Microsoft said Thursday that it had set up a facility on its Redmond, Wash., camps where members of Microsoft, other businesses, and law enforcement can team together to take on cybercrime. Microsoft already employs nearly 100 attorneys, investigators, technical experts and forensic analysts to fight counterfeit software, as well as halt the spread of child pornography, click fraud, and other online threats. “The Microsoft Cybercrime Center is where our experts come together with customers and partners to focus on one thing: keeping people safe online,” said David Finn, associate general counsel of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, in a statement. There’s no indication that the center will be any more effective than working online, via the various “white hat” forces drawn up against “black hat” hackers. Companies like Microsoft and others already work closely with the FBI, Interpol, and others to try and keep the Interne safer. Still, the secured center on the Microsoft campus is a formal statement of Microsoft’s commitment to help solve the problem, said Noboru Nakatani, executive director of the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation, in a introducing the center.
Two years ago, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile blocked Google Wallet. But the carriers' answer -- ISIS -- is just a more annoying attempt at pay by phone.
Because a list of accomplishments is so much more satisfying than a never-ending stream of tasks.
Salesforce.com’s customers have become more loyal and committed to using products from the vendor and its partners over the past year, according to a new report from consulting firm Bluewolf in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management. Some 90 percent of the 450 respondents said their Salesforce.com investment is “more valuable to their company today than it was a year ago,” according to the “State of Salesforce” study. Sixty-nine percent said they plan to spend more money on Salesforce.com-related products moving forward, with 27 percent saying that budget would remain flat and only 4 percent planning to slow down spending on Salesforce.com. Other survey results indicated many companies see Salesforce.com as a development platform and not just a CRM (customer relationship management) application. Sixty percent of respondents intend to spend more money creating custom applications with Salesforce.com’s platform, and 52 percent have already or are going to build custom mobile software with its tools.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering the open-source PostgreSQL relational database as part of its RDS (Relational Database Service). Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced the new offering, which is in beta, Thursday at the AWS’ re:Invent 2013 user conference in Las Vegas. Amazon prepped the at the behest of its users, Vogels said. “This has been on the top of the RDS list that our customers have been asking about,” Vogels said. “This has been requested so often in the past year and half that it is almost obvious that this is coming.” “Postgres is an amazing database and has many features that you want,” Vogels told the audience, which erupted in enthusiastic applause over the news. He noted that a number of AWS customers have already been running PostgreSQL clusters on AWS’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) service.
. This brings the total number of domestic carriers officially offering the device to two, alongside Nexus 5 launch partner Sprint. T-Mobile's unlocked price for the16GB version of the handset is $450. It's also available for $42 up front plus $17 per month if you opt for a two-year installment plan. In keeping with T-Mobile's recent moves away from long-term contracts, the phone is sold without the requirement of a two-year service plan. charges $50 for the phone, also in the 16GB flavor, but only with a two-year service contract. (It also lists the phone's full price at $450, but actually doesn't sell it sans contract.) from either T-Mobile or Sprint, nor are the white versions of the phone available from the carriers.) The phone is also available through third-party retailers like Amazon and Best Buy, but pricing is similar to that offered by T-Mobile.
The beauty of Web apps is that a company can add features that don't require you to download anything new. And lucky you, Apple just added some new capabilities to its iWork for iCloud beta apps.
Zoho has added a series of features to its CRM (customer-relationship-management) software in a bid to appeal to larger companies as well as lure away customers from the likes of Salesforce.com. In some respects, the Zoho update amounts to the company catching up to Salesforce.com and others rather than showcasing truly new innovations. Zoho CRM Enterprise now includes improved territory management, allowing customers to be broken up by factors such as geographic area and revenue, and allowing sales teams to hone their efforts around specific groups of prospects. In addition, Zoho has added the ability to run sales forecasts according to geography. Larger companies with multiple divisions and lines of business may also need more than a standard set of CRM modules. To meet this need, Zoho CRM Enterprise now includes the ability to create custom modules that are compatible with the standard set.
Eventually, Microsoft will bring a touch-optimized version of Office to the iPad. Until that day arrives, however, there’s Apple’s iWork—and now HopTo, which offers a reskinned version of Word as lovely and useful as an iPad app should be. is available Thursday in the Apple's App Store. Why try it? Because other virtualized, cloud-based versions of Office have largely failed to gain traction on tablets, hamstrung by the need to route virtually every instruction through a remote server. The virtualized apps are slow and unresponsive, and always threaten to disconnect and crash at the worst possible time. Worse still, users have typically had to pay for their troubling experiences, often via a monthly subscription. The alternative has been to use native iPad apps. Apple’s iWork suite is probably the preferred choice, but there’s also ByteSquared’s Office2HD and DataViz Documents to Go Premium. But various quirks—such as Apple Page's burial of the “Save As” command, for example—have left some users pining for something that makes more sense.
