Articles about Digital Lifestyle

In another busy week, Microsoft continued to promote Internet Explorer 11 by showing off some of the new features that will be available to Windows 8 users. At the same time, the company released a tool that lets Windows 7 users block the update. Microsoft also announced that it would speed up the approval process for apps submitted to the Windows Store, so initial certification can be complete within five days.

Moving away from the desktop, champagne corks were popping as it was revealed that Raspberry Pi has sold 1.75 million units. After the launch of Mavericks, Mihaita was taken with his MacBook Air, and I was quite impressed with the Tesco Hudl -- although it's not going to be replacing my Nexus 7 any time soon.

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The emergence of a generation of smart machines taking over middle-class jobs within 15-years is a "futurist fantasy" according to 60 percent of respondents to Gartner's 2013 CEO survey. However, the analysts predict the rise of smart machines will have widespread business impact within only seven years.

"Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades," says Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner. "Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market's ability to create valuable new ones".

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T-Mobile is taking the wraps off the next stage of its "uncarrier" program, revealing that from the end of October anyone on its Simple Choice plans are going to get something for free. Not just any old something. Free text and free unlimited data. It doesn't end there. The free offers work on a global scale, meaning that international data and texts will be free in more than 100 countries.

John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile US, Inc. says "Today's phones are designed to work around the world, but we're forced to pay insanely inflated international connectivity fees to actually use them. You can't leave the country without coming home to bill shock. So we're making the world your network -- at no extra cost".

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The technology community is abuzz with excitement over the next-generation of Chromebooks. Yesterday, my colleague Joe Wilcox reviewed the sexy $279 Chromebook 11 by Hewlett-Packard. Sadly, while HP's Chromebook looks great, it is very much under-powered. After all, the specs are the same as last year's Samsung model -- ARM processor and a paltry 2GB of RAM.

Today, Acer announces the C720 which undercuts the HP variant in price and trumps it in specifications.

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Folks are increasingly using Twitter while watching their favorite TV shows. A couple of days ago, Nielsen announced that viewers were becoming more engaged with television as a result. However, I argued that this could potentially distract users from both the programming and advertising. Today, Twitter and Comcast announce a partnership that looks to bring users to the TV with the power of tweets, rather than pull them away, with a feature called See It.

"It's a simple, but exciting tool that helps people more easily watch the shows they read about or discover online. See It lets people tune-in or record their favorite shows -- directly from the conversations happening on Twitter. In a typical week, #thevoice generates more than 350,000,000 Twitter impressions. What’s missing is how to seamlessly move from that conversation to consumption. And that's where See It comes in", says Sam Schwartz, chief business development officer at Comcast.

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You know how frustrating it can be when you hear a track on the radio or TV and miss the announcement that tells you what it's called? With the public beta launch of its new Playlister tool the BBC aims to offer a solution to that problem.

Using Playlister you can tag tracks from across the BBC's web services which will be saved to a personal playlist. Once you've created a list you can export it as a PDF or print it out, but more usefully you have the option to export the list to Spotify, Deezer or YouTube so that you can stream the tracks. Other services are expected to be added in future.

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When it comes to fire, you can never be too safe. Sadly, I know all too well. You see, I once lived through a fire that destroyed my apartment and all of my belongings. While it was a devastating event, I came out of it uninjured and with a new respect for fire safety.

Today, Nest announces a new product that combines technology with not only fire safety but carbon monoxide protection too.

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Adblock Plus is in its seventh year of clearing out advertisements from web pages, and is now for the first time sharing details about how its whitelisting system works. Known as Acceptable Ads, Adblock Plus recognizes the fact that advertising exists for a reason and is a cornerstone that keeps the internet running.

For this reason, advertisements that meet certain criteria are whitelisted, and Adblock Plus' Ben Williams reveals details of how the process works.

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We have a tendency to take access to the internet for granted, but for people in many countries it is a luxury that is prohibitively expensive. This is something that the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) wants to change, aiming to drive down the cost of web access worldwide so that it works out to less than 5 percent of monthly income. A4AI is a consortium of tech companies and other organizations which has the backing of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web.

Membership includes such names as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Intel, and the alliance wants to do something about the fact that around two thirds of the world's population is not online. The coalition cites figures from the International Telecommunication Union that shows that while internet access in developed countries can cost as little as 2 percent of household income, in other parts of the world this can spiral up to around a third.

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Whenever I watch TV, my tablet is with me. I am often tweeting, instant messaging and playing games while "watching" TV. Because I am so distracted, I must use the term "watching" loosely and apparently, I am not alone. You see, tweeting while watching television is so prevalent, that Nielsen and Twitter teamed-up to establish a social TV rating last year.

At the time, Twitter said "as the experience of TV viewing continues to evolve, our TV partners have consistently asked for one common benchmark from which to measure the engagement of their programming. This new metric is intended to answer that request, and to act as a complement and companion to the Nielsen TV rating". Today, almost a year later, the results of the agreement have come to fruition.

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As the Internet gets bigger and more crowded it can be increasingly difficult to find a catchy domain name. Startup company Panabee aims to provide a simple tool for individuals and businesses to find great domain names and it has just reached the milestone of 10 million monthly searches -- up 50 percent from 2012.

Given the scarcity of available names, Panabee offers a new interface for brainstorming alternatives besides dot-coms. As consumers become more Internet savvy, it allows businesses to embrace different domain endings like .co.uk, .biz, .net and more.

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According to a new report by the UK media regulator Ofcom, tablets are becoming the must have device for children, displacing the smartphone for younger age groups.

Around a quarter of children aged 12-15 (26 percent) and 18 percent aged 8-11 now have their own tablet computer, while household ownership of a tablet has more than doubled since 2012 to 51 percent up from 20 percent. Use of a tablet computer at home has tripled among 5-15s since 2012, 42 percent up from 14 percent, whilst a quarter of 3-4s now use a tablet computer at home.

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Flutter, the app that lets you control music and movie playback using gestures picked up by a webcam, is to continue life as a Google product. The innovative app is the latest acquisition by the search giant, and comes just three years after the company was founded in San Francisco, California. Flutter is extremely upbeat about the purchase, seemingly keen to reap the benefits of the Google marketing machine.

Flutter CEO Navneet Dalal announces the acquisition on the Flutter website:

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The British Film Institute (BFI) today announces plans to launch its own online movie-streaming service, offering a mix of free and paid-for viewing, all presented in HD quality.

BFI Chair Greg Dyke unveiled the BFI Player at a London press event earlier today, saying: "The launch of the BFI Player is a defining moment in the BFI’s 80 year history -- it will unlock the past, present and future of British film and, most importantly, offers a new deal for UK audiences to get great films out to as many people as possible across the UK. I’m really excited about the BFI Player’s potential. The BFI is pivotal to identifying great films and nurturing and giving a voice to great filmmakers in the UK and now offers a platform to take these stories out to whole new audiences".

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Almost every week some reader asks me to write about Bitcoin, currently the most popular so-called crypto currency and the first one to possibly reach something like critical mass. I’ve come close to writing those columns, but just can’t get excited enough. So this week when yet another reader asked, it made sense to explain my nervousness. Bitcoin is clever, interesting, brilliant even, but I find it too troubling to support.

But first, why should you believe me? You shouldn’t. Though I’m year after year identified by the Kauffman Foundation as one of the top 50 economics bloggers in America, that only means I get to hang out occasionally with the real experts, eating Kansas City barbecue. Unlike them I’m not an economist, I just play one on TV. So don’t take my word for anything here: just think about the arguments I present and whether they make sense to you.

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