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In 2015, AMD owned the PC gaming world. Its brilliant cards were not only powerful, but reasonably priced too. Hell, they were downright beautiful; the Fury X and R9 Nano specifically, were engineering marvels and works of art.

My favorite trend of the year, however, was the acceptance of AMD's FreeSync technology -- which reduces lag and tearing -- by monitor manufacturers. Unlike Nvidia's G-SYNC, it is an open technology, and better for both consumers and the gaming industry alike. Today, Samsung announces three curved gaming monitors that all feature AMD FreeSync over HDMI.

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The economy may be better for some, but for many, it is still bad, leading to downsized homes or moving in with relatives. Of course, this means smaller work spaces; the idea of having a dedicated computer room with large desk and PC is slowly disappearing. While consumers' bank accounts continue to shrink, luckily, so too do computers.

The Intel Compute Stick, for instance, takes up very little space, while historically being affordable too. Unfortunately, even though the tiny stick could run full Windows, it was a bit under-powered. Today, however, this changes. The Compute Stick receives a Skylake Core M processor refresh, making it a much more powerful -- and expensive -- affair. For more conservative budgets, however, Intel announces an upgraded Atom model too.

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Crowdfunding has become a popular way for smaller businesses and independent designers to gain backing for their projects. Now though funding platform Indiegogo is turning its sights on bigger business.

It's launching a new Enterprise Crowdfunding service to provide large corporations with specific services for engaging with Indiegogo's audience of early adopters, entrepreneurs and makers. This will allow enterprises to validate and optimize product concepts, as well as source new innovations.

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This morning I asked someone stomping around the Consumer Electronics Show: "Will your team survive CES? Will anyone?" She answered: "Survival rates still TBD". True that. Today is officially Day 1, but that's a meaningless designation. Major announcements started Day -1, and there were even more on what I call Day 0 because the opening keynote is that evening. Acer shot its wad on January 4th, for example. The 5th brought major announcements from Casio, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, and, among many, many, many, many more vendors.

CES is such a cacophony of product announcements early is the only way to assure news coverage. Hehe, if any. With so many of vendor mini-events already completed, one could contend that the Consumer Electronics Show is over before the first day ends.

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While I've been running Windows 10 for what seems like forever now, a desktop computer sitting in my office running Windows 8.1 has been crying out for an upgrade for some time. Having had a problem-free upgrade on three other machines, I expected nothing out of the ordinary with this computer. I was wrong.

Initially I left Windows Update to do its thing, but this failed on countless occasions. The error message suggested that a problem with my internet connection had interrupted the download, but this seemed unlikely. After numerous attempts, I decided to opt for a USB-driven installation. This also failed, this time with error 0xc0000017: "There isn't enough memory available to create a ramdisk device". Thankfully, the problem can be fixed -- here's what you need to do.

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Netflix, which began life as a DVD by mail service that took off, has been slowly expanding to countries not named the US. The growth speaks well for the business model and the company has long since left DVDs behind in favor of online streaming. That makes for easier expansion into new markets.

Today the company is announcing it is expanding to pretty much all markets. We'd list them here, but with more than 190 countries it would be tedious for you and us. That's 130 nations that previously did not have Netflix.

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At CES 2016, NVIDIA has announced the release of its Drive PX2 which is the company’s latest offering in the autonomous vehicle hardware market. NVIDIA hopes that the Drive PX2 will provide the ability to train, optimize and develop the neural networks which will be the foundation of self-driving cars in the future.

Several earlier NVIDIA components combine to form the Drive PX2 such as DIGITS and DriveWorks. However, Drive PX 2 hardware is also the successor to the Tegra-powered Drive PX released last year with the new Drive PX 2 representing  a major computational power jump with 12 CPU cores and two discrete "Pascal"-based GPUs.

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Elon Musk’s car company Tesla just managed to meet its low end production target during the final quarter of 2015. The company was only able to manufacture 17,400 of its luxury electric cars despite having previously projected that it would produce 17,000 to 19,000. Tesla did however reach its target for 2015 by delivering a total of 50,580 cars.

