The indie hit Terraria makes the move to mobile.
The PC market will weaken even further this year, and Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8.1 OS will be unable to reverse the drop in shipments, IDC said on Thursday. Due in part to increased adoption of mobile devices globally and a drop in PC sales in China, shipments will shrink 9.7 percent in 2013, according to IDC, which previously had predicted a fall of 7.7 percent drop. Microsoft’s Windows 8 has also been blamed by analysts as one of the reasons for the decline in the PC market. Windows 8.1, due to ship in mid-October, will address some user complaints, but PC shipments will also fall next year, and rebound with only single-digit growth in 2015, said Jay Chou, senior research analyst at IDC, in a statement. With Windows 8, Microsoft has put a tablet-like touch user interface on PCs, which has baffled users buying non-touch PCs. Touch laptops remain expensive, and PC makers expect enterprises to upgrade laptops to the Windows 7 OS. The Windows 8 OS and high prices of PCs are reasons why people are looking at attractively priced tablets instead, Chou said.
Lobbyists derailed an effort by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration to create mobile privacy standards, a privacy group charged on Thursday, while some participants in the process conceded it lacked focus. . “While the [Obama] administration had an opportunity to advance the privacy and consumer protection interests of the American public, it failed to engage in the serious scrutiny and leadership these issues require,” Jeffrey Chester, CDD’s executive director, wrote in the report. “Missing almost entirely from the more than yearlong discussion was the impact that current digital marketing, mobile, and app-related business models have on the capability of a consumer to make meaningful privacy choices.” The NTIA’s decision to separate out mobile privacy for discussion ignored significant cross-platform tracking of consumers, Chester said. The privacy discussions were “dominated by industry lobbyists,” leading to weak consumer safeguards, he wrote. Other privacy advocates agreed, saying they were under-represented during the discussions.
Xiaomi (loosely pronounced , putting its worth on par with Lenovo, the second-largest maker of personal computers in the world. But while Lenovo sells all manner of computer products, Xiaomi only sells one type - cell phones - and they have taken the Chinese market by storm. In the first half of 2013, the company was behind the top-selling phone in China, the -powered Mi 2S, which beat out Samsung’s Galaxy S4 for the top spot. Leading mobile processor developer Qualcomm, incidentally, is also an investor in Xiaomi. But Xiaomi doesn’t just have eyes on China. It’s also priming itself for a big international expansion, thanks to today’s industry-shaking hire of Hugo Barra. Barra was Google’s vice president in charge of managing the Android operating system, and his defection to a Chinese firm is one of the Western executive transitions to date. His new role will be as Vice President of Xiaomi Global, a strong hint that his job will involve getting Xiaomi’s products into users’ hands across the Chinese border. In addition to another Google VP, Xiaomi also employs former executives from Microsoft and Motorola. The most immediate question observers might ask is whether an untested Chinese brand is likely to find success in Europe and America. Consider the acquisition by Lenovo of IBM’s venerable ThinkPad laptop line in 2005. Until that point, no one on our shores had ever heard of Lenovo, and the idea of ThinkPad being separated from the iconic IBM seemed unthinkable. But consumers accepted the change quickly, and , the company had axed the IBM logo and put Lenovo’s in its place. Consumers didn’t flinch.
The social network clarifies its data use policies in the wake of a class-action lawsuit settlement.
Steven Sinofsky remains very active after his retirement from Microsoft, now signing on with Box as an adviser for its cloud storage and file-sharing service, its developer platform, and its mobile applications. as a board partner, representing the high-profile venture capital firm on the board of companies it invests in. Although Andreessen Horowitz is one of Box’s investors, Sinofsky and Box struck their own deal separate from his work for the VC firm. There’s also a Facebook angle to the hookup. Box CEO Aaron Levie initially contacted Sinofsky about six months ago by sending him an unsolicited message via the social networking site.
Wondering if your private pictures and posts are public? It's easy to find out!
HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is one the smallest, lightest, and least expensive notebooks we’ve ever reviewed. It’s also one of the slowest, finishing dead last on nearly every criterion in our five-system roundup except two important ones: weight and battery life. Despite carrying a price tag of just $410, this Pavilion has a touchscreen. It measures just 11.6 inches, but delivers ten-point touch and the same 1366-by-768-pixel resolution as the other budget notebooks we looked at. Once you get over its diminutive size, you realize that the display is actually pretty good. Though it has a minor issue with vertical off-axis viewing, it’s much better than the screen on the Toshiba T Satellite L55Dt-A5253. Augmenting the Pavilion’s touchscreen is a trackpad that supports Windows 8 gestures such as two-finger scrolling, zoom, and rotate. Mechanical right and left mouse buttons are situated beneath the pad. Apart from its small size, the Pavilion doesn’t look like a cheap PC. Though its case is composed almost entirely of plastic, the finishes on the lid and chassis are dead ringers for brushed aluminum, and the computer feels very sturdy despite being just 0.86 inch thick. Although this laptop was one of the lightest we considered for our roundup, its 3.4-pound heft is not especially impressive for its overall size. If you have large fingers, you won’t like the reduced size of the Pavilion’s non-backlit keyboard. The keys are only slightly smaller than average, but the difference drove me crazy during touch-typing sessions. The laptop is too small to accommodate a numeric keypad, too—and I loathe its arrow keys’ design. Rather than laying them out in the familiar inverted T formation, HP made the right and left keys oversize, and the up and down keys half-size—and bookended by the other two.
This solidly built notebook features a great touchscreen display, an even better keyboard, and a huge and fast hard drive. But Lenovo’s networking component choices are a bit disappointing. Lenovo laptops are the models of choice for many corporate IT departments, and the company manufactures some very good consumer-oriented machines, too. The IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a case in point. You wouldn’t mistake it for a sleek Ultrabook—it’s thick and heavy, and its battery life is wretched—but the Z400 did finish second on Notebook WorldBench 8.1 in our five-laptop competition. And despite Lenovo’s copious use of plastic, the Z400 is built like a brick outhouse. Lenovo stuck with Intel’s third-generation Core processor for this budget-priced machine, pairing a 1.6GHz Core i5-3230M with 6GB of DDR/1600 memory. At 14.0 inches, its 1366-by-768-pixel display is much smaller than the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870’s 15.6-inch display; but the IdeaPad Z400 boasts a ten-point touchscreen, whereas the Acer does not. The Z400 is an attractive PC, with charcoal-colored soft-touch paint on the outside and a pretty carbon-fiber look on the inside. Lenovo’s computer feels as rugged as Acer’s feels fragile. Though the display exhibits a little flex, the lower chassis is as rigid as some all-metal bodies I’ve tried to bend. The downside to the solid construction is weight gain: Despite its smaller display, the Z400 outweighs the Acer by 0.7 pound. Still, it comes by most of that weight honestly. Lenovo provides 6GB of memory (as against Acer’s 4GB); packs a 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive (versus the Aspire’s 500GB drive); and includes a DVD burner (Acer provides no optical drive at all).
The buyers that Toshiba targets with its luxury wouldn’t touch a Satellite L55Dt-A5253 if Neiman Marcus was giving them away. That’s too bad, because this laptop actually offers a much better price-to-performance ratio. Toshiba selected AMD’s 2.0GHz A6-5200 APU to power this $650 notebook. That chip features an integrated AMD Radeon HD 8400 graphics processor, which helped Toshiba secure a second-place finish in the games portion of our benchmark suite. But the machine’s 6GB of DDR3 memory runs at only 1333MHz, which held its performance back in comparison to some of the laptops equipped with Intel CPUs and faster DDR3/1600 memory. Like most notebooks in its price range, the Satellite is composed primarily of plastic, but Toshiba’s attractive material does a nice job of resisting smudges and fingerprints. The computer’s lid and chassis also feel more rigid than most, though it does weigh a full pound more than the Acer Aspire E1—a significant consideration if you’ll be carrying your laptop on your shoulder for extended periods every day. The Satellite L55Dt features a 15.6-inch, LED-backlit touchscreen display with a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. The display is attractive enough, if you position it just so. Text appears most legibly when the screen is tilted back; but bring it even slightly forward—as you might have to do when using the computer on your airline tray table, if the passenger in front of you decides to recline—and you may not be able to read it at all.
