Latest Technology News

Prismatic, the six-month old app that builds custom newsfeeds based upon your social network interests and behavior, released a major design update to its web-based interface on Thursday.

After Prismatic determines the information most relevant to your interests, it presents you with a feed of stories. Each entry contains three kinds of information: The actual story, the story's "meta information" (topic, publisher, author, origin of recommendation) and the related social information (shares, likes, and the ability to share the story to Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.) In today's update, Prismatic has consolidated all meta information and social information into a single, smaller bar, and devoted more time to the story itself.

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Newzbin2, a site offering links to pirated content, hit the headlines back in November 2011 when a successful court case brought by the Motion Picture Association led to it being blocked by a number of major ISPs in the UK, including BT, Virgin Media, Sky, and TalkTalk.

The website responded in bullish fashion by rolling out an encrypted software client to circumvent the ban and switching to a Spanish domain to avoid the threat of domain seizure, but the adverse publicity meant that payment providers were unwilling to work with the site, leaving the owners unable to pay the hosting costs. Despite this, Newzbin2 struggled on, offering an increasingly unreliable service, until today when it finally closed for good.

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Corporations, especially big American ones, file lawsuits all the time for many reasons. Often they sue to force others to comply with agreements or to punish non-compliance with the law. But sometimes they sue, well, just because they can. I suspect that is what’s happening in Hewlett Packard’s current fight over Autonomy, the UK software company HP bought two years ago for $11.1 billion. The HP board seems determined to demonize Autonomy founder Mike Lynch for being smarter than they are.

Given the smarts that HP board has shown in recent years, we may all be at risk of being sued by the company.

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When Microsoft announced the Surface product family a few months ago, I was immediately drawn towards Surface Pro, and not Surface with Windows RT. Imagine my disappointment when Microsoft went silent again after the revelation of the company's first entry in the tablet market. Essential information like price or availability were missing at that point in time, and it was shortly before launch of the device that Microsoft revealed anything meaningful.

There was no word on the Surface Pro though, until now. Tami Reller, Windows and Windows Live Division chief marketing officer, reveals at the Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference 2012 that Surface Pro will launch in January 2013. Today, Microsoft also revealed pricing: $899 (64GB); $999 (128GB).

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Google announced a major update to cloud storage app Drive, which can now be used to manage spreadsheets straight from mobile devices. The search giant first touted the update on the Android Blog, but the new feature made its way to iOS as well.

With the latest Google Drive version, the Mountain View, Calif.-based corporation brings its mobile cloud storage app closer to the web version. Users can now create, perform alternations and even collaborate on spreadsheets. On the Android front the updated app comes with the ability to edit contents of tables and single tap to edit in the Docs editor, better formatting, shortcuts to files and folders on the homescreen. The revised Send Link can now be used to copy to clipboard.

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A little more than four months ago, part of the interestingly named "Project Sputnik", Dell announced the XPS 13 Developer Edition which ran popular open source operating system Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. After a long wait, the new laptop is available for purchase today for a not-so-cheap $1,549.

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition ships with a 13.3-inch 720p HD display. Processing power is provided by a third generation Intel Core i7 3517U processor that tops out at 3 GHz, an HD 4000 video card, and 8GB of DDRIII RAM. It also comes with a 256GB solid state drive, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. To keep the laptop running off the grid, there is a 47WHr battery which Dell says can deliver up to 6 hours and 13 minutes of unplugged operation.

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Quick, someone add "Nearer My God to Thee" to Steve Ballmer's Xbox Music queue. Microsoft's CEO has a real problem -- well, at least his OEM partners. Simply stated: US Windows PC sales still suck and got absolutely no lift from Windows 8's release. So much for 40 million licenses sold in the first month (and we know it really was longer, since license sales to businesses started in August). Then there is increasing context for Windows chief Steven Sinofsky's sudden departure. The new operating system sinks like Windows Vista. Cue the violins.

New Windows version is supposed to lift PC sales, but they're down 21 percent since the October 26 launch. Notebook sales slumped 24 percent and desktops 9 percent, for the same time period a year ago. "Clearly Windows 8 did not prove to be the impetus for a sales turnaround some had hoped for", Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, says.

