Articles about Digital Lifestyle

Email is the most common form of digital ID, used to login to websites, complete transactions and more besides. This means that over time each email address develops its own unique reputation and digital life based on its past behavior and actions online.

Phoenix-based startup company Emailage has used this to develop a risk scoring system for email addresses which will help companies to reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions. Emailage has successfully flagged over 2 million transactions as risky in the past year alone, amounting to $150 million it's saved customers. The company has now received $3.8 million in venture capital funding to further develop its product.

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Unless you and your family are into just the one tech manufacturer -- Apple say -- the chances are you will have various devices running different operating systems. In my home, for example, there are three Windows PCs, two Android phones, two Android tablets, an iPad and an iPhone. All of which have media -- photos, videos, music -- stored on them.

There are various ways to make all of this content accessible across the different devices, but Seagate Wireless from Ebuyer is a simple, yet powerful solution. It’s a portable, battery powered 500GB drive with a built-in wireless network that can stream content to up to three smartphones, tablets and laptops simultaneously.

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Software-driven intelligent devices and the Internet of Things are changing the way companies deliver their products and services.

This is among the findings of a new report from Flexera Software and IDC which points towards a 'third industrial revolution' transforming the global economy.

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The emoji heart was, perhaps not surprisingly, the most used "word" of 2014. It’s the first time that the Global Language Monitor has awarded the title to a symbol, a significant moment for the English language.

New digital formats continue to change communications; text speak was the first widespread digital vernacular and, although it might be out of fashion now, we still use words derived from that language today. We live in an era of images and video, where Pinterest, Vine and emoticons are prevalent in our lives. If people do use words at all, they communicate in 140 characters. Social and digital tools have also made people see symbols differently. Before the smiley face emoticon first appeared in a post to Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science General Board, from Professor Scott E Fahlman in 1982, or indeed prior to this in a public appearance in Puck magazine in 1881, would our brains have recognized the punctuation pictorially? Probably not. However, digital technology has taught us en masse to recognize the position of the open parenthesis relative to the hyphen and the colon.

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One of the biggest trends of this year's CES was the "Health of Things", with wearable technology increasingly being connected to healthcare in order to enhance users' lives.

I spoke to health tech specialist Nudge about what exactly the "Health of Things" means to the general consumer and the impact it's having -- and will have -- on the tech and healthcare industries.

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To celebrate the fact we are now in the year Marty McFly was teleported to, yesterday we had a look back at what Back to the Future II creator Robert Zemeckis got right in his look forward to the year 2015 where he envisaged everything from smart homes and wearables to hoverboards.

There was, of course, also a whole lot he got wrong about the future, and here’s a rundown of the things that didn’t go according to his vision.

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With more and more websites requiring passwords to access them, people are looking for ways to manage their surfing that don't require multiple IDs.

Increasingly the answer they're turning to is social media and in particular Facebook. A new infographic from identity management specialist Gigya shows that the social network accounted for over 60 percent of logins in the fourth quarter of last year.

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Marty McFly visits the year 2015 in Back to the Future Part II, the sequel to Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 masterpiece "Back to the Future".

Now that we’ve finally hit the year portrayed in the film it’s time to give them a report card on the things they got right.

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Microsoft's Bill Gates predicted the death of the password as long ago as 2004, yet we're still heavily reliant on them for our day-to-day security.

Part of the reason the password has lingered so long is the lack of solutions that provide security combined with ease of use.

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Smartphones make me fed up. There. I said it.

Every year since Apple released its paradigm shifting iPhone 3G and pushed the industry into the stratosphere there has been nothing to get truly excited about in a sector that should be just that: exciting.

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Small computers are proving very popular these days. As well as the likes of Raspberry Pi, there are Windows 8.1/Linux devices like Intel's Compute Stick on the way, and fans of Linux Mint can purchase the CompuLab MintBox Mini. Given the size of this new generation of diminutive device, it’s perhaps surprising that no one has (successfully) tried to squeeze a PC into a mouse before.

Well, now, finally they have. Mouse-Box aims to be a complete computer inside in a fully functioning pointing device. You’ll be able to use it with your normal PC, and then switch to the Mouse-Box computer with ease. You just need access to a screen and keyboard (you already have the mouse!)

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A new study from Fujitsu has revealed that UK consumers are ready for a nation that is digital by default.

Over a fifth of us will always opt for a digital-first approach, when a digital service is offered. Driven by a desire to speed up (66 percent) and simplify (62 percent) everyday processes, the results show a digitally confident nation, one that is seeking to move faster towards a digital future (39 percent) and that would vote for a political party if it focused on digital policies (20 percent).

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Yesterday afternoon, a San Diego State University student bought my MacBook Pro—13-inch Retina Display, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD—for $1,100. I purchased the laptop from local dealer DC Computers in late-August 2014 for a few hundred dollars more. The buyer's interest was my own: Mac, large SSD, and extended warranty (expires April 2017).

The proceeds go to buying Toshiba Chromebook 2 (two, another for my wife) and Android phone for her. She moves from iPad Air, which has been, since September 2014, her PC—and that experience should be another story (be patient). If time travel was possible, I would keep, rather than sell, my Chromebook Pixel early last summer. The Chromie lifestyle suits me best, and I am excited to be back to it. However, in December, when reviewing the tech products that changed my digital lifestyle last year, including the switch to Apple's platforms: "I can’t imagine using anything else". I lied to myself, and unintentionally to you.

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For anyone under 30 it may be hard to remember a time when you shared your musical tastes via mixtapes rather than playlists, when the top of every bus shelter was adorned by a broken cassette trailing yards of tape, and when loading a home computer program involved a tense few minutes hoping that you wouldn't suffer a read error before the end of the tape.

Well, prepare for a wave of hissing and clicking nostalgia as the cassette player seems to be making a comeback. According to UK catalog retailer Argos sales of cassette players over the past three months are 45 percent higher than the same period last year.

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January is the time of year when people traditionally decide to lose weight and get fit. Partly it’s because a new year equals a new start, and secondly it’s because the month follows the holidays when we’ve all overindulged and packed on the pounds.

This is the perfect time for companies to release fitness products, and veteran games company Atari is hoping to cash in with the announcement of a new 'gamified' fitness app that offers an unusual nostalgic twist.

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