Tim Conneally

In a statement announcing an executive reorganization, Apple on Monday announced that its senior vice president of iOS software, Scott Forstall, and its head of retail, John Browett will both be leaving the company.

The executive shuffle is being done to "encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s…hardware, software and services teams," according to Apple.

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Phillips Electronics on Monday announced a new home automation accessory called Hue, which lets its users control home light fixtures wirelessly from a smartphone application.

Hue pairs a ZigBee LightLink local communications network with your home Wi-Fi network and mobile app. The LED bulbs communicate with the "bridge" device via ZigBee LightLink, and the bridge communicates with your router, which in turn communicates with your Wi-Fi enabled smart devices. From the application, users can control the color of their Hue lights in any of 16 million shades, program timers, and schedule settings for optimal light and energy management. A single bridge can control up to 50 individual lightbulbs.

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Eight might just be a lucky number for Microsoft. The company launched Windows 8 in New York just before a crippling hurricane arrived and took out a competing Google Android launch event; and today, it launches Windows Phone 8 in a San Francisco still reeling from the Giants winning the World Series.

Today at 10am Pacific, Microsoft will be hosting the live launch event of Windows Phone 8, which we have been expecting since late June, when it was first revealed.

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The disused Pier 57 pavilion in New York City's Meatpacking District served as a fitting backdrop for Microsoft's Windows 8 launch party yesterday. The ramshackle warehouse is currently only used as a location for big monthly events, and not for any daily purpose. The big blocks of color, and simple, attractive Windows 8 logos stood in stark contrast to the rough building itself. It was easy to see the entire event as a metaphor for the current state of the personal computer industry.

The entire PC market has been in decline across the board, and Windows revenue has fallen for the last two years according to three leading market research firms IHS iSuppli, Gartner, and IDC. Despite the unquestionable popularity of mobile devices, the PC is hardly less relevant or less valuable than it was. The more pressing problem has been the difficulty individuals and businesses have in justifying the purchase of a new machine in such low economic times.

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Windows 8, RT, and Surface launch at midnight. A scant fourteen hours before the new generation of operating systems becomes available to the general public, Microsoft is hosting a celebration at New York City's historic Pier 57. Your faithful skeptic Tim Conneally will be present at the event, liveblogging and keeping an eye out for any heretofore unseen news.

The event begins at 10am EST and lasts until 3pm EST. Check back here throughout the day for updates on Windows 8!

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Networking infrastructure company Cisco announced on Tuesday evening that its first "Smart+Connected" city will be the planned community of Lake Nona, Florida which exists inside the city limits of Orlando. The fifteen-year Lake Nona project will be Cisco's first of nine planned Smart+Connected cities. The company first announced this initiative more than two years ago.

The Smart+Connected initiative is Cisco's experiment with building the communications infrastructure that connects all aspects of a community, from government to health care to education to enterprise to home and beyond. More than simply a communications ecosystem, the initiative is squarely focused on preparing for the nascent "Internet of things" era.

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At WWDC 2012 in San Francisco last June, Apple debuted its latest generation of Macbooks. Today, at an event to spotlight the new iPad Mini, Apple also unveiled a version of the 13" Macbook Pro which includes the high definition Retina Display. For the last five months, this display has only been available on the 15" Macbook Pro.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said the 13" Macbook Pro is Apple's most popular notebook computer, and by adding the Retina Display into the mix, the company now offers four different stock versions of the PC.

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When Apple debuted the iPhone 5 just over one month ago, I was assigned to cover the launch event in a liveblog, despite the fact that I wasn't actually present at the event. So I did the liveblog the only way I saw fit: in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

So here we are again, there is another Apple event today in San Jose, where the company is expected to unveil a couple of new products including the smaller, cheaper 7-inch iPad, and a new Macbook with a high-resolution Retina display. The event will begin at 10am Pacific, or 1PM EST, and I'll be providing a live, unscripted sarcasm track starting approximately an hour before the event begins. Unlike the iPhone 5 launch event, this one will be live streamed at Apple Events.

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For the last couple of years, there has been an increase in corporate executives being assigned to a post known as Chief Digital Officer. At the Gartner Symposium/iTxpo 2012 on Monday, market research company Gartner predicted that by 2015, as much as 25 percent of all organizations will have a Chief Digital Officer in their executive staff.

The first decade of the 2000's saw a dramatic rise in two technology-centric executive offices: the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Depending upon the environment in which they work, these executives do different things. Generally speaking, however, a CIO is the head honcho of information systems and IT, and a CTO is an individual chosen to bring broader technological vision, direction and management to a company or government, sometimes outside of the realm of what could be considered IT.

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Realtime automobile traffic data service Inrix on Monday released a major update to its freemium Inrix traffic app for Android. Now in its second year on the Android platform, Inrix has improved aspects both premium and free within the application.

Inrix Traffic utilizes live traffic data and scheduled event data to calculate the fastest routes immediately at the time of travel, or at some point in the future rather than strictly using distance calculations like Google Maps. Inrix incorporates school traffic, event traffic, and live traffic to generate trip lengths and live ETAs. This update adds recommended departure and travel times, personalized traffic alerts, and the ability to send out automatically-generated ETA texts and emails to contacts.

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Microsoft's voice, video, and text chatting service Skype has revealed that the new Windows 8 version of Skype will be available on Windows 8 day one, October 26. The entire application has been crafted to follow the Windows 8 design ethic, with big touchable icons, a new dialer screen, a live tile on the homescreen that shows incoming messages and missed calls, and integration with the Windows 8 People app.

Prior to Skype's announcement today, there were plenty of hints that Skype would be getting a major Windows 8 upgrade, with mentions of "dual microphones tuned for Skype" and "hands-free Skype video chat" on Surface hardware pages, among others.

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In the late 90's and early 2000's, American music video channel VH1 aired a program called Pop-Up Video, which took existing music videos and augmented them with additional information about the performers, the videos, the music, and so forth. This information "popped" on screen at relevant times with an audible bubble popping noise.

The show turned out to be so popular that it ran for six years, and came back to VH1 nine years later. Right now, it's in its second year as a revival.

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Microsoft is taking its subscription-based productivity suite Office 365 into the realm of higher education in the first quarter of 2013 with a new package called Office 365 University.

At just $1.67 per month, college students can get Office 365 for their entire four years of undergrad for just about $80. The subscription includes the usual Office Home and Student Gang: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, plus Outlook, Access, and Publisher which aren't available in the $119.99 desktop version (but are only available to Windows PC users.)

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Two hours before its scheduled quarterly meeting with investors, search giant Google preemptively released its third-quarter 2012 earnings results on Thursday, showing a 20 percent decline in profit for the quarter and falling short of Wall Street expectations.

The company's shares dropped approximately 10 percent following the accidental release of the statement, but trading was halted shortly thereafter.

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Registration for Microsoft's global Windows 8 hackathon began on Wednesday. The event, called Wowzapp 2012 despite the fact that there's never been another event called "Wowzapp" before, will take place in more than 60 cities across the globe on the weekend of November 9th to the 11th.

The event, previously listed as "Gen Appathon," invites students and aspiring app developers to bring a Windows 8 PC and their rough apps or general app ideas for one-on-one support from Microsoft and community experts, free food and entertainment, and prizes for best Win 8 app, best Windows phone app, and best use of Azure. Attendees will be given Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 and a free Windows Store registration code, and apps will be published straight to the Windows Store.

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