Microsoft In a
Facebook is on an aggressive push to gain users in emerging markets, and on Thursday it began tackling a new task: making money from them. With more than a billion users, the company's footprint already extends to almost every country on Earth, but the Facebook seen by users in one country can be very different from what their neighbors get. That poses a problem for the company. Differences in cellular connection speeds and phones mean that posts, photos or ads loaded in a fraction of a second on 4G connections could take minutes to load for users in remote areas. It's an annoyance for users and a problem for Facebook as it tries to sell ads.
People who have been testing the latest beta versions of Microsoft's Windows 10 for smartphones have a new operating system build to play with Thursday. The company This build doesn't have anything in the way of new features over its
The Bluetooth-enabled smart plug features presence-based automation.
Spooky asylum hellhole
Twitch is best known as the home of passionate gamers who Recently, Twitch decided to throw its full support behind the site’s artistic sub-culture with a To celebrate, Twitch will also live stream every episode of
Fan TV is discontinuing a $150 set-top box that aimed to reinvent how people watch live TV channels. Rovi, which acquired Fan TV last year, stopped selling the hardware last week, Fan TV’s hardware launched in April 2014 with the idea of combining live cable channels and streaming sources such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Go. All this content appeared in a single interface, and instead of a button-laden remote, users controlled the device with a slick touchpad.
Amazon’s Fire TV devices offer some of the best bang for your buck, but those low prices may soon come at the cost of advertising. The top banner itself is not new, but until now Amazon has only used it to advertise television content. The shopping element has been in testing for the last two weeks, with a source telling GeekWire that results had far exceeded expectations. (We’ve looked for these ads on a 2014 Fire TV set-top box, but have yet to see them.)
The dark web got just a little bit brighter thanks to the efforts of Facebook and the Tor project. The pair, with help from many others, has successfully petitioned the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to designate web addresses ending in “.onion” as special use domain names. The IETF is the standards-setting body for the Internet. That may not sound entirely exciting, but its ramifications are important as it makes running a .onion hidden site that much easier. First, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) cannot make .onion a regular top-level domain. That means .onion won’t be sold off during a
Reliability Monitor is a built-in part of Windows that’s been around since the introduction of Windows Vista back in January 2007. It’s always been a somewhat hidden feature of the Windows operating system, and therefore easy for users and admins alike to overlook. Nevertheless, it’s a great tool that provides all kinds of interesting insight into system history and stability ( Reliability Monitor is part and parcel of the Reliability & Performance Monitor snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). That said, Reliability Monitor comes pre-defined with all modern Windows versions, so there’s no need to launch MMC, and then to start adding and configuring snap-ins to make Reliability Monitor work.
After reviewing the Microsoft Band 2, I’d dub it the Microsoft Zune of wearables: a proudly specialized device that hasn’t yet realized that it’s on the wrong side of history. Microsoft clearly took care in designing the sleek, curved interface of its new Band 2 smartwatch. But in the past year, Apple launched the Apple Watch, and Google’s partners iterated on their Android Wear devices. They’re all competent wearables by themselves. But one of their key selling points are Today, you can buy the Microsoft Band 2 for $250—$50 more than the original Band, but at the low end of Android Wear smartwatches and well below the cheapest Apple Watch. Microsoft makes every effort to justify that price, rolling up what it added to the original Band—golf and cycling apps, a tiny keyboard, and more—plus a more comfortable fit, a new barometric sensor, and some other tweaks.
The industrial giant is introducing both a new connected-home product line as well as a new online shopping experience, dubbed “C by GE.”
Nintendo will roll out its first smartphone game in March rather than this year as originally planned, delaying the company’s plans to cash in on the growing market for games on smartphones. The company’s president Tatsumi Kimishima said during an investor presentation that the first game to be released would be Miitomo, which he described as a “friendly conversation starter.” It allows users to create their own avatars, called Mii, which will converse with the user and share the information with avatars created by other persons registered as friends. The game is likely to be a disappointment for gamers who had expected the popular character Mario to figure in the first smartphone game from Nintendo.
We caught up with Tom Moss, Scott Croyle, and Mike Chan to find out how Nextbit hopes to inspire the rest of the industry.
One year ago today, I kicked off my weekly I’m happy to say that since writing that first column, living cable-TV-free has only gotten easier. Those who ditch the bloated cable bundle now have more choices and better programming than they did a year ago, as TV networks and service providers realize they must start appealing to this rapidly-growing audience.