Tesla currently produces two models of electric cars: the Model S sedan and the Model X SUV. The Model S was introduced in 2012 and it has been well-received by both critics and consumers. The Model X SUV however, just began being delivered to consumers in September of 2015. Its production was delayed quite heavily due to various problems regarding how difficult it is to manufacture.

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Here's the deal, folks; I eat meat. Cows, fish, chickens, lamb -- I do not discriminate. With that said, me having to kill these poor creatures would break my heart. Does it make me a hypocrite that I can eat something, while simultaneously caring for it? Probably. Unless my life depended on it, however, I could never hunt. That is not an attack on hunters -- if you eat what you kill, more power to you.

While I understand the need to hunt for food, I do frown on enjoying the kill. So I am a bit upset by the Bracketron Xventure hunting mounts. These products let you mount an iPhone or other camera on your rifle or bow so you can record video of your kill. Why does this upset me? Well, I struggle to understand someone actually wanting to replay and relive the memory of taking an animal's life. Am I off-base here?

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Xiaomi is entering the laptop market with a device that looks to carry on the company tradition of delivering high specs at low cost.

The model has not yet been named, but is available for pre-order via Chinese retailer Banggood for £490.50.

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Hey, bro -- ready to do some extreme sports? Yeah, me too. I'm about to do some naked skydiving and then surf during a hurricane. Of course, I will capture all of my gnarly adventures with my camera, so I can show-off how extreme my life is on social media, bro.

Obviously, I am joking, dear BetaNews readers. As you know by now, the most extreme I get is getting a venti blonde roast from Starbucks rather than a tall. Still, despite my boring life, I like rugged technology. This is especially true when it comes to backing up files. My family photos are precious to me -- the more durable the storage drive, the better. Today, Sandisk announces such a hardcore external drive -- the Extreme 510 Portable SSD.

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There’s no shortage of VR products available to buy, but the daddy of them all is unquestionably Oculus Rift. Unlike some rivals, this isn’t just a device you slap a smartphone in and strap to your face, it’s a full blown VR system with a sensor for tracking head position, and an input device that’s been built specially for navigating VR worlds.

The Rift has just gone up for pre-order now, and Oculus will start shipping it from March 28. It will be available in 20 countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan. The full list of supported territories is here. It will also be available through select retailers from April.

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Fitbit's stock has taken a dive after the company announced a smartwatch at CES 2016, sending shares from $30.21 at the stock market's opening yesterday, to just $23.73 at the time of writing this article. It would seem that investors were not too keen on Fitbit going after the likes of Apple Watch with its upcoming Blaze.

Fitbit is focused on fitness trackers, and is actually the largest vendor in the wearables market, having shipped 4.7 million units in Q3 2015. The smartwatch market is dominated by Apple Watch; although there are no official sales numbers, IDC says that Apple sold 3.9 million units in the same time frame.

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Using the web can mean selling your soul to the devil. Or Google. (Which you may well regard as the same thing.) With the increased interest in privacy there is a new market for tools and services that help to protect users. Catering to web users who are concerned about how Google might use search data, Oscobo is a new search engine that promises not to track users.

Founded on the belief that "personal data should remain just that -- personal", Oscobo is a UK-based company that says it won't store any data about its users, let alone share it with anyone else. With the controversy surrounding the snooper's charter, it makes sense that the privacy-focused search engine should start life in the UK, but there are plans to expand further afield to provide tailored results for people around the world.

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Apple's stock has taken a huge hit in the past couple of months, with shares now trading close to the $100 mark. Investors seem to be overly concerned with the iPhone's performance in the last quarter of 2015, after analysts have delivered mixed sales estimates, and a so-called report of a 30 percent production cut for the first quarter of 2016 is only making things worse.

So, unsurprisingly, Apple is looking to reassure investors that it's in good financial health, revealing today a "record-breaking holiday season for the App Store". Is this the company's way of suggesting that hardware sales have actually been strong during the holiday season?

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