Microsoft Band, the wearable fitness tracker, and its accompanying Health app have received their first major update, some four months after the initial release.

With the latest update, the band is getting some new features -- enabling it to monitor biking (yes, even stationary biking), a quick read feature for notifications and -- (you’re not going to believe this) -- an on-screen keyboard.

Continue reading →

Advertisements make the world go around. I understand they can sometimes be unpopular on the web, but using ad-blocking software is counter-productive, as it can harm the site that you are visiting. True, some ads can be intrusive and inappropriate (depending on the site), but they can be good too, as they educate you on new products. If there were no ads on TV, the radio or the Internet, how would you learn about new products on the market? Sometimes I don't even fast-forward on my Tivo, so I can learn about new products.

Today, Google announces that Adwords will be automatically converting Adobe Flash-based advertisements to HTML5. This will increase visibility of the ads, especially on mobile platforms where Flash is very rarely used nowadays.

Continue reading →

I’m an older guy with younger kids so to some extent I live vicariously through my friends, many of whom have children who are now entering the work force and some of those children can’t find jobs. We’re not in a recession, the economy is expanding, new positions are supposedly being added every day, but the sons and daughters of my friends aren’t generally getting those jobs so they are staying in school or going back to school, joining the Peace Corps., whatever. Everyone is rattled by this. Kids don’t want to move home and parents don’t want to have them move home. Student debt continues to increase. Everyone wants to get on with the lives they thought they were promised -- the lives they’d signed up for and earned.

What changed?

Continue reading →

Apple has been granted a patent that could potentially allow it to track an individual’s iPhone, even when it appears to have been turned off.

The feature enables phones to enter a sleep-like state that suggests it has been shut down, but instead the phone’s movements can still be traced.

Continue reading →

A new report from IDC and enterprise mobile specialist Amdoc's OpenMarket reveals that taking an ad hoc approach to mobile messaging is harming return on investment.

The findings reveal that 62 percent of businesses have more than one messaging platform deployed and 78.5 percent have more than one instance of the same platform active across different departments.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Garage is home to all manner of innovative projects from Microsoft employees, and today a new batch of projects has been unveiled. As Garage is a cross-platform venture, there are apps for Windows Phone, Android and desktop Windows, and the myriad tools cover everything from app development to the weather.

On the productivity front, Mouse Without Borders is a name that might seem familiar. Strictly speaking, this is a re-release rather than a new release, and the utility makes it possible to control up to four computers with a single keyboard and mouse by acting like a virtual KVM switch. If this isn’t your sort of thing, there are plenty more tools to explore.

Continue reading →

Being able to do business online is almost essential these days, but for smaller companies the mechanisms needed to accept payments can prove complex and expensive.

Specialist in web client engagement software for small businesses vCita is making things simpler with the launch of its new, seamless online payment solution for service-based small businesses.

Continue reading →

Utilities developer Tweaking.com has released Technician’s Toolbox and Technician’s Toolbox Portable, a free-for-personal-use suite of 20+ PC maintenance, monitoring and management tools.

Networking features are a highlight, with a graphical netstat, in-depth details on your network adapters, traffic monitoring, DNS server management, an IP subnet calculator, network scanner and more.

Continue reading →

Up to now smart glasses have been a bit of a gimmick, but they could soon be making a major impact in the enterprise market, allowing workers to communicate as they carry out tasks.

Eyewear technology company Vuzix has announced a partnership to use its Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses for the EyeSight platform from wearable software specialist Pristine. Customers taking advantage of the combined Pristine and Vuzix platform will benefit from impressive video quality, strong integrations into safety goggles and a vertically adjustable camera, useful for surgery and hands-on repair tasks.

Continue reading →

Unless you and your family are into just the one tech manufacturer -- Apple say -- the chances are you will have various devices running different operating systems. In my home, for example, there are three Windows PCs, two Android phones, two Android tablets, an iPad and an iPhone. All of which have media -- photos, videos, music -- stored on them.

There are various ways to make all of this content accessible across the different devices, but Seagate Wireless from Ebuyer is a simple, yet powerful solution. It’s a portable, battery powered 500GB drive with a built-in wireless network that can stream content to up to three smartphones, tablets and laptops simultaneously.

Continue reading →

Although organizations are increasingly concerned about data protection many of them don’t have the appropriate tools in place to secure their information.

According to a new report from data loss prevention specialists Boldon James compiled by Bloor Research, although over half of organizations see data security as a major concern 47 percent say they don't have a data classification tool.

Continue reading →

Pebble launched its first smartwatch through Kickstarter, raising more than $10 million from nearly 70,000 backers. It's one of the most successful campaigns to ever be hosted on the crowdsourcing site. Some might say that it's time for Pebble to move on to the next level.

However, earlier this week Pebble used Kickstarter once again to launch its latest smartwatch, called Pebble Time. The company's second crowdsourcing campaign is a huge hit, days after its start, surpassing its initial goal of just $500,000 by nearly $8 million at the time of writing this article, with 30 more days to go before the grand finale.

Continue reading →

If you want to post naked pictures or videos of people on Reddit without their consent, you only have a couple of weeks to do so. As of March, the site is imposing a ban on content of an explicit nature that the subject has not given permission to be posted.

The cleanup of the site comes hot on the heels of news from Google that explicit content will be banned from Blogger. It also comes in the wake of last year’s Fappening which saw a glut of naked celebrity photos leaked online.

Continue reading →

Gemalto, the world’s largest producer of SIM cards which reportedly had its encryption keys stolen by the NSA and GCHQ spying agencies, announced today that its network was hacked, but it didn’t result in massive theft of keys used to encrypt conversations, messages and data traffic, a conclusion it reached after a thorough investigation.

The Netherlands-based SIM manufacturer says that it noted sophisticated attacks on its networks between 2010 and 2011 that appear to have been carried out by the aforementioned intelligence agencies. But the company notes that the agencies couldn’t get in far enough to get access to SIM encryption keys.

Continue reading →

Piriform Ltd has today released CCleaner 5.03 and CCleaner Portable 5.03, the latest revisions of its popular Windows maintenance tool.

The build brings new support for cleaning Google Chrome IndexedDB, a technology which websites can use to persistently store data within a visitor’s browser.

Continue reading →