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Entertainment is the lifeblood of streaming services, bringing TV shows and movies to customers. That includes both original content and that which comes from studios. However, deals don't always work out as planned. The studios can be notoriously bad with licensing content.

Netflix points out that "We hear from our members that you wish we had newer movies. So do we. Studio licensing practices means it often takes more than a year before consumers can watch a theatrically released movie when and how they want".

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Increasingly businesses are turning to the cloud or to hybrid solutions for their IT. But this can make it harder to track usage and keep control of costs.

Californian company Cloud Cruiser is launching a new CloudSmart-Now solution that allows customers to easily track hybrid cloud usage by user and keep an eye on costs with built-in analytics.

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There are currently an estimated 1.91 billion smartphone users worldwide, and 82 percent of them use their mobile devices to shop. As consumers are five times more likely to abandon shopping if the site isn’t optimized this means embracing mobile is crucial for businesses.

Online shopping portal DirectBuy has produced an infographic looking at how the world is moving towards a mobile shopping environment.

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Big Data promises businesses a number of advantages, but in order to harness these effectively they must first choose the right software to engage with and analyze vast quantities of information.

For many organizations, including high profile firms like Facebook and Yahoo, Hadoop is the software of choice when it comes to managing Big Data. In fact, the global Hadoop market is reported to be growing at around 55 percent a year and is expected to be worth $20.9 billion by 2018.

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On September 9, Apple will hold a media event, where, presumably, the next-generation iPhone(s) will be unveiled. The company announced new handsets the same date last year, the 10th in 2013, and the 12th in 2012. But as the big reveal approaches, shadows rise over iPhone's future: China's slowing economy; smartphone saturation in core markets; lower selling prices in growth geographies; the end of cellular carrier subsidies in the United States, and, most serious of all, the "good enough problem".

iPhone rode a perfect storm of success, raising Apple's fortunes like a tsunami crashing down on competitors. This fact cannot be emphasized enough to illustrate how the bitten fruit logo company's fortunes could fall as quickly, and as dramatically, as they rose. All the while, Android grows from swell to monsoon.

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The LG G4 is making quite a splash and being advertised seemingly everywhere. There's good reason for that as I previously explained in my review. Overall it's a nice phone, but there are a few things you need to know before getting underway with it.

One is that OK Google is not enabled by default, you'll need to do so yourself. It isn't intuitive, either. But the good news is that it isn't hard once you know how to do it. Here are some simple steps to get you going.

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You've found a great new Chrome extension. Installing it only takes a click, but if you're not quite sure what it's doing, whether it's safe, you might want to take a look at its source code, first.

Chrome Extension Source Viewer (CSEV) is a free extension which makes it easy to inspect the innards of other Chrome add-ons.

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Unlike on PC, console gamers have far fewer options to gain an advantage by buying hardware. PC gamers, for instance, can buy faster processors, better graphics cards, SSDs and more. Console gamers can pretty much just buy different controllers. Third party console controllers have historically been horrible, typically offering less precision at a lower price. The old joke was that third party controllers were reserved for the console-owner's friends.

Peripheral manufacturer Razer hopes to change this with its new Wildcat controller for Xbox One (it should also work on Windows 10). The company calls it 'tournament-grade'. Featuring advanced ergonomics and additional buttons, can it outdo the stock controller? More importantly, however, can it compete with Microsoft's upcoming Xbox Elite Wireless Controller?

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Microsoft has been cleared of patent infringement by the US International Trade Commission. The case dates back to 2007 when InterDigital Inc claimed Microsoft infringed its patents, and there were calls for a ban on the import of handsets.

InterDigital Inc has been battling in court for eight years, initially trying to claim royalties on phones made by Nokia, now transferred to Microsoft. As well as blocking the call for an import ban, the ITC stated that Microsoft did not infringe patents relating to the way mobiles make calls. In short Microsoft is in the clear and InterDigital's rights have not been violated.

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Workforce diversity is something that every company wants to be seen to be getting right. At the moment -- particularly in the world of technology -- they're failing spectacularly. As in so many walks of life, it's a world dominated by white, middleclass men, and it's a problem that gets worse the further up the hierarchy you look. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. They all have one thing in common: a desire to be seen as the most welcoming, ethnically and sexually diverse, forward-thinking companies out there.

It's great PR, and now Twitter is trying to step up its game. News of a commitment to making the Twitter workforce more diverse sounds great, but sounding great isn’t the same as being great. I've mentioned that talk of diversity is good public relations, and that's exactly what we see here -- spiel, empty gestures, misguided proposals, and embarrassingly ham-fisted approaches. Now Twitter is taking things a step further.

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Is it a design flaw, or just a case of a company expecting its customers to know how to do something? The problem of the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 S Pen getting stuck inside the handset if inserted the wrong way has divided opinion.

But whether you think someone who has managed to get their S Pen stuck is stupid or has fallen into a trap that could have caught out anyone, there is a solution. There's no need to resort to brute force to remove your S Pen -- it is possible to get it out without breaking anything. The solution is beautiful in its simplicity.

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Think of video piracy, and talk of BitTorrent probably isn’t far away. While torrented movies and TV shows account for a large proportion of pirated material, it is far from being the end of the story. Even sites as seemingly innocuous as Facebook can be part of the problem.

The social network is not really used as a way to share the latest blockbuster movies, but it is home to a lot of 'recycled' content, the rights for which are not necessarily owned by the uploader. Responding to growing complaints from video publishers, Facebook is ramping up its fight against piracy, boosting the existing Audible Magic audio fingerprinting tool, introducing a video fingerprinting utility, and ensuring that repeat offenders are kept off the site.

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"You can't get there from here". That's how many customers must feel as they ponder the broken Windows 10 upgrade path for first-generation Windows 8 hybrid PCs. With Intel refusing to update the Atom z2760 video driver, and with existing Windows 8.1 drivers providing spotty compatibility, these early adopters are at a crossroads.

Do they stick with Windows 8.1 and watch while the bulk Microsoft's development effort goes into Windows 10 (leaving them clinging to an all but abandoned OS platform)? Or do they bite the bullet and begin vetting potential replacements for their still functional HP Envy x2s, Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2s, Dell Latitude 10s, etc?

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The writing has been on the wall for Flash for some time now. A web technology loathed for countless reasons -- not least the security issues -- the death knell is now tolling loudly as HTML5 is more widely embraced.

Back in June, Google announced that Chrome would pause Flash ads in its browser by default, helping to eliminate a major online annoyance. Now the company has outlined when this will happen -- and there are only a few days to wait.

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I must apologize to Art Alexakis, lead singer for Everclear. In a personal post last night observing his role as a tattoo artist in movie "Wild", his name is misspelled. Funny thing, so to get it right, I copied and pasted from the web into the WordPress editor. Yet somehow when published, and I missed, his name appeared as Alexis. My thanks goes to Scott Bell, who pointed out the error in a Google+ comment.

It's strange how tech meant to be beneficial gets in the way. More mistakes appear in my stories because of autocorrect than I make myself. The pattern is consistent: I will write, nix autocorrect's changed misspelling, but later edit something else in the sentence. Word changes! As a long-time writer and editor, I revise constantly until publishing—and afterwards, too. The spelling errors I miss most often typically are the ones made for me during spot edits.

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