Robert Schoon
Motorola offered a big discount on Cyber Monday on its Moto X smartphone, which many customers ended up unable to take advantage of after the Motomaker customization site crashed. The company then rescheduled the sale for later, and then made it ongoing until the new year. Now, Motorola has announced that the $150-off price for an unlocked Moto X is permanent.
The biggest problem facing the idea of widespread Ultra-HD, or 4K, video is streaming. Google may now have fixed that problem, as YouTube plans on demonstrating a 4K video streaming codec that halves the amount of bandwidth used.
In an ironic nod to overblown technology news headlines, blogger and noted Google Glass-in-shower enthusiast Robert Scoble titled his latest Google+ post "Scoble says Google Glass is doomed." Scoble then lists the reasons why Google Glass will not take off when its consumer edition released (expected sometime in 2014).
Just before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas begins, Samsung has announced the second generation of its push into the pure photography market with the Samsung Galaxy Camera 2. The next generation smart camera includes some features that the company hopes will boost its device ecosystem.
This week, Facebook joined the S&P 500 while founder Mark Zuckerberg personally made more shares in the company available for purchase, Google and Facebook battle it out with different year-end roundup services for their users, Twitter will let Vine users get vanity URLs, and it turned out that Instagram's new ads are a success.
Young Latinos spend more time reading than they do on the computer, according to a new study released in December by Northwestern University and the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL). The study delves into what kinds of media are most important in Hispanic families today, and includes some interesting findings.
It's sometimes fun to be part of a Secret Santa gift exchange, but it's much more fun to be in Reddit's Secret Santa gift exchange, which involves tens of thousands of mostly anonymous participants. But what's better than that? Finding out your Secret Santa, "Bill," is none other than Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
The National Security Agency essentially bribed an important industry computer and network security firm to put a secret backdoor in their encryption formulas, according to a new report.
Facebook has experimented with a more nuanced approach to responding to friends' posts, though it has not shown up on the world's largest social network yet. The "sympathize" button appeared at one of Facebook's hackathons, as a way to express Facebook's popular one-click support, without seeming callous.
In late 2010, a group of Anonymous hacktivists fired the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (otherwise known as the hacker group's distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack) at PayPal as part of "Operation Payback." On Thursday, 13 defendants who had been charged with that PayPal attack pleaded guilty in a California federal court.
Since the late summer, we've known that the FBI had an elite hacker squad to develop surveillance on terrorism and organized crime suspects using malware. Now new details are emerging about the capabilities of that malware, and it reportedly includes using a suspect's laptop camera to spy on them.
Facebook announced changes to its News Feed on Monday, promising to increase the "quality" of news-related posts by tweaking the visibility of "relevant" posts. But Facebook's explanation of how it would accomplish this was rather nebulous, only giving an example of reducing the number of meme photos from third-party sites. Now, News Feed manager Lars Backstrom has revealed some details, and it sounds like Facebook's News Feed is taking a page from Google.
T-Mobile has begun upgrading its LTE service for faster speeds by using some of the spectrum it acquired in its MetroPCS purchase. The rollout just began in late Nov., but T-Mobile plans to offer the LTE expansion in its top markets soon.
Microsoft is looking to stir up interest in Windows 8.1 devices by offering ridiculous deals during the 12 business days before Christmas, judging by its first sale in the series. Starting Monday, the usually $299 Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet is on sale for $99. But the sale is quite limited.
It's becoming clear that the future of the internet will be not on computers, but out in the world. Apple made a step towards that future on Friday with iBeacon, a location awareness app for iPhone that embeds virtual offers and information in various locations inside the Apple Store.