The Motorola message synchronization patent had been forcing Apple to switch off iOS push email services in Germany for more than a year.
A U.S. judge has thrown out a long-standing copyright infringement case brought against Google by the Authors Guild, saying the company’s book-scanning project provides significant benefits to the public. Judge Denny Chin, formerly of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, dismissed the author advocacy group’s 8-year-old copyright lawsuit against Google on Thursday. Google’s Books project is protected by U.S. fair use doctrine, Chin ruled. The benefits of the Google Books project “are many,” Chin wrote in his ruling. “Google Books provides a new and efficient way for readers and researchers to find books. It makes tens of millions of books searchable by words and phrases.” Google Books has become “an essential research tool, as it helps librarians identify and find research sources, it makes the process of interlibrary lending more efficient, and it facilitates finding and checking citations,” Chin added.
A secretive international trade treaty up for discussion next week could have far-reaching effects on Internet services, copyright law and civil liberties, a suggests. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement’s 95-page draft chapter on intellectual property highlights disagreements between the negotiating parties, often pitting the U.S. and Australia on the one hand against Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam on the other. Intellectual property rights (IPR) typically refers to patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. The countries are fighting over rules that could extend the duration of copyright, limit exceptions to copyright, raise the level of damages for breaking technical protection measures such as digital rights management, and strengthen patents for drugs, medical procedures and living organisms. “If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs,” said Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange in a statement accompanying the treaty text.
and secret court orders abound. . . What's more, the number of U.S. information requests has nearly tripled since the latter half of 2009 and account for just shy of half of all global government requests. (Worldwide, the number has "only" doubled in the same time frame.) , and the Redmond company said it received 37,196 data requests from governments. Nearly 8,000 of those came from the U.S. government,and those requests revealed data for more than 22,000 accounts
I strongly recommend cloning the drive on an old PC to a new one. You bring all of your old problems to a new machine. What's more, you create more problems, because every Windows installation is adapted to the particular hardware it was installed on. Finally, you'll have the same Windows license running on two computers (Microsoft doesn't like that) while not using the license you paid for when you bought the new PC. Sorry to say this, but you need to take the time to move everything over properly. Here's how:
The lovechild of Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile is finally available from coast to coast, hoping to spark the 'tap to pay' craze in ways that Google Wallet never could.
An update to Android's Google Search app has added some handy-dandy new features to Google Now.
The European Commission gave airlines permission to offer their passengers Internet access via 3G and 4G connections so they can send emails and surf the Web while in flight. “This means that from now onwards, spectrum for 3G (UMTS) and 4G (LTE) communications may be used above an altitude of 3,000 meters. Until now only 2G (GSM) has been permissible on-board aircraft flying in the E.U.,” the Commission said in a news release on Thursday. To enable this, new rules have been adopted for aircraft flying over the European Union. The Commission’s announcement follows a decision by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which said on Wednesday that it will allow the use of personal electronics such as tablets, smartphones and e-readers during all phases of a flight. The rules will apply to all devices except bulky ones like laptops, which still need to be stowed during take-off, landing and taxiing, EASA said. The agency will issue guidance on in-flight use of devices and the use of mobile broadband connections by the end of November.
Security researchers have compromised Microsoft Surface Pro, Nexus 4 and Samsung Galaxy S4 devices by exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 11 running on Windows 8.1 and Google Chrome running on Android. The exploits were demonstrated during the Mobile Pwn2Own hacking contest that ran Wednesday and Thursday at the PacSec Applied Security Conference in Tokyo. Researchers Abdul Aziz Hariri and Matt Molinyawe from Hewlett-Packard’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) team, which organized the contest, on a Microsoft Surface Pro device running Windows 8.1. The demonstration had an educational purpose and was not part of the actual competition. “Exploiting a bug in IE is difficult in general because of the protections and security controls they’ve implemented,” Hariri said. The vulnerability was exploited twice in order to leak a memory address and then gain remote code execution, “which gave us full control over the whole machine,” he said.
, because "Pentium" was synonymous with "awesome." processors. , with plans to open several pop-up holiday stores at locations across the U.S. The first store is scheduled to open its doors in New York City's NoLita neighborhood on November 23. Intel hasn't specified what kind of products will be on display and what, if anything, the stores will be selling. Based on a company promotional video, however, it appears these Intel Experience Stores will mostly be showrooms for Ultrabooks, tablets, and other devices packed with Intel chips.