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To Microsoft's credit, it knows it has to be constantly vigilant with its public image. Internet Explorer has been raked across the coals for years, and no matter what Microsoft does, people seem to be unhappy. This is not to say the browser hasn't earned a lot of this criticism with security vulnerabilities and web standards problems, but sometimes the relentless onslaught of negativity in web comment sections is too much to handle.

Microsoft's latest video shows that sometimes the best a company can hope for is for people to hate them less.

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If you want to download music for free then the Internet isn’t exactly short of options, so discovering that we now had another, in the shape of the new MP3jam, didn’t exactly fill us with excitement.

But then we actually tried the program. And it turned out to be a real surprise.

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A month ago Microsoft released Windows Phone 8, with major improvements designed to give the company's smartphone operating system a better fighting chance against established market competitors such as Android and iOS. Current Windows Phone 7.5 users, however, will only get a limited number of the new features through Windows Phone 7.8, which the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation announced that it will ship in early 2013.

The launch date, however, does not coincide with the Windows Phone 7.8 ETA provided by Microsoft Italy on Facebook late last month. The update will be rolled-out to existing customers in "early 2013", rather than shortly after Windows Phone 8 is released as was previously suggested by Microsoft's European arm. The new smartphone operating system is still in the process of testing and approval, suggesting the reason why the upgrade is not yet deployed. Microsoft's reward to early Windows Phone adopters is nothing. Clearly the new thing, Windows Phone 8, is greater priority.

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Google has updated the iPhone and iPad version of its famous browser, adding support for Passbook and allowing users to open PDF files in other applications. Google Chrome for iOS 23.0.1271.91 also includes a number of tweaks and bug fixes.

The update is joined by a minor stability update to Google Chrome for Android 18.0.1025469, which Google promises to resolve issues with “frequently occurring stability issues”.

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You’ve got a speedy, modern PC and a fast internet connection -- so why is it that you can’t watch streaming videos without regular dropouts and interruptions?

These kind of problems can be frustrating, and they’re certainly tricky to diagnose. But the free DPC Latency Checker could help point you in the right direction.

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In the beginning there was English and it was good. Okay, not so much. Honestly I found YouTube captions early on to be pretty darn bad. The Google speech recognition tool wasn't up to snuff and it sometimes led to hilarious results. But, to it's credit, the company has made strides to improve. In fact, if you have used Android lately then I think you will find speech-to-text to be pretty solid.

YouTube, a Google property, introduced captions back in 2009. At the time it was English only, but as the technology improved other languages were added -- Japanese, Korean and Spanish were next to appear. Now the service offers an additional six languages.

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I'm not wrong -- tablets are still incapable of replacing PCs, but I purchased one anyway. Local Black Friday sales got the best of me, and the end result is the iPad 2 that's laying on my couch right now. Before you start calling me names for buying an older product or "betraying the Android army", let me put it like this -- Apple's tablet was cheaper than a Google Nexus 7.

Price is a very strong incentive in any of my buying decisions. Because of it I couldn't even think about purchasing an iPad, as it normally runs for $550 in my area. But that changed when I read the price tag during the Black Friday sale -- it was roughly $285. Suddenly priorities changed and an older, otherwise overpriced, product made sense. I just had to get it, despite what logic may have tried to dictate at the time.

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I have a special request for you, President Barack Obama. Intervene on behalf of a great American institution. Surely all it takes is an executive order. You bailed out General Motors and the banks, something you reminded all of us during your reelection campaign. Surely you can come to the aid of a company dear to you. Research in Motion has a big problem. Nokia asks courts in Britain, Canada and the United States to ban BlackBerries, because of a contract dispute. You have the power to stop this travesty before it starts.

We all know how you feel about BlackBerry; after becoming president you fought to keep your RIM smartphone and won. BlackBerry security protocols are good enough even for our Commander-in-Chief. You're an addict and make no secret of the fact. Hell, there have been rumors among hacker communities for years that you are a frequent poster on some CrackBerry forums. You're a fanboy, Mr. President. Now is time to put your loyalty to practice, by saving the tech you love so dearly.

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