Latest Technology News

Switching broadband providers should be easy -- the emphasis is very heavily on the word "should" here -- but in practice this is often not the case. There may be issues getting hold of the necessary authorization code, or the dreaded period of downtime as one ISP takes over from another. All this could be set to change, for the UK at least, if Ofcom's proposed new measures have the desired effect.

To help make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible, Ofcom is eliminating one potential bottleneck. Now customers looking to switch need do nothing more than contact the ISP they would like to move to. There's no need to get in touch with the current ISP who may drag their heels, the new provider can now take care of the entire process on behalf of the customer.

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Windows 8 users already enjoy the Bing app suite on their laptops, desktops and tablets. Since these apps are very mobile and touch-focused, it has been disappointing and rather curious that they were absent from Microsoft's own Windows Phone 8 platform. But, now, it finally arrives.

The suite is comprised of four Bing apps -- Sports, Finance, Weather and News. The apps closely mirror their desktop counterparts; including live tiles. The live tiles are nothing short of gorgeous and improve the value of the home screen immensely. By pinning the apps to the "Start" page, the user is presented with ongoing information. Tapping on the live tile delivers personalized information. I must say that the suite is, well... sweet.

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Baseball season may be entering the final stretch, but there are still many games left to be played and Windows Phone 8 customers can keep up with all of the action going on in the run up to playoff time. Regardless of how your team is faring, you can still follow the action from your mobile handset.

At Bat 13 today debuted in the Windows Phone store, bringing features such as live scoreboards, standings, schedules, and pinning your favorite team to Start for quick access to the team's page. In addition, you can watch the free MLB.TV Game of the Day or pick up an MLB.TV Premium subscription (learn more) to see every out-of-market game, hear radio broadcasts, and access the 2013 season's archives on-demand.

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YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have launched MixBit for iPhone 1.0.3 through their company AVOS Systems. The app -- also coming to Android next month -- is aimed firmly at the social networking market, providing users with a convenient tool for constructing hour-long videos from 16-second clips that can subsequently be published on the parent Mixbit.com site or shared via popular social networks.

Mixbit.com is described as "a community of creators", according to its website, highlighting the public nature of videos uploaded to it. All shared videos become public domain, allowing other users to easily embed all or parts of those videos into their own work.

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As my colleague Wayne Williams reported earlier today the PC market is continuing to shrink at the hands of tablets. Further confirmation of this, just in case you needed any, comes from a Gartner survey showing that the PC market in western Europe slumped by 20 percent in the second quarter of 2013.

All PC segments in Western Europe declined over the quarter. Mobile and desktop shipments dropped 23.9 percent and 12.2 percent respectively. PC shipments in the professional market declined by 13.5 percent, while the consumer PC market decreased 25.8 percent in the same period. This equates to a 19.8 percent drop overall

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Microsoft's next-generation console...ahh...living room entertainment hub will not ship until this November, but still promises to light up the holiday shopping season. The company already showed it off and announced games, plus my colleague Derrick Wlodarz recently laid out very good reasons why he expects this war to be won by Xbox, as opposed to Sony and its PS4, which is expected around the same time.

Now potential customers can get one more sneak peak at what to expect. In a new video from Xbox Live chief Larry Hryb, better known as MajorNelson, the new console is unboxed -- something many a person likely hopes to be doing themselves this holiday season.

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The Google Play store is being bombarded with apps designed to scam unsuspecting users, according to consumer advice platform Scambook.

The scammers aren't even bothering to write malicious code, instead relying on simple human error to install their fraudulent apps. One app in particular has no purpose other than to launch a link to an adult video website. When the user is then asked to register, an email form is generated linking to another service on another website. Users are then asked to pay a $3,200.00 yearly fee within days of receipt.

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The worldwide PC market continues to experience few signs of growth, with a healthy increase in global tablet shipments merely helping to offset the continuing descent of traditional desktop and notebook systems, according to independent analyst firm Canalys.

