Latest Technology News

A Palm spokesperson today disputed published reports that the company is launching a brand new online software store. Less vigor, however, was devoted to rumors that Palm will introduce its long-planned Linux-based Foleo OS at CES.

Contrary to reports stating that Palm is following the lead of Apple and Google in launching a new applications store, Palm has actually been running an online store for quite some time, a company spokesperson told BetaNews today.

In a completely unexpected announcement today, Apple Inc. stated that next month's appearance at IDG's Macworld Expo will be the company's last, as it scales back its appearances at other presenters' trade shows worldwide.

Monday, January 5, will be Apple CEO Steve Jobs' final address to the Macworld Expo at Moscone Center in San Francisco, the company said in a prepared statement today. The company has released no details as to why, though it's likely that the company will continue to produce its own rollout events, probably at Moscone, at times and dates of its own choosing.

Hasbro on Friday dropped its lawsuit against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, creators of the wildly popular Scrabulous game. Now, please stop saying "Scrabulous."

Scrabulous, which the Agarwalla brothers launched as a Scrabble-style game with a superior interface to others they'd seen online, launched in July 2005 and immediately made a major splash among certain Facebook populations, even encouraging some to sign up for the service specifically to play against friends. The trademark-infringement

At CES 2009, a startup company called XStreamHD plans to demonstrate an innovative new satellite delivery system for on-demand, high-definition video...wait a minute, haven't we done this one?

Last January, we called it the "real deal" -- a digitally-streamed, on-demand movie programming service in full high definition, delivered via satellite. At CES 2008, XStreamHD gave the press, including BetaNews, hands-on demonstrations of an innovative HD streaming service -- maybe not quite "on-demand" in terms of time of delivery, but certainly a way to get high-quality movies of the consumer's choice delivered directly into the home, outside of the Internet.

We're not even really sure if the reports of new exploits affecting Internet Explorer browsers are actually valid, but in case they are, Microsoft will issue a patch that addresses the problem those exploits may be targeting.

It's the kind of development that could give "zero-day" a whole new meaning: a wave of alleged Internet Explorer exploits, the total number of experimentally validated cases of which apparently numbers zero. Still, the subject matter is of some concern: the apparent ability of an ActiveX control -- for the dozens upon dozens of sites that still use them -- to leave code in memory after cleanup that's still capable of being executed without privilege.

Dell hopes to save $8.1 million over the next four years by making changes to the materials used in packing and shipping its PCs. The new packaging will be formed from recycled milk and detergent containers, among other things.

Today, Dell announced plans to trim its costs over the next four years by cutting out 20 million pounds of its customary computer packaging materials.

Sony Corp's shares closed nearly 6% down in Japanese trading today, after financial group Credit Suisse AG classified the company's stock as "underperforming."

In a reiteration of statements he made earlier this month, Credit Suisse analyst Koya Tabata wrote, "Compared to its peers both at home and overseas, Sony has been slow to react to the current crisis...We believe fundamental changes to its business structure are necessary."

Year-over-year revenue may be down 77%, "voluntary reductions" are underway, and the environment's difficulty level is somewhere between challenging and shriek-inducing. Still, Best Buy's Tuesday earnings call was remarkably upbeat.

The electronics retailer's Q3 2009 (not a typo) ended on November 29, and during that three-month period it reported profits of $52 million, or 13 cents/share. Sales performance on Black Friday was, however, not bad at all, and meant the difference between domestic results being down 6.3% and being essentially flat.

In a move designed to intentionally eliminate all surprises, Microsoft posted a detailed guide to its planned implementation of OpenDocument Format in the next edition of Office, to an interoperability Web site it launched last March.

By designating point-by-point how it intends to implement elements of the ODF 1.1 standard in Word, Excel, and other future editions of the suite still, for now, named "Office 14," Microsoft may quite literally be seizing the initiative. Specifically, by pre-empting its own effort in documenting how it will implement Open XML -- the internationally standardized derivative of the XML-based format Office 2007 already put in motion -- the company appears to be taking public steps to document what could easily become the most deployed ODF-supporting application come next year.

The world's CE products, especially portables, depend on flash memory. But even with demand continuing to grow, albeit less briskly than before, a global glut in NAND is forcing two of the world's top producers to cut production.

Amid warnings that the semiconductor industry as a whole could spend significantly less to retool and maintain their factories in 2009, two of the largest producers of flash memory said they will jointly take steps to make those capital expenditure cuts this month, beginning with a temporary shutdown of two of their biggest production facilities.

As far back as last year, Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom said it was in the process of making an exclusive deal with Apple to deliver the iPhone 3G to the East Asian island. Over the weekend, the deal became official.

Prior to the device's Taiwan launch, CHT representatives said the iPhone 3G would only work on CHT's 3G network. But according to new reports, the device actually launched unlocked, with the ability to assign networks via SIM card.

In a surprising twist, Windows PCs regained ground against Macs during the month of November, says a leading analyst firm. Yet regardless of a difficult economy, notebook PCs of both persuasions showed strong sales.

In somewhat of a reversal of recent trends, sales of Apple's Macintosh computers fell flat in November, with no movement either up or down, whereas those of Windows PCs -- specifically, PCs with Windows pre-installed, as opposed to Linux PCs -- increased to the tune of 7 percent, according to new statistics from analyst firm NPD Group.

An unusual spike in comments posted to Apple's support forums since yesterday afternoon points to the possibility of certain problems in particular with the company's latest rollup to the Mac operating system.

The blue screen has typically been the unofficial Windows logo, at least in and around Macintosh circles. But this morning, users of Mac OS X have been reporting a number of problems, most of which fall into the same category, and some of which are leaving users' computers booting up with nothing on their screens but a field of blue.

An unusual project monitoring the accuracy of electronic voting in Humboldt County, Calif. uncovered a glitch that dropped or miscounted 197 ballots in the November election. The bug has been known to the manufacturer for four years.

E-voting's troubles are widely known by now, so much so that Humboldt County registrar Carolyn Crnich consented to work with a group of election integrity experts -- banded together and calling themselves the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project (HCETP) -- to find a way to double-check the results of the June 2008 voting in her county. Humboldt uses Diebold optical-scan units running, as it turned out, version 1.18.19.0 of the firm's Gems software.

Seventy-five years ago this month, the US junked Prohibition. However, a remarkable number of states still fight bottle battles in one of the Web's longest-running e-commerce controversies -- one that pre-dates e-commerce.

About one-fifth of the US is substantially restricted from buying wine or other spirits online. Fifteen states, according to the Free the Grapes! site, prohibit consumers from doing business directly with wineries in other states; it's a felony in Kentucky, Tennessee and Utah.