Latest Technology News

Russian media, including the Moscow Times have been posting reports that the son of Yvegny Kaspersky, head of leading international data security firm Kaspersky Lab, has been kidnapped.

At about 4pm EST on Thursday, the Russian government's daily paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta published a report which said local law enforcement had confirmed the kidnapping of 20 year old Ivan Kaspersky.

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Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped the human resources equivalent of an atomic bomb on Redmond, Wash. The company will change how employees are reviewed and compensated. The changes are effective during September evaluations and will put more emphasis on cash compensation rather than stock rewards and simplify criteria used to evaluate performance. The changes reaffirm my renewed confidence in Ballmer, something I blogged about just three days ago (not that most anonymous commenters to the Mini-Microsoft blog agree).

For years, I've heard Microsoft employees moan about the convoluted evaluation process, which often puts them at the mercy of middle managers more interested in keeping their jobs than doing right by the company. The changes could fix some of the middle manager mayhem and prevent poaching from the likes of Amazon, Facebook or Google. But the devil is in the details, as they say.

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Google on Thursday launched a beta of Google Offers, an online coupon site in the vein of Groupon and LivingSocial. The move had been widely expected since January, when reports first surfaced of the Mountain View, Calif. company's plans.

Like its competitors, the service aims to give users 50 percent off or more from participating local businesses. While the company is officially launching in Portland, Ore. first, the page offers the option to sign up for deals across New York City and San Francisco as well.

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While Nintendo may be gearing up to introduce the next-generation Wii as early as late 2012, it may have quite a bit of lead time on its competitors. Gaming site Kotaku says sources have told it that neither Microsoft nor Sony has plans to launch new consoles until as late as 2014.

If the companies do indeed follow these rumored plans, at that time the Xbox 360 would have had a life cycle of nine years, and the PlayStation 3 eight. It would be about twice as long as the traditional life cycle for a gaming console, which is typically around five years.

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CyberLink has released the latest version of its do-everything media player, PowerDVD 11, which the company now boasts will "play any media format, from any source." This starts with support for playing all the main video formats, now including MKV (H.264), FLV (H.264), WTV, 3GP and 3G2 files. The program can also play your music files, though, and this version adds support for playing photos in slideshows, too.

If the content isn't on your hard drive, then PowerDVD 11 adds new support for streaming files from DLNA servers. It's able to access files on Apple and Android devices, and enhanced social media tools mean you're able to able to access YouTube videos, Facebook and Flickr images, all from within the program.

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A partial failure of Amazon's cloud server network brought down the websites of several popular services, including Quora, Reddit and Foursquare for several hours beginning around 4:41am Eastern Time Thursday. The issues were isolated to the company's data centers in Northern Virginia.

Amazon's AWS status page indicated that as of press time Thursday afternoon on the East Coast, issues were still ongoing, including "instance connectivity, latency and error rates." According to the company, the issue began when a unspecified "networking event" caused AWS servers to erroneously re-mirror a large amount of data.

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When Microsoft and Nokia announced in February that they would be partnering for the production of Windows Phones, we outlined ten main points about the partnership that were important for consumers to know. The list inspected the effect the partnership would have on Nokia's Ovi services, Microsoft's Bing, Nokia's Finnish workforce, and Windows Phone as a whole.

On Thursday, Microsoft provided further information about the partnership, giving slightly deeper insight into how the Nokia Windows Phones ecosystem will look.

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iOS users are spoilt for choice when it comes to keeping up to date with their favorite social networks. There are a number of official and unofficial apps available for the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and there is always the option of using the mobile versions of web sites. RockMelt is an iOS app that make interacting with social networks a little easier, enabling you to view updates from Twitter, Facebook and a number of other sites in a single location.

Used to access Facebook and Twitter, RockMelt provides access to your timeline so you can view update from your friends and people you follow. Any notifications you receive from Facebook can be viewed in the app's overview screen and from here you can also create new posts complete with a photo. RockMelt allows you to post comments on items in your newsfeed so you can interact with your Facebook friends.