The general counsel of a U.S. spying agency told a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday that if Internet companies provide information about the number of surveillance orders they receive for user data, it would alert the country’s adversaries on which services to avoid. The government defended its data collection and disclosure policies even as a representative from Google warned the senators that U.S. surveillance practices could lead to the break up of the Internet. “Providing that information in that level of detail could provide our adversaries a detailed road map of which providers and which platforms to avoid in order to escape surveillance,” said Robert Litt, general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Brad Wiegmann, deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, in a prepared statement in connection with the Senate hearing on “The Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013.” The proposed legislation aims to bring greater transparency in data collection by the National Security Agency.
IBM is preparing to give third parties access to its Watson supercomputer with the aim of spurring the growth of applications that take advantage of the system’s artificial intelligence capabilities. human opponents on the Jeopardy! game show. IBM has been applying Watson’s machine learning—or “cognitive computing”—technology to domains such as health care, but now the company is ready to share Watson with the broader world.
Nvidia has made improvements to its underlying software tools to make it easier to write programs for faster execution across CPUs and graphics processors. The company on Thursday announced CUDA 6, which will make programming easier for supercomputers, servers, PCs and, to a lesser extent, smartphones. The goal of CUDA is to provide underlying tools so programmers can off-load processing from CPUs to GPUs, which is faster for technical and graphics applications. CUDA 6 offers unified memory, an advanced management feature that makes GPU memory as readily accessible as CPU memory. Previously, data had to be moved from CPUs to GPUs for execution and then moved back, creating two data pools. But with unified memory, a developer doesn’t have to manage where data is to take advantage of the GPU. The memory management feature will figure out whether to dispatch data to CPU or GPU memory, and that will reduce the need for programmers to add lines of code to define where the data should be sent, said Sumit Gupta, general manager of Tesla Accelerated Computing products at Nvidia.
The idea of upgrading to a shiny new smartphone sounds appealing ... until you consider all of the data residing on your older handset. From the pictures and videos you've captured to the thousands of text messages you've exchanged, your aging smartphone is a virtual treasure chest. But Wondershare MobileTrans makes it a breeze to take most of those treasures with you when you move up the smartphone food chain.
The low-price might be tempting, but you're better off saving your money for a better tablet.
This new hatchback has more doors, more headroom, and more tech than its mini-car cousin.
has certainly made it difficult to trust sensitive data to a third-party provider. Alternatives exist. With a combination of hardware, apps, and services, you can create secure, easily accessible data backups without relying on the cloud. Long before cloud backup services sprang up, businesses and individuals made do by using external USB hard drives. Backing up data locally to an external USB hard drive is faster than uploading it to the cloud—especially via a USB 3.0 connection—and external drives are a relatively cheap, one-time investment rather than an ongoing subscription. Still, two potential concerns with backing up to an external hard drive remain. —usually about the same time your PC crashes, if Murphy has anything to say about it. Second, if a fire or flood destroys your home or office, your external drive will succumb right along with your PC.
The battery life is really long, so you can hate using it all day on a single charge.
With Windows 7 as its operating system, Dell’s Latitude E6540 feels like a throwback. Whether that’s a good thing depends on what you’re looking for in a business-class laptop. If you want a comfortable, expandable machine to take the place of a desktop, this might be just what the IT department ordered. But you’ll have to contend with a dull, dated design and a high price tag. I’d also recommend a little weight training if you intend to travel with this beast. The E6540 is a big system, measuring a full 1.3 inches thick and rockin’ the scale at 6.7 pounds. That leaves room to accommodate a 15.6-inch screen, a full-size numeric keypad, and a DVD+RW drive, but it doesn’t make for a very travel-friendly laptop. Indeed, an extended battery protrudes a full inch from the rear. The Latitude E6540 has a decidedly old-fashioned keyboard. It’s spacious and comfortable, offering more travel than most modern island-style keyboards. That’s great for old-school typists like me, but may be a turnoff for younger users who are more accustomed to the newer designs. Although Dell provides both a keyboard-embedded pointing stick and a touchpad, the latter is small and doesn’t support any gestures other than two-finger scrolling (which it handles very smoothly). Dell outfitted this machine with an Intel Core i7-4800MQ processor, 8GB of DDR3/1600 RAM, and a discrete AMD Radeon 8790M graphics card with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. To preserve battery power, the system will automatically turn off the discrete GPU when it’s not needed. So if you do end up traveling with the machine (remember, lift with your knees!), you’ll appreciate its above-average battery life (for a desktop replacement, at least) of 5 hours, 21 minutes.
