Latest Technology News

Amazon wants you to shop on its website this Saturday. How much so? It is enticing users of Amazon Price Check with up to $15 savings on items they scan in stores and end up buying through the retailer. Users can earn up to a $5 discount per purchase (five percent) on electronics, toys, sports, music and DVDs.

The company is using those scanning to effectively spy on brick-and-mortar retailers for them by enabling a share price function in the app. Amazon says it will use this data to keep its prices competitive. To earn the discount, customers would need to use the checkout function within Price Check.

Google on Thursday officially launched Google Currents, a news reading application for Android and iOS-based smartphones and tablets, and publishing backend for content producers.

Similar in concept to Flipboard, Zite or any of the dozens of "iPad magazines," Google Currents lets readers subscribe to different news sites and view their Google Reader RSS feeds paginated like a magazine, instead of infinitely vertical like a website. A user's Gmail account is tied with their Currents reading list, so sharing on Google+ has been built into the service.

At the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar this week, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang put on his largest "explosion event" of the last three years, utilizing microchip-controlled explosives to form incredible designs and patterns. The video we've embedded of the event is an impressive testament to how a volatile black powder explosion can be controlled and shaped by computer.

Each set of explosions was calculated to paint a different picture. One series of explosions created black smoke clouds that looked like "drops of ink splattered across the sky."

All kinds of unsolicited mail pours into my inbox, and I ignore about half the stuff that probably matters -- that's if the Junk Mail filter doesn't grab it first. I'm particularly leery of messages promoting an infographic made by some organization that might have vested interest in the topic. But this one, from BusinessInsuranceQuotes, depicts such an emotionally-heated topic, I figured: "Oh, what the hell, just post the damn thing".

Feast your eyes on this little ditty about SOPA -- the Stop Online Piracy Act -- that I repeatedly mistype as "privacy", subconscious response meaning to invade it, perhaps. The infographic really lacks the drama SOPA would create if enacted as law. Little things like empowering the government to take down your site or seize your domain based on the presumption of guilt. That's the painless part. You go to jail if convicted. Perhaps Federal prisons aren't as overcrowded as California jails.

The world of academia and research thrives on organization and collaboration. And when it comes to keeping your research, notes, journals and other documents in order, Mendeley is just the service you need.

It’s cloud-based, allowing you to not just back up and sync your research library online and across multiple computers via the cross-platform Mendeley Desktop tool and Mendeley (Lite) for iPhone and iPad, but you can also collaborate with others, too, thanks to the tools it provides in conjunction with its group sharing capabilities.

T-Mobile is the first stop in the United States for Nokia's Windows Phone line, as a Federal Communications Commission filing and an invite sent to the media confirm the nation's fourth largest carrier plans to bring the Lumia 710 to its network. The FCC filing can be seen here.

The 710 sports a 3.7-inch screen and 1.4 GHz Qualcomm processor with 512MB of RAM. It has 8GB of on-board storage and integrated 5-megapixel digital camera. Nokia produces GSM and WCDMA models, running Windows Phone 7.5.

Acer Inc, the world's fourth-largest personal computer maker, is shifting gears slightly after nearly a full year of unprofitability.

In an interview with Dow Jones yesterday, Acer CEO J.T. Wang said the company is moving away from the low-cost strategy to one more focused on profit margins.

Does the world really need another PC maintenance suite? Probably not, but they keep coming anyway. And at first glance, the latest, Toolwiz Care, didn’t look like it would exactly break new ground. The program includes a Registry cleaner, for instance. A module to free up a little hard drive space (though not as much as if we’d just installed CCleaner). And another to help control our Windows startup programs: it all seemed very ordinary.

When we took a closer look, though, some interesting differences emerged. So the Startup Programs module didn’t simply provide a list of applications and leave us to make the difficult decisions. It actually makes sensible recommendations about what you should disable or remove to accelerate your boot time. And provides figures to help put your boot time in context in the first place: our boot time is apparently 30-percent faster than the average of other Toolwiz Care users, which tells us it’s probably not worth expending a great deal of effort in trying to improve it further.

