Without the format war going on in the background, Blu-ray consoles may no longer be able to justify artificial price premiums. So tech provider Broadcom may be stepping in to drive the adoption of cheaper components.
Broadcom announced Monday that it has acquired Sunext Design Incorporated, the US arm of Taiwanese company Sunext Technology which specializes in chips and architecture for optical drives.
Imagine if your cell phone represented your bank account. Rather than a "smart card," you could wave your smart phone in front of a payment kiosk. Today, the standard to bring that about worldwide took a huge leap forward.
Today, "wallet phones" took one step closer to becoming a reality with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI) approval of another Near Field Communications (NFC) standard.
The translation project that was only announced at the beginning of the year for Facebook has already made massive progress with only the help of volunteers.
Early in February of this year, the social networking site announced that a team of 1,500 volunteers had translated the entire site to Spanish in just under four weeks.
Asus will be showing off the new design of its upcoming UMPC, and instead of being modeled after a laptop like the Eee PC, it's a keyboard-less tablet design.
At CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, Asus is preparing to unveil what could become its next generation UMPC design: the R70, the 7" cousin to the 5" R50 announced in November. Like the smaller model, the R70 lacks a keyboard, but relies instead on a control pad and Asus' "InfoPen" stylus controller. The result is a device somewhat similar to the Samsung Q1.
With 40% of last quarter's iPod sales going to first-time buyers, Apple managed to convert a sizeable segment of the entire United States into white earbud wearers.
In analyst David Bailey's research notes to Goldman Sachs investment bank, he noted that of the Q1 2008 sales of Apple's iPod, 40 percent were to first-time buyers.
In the last few years, major record labels have issued dozens of lawsuits against sites distributing audio and video files of their property. Artists' representatives are now saying the settlement money isn't going where it belongs.
Of the suits that have been settled, Napster agreed to pay out $270 million, and Kazaa acquiesced to paying $115 million from a case launched in 2004, compensating for past infringements, and converting to a legal download business offering licensed music. Universal Music Group, who went up against Grouper and Myspace for copyright infringement, inked a settlement from online video site Bolt.com.
Online word processing and document collaboration suite Zoho Writer received an update which has made it compatible with Microsoft's Office Open XML file format.
Zoho's free online productivity suite already offered many of the same features as Microsoft Office, and even went so far as to coyly address the need for Office to a Zoho user, mentioning that there's an plug-in for Word and Excel that lets you save directly to Zoho.
Corsair announced today its new 16GB Voyager "GT" USB 2.0 flash drive that will be showing at CeBIT next week in Hanover, Germany.
The company typically markets its devices as more rugged than other removable memory devices, with its Survivor line designed to even be water resistant to 200 meters. But the GT is instead shown off for its transfer speeds.
Video search engine Blinkx has announced content partnerships today with BBC, CBS and The Weather Channel. If you watch TV while you're on the Internet, Blinkx thinks it can be of service.
Though it does have a history of jumping the gun when it comes to announcements, Blinkx's new partners build considerably its library of 18 million indexed hours of video.
Like a tourist attraction on opening day, the Encyclopedia of Life today opened its site to the public, and was promptly swamped with visitiors.
The project was announced in May of 2007, and undertook the massive initial task of cataloguing every single of the 1.8 million living animal species upon the Earth today. The first 30,000 pages of data were unveiled this morning, and by midday, the site was inaccessible due to the heavy traffic it was seeing. As of press time, the site was still unreachable.
Germany's Constitutional Court has determined that any data stored or exchanged on PCs is private and protected by the country's constitution -- just not if you're a suspect.
The court determined that data collection directly encroaches on citizens' rights, but that authorities will be allowed to spy on suspicious individuals with high court approval.
The proposed tightening of Internet censorship in Australia is now in its first phase.
Australia's Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will soon be conducting tests of ISP-based filters in Tasmania before a nationwide field test deployment takes place.
A video circulated online depicting white students exploiting black workers at a South African University has elicited national outrage and near riots today.
Filmed at South Africa's University of the Free State, the video features a group of white students going through Jackass-esque events with members of the maintenance staff, who all appear to be willingly participating, chugging beer, engaging in sports, and ultimately consuming what appears to be chili in which one of the students urinated.
Topping the MacBook Air in features but not price, Lenovo has announced its answer to the ultra-portable laptop, the ThinkPad X300.
At 0.75-inches thick, and 2.9 pounds in weight, Lenovo's Thinkpad X300 shaves a tremendous amount of girth from the company's traditionally boxy laptops. Precisely what class this model belongs to is somewhat mysterious because of this.
"Hacktivist" group Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) began offering a software tool that scans for security flaws in Web sites by exploiting Google's omnipresence.
Goolag Scanner was developed by John Long, who is a published author and early pioneer in the Google Hacking tehnique. He is also a self-proclaimed "Christian Hacker" that often does his work for charity.