As our digital lives shift more and more to the cloud, more and more of the Web merges into the desktop. Consider the humble Web browser: Once a mere renderer of static HTML, today's browsers come chock-full of capabilities that can transform webpages into something downright . Think I'm laying it on thick? Check out these eight killer features found in modern browsers and see for yourself. Fair warning: When you're done, any preconceptions you have about the impossibility of living life in a browser may well be shattered. Say goodbye to the colorful two-dimensional sprites of to see what WebGL and its brethren can do. Firefox, meanwhile, has recently been focusing on a JavaScript subset dubbed asm.js to turbo-charge its graphics. That endeavor has been so successful that the popular Unreal Engine now plays nice on the Web, as beautifully evidenced by .
Google has announced a range of enhancements to its voice controlled digital assistant Google Now. Top of the change log this time is the addition of Waze powered traffic reports. New cards include "news topic", "website update" and "what to watch".
Over time Yahoo built up quite a portfolio of domain names, and it is now ready to part with some of them. Most interesting is sandwich.com. The auction started today and runs for a week. Yahoo is calling the event Domainapalooza.
It's been three months since we last checked in on comScore's monthly update on search engine market share – and not much has changed. Google is still hovering around 67 percent market share, while Bing has made some small gains at Yahoo's expense.
Real-time Events and Conversions reports are now officially out of beta and everyone will start to see the reports over the next few weeks. Both the real-time reports for events and conversions will also be expanded to app profiles.
Notable updates via Twitter this week include custom timelines that let publishers leverage an API to create and share timelines around specific topics, and more granular mobile targeting for advertisers by device type and WiFi connection.
If you focus all your SEO efforts on a single term with a "Page 1 or Bust" mentality, you're putting your business and domain in jeopardy. Here's why you should take a more diversified, comprehensive approach to keyword targeting and expansion.
Link building isn't just some activity you do. It should be an integral part of all your activities, even outside regular marketing. Here's how to get link building integrated into the DNA of your client's daily activities for best SEO results.
Should PPC practitioners focus on Twitter as an emerging ad channel that can drive direct response metrics, or is its value largely brand in nature? Here are some major opportunities and challenges of leveraging Twitter as a scalable PPC ad channel.
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, The Search Agency released its mobile experience scorecard for the top online retailers in the United States. Of the 100 retailers examined, REI came in first and Apple came in last.
Google AdWords advertisers who are using mobile "Click to Call" ads will now find them listed in the regular Conversion column. This is part of a change to make it easier for advertisers to optimize their bidding strategy for click to call.
Marketers and brand leaders need to consider how their brand content is discovered and engaged with by searchers on a mobile device compared to a desktop. Here are five ways brands and agencies can ensure maximum mobile search reach and engagement.
When set up properly a combination of all match types can help you cover the ground needed to drive high quality, relevant traffic to your site. But in order to get optimal performance, you need to make sure a tiered bidding strategy is utilized.
Hummingbird gives Google a better understanding of query meaning by recognizing and then connecting entities and attributes contained within search queries to existing knowledge data, then applying context to each query. So what are SEO folks to do?
Google is allowing advertisers to test Nielsen's online ad measurement product when they negotiate ad buys on Google's YouTube. Many industry analysts say Google's new position could fuel the shift of additional TV ad dollars to YouTube.
Google's new option uses improved signals and methods to determine which of the display network sites an advertiser's ads are likely to perform the best. Initial tests showed 35 percent higher click-through rates and 35 percent lower costs.
Google Helpouts is the latest offering from the company, which is similar to a video format of a Q&A site, except you get to ask the questions, have an expert answer them, and pay for the privilege. It is all done live over video.
SEMPO is currently collecting feedback from digital marketers across the board to feed its 9th annual "State of Search" report. Participants will receive a copy of the research (usually for members only or for a fee) plus a chance to win an iPad 3.
You can still implement these tips to ready your website, drive more visibility, and connect with your target consumer in time for Cyber Monday 2013 and claim your share of the estimated $82 billion that will be spent in online holiday shopping.
While there are many similarities between social PPC and search PPC, there are some key differences. If you're struggling to get your head around Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter PPC, here are some best practices for success from the social PPC pros.
As Twitter seeks out new revenue streams over the next year, the company should consider adding these hot new features: embedded Slideshares; click to buy; retargeting for promoted tweets; feed control; and basic analytics for basic users.