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The money is pouring into Pebble's Kickstarter campaign, launched Tuesday, for its new smartwatch, Pebble Time Within hours, upwards of 27,000 supporters had pledged more than US$5.6 million. The project's goal was to raise a mere $500,000....

Apple on Monday announced a plan to build two new data centers in Europe -- one in County Galway in Ireland and the other in central Jutland in Denmark. Apple plans to spend US$1.9 billion (1.7 billion euros) on the project -- its largest European investment to date. The new facilities will power its online services including the iTunes Store, App Store, iMessage, Maps and Siri...

There has been a lot of coverage lately of where and how Apple will sell the Apple Watch -- through high-end luxury department stores in Paris, for example, or through special new displays inside of Apple Stores, guided into existence by fashion genius Angela Ahrendts. Finding new ways to present the watch is important, but how will Apple actually trigger a buy decision?...

Citizenfour, a film documenting interviews director Laura Poitras conducted with whistle-blower Edward Snowden, won the Oscar for best documentary Sunday. The talks took place as Snowden blew the lid off the United States National Security Agency's surveillance activities ...

Google on Monday announced YouTube Kids, a new mobile app designed to deliver family-friendly video content. In making a play for the tyke market, YouTube joins other streaming video providers like Amazon and Netflix....

The United States' National Security Agency and British spy agency GCHQ have hacked into the internal computer network of Gemalto, the world's largest maker of SIM cards, and stolen the cards' encryption keys, The Intercept reported last week. Information about the government hack attacks came from files leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden Gema...

Salutations, and welcome to a new installment of Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, your hitchhiker's guide through the maelstrom of new gizmo announcements On the road this week are an e-ink bracelet, a View-Master revival, a smart plush toy for kids, and an all-in-one touchscreen remote....

The idea of using incentives to drive business behaviors is not a new one. It happens in all areas of business, but it's most obvious in sales, where compensation is tied to performance This is the most basic type of incentive, and it's used to get people who sell for a living to sell. However, other incentives can drive behaviors more complex than...

Google is fighting a proposed amendment to Rule 41 of the United States Criminal Code that might allow authorities to hack into computers abroad The Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, which advises the Judicial Conference of the United States, is considering the amendment.

Electric-car battery maker A123 Systems earlier this week filed a lawsuit against Apple in a Massachusetts Superior Court in Middlesex County. A123 also sought a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to stop its former employee, Mujeeb Ijaz, from violating his non-disclosure and non-compete agreement Ijaz had moved to Apple to app...

The global access and entertainment services marketplace continues its pace of dramatic change, as broadband services have achieved new levels of penetration and speed worldwide. Emerging markets in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia are experiencing rapid growth, as many homes obtain high-speed broadband services for the first time. While pen...

Fuel Industries last year sought to find the long-rumored cache of buried E.T. theExtra-Terrestrial video games. The games, made for the Atari 2600, long have been linkedto the video game industry's crash in the early 1980s. ...

Lenovo on Thursday came under fire for preinstalling spyware on some of its laptops The software, Superfish, uses the same techniques cybercriminals often employ to crack encrypted traffic from computers to the Internet....

Samsung has purchased mobile payments firm LoopPay to create its own digital wallet. Samsung already was an investor in the startup, along with Visa and Synchrony Financial LoopPay's contactless magnetic secure transmission technology works with magnetic stripe readers....

You might remember Garry Kasparov, the last chess grand master to beat a computer. That was about 20 years ago when he went up against Deep Blue, the IBM megaframe that is the direct ancestor of Jeopardy-winning Watson. A rematch between Deep Blue and Kasparov a year later did not go so well for the human -- and that was the end of an era. You mig...

Customer satisfaction with retail has dropped for the first time in four years, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index -- except in the subcategory of e-commerce. All of the brick-and-mortar retail categories registered weak or flat customer satisfaction for the fourth quarter of 2014, while online retail posted a year-over-year gai...

Pivotal on Wednesday announced its decision to open source all of the core components of its big data platform, becoming the first big data industry player to do so The company also announced its participation in the Open Data Platform, which seeks to encourage more enterprise collaboration, along with the adoption of modern, scalable data architec...

Xiaomi may soon take its first steps into the United States. How will it do? I have some suggestions to offer. If it follows them, its chances of success will increase. If it doesn't, well, it may face the same problems that have dogged Microsoft, BlackBerry, Motorola, HTC and many others I have watched many handset makers fail. Wireless in the U.S

Microsoft on Wednesday announced new data services running on its Azure cloud in what it has positioned as a bid to bring big data to the mainstream Those services include the HDInsight Apache Hadoop-based service; Storm on HDInsight, which lets users use Hadoop and Storm to create distributed, real-time data processing solutions in Azure; and Azur...

Yandex has asked Russia's antitrust authorities to look into whether Google is breaking the country's laws by not allowing preinstallation of third-party services on Android devices. Three smartphone vendors told Yandex last year that they couldn't install its search engine as the default on Android devices, the company claimed....