it provides a reminder that being mindful of search trends can create revenue opportunities for brands.
Google has had sight of 60 trillion unique URLs, up from 30 trillion last year at this time. How can your content stand out? Find out from Patrick Thomas, a specialist on Google's User Policy team, during an interactive keynote at SES San Francisco.
Today's Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize winning Austrian quantum physicist. He is most notably famous for a thought experiment called Schrödinger's cat, depicted in the logo with an alive and dead cat.
Panda? Penguin? No. Understanding Google's Vince update – which gave more preference to "big brands" in Google’s search results – is perhaps the most important update that you can understand, to help get your SEO programs on track.
With consumer habits changing fast in favor of mobile, mobile will begin to effectively monetize. Use the power of story to demonstrate the value of mobile advertising – and how it will help bring your clients closer to that pot of gold.
SEO is currently in a "flight to quality". This is what most columnists and bloggers mean by the "new" SEO. Sure, it's similar to the old SEO, but now there's a greater emphasis on quality and avoiding excessive, large-scale, low-quality SEO tactics.
As Google continues its worldwide dominance of search, we take a quick glance at the major events since a couple of kids in Stanford started their BackRub service. And who better to help us out than the Greatest Living American – Stephen Colbert.
For local businesses wanting to advertise, Google has announced that relevant ads will appear to users after they perform a search, placed at the bottom of the screen that includes title, ad text, and a link to get directions to the business.
Moz has released the 2013 Local Search Ranking Factors. When it comes to overall ranking factors, page place signals are considered the most important. This includes things like appropriate categories, keywords in business titles and proximity.