If someone tells you “Dude! You’re gettin’ a Dell!” in reference to the Latitude 3330, run away. Dell makes plenty of good computers, but this isn’t one of them. Admittedly, the Latitude 3330 didn’t burst into flames or poke anyone’s eye out during our testing. But you have many better choices in the same price range. Though one of the five budget notebooks in this roundup (HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000) delivered even lower performance than this one—probably because it has an even less powerful CPU than the Dell’s 1.5GHz Intel Core i3-2375m—the HP also costs $110 less than the Latitude 3330 and has a ten-point touchscreen. The Dell’s 13.3-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display doesn’t support touch, though its trackpad does support simple gestures such as two-finger scrolling. The Latitude has only 4GB of DDR/1600 memory, but an open and readily accessible slot accommodates a second module to double its memory. Its puny 320GB, 5400-rpm hard drive is similarly easy to access and upgrade. And this is one of only two notebooks in our roundup to include a removable and upgradable battery (the other one again being the HP Pavilion). One component that won’t be easy to swap out is the Dell Wireless 1504 single-band (2.4GHz), 1x1, 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, which delivers a physical link rate of just 150 megabits per second. The laptop doesn’t provide Bluetooth support, either. But it does have a gigabit ethernet interface.
created this framework—but the bolts and girders connecting everything together are more fragile than you might think, and the departure of Steve Ballmer will stress Microsoft’s ecosystem at precisely the wrong time. . But all this discussion is just background noise that’s drowning out a bigger issue: A company with Microsoft’s problems doesn’t easily embrace new leadership midstream. Ballmer himself awkwardly addressed the problem, saying in one breath that “now was the right time,” then in the next breath suggesting that it wasn’t: . “My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our transformation to a devices and services company focused on empowering customers in the activities they value most. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.”
The $80 Android-based game console is on sale through several online retailers, including Amazon and GameStop.
More than half of employees admit to storing, sharing and working on corporate documents on their personal devices-and this number is growing. You might want to re-read that statement. It’s a doozy. If you think your BYOD policy telling employees that they can’t put sensitive data on their personal smartphones, laptops and tablets is keeping your company safe, think again. Few office workers are actually aware of their company’s BYOD policy. These are the alarming findings from a in the United States and United Kingdom, conducted by market researcher Ipsos Mori and commissioned by cloud collaboration platform provider Huddle. If you’re not in the BYOD game, you’ve still got problems. The survey found that 73 percent of respondents in the United States are downloading personal software and apps onto corporate-owned tablets. These might be productivity-killing apps, cloud-storage apps or worse. But you knew that, right?
Vodafone confirmed the talks Thursday in response to media reports that the companies were discussing a possible deal worth more than $100 billion.
There's just nothing left to say or do. It can all only be downhill from here.
An Atlanta medical testing laboratory had billing information for more than 9000 customers land on a peer-to-peer file-sharing network in 2008, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has alleged. The FTC has filed a complaint against LabMD, alleging that the company failed to reasonably protect its customers’ personal data, the agency said Thursday. In addition to the P-to-P allegation, LabMD lost personal information of about 500 customers to identity thieves in 2012, the agency alleged. A LabMD spreadsheet found on a P-to-P network contained sensitive personal information for more than 9,000 consumers, including names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, health insurance provider information, and standardized medical treatment codes, the FTC said. LabMD said it will “vigorously” fight against the FTC allegations. “The Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement action against LabMD based, in part, on the alleged actions of Internet trolls, is yet another example of the FTC’s pattern of abusing its authority to engage in an ongoing witch hunt against private businesses,” the company said in a statement. “The allegations in the FTC’s complaint are just that: allegations.”
If you’re afraid the future of touch-enabled smartphones, tablets, and PCs are going to rip your keyboard from your cold, dead hands, fear not. Researchers from Xerox PARC and SRI International joined Andy Wilson, principal researcher at Microsoft, Tuesday at a Churchill Club forum at SRI’s headquarters in Menlo Park to ponder this question: how will users interact with computers that are beginning to see, hear, and “think” for themselves? The question had relevance, if only because one of the most famous digital assistants, Apple's Siri, spun off from SRI. SRI also birthed Nuance Communications, which recently told PCWorld that it’s working to develop its own Siri-like assistant . But the discussion also prompted another question: if tablets, phones, Windows 8, and the Chromebook Pixel are teaching us to use touchscreens and speech inputs, will there be a day when the keyboard becomes the equivalent of the floppy disk and simply fades away?
For general use, Acer’s Aspire E1 is the clear winner in this roundup. Acer crams a lot of value into this laptop’s $580 price tag, including a Haswell-class CPU (Intel’s 1.6GHz Core i5-4200U) and a 15.6-inch LED-backlit display with native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. Though Acer uses quite a bit of plastic in the Aspire E1’s design, you won’t be ashamed to pull the notebook out of your bag. A smooth finish and rich color—Acer calls it Clarinet Black—make the 1-inch-thick machine very attractive. The chassis and lid, on the other hand, exhibit quite a bit of flex, so you won’t want to subject this machine to rough handling. The upside to all the plastic is low weight: At 4.6 pounds, this laptop has an advantage of more than 1 pound over the other 15.6-inch models I looked at, and it weighs just over a pound more than the ones with smaller displays. Capitalizing on the display’s generous size, Acer includes a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad on the Aspire E1’s deck. I expected the island-style keyboard to be somewhat flimsy, but I was pleasantly surprised by its solid tactile feedback. It’s not backlit and it’s a trifle noisy, but I have no complaints about how it felt under my fingertips.
