Latest Technology News

Netflix is building its own content delivery network, a sign that the company wants to be able to deliver its content on its own terms. The move signals trouble for current content delivery partners, many of which get a large portion of their revenues through contracts with Netflix.

The company is not immediately tearing up these contracts: rather Netflix will continue to use these commercial networks for the "next few years". Eventually, however, most Netflix content will be delivered through its own pipes, called the "Open Connect Network".

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Google issued a succinct announcement on Tuesday, stating it had acquired cross-platform mobile productivity app makers Quickoffice, and that Quickoffice will soon be integrated into the Google Apps product suite.

"When we embarked on our mission to become the world leader in office productivity, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge. We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It's been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users," said Allen Masarek, Co-founder and CEO of Quickoffice in a statement on Tuesday. "Now, we are ushering in a new chapter with Google. By combining the magic of Google's intuitive solutions with Quickoffice's powerful products, our shared vision for anytime, anywhere productivity can only grow."

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Toshiba USA on Tuesday announced a small selection of next-generation Windows machines, including a new ultrabook in the Satellite family, a convertible Windows 8 notebook designed in conjunction with Intel, and pair of mobile devices running Windows RT.

Unlike Asus, who yesterday presented mostly finished preproduction prototypes of its first Windows RT device, Toshiba did not show off much in the way of RT hardware. Instead, the company presented a loose roadmap for device availability.

The two devices Toshiba announced on Tuesday are being designed in conjunction with Texas Instruments, and will be powered by multi-core TI OMAP systems on a chip. One will be a touchscreen clamshell PC, and one will be a mobile tablet with keyboard dock similar to the Asus Tablet 600.

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Ahead of the E3 Expo's first full day, Microsoft unveiled "Xbox SmartGlass", which is an app not a piece of glass. The agnostic application runs on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Windows 8 -- and its synergy with the latter matters most to Microsoft.

In a platform that I can only say out-Wii's the Wii, SmartGlass will bring a large dynamic to games and to media playback. Some of the features look similar to Apple's Airplay by allowing users to send video and audio to the TV with a flick of a finger. But there's more -- particularly the content synchronization and integration SmartGlass brings among devices.

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Rarely does a ChangeWave consumer buying survey offer so many intriguing topic possibilities. Interest in Kindle Fire has collapsed, only 7 percent of respondents plan to purchase a new tablet within 90 days, those buying overwhelmingly choose iPad, but interest in a smaller Apple tablet is fairly modest.

Buying intention surveys are often misleading. What people would like to do often isn't what they will when time comes to pay up. With that caveat, the survey -- 2,893 consumers last month -- bodes ill for Kindle Fire or prospective iPad mini. In November, 22 percent of respondents said they would buy Kindle Fire, but only 8 percent in May. Meanwhile a mere 3 percent of respondents would very likely buy iPad mini.

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When you’re looking to speed up your PC’s operations then learning any available keyboard shortcuts can often help, by minimizing the time and effort required to perform common system tasks.

If you’ve already mastered the standard shortcuts, though, it may be time to consider creating your own -- and HotKeyMan is a very simple way to help you get started.

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Music software developer Freemake dropped an intriguing infographic in my inbox this morning, claiming most people won't pay for music next year. Heck, who does today, I ask.

My daughter has a music library with more than 7,000 songs, but she now just streams Pandora on her iPhone to connected speakers. She hasn't listened to anything from her own library for months. She pays zero. I'm a big fan of Vevo. I don't often have time to watch music videos, but I can listen to them streaming in the background.

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How can you find the size of a file on an NTFS drive? Sounds easy enough -- just right-click and select Properties -- but that will only provide the size of the file’s main data stream. Under NTFS, files may also have additional streams, which can be of any size (even larger than the main data stream), yet they’re not mentioned at all in the Explorer properties dialog.

While this may sound odd, it can be useful, and there are plenty of legitimate uses for alternate data streams (ADS). Create a favorite in Internet Explorer and the browser will store the site’s icon (if available) in the resulting shortcut, for instance. And IE also uses ADS to tag files as having been downloaded from the internet, which can be very valuable information in some circumstances.

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Do you use Meebo? Will you switch to Google+? Think hard before you answer, because Google is buying Meebo, the companies disclosed late today. The Meebo team, and presumably technology, will move to Google+, just as the social network's year anniversary approaches. (Whoa, has it been that long already?)

I remember Meebo, which launched in 2005, for its socially-oriented messaging client, which didn't stick to my online habits. More recently the company is better known for the Meebo Bar, which adorns tens of thousands of websites. I signed up two years ago and quickly gave it up. Meebo isn't alone producing this kind of website shtick, and I can only hope Google doesn't make Plus negative by adopting any similar menu bar motif.

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Late last year, I got pretty excited about the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android tablet. The tablet/notebook form factor spoke to me, the specs were impressive, and the overall package looked just right for an individual looking to do more working than playing.

Asus has revisited the appealling form factor of the Transformer Prime and applied it to Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 specifically for devices running on ARM-based processors.

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A week ago the big malware news was the code known as Flame, Flamer, or sKyWIper (detected by ESET as Win32/Flamer.A), then on June 1, this news broke: "A damaging cyberattack against Iran’s nuclear program was the work of US and Israeli experts and proceeded under the secret orders of President Obama" (Washington Post). Clearly, the antivirus community is going to have a lot to say about this news and there will probably be several posts on the topic from ESET researchers.

Just to give some background, the attack was Stuxnet, a piece of malware that was documented in detail in the ESET white paper Stuxnet Under the Microscope. The goal of Stuxnet was to attack and sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and as the New York times puts it: "the last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium".

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Asymco's Horace Dediu asks an interesting question today: "Trouble with the Robot?" -- referring to Android. He hones in on two seemingly convergent trends: a slight sequential dip in US Android share and sharp decline in US subscribers switching from feature phones to smartphones.

Based on his analysis of April data, iPhone sales remain fairly constant, while Android disproportionally declines. "Broken out by platforms, we see signs that the slowing in smartphone growth seems to be attributable to a slowing in Android adoption", Dediu explains. Stated differently, referring to comScore data he adds: "We see the lowest user growth for Android since 2009". The easy interpretation -- Android is now declining before iPhone -- would be wrong.

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Instapaper, the popular iOS application that lets users save web pages for offline reading, was released for Android on Monday, and can now be downloaded in Google Play.

Instapaper's creator Marco Arment released the app exclusively for iOS, and showed a public preference for the platform, hence earning him the label of "Apple Fanboy" from much of the platform-partisan Web. But due to the undeniable success of Android tablets such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble's Nook, Arment and Android app makers Mobelux have ported Instapaper to Android.

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Australian utilities developer Auslogics, perhaps most famous for the excellent Disk Defrag tool, has extended its range with the release of BitReplica, a straightforward and free backup tool.

The program clearly aims for simplicity above all else. Create a new backup job, say, and you’re able to choose common backup sources (Documents folder, Pictures, browser and Outlook Profiles) by just checking boxes, which works for us.

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If you're ogling Galaxy S III and thinking "I want", perhaps you should be asking "i what?" Galaxy S III arrives on these shores from all major carriers this month. As for iPhone 4S, well, whatever. Preorders start tomorrow (from Sprint, T-Mobile); June 6 (from Verizon).

But to get lower-cost, subsidized US models, many buyers will gain in network connectivity but lose in raw processing power. US models, also from AT&T, Sprint and US Cellular, are dual-core -- not the quad-core beauts shipping overseas. To get one those babies, unlocked, expect to plunk down at least $650. US, locked, contractual commitment S3s start at $199.99.

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