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Nero Software has released a free tool, Nero Kwik Media that promises to give users greater and easier control over their media files: photos, video and music. The program boasts a number of headline features, such as the ability to automatically apply face recognition across a library of photos and effortlessly move files between different portable devices and your computer, but this additional functionality comes at a cost.

This is because Nero Kwik Media offers only core functionality for free: the software can organize, play and share all media content, but editing facilities are limited to photos while the program can only burn music CDs by default. Additional functionality must be added through the program's built-in App Store, with prices ranging from 99 cents to $29.99 for add-on components and additional themes.

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This morning, before the opening Bell, Verizon released first quarter earnings results, finally disclosing iPhone 4 activations -- 2.2 million since the device's February 11 launch. That's 44,898 activations per day for 49 days availability. However, Verizon started taking preorders a week earlier. By that measure, activations were 39,286 per day. Yesterday, AT&T revealed, as part of Q1 earnings, 3.6 million iPhone activations, which works out to 40,000 per day for the quarter.

Near equal sales is great news for Apple and Verizon, and really not terrible for AT&T (although there is some trouble in the numbers). Contrary to persistent punditry on the InterWebs, the numbers show no perceptible subscriber losses for AT&T. Before Verion iPhone's launch, for example, ChangeWave predicted that 26 percent of AT&T iPhone users would switch to Verizon. Other analyses predicted even higher defections -- some close to 50 percent. AT&T iPhone activations rose 1 million units year over year, with churn -- that is subscribers switching to another carrier -- flat Q1 to Q1.

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Ricoh, the Japanese company best known for its printers and imaging equipment, released a social photo sharing app for iOS and Android on Thursday called EventJot which seeks to be a slightly more conservative version of Color.

In late March, there was a big buzz spike for a mobile app called Color. That app lets users create group photo albums where any user could upload and share their photos as long as they're in a certain location, as determined by their GPS. The idea is that users at big events such as political rallies, sporting events, concerts, parties, and so forth can all take pictures that are automatically cataloged and indexed according to date, time, location, and event.

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Amazon on Wednesday announced Kindle Library Lending, a program that will let Kindle users borrow books from more than 11,000 libraries in the United States. The program follows Amazon's person-to-person Kindle Book Lending feature that debuted at the end of 2010 and addresses long-running concerns that e-readers like the Kindle would bypass libraries entirely.

In the program, users will be able to check out Kindle books from their local library, and then add notes and highlights which are synced to the user's Kindle account. If the book is re-rented or purchased, all the annotations and highlighted passages are retained. They do not pass from user to user.

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[Editor's Note: This is a live document from 4:49 p.m. EDT until 6:20 p.m. ET, following the end of Apple's earnings call.]

Coming into today's Apple fiscal 2011 second quarter earnings report, amateurs and professionals debated what impact iPad 2 and Verizon iPhone 4 launches would have on the results. Apple has answered them, once again sweeping past Wall Street consensus. Suddenly, Apple's Mac business looks puny alongside iOS.

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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court judgement that would force EchoStar to disable its DVR functionality in as many as eight million subscriber boxes, delivering what might be a fatal blow to the company's chances for victory in the case.

The panel of judges did however reject the lower courts ruling that Dish's workaround was "insufficient" to avoid infringement, giving the company some good news. Either way experts argue that the ruling likely means that the satellite television provider will be forced to enter into a costly settlement to prevent its customers from having their service interrupted.

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Music creation apps on Android, be they beatmakers, step sequencers, drum machines, or virtual synths, are pretty rare for as advanced as the platform has become. Despite the thousands of Android users, the platform is nowhere near as robust as iOS for the musically inclined.

But that isn't to say there aren't many potential Android musicians out there. Quite the contrary, I know there is a big potential audience to be had (at least anecdotally,) because most of the traffic on my Android-specific blog goes to my music app reviews.

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