You can't own a color, but T-Mobile is hoping it can own magenta in regards to branding a no-contract carrier.
IBM hopes to spawn third-party Power servers by opening up its 12-core Power8 chip design to licensees, and now the company has to convince component makers to make parts for the servers. With Power8, IBM is providing hooks so component makers can easily plug their parts into the new breed of servers, said Bill Starke, Power chip architect, in an interview during the Hot Chips conference this week in Stanford, California. IBM presented technical details of the chip at the show. IBM now has to help build a secondary third-party component industry to ensure parts are readily available for servers. The company has made some interface changes to its Power8 chip design to ensure outside components can communicate with the CPU and other processing units. that it would license its Power architecture for the first time to third parties such as server and component makers as part of a development alliance called OpenPower. Power was previously relegated to homegrown IBM servers and custom chips, and the company now hopes to see more Power systems in the market.
Researchers claim to have developed a way to bring photon-bending quantum cryptography to mobile phones, creating a nearly uncrackable connection
Allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on French citizens with its Prism program have prompted the French public prosecutor to begin a preliminary inquiry, a court spokeswoman said Thursday. against persons unknown with the Paris High Court on July 11. In it they alleged that a number of offenses had been committed, including collection of personal data by illegal means, breach of privacy, fraudulent access to a computer system and interception of electronic communications. They asked the public prosecutor to investigate the alleged offenses, which they said were revealed in documents released in June by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Users of Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud can now take advantage of CloudFormation, which aims to make it easier to manage more complex environments. As companies get more used to running applications in the cloud, they are also putting together more complex systems. That in turn puts higher demands on management platforms, which have to allow users to take better advantage of the programmability and scalability of the cloud. CloudFormation is one of Amazon’s answers, and the goal is to give developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion using templates. Thanks to CloudFormation, they don’t have to figure out the order in which different services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work, according to Amazon.
Rest easy, suspicious Web dwellers: The U.S. Patent Office now officially guarantees that if you're going to get "scroogled" by anybody, you're going to get scroogled by Google. , which promotes Bing for Schools. other words, it's a patent that lets Google display the tailored ads seen on Gmail and other services. Dishing out targeted information is good for more than just ads, though. The patent makes pains to point out the beneficial aspects of Google's data scraping. Numerous drawings included with the patent hold examples of helpful contextual information that can be offered after scraping the content of a message, such offers to add travel details to your calendar or search for local weather or hotels when you're sent a trip itinerary.
If the world someday decides that it wants 3D video chat, Skype will be ready. that the company has worked on 3D video calling in its labs. “We have it in the lab, we know how to make it work and we're looking at the ecosystem of devices and their capability to support it in order to make a decision when we might think about bringing something like that to market,” Gillett said, in a BBC interview commemorating Skype's 10th anniversary. as the company expected.)
Just as with some gun owners and firearms, some businesses won’t be giving up their copies of Office 2003 when Microsoft cuts support for it in April 2014 until it is pried it from their hands. That could be a mistake, say security experts. “Microsoft has done a really good job of battening down most of the really big problem areas in Office 2003 a long time ago,” Wes Miller, a research analyst for Directions on Microsoft, told CSOonline. , which is scheduled to lose its support at the same time as Office 2003. “From a security perspective, Office 2003 will become more attackable over time,”Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek said in an interview.”We habitually find problems today in Office 2003. That will not stop next year just because Microsoft stops supporting it.”
Double-click any word in this paragraph. Your browser will select the word, and you'll be able to copy and paste it into your word processor or email program. But try double-clicking a word in the picture above (or in any of the other pictures in this article). It doesn't work. In the digital world, there's a big difference between real text and an image that looks like text--even if it's not always obvious to the user. Fortunately, there are ways to turn either one into the other. Let's start with turning text into a bitmapped image like a .jpg or .png.
