Articles by Mike Pearson

Hulu Plus emerged from its four-month preview on Wednesday, opening its streaming TV service to all and chopping US$2 off its price tag at the same time The service allows Hulu users to stream high-definition video to their computers, iPhones, iPads, select Samsung and Sony televisions and Blu-ray players, as well as the Sony PlayStation 3 and the ...

Everything about Facebook is big. A half-billion users, 700 billion minutes a month spent there. It has 900 million pages, groups and events, according to the Facebook stats page ...

Samsung and Motorola have dropped three new phones on the market, from an Android number with not one but two Super AMOLED displays to a flip phone that uses an E Ink display ...

Amazon.com will more than double the revenue share for periodical publishers as it faces rising competition, at least in public perception, with Apple and other rivals for magazine and newspaper publications The move comes shortly after Amazon announced that it would make magazines and newspapers available to users of its Kindle apps -- software th...

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is in the wild, and one of the big questions about the launch involves the app ecosystem for the new mobile operating system Microsoft promised about 1,000 apps on launch day, and it appears the company has managed to cover most of the bases for big-name apps, with offerings such as Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, YouTube, S...

Barnes & Noble took a big swipe at Amazon's dominance of the e-reader market with the introduction Wednesday of a new color Nookreader and a program to encourage the development of apps for its devices The US$249 Nook Color is designed to appeal to readers interested in periodicals and graphic books as well as traditional text-dominated books, and ...

Citing First Amendment protections, a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle has ruled in favor of Amazon.com in its battle with North Carolina over potentially sensitive customer data the state claims it needs to calculate taxes Judge Marsha J. Pechman ruled Monday that Amazon is not obligated to provide the names, addresses and purchasing records o...

Adding the iPhone to its product mix helped Radio Shack lift its net income 23 percent in the third quarter, the company announced Monday. But falling margins and continued uncertainty about the venerable brand's future left the market unimpressed Radio Shack reported diluted earnings per share of 37 US cents compared to 30 cents in the same period...

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has weighed in publicly in the dispute between the Fox broadcasting empire and cable provider Cablevision over payments for broadcasting Fox programming. The scuffle could wind up giving the agency greater power to regulate such standoffs Genachowski's agency released a letter to Fox and Cablevision executives on Tue...

Verizon, the very same company that recently announced it will sell the iPad beginning next week, announced Wednesday that it will become the first U.S. carrier to stock Samsung's Galaxy Tab ...

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it will combine its Officeproductivity Web apps suite and integrated Shareport, Exchange andLync services into a monthly package service beginning next year The service, called "Office 365," is a significant step-up from theWeb-based productivity apps Microsoft previously offered under theWindows Live banner....

Ray Ozzie is out as chief software architect at Microsoft, opening abig void through which analysts are tossing innumerable opinions regardingwhat the departure means for the company Ozzie's role was frequently seen as being Bill Gates' successor as thecompany's visionary technologist, a foil to CEO Steve Ballmer's purelybusiness-minded approach....

A week after Logitech rolled out the first standalone box runningGoogle TV, Sony has revealed four new HDTVs and a Blu-ray playerpowered by the system ...

Defying expectations that it would announce a complete site redesign, a new integration agreementwith Skype or even a phone of its very own, Facebook instead unveiled a revampedgroups feature on Wednesday, along with new tools to audit how apps areusing personal data and to download all of a user's data to abrowser-viewable file The groups feature ...

It comes as no surprise that venerable Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, has been on the decline in recent years, bowing under pressure from rivals like Firefox and Google Chrome. However, Web analytics firm StatCounter says while it's still the most-used browser family on Earth, fewer than half of Web users are now on it The company said...

Twitter Cofounder Evan Williams has stepped aside as CEO and placed Dick Costolo, the man he hired as chief operating officer, in charge of the company as it works to build its business model "I am most satisfied while pushing product direction," Williams wrote in a blog post announcing his decision. "Building things is my passion, and I've never b...

You can almost hear the old-timers growling: "Back in my day, you wanted to get published, first you had to cut down the trees yourself. In the snow. With only a pen knife." Now, it literally just takes a push of a button....

You can almost hear the old-timers growling: "Back in my day, you wanted to get published, first you had to cut down the trees yourself. In the snow. With only a pen knife." Now, it literally just takes a push of a button....

You can almost hear the old-timers growling: "Back in my day, you wanted to get published, first you had to cut down the trees yourself. In the snow. With only a pen knife." Now, it literally just takes a push of a button....

The Indian government has been unable to intercept communications carried over BlackBerry devices despite an interim agreement on data sharing that kept Research In Motion's service alive after a threatened August outage, according to a report published Friday in the Economic Times, an Indian news site The development threatens to once again shut d...