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Samsung and LG both announced brand-new smartwatches on Wednesday in the run-up to next week's IFA 2014 consumer electronics trade show in Berlin. Featuring a sleek, curved Super AMOLED display along with 3G, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, the Samsung Gear S (pictured above) runs Tizen and allows users to make and receive phone calls. Customizab...

American Airlines this week withdrew its flight content from Orbitz Worldwide's websites, which include Orbitz.com, ebookers.com and CheapTickets.com. The companies are locked in a booking fee dispute. They have clashed on this issue before, and it is also a brewing source of discontent between the airlines and Orbitz's competitors, such as Expedi...

Time Warner Cable suffered a massive service outage in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, leaving an unknown number of its nearly 12 million customers nationwide without service for hours "As of 6 a.m. ET, services were largely restored ... . As of 8 a.m., all services were back to normal," TWC spokesperson Eric Mangan told the E-Commerce Times....

The recent data breach at Community Health Systems, in which Chinese hackers stole the personal information of 4.3 million patients, was another sign of a disturbing trend that security researchers at Websense have been observing for months: Healthcare providers are coming under cyberattack at an alarming rate "We've seen a 600 percent increase in ...

Comcast has been trying to improve customer care. It has made some headway, but reliability of its services still is a big issue. I like Comcast people. During the last couple of years, their performance has gotten better. However, the quality of Comcast's service is still unreliable, at best, and problems just don't go away Think of Comcast as a f...

A team of university researchers have been busy building Robo Brain, a large-scale computational system that collates information from the Internet, as well as data from computer simulations and real-life robot trials, and learns from it That knowledge base will be used to drive prototypes for robotics research, household robots and self-driving ca...

While the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is working to establish itself as the perfect tweener device between tablet and laptop, one hot rumor suggests that Apple's answer for more working space on an iPad will come in the form of a bigger screen -- 12.9 inches of touch-sensitive glory The rumor comes from Bloomberg, which vaguely noted that Apple's suppl...

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced the debut of the Salesforce1 Community Cloud. The product is launching as a new division for Salesforce.com, on par with its Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud offerings, said Lisa Hammitt, vice president of business operations for Salesforce1 Community Cloud. Built on the Salesforce1 Platform, Community Cloud...

Instagram on Tuesday released Hyperlapse, a free iPhone app that takes the jitters out of time-lapse video. It was just two weeks ago that Microsoft demonstrated a similar technology that bears the same name The Instagram app "is the most impressive effect to hit smartphone video in recent memory," Ross Rubin, principal analyst with Reticle Researc...

Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday signed into law a bill requiring that anti-theft measures be incorporated into all smartphones sold within California. The measure applies to phones manufactured after July 1, 2015 Though it doesn't specify the particular technologies used to enable that capability -- both hardware and software solutions are possibilities...

Researchers from several universities recently developed a technique to record the quantum mechanical behavior of one electron in a nanoscale defect in diamond The team, led by David Awschalom of the University of Chicago, used ultra-fast pulses of laser light both to control the defect's entire quantum state and to observe how the state of one ele...

The CRM Evolution conference held last week in New York was interesting for multiple reasons. Most importantly, perhaps, is the perception that the market is moving into a higher gear, slipping past the restraints of a recession that would not quit. Good things are in store for the industry, I think, as buyers step up their games and vendors unleash a passel of new solutions...

Clickbaiting may soon come to an end on Facebook, which has launched an effort to deal with the problem Posts with clickbait headlines get higher placement in News Feeds -- but 80 percent of the time, users prefer headlines that help them decide whether they want to read a full article before having to click through, a Facebook survey indicated....

An update to the software that runs Glass gives users of Google's wearable computing device more control over their interactions with contacts The latest version of the software -- also known as version XE20.1 -- adds the flexibility to choose how to reach out to a contact after selecting the person from the contacts list.

Amazon appears to be readying an advertising platform to compete with Google's AdWords It has started talking up its new Amazon Sponsored Links platform with potential partners and is anticipating a launch later this year, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday....

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, a column that takes a look at some new gadgets that are not yet released or have just hit the shelves I'll trawl through product announcements to find potential gems -- as well as gizmos that deserve to be ignored after we've poked a little fun at them.

China is developing a homegrown operating system that could be ready as soon as October as part of an effort to wean itself from Western-made software, according to a Sunday report from the Xinhua government news agency Following hard on the heels of China's announcement last month that it had launched an investigation of Microsoft under the countr...

The United States National Security Agency secretly shares the communications data it has amassed over the years with nearly 24 U.S. government agencies using a search engine resembling Google Search, The Intercept reported Monday That's more than 850 billion records of phone calls, emails, cellphone locations and Internet chats....

Qvidian has updated its Sales Playbooks & Analytics platform with features that help reps do a better job of gleaning pertinent information from the buyer in the initial sales approach. It then incorporates that information into the CRM system. Other enhancements are aimed at helping sales reps respond to buyers' questions on the fly by serving u...

Amazon on Monday announced an agreement to acquire Twitch Interactive, a real-time video platform for gamers. Prior to the disclosure, rumors had been building that it was on track to snatch Twitch from Google, which reportedly had been very close to buying it. The pending acquisition was rumored to be for upwards of US$1 billion. However, Amazon ...