While tablet shipments saw a 42.9 percent increase compared with this time last year, desktop and notebook shipments fell 7.4 percent and 13.9 percent respectively. Total shipments for PCs (Canalys lumps desktops, notebooks and tablets together) delivered a 0.3 percent growth for the year.

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David Thoiron has announced the release of FotoSketcher 2.50, his excellent tool for transforming digital photos into paintings, sketches, cartoons and more. And while it doesn’t exactly transform the program, the update does include one or two very welcome improvements.

Top of the list has to be the new linear halftoning effect. With its default settings this is a very effective abstraction tool, and delivers great results on both color and black and white images. But as usual with FotoSketcher, the effect has a host of configuration settings (Abstraction, Angle, Color Intensity, Texture and more), and it’s easy to produce more customized results to better suit individual images.

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Instagram just introduced a major change to the video-posting feature in its Android and iOS mobile apps, with the popular social network now allowing users to upload pre-recorded clips from the smartphone's gallery.

The revamped video-posting feature is part of the new Instagram apps for Android and iOS, version 4.1. "Starting today you can upload videos from your phone's media library and share those moments to Instagram regardless of when they were captured", says Instagram. "Once you select the video clip you'd like to import, you can trim it down to the exact part you like best. We've also made it so that you can choose how you square-crop your clip so you can keep the action front and center".

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There are several new data points this week in the ongoing cratering of IBM as an IT vendor. The state of Pennsylvania cancelled an unemployment compensation system contract that was 42 months behind and $60 million over budget. Big Blue has been banned from the Australian state of Queensland after botching a $6.9 million SAP project that will now reportedly cost the people of Queensland $A1.2 billion to fix. That’s some botch.

Credit Suisse analyst Kulbinder Garcha says IBM has a cash flow problem and downgraded the stock. At IBM’s Systems & Technology Group, management announced to employees a one week mandatory furlough at the end of August or beginning of September. And finally, I’m told that there is now a filter on the IBM corporate e-mail system that flags any messages that contain the word Cringely. I’m flattered.

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While LG has slowly made a name for itself in the USA with such devices as televisions and washing machines, the company has also released smartphones to much lesser fanfare. The South Korean company has a small and quiet following in the Android community, but it is far outmatched by the likes of Samsung, Motorola and HTC. Today, the company hopes to change this by announcing the LG G2 -- an interesting new smartphone with an unfortunate ho-hum name.

The most intriguing new aspect of the G2 is something LG calls "Rear Key". Basically, the volume and power buttons have been moved from the side of the device to the rear. This is truly innovative outside-the-box product design -- my mind is officially blown!

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Success on Facebook is as much about the quality of posts as it is about the quantity of posts. Research by Expion into the social network finds that user engagement with brands has declined despite an increase in the number of posts from the top 50 retailers.

The list includes such names as Tiffany & Co, Walmart and Amazon who are responsible for a good deal of the site's ad revenue and the findings go some way to explaining not just why the news feed algorithm has changed, but also why Facebook announced it so publicly.

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In June of 2012 Apple officially shut down MobileMe, migrating customers to iCloud. With storage space now being downgraded, the market apparently seems right to Microsoft to take advantage of cloud customers by offering its own alternative, in the form of SkyDrive -- or the service soon to be formerly known as SkyDrive.

The only official announcement came from the service's official Twitter account, simply asking a question and offering a solution -- "did Apple cancel your extra MobileMe storage? Fwd the downgrade email to [email protected] for an extra 15GB of SkyDrive for 1 year".

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Microsoft Office 365, and its business social platform Yammer, have been steadily finding their way into corporations and government offices in a battle with Google Apps. Now the software giant takes wing across the Atlantic with its latest conquest -- the friendly skies of the United Kingdom.

Today the company announces a deal that brings the applications to International Airline Group (IAG), the parent company of British Airways, Iberia and Vueling.

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