Here's something I don't wake up to everyday -- actually never. At 7:35 am ET, BetaNews received an email demanding that we remove photos from the excellent Xbox 360 review penned by one of our readers: "Microsoft requests that you remove the photos, but not the text, of this story, because the images are copyrighted and were released in violation of an NDA".

BetaNews is investigating the matter, and I will appropriately respond. BetaNews respects copyrights and non-disclosure agreements. It's one reason you see so few rumor stories and supporting photos here. We assume that the writer took the photos and that he participated in the Xbox 360 dashboard preview program. Reviewers take photos all the time while under NDA or embargo and publish them after the restriction lifts. BetaNews posted the review (and accompanying photos) after Microsoft publicly announced and released the autumn 2011 Xbox 360 updates. We assume for now that this is a misunderstanding.

There are countless ways to customize the look of Windows -- the operating system itself has some scope for personalization even if only through changing colors and desktop background. If you would like to take things to the next level, you’re going to need some third party tools. The sheer number of ways in which Windows can be customized means that you could end up installing a large number of apps and spending a huge amount of time tweaking and tailoring different aspects of your system to your liking. If time is precious, you may want to try out a skin pack -- and what better place to start than with a Christmas skin to give your computer a seasonal look. Enter Christmas Skin Pack 1.0 (32-bit).

This is the 32-bit version of the skin pack, but there is also a 64-bit version -- be sure to install the correct version. The Skin Pack includes all of the tools that are needed to install new icons and cursors, change the boot screen, add a new look Start menu and much, much more. This isn’t likely to be a theme to keep installed all year round, but throughout December and January, it is a great bit of fun. The automated installation process makes customizing your desktop a whole lot easier than having to track down the individual tools needed to tweak different parts of your system to your liking.

Do you like the sophisticated design of Microsoft's mobile UI, but can't part with your iPhone? Microsoft gives iOS users a taste of mobile life Redmond style, by releasing an Xbox Live app for iPhone and iPad. While basic, the app gives Xbox Live subscribers control of their accounts.

The app sports much of the transitions and user interface considerations that earned Windows Phone accolades from even the most vocal critics of Microsoft's mobile efforts.

Android users have a multitude of options in order to detect whether Carrier IQ exists on their smartphones, with at least a dozen applications available through the Android Market. While most of the apps will not stop Carrier IQ from running, they will at least give those concerned with the company's actions some solace in knowing for sure whether they're being tracked or not.

Carrier IQ's discovery -- that stealthily monitors cellular users' smartphone activity -- set off a firestorm of controversy over the past several weeks. Some see it as a serious threat to users' security and privacy, while others have likened the reaction to mass hysteria generated by the media.

The tipping point fast approaches in the Android/iOS platform wars. This week, Android Market reached an important milestone: 10 billion downloads. While still far behind Apple's App Store, Android Market is catching up at a ferocious pace. Only huge iOS device shipments can slow Android's advance now, and Holiday sales will matter much there.

For comparison, App Store reached 15 billion downloads in July, up from 10 billion in January and 3 billion a year earlier. But Android Market is accelerating at faster pace, which isn't surprising given the number of device activations (550,000-plus per day) and how many more handsets/tablets are available compared to iPhone and iPad. Android Market went from 3 billion downloads in March to 6 billion in July to 10 billion in December.

Microsoft has rolled out the latest build of the Windows Defender Offline beta, a version of Windows' anti-spyware feature that is meant to be executed from a DVD or USB flash drive before Windows even starts up.

Windows Defender is included with Windows and has agents that can be run periodically, or at all times on a running system. Because it runs inside Windows, though, it is limited in what it can do.

The release of OS X Lion unleashed some cool new features. It also seemed to turn some other cool, established features on their head. Suddenly, things that worked perfectly adequately in Snow Leopard changed, leaving users first scratching their heads and then frustrated at having to learn new ways of doing things.

Thankfully, it’s possible to revert back to the old way of doing things. And while it’s not always intuitive or easy to do so, there are free third-party solutions available. One of the newest is Indonesian firm TweakNow’s Lion Secrets.