, a cloud storage tool that puts the user in control of security. IDriveSync bills itself as a "sync and share solution,"and it's a good description. This software-and-service combo allows you to sync files across multiple devices, including Macs, PCs, Android, and iOS devices, and lets you share files with friends and colleagues. It also is accessible via the Web. Once you install IDriveSync on your desktop, it adds an IDriveSync folder to your computer—and I like that it allows you to select the folder's location. You simply drag files to that folder in order to save them to your IDriveSync account, where they will be synced across all of the devices that you use to access the service. I also like it that IDriveSync saves the 30 most recent versions of each file, so you can go back and see what changes have been made. IDriveSync has some handy features that anyone looking for a cloud storage service will appreciate. I like the different views that IDriveSync offers when you're browsing the content you've saved. You can browse by folder and file name, or you can use the Timeline view, which allows you to browse files chronologically, by the date they were updated. And with any photos that you've saved, you can choose to view them individually or using the Gallery view, which arranges them on a black background for a better look.
Trendrr creates big data social analytics products for TV and media brands, including Curatorr, which allows clients to curate tweets for broadcast, or analyze discussions on social networks to create ranking lists or voting systems.
Disgruntled business owners recently vented their frustrations at a Yelp town hall meeting. Not surprisingly, the majority of the complaints had to do with the site's reviews filter. Business owners are still insisting that the filter is rigged.
Facebook has drastically changed its contest rules for businesses. What was once restricted is now available. Brands can choose to run contests on the timeline with a variety of entry and voting mechanisms, as well as through a third-party app.
It's absolutely critical to understand and remember the differences between correlation, causation, and coincidence. Here we define each term, and look at some examples that you likely have (or will) encounter while monitoring your rankings.
Revenue from paid search grew to 44 percent of revenue from all search engine traffic, including organic, MarketLive reported. Paid search made up about one-third of search engine visits. One-third of all traffic came from smartphones and tablets.
Discovering the less obvious or intuitive interests of your target audience is a phenomenal opportunity to unlock insights into topics and content that can capture their attention and drive search and social engagement in surprising ways.
Today's Google Doodle celebrates Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a defining moment in the American Civil Rights Movement, which he gave August 28, 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedoms at the Lincoln Memorial.
YouTube has decided to retire Video Responses due to extreme low click-throughs. Many are lamenting the passing of this little-used feature. But what's worth commenting on are the features that YouTube has quietly given video marketers.
Google's "(not provided)" designation in Google Analytics is up. Way up. But it's not the same for all industries. Some experience this nuisance more than others, with the tech industry in first position, according to the study.
There are times that hidden technical problems get rolled out to a website that can negatively impact SEO. Learn about four mistakes that can sending dangerous signals to Google and Bing, and how to make sure those problems never happen to you.
We've all been told that creating unique, awesome content is our key to visibility gold and customer loyalty. But how do we do it, consistently? Awesome content isn't going to write itself. It doesn't just happen. This is how you write it.
Voucher sites and car classifieds websites were among the industries hit hardest by Google's Panda updates. But some sites have snatched recoveries from the jaws of Panda and have now seen traffic return – and even grow. Here's how they did it.
If your website has received a manual action notice called "Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing", the solution is pretty easy: simply remove it. Google also says you should document your cleanup process for the reconsideration request.
For years, EdgeRank has been the name of the algorithm Facebook uses to determine which posts users see in their news feed. However, Facebook is no longer using the term EdgeRank. Despite dropping the name, the framework is still alive and well.
Big changes are coming to Bing's shopping results. Bing announced it is integrating shopping information directly into the main search results to show users product features, specifications, reviews, and related products.
Earning top search rankings on Google isn't easy. It takes a lot of work to ensure your site is optimized, is high-quality, and has a great user experience. Here are 10 tips on how to get started optimizing for Google's algorithm today and beyond.
Marin Software released a report examining the performance of product listing ads (PLAs). The research found that PLAs not only have a higher click-through rate (CTR) than text ads, but PLA CTRs have increased each month since February.
Google Authorship adoption is continuing to grow and gain prominence in the search results. Here's a look at the state of Google authorship, some best practices for optimizing your authorship, and what we can – presumably – expect in the future.
At SES San Francisco, Bryan Eisenberg will show you how to leverage big data and act on insights in real-time. Here, Eisenberg shares some insights on big data, secrets to great Google rankings, and a few must-have tools and apps.
With the new AdWords Paid & Organic report, Google is now encouraging more paid and organic integration. Co-optimization offers benefits. By digging into the data, you can find a significant number of opportunities on both sides of the search aisle.