Articles by Fred J. Aun

Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, is acquiring movie ticket sales portal Fandango and launching a new Web site to help people locate online video content The new site, to be called "Fancast," will complement Fandango, which will continue to sell movie tickets, said Comcast. Both will be managed by Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), a divis...

Mountain View, Calif.-based Dash Navigation is recruiting 2,000 drivers to "road test" the company's Dash Express automotive GPS, a unit that automatically connects to the Internet to provide real-time traffic conditions and other information for motorists Dash just finished a six-month field trial of the devices in the San Francisco Bay Area and n...

Hewlett-Packard's purchase last year of high-end gaming PC maker VoodooPC is beginning to bear fruit as the computing and printing giant is now offering previews of advanced game technologies it might soon bring to market These are likely to include groundbreaking devices and applications such as a handheld, tablet PC-type game unit that will use G...

Google has unveiled a way for users of its popular Maps application to create and share maps they make themselves, creations that can include all sorts of digital content including videos, text and photos The new Google My Maps tab, found on the Google Maps page, simplifies the integration of user-created maps with other media such as photos and vi...

In a move framed as an anniversary celebration, not a reaction to competition, Sony Computer Entertainment America is cutting the price of the PlayStation Portable (PSP) game console by US$30 Sony said the units will now sell for $169.99, "delivering a significant $30 savings to consumers." That's about the same price being charged by some retailer...

IBM is close to unveiling a new Internet browsing technology that will help the visually impaired enjoy streaming video and animation Code named "A-browser," which stands for "Accessibility Browser," the application uses and augments some of the technology found in IBM's Easy Web Browser, the software used on sites -- such as Macy's.com -- that hel...

Digital television broadcasts targeted for children will soon be available in Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicles, starting with the 2008 Chrysler and Dodge minivans The service, coming from Sirius Satellite Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI), will be called "Sirius Backseat TV." While the name implies it will be available only to TV monitors in vehicles' rear sea...

Microsoft on Wednesday announced the upcoming release of the long-rumored new version of the Xbox 360 gaming console, a system with beefed-up storage capacity, a high-definition port, a black case and more The unit, called the "Xbox 360 Elite," will sell for about US$480 and be in stores April 29, Microsoft said....

Over-the-air music downloads just got less expensive, at least for Sprint customers As part of a number of moves to boost its music download business, Sprint announced it will charge 99 US cents for all songs purchased from its Sprint Music Store. The price cut, slated to begin early next month, will coincide with two "Power Vision" data plans focu...

Helio, the mobile communication joint venture of SK Telecom and Earthlink, has introduced a new device called "Ocean," asserting it is the world's first dual-slider with both a numeric keypad and a separate full QWERTY keyboard Expected to be available soon at a recommended price of US$295, the unit is being billed by Helio as "the ultimate social ...

Borders Group is severing its alignment with Amazon.com and will be unveiling its own book-selling Web site as part of a major company restructuring designed to "revitalize, refocus, and ultimately reinvent the company." Borders' arrangement with Amazon, initiated seven years ago as a seemingly good way for the company to add an Internet presence a...

Ill-willed players on the Microsoft Xbox Live system managed to gain access to other players' accounts by using pretexting and other forms of social engineering to trick customer service staffers into revealing private information By making numerous calls to the Xbox Live customer support center, the miscreants were able to have new passwords assig...

Vowing to play a "powerful role" in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, MySpace.com has introduced a portal featuring candidate-created profiles as well as voter-registration tools, job listings, videos, "friends" pages and other political content MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., dubbed the new portal "The Impact Channel" and said it...

What does the sitcom "Seinfeld" have to do with One Laptop per Child (OLPC), the project aiming to distribute inexpensive notebook computers to the impoverished, third-world children? Not much, except for the fact that two critics of OLPC -- Linspire President and CEO Kevin Carmony and company Chairman Michael Robertson -- refer to an episode of th...

A new software update for Sony's PlayStation 3 consoles includes Bluetooth support, enhanced downloading and the ability to help a Stanford University distributed-computing program hoping to cure protein-related diseases Dubbed "Firmware 1.60," the upgrade can be installed directly to Internet-connected PS3 consoles, downloaded into a home computer...

Mario must be feeling super today. The latest game console sales figures for America, compiled by NPD Group, show his creator, Nintendo, outdistancing the competition by thousands of units There were 485,000 Nintendo DS units sold in February and 335,000 sales of Nintendo's newest console, Wii, according to the NPD report. That means Nintendo almos...

While the Internet has become a daily part of most American lives, Hispanics with lower levels of education and English proficiency are lagging, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project Seventy-one percent of the non-Hispanic, white adult population in the United States currently goes online, the study found, but only a...

Coming closer to founder Bill Gates' goal of providing gamers the chance to play online almost anywhere, Microsoft said Wednesday its Games for Windows Live will be activated May 8 When that happens, people playing PC games on computers running the new Windows Vista operating system will enjoy many of the same online experiences now available to Xb...

The days of the spinning disk hard drive seem to be numbered as Intel Tuesday joined the growing field of companies offering solid state flash memory drives that claim to be faster, quieter and more power efficient The new Intel unit, named the "Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive," is based on NAND flash memory, a type of solid state memory -- commonly...

To help meet demand for online streaming video of the upcoming NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball Championship, CBS SportsLine is doubling its bandwidth reserves and offering preregistration The company, part of CBS Interactive, expects "an even greater audience" for the March Madness games than it enjoyed last year, when it served more than 19 milli...