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Apple and Comcast are discussing a streaming-TV service that will go through an Apple set-top box, The Wall Street Journal reported Apple apparently wants the service to be treated as a managed service, meaning it will run on cabling separate from that used for public Internet access....

Nuzzel, a service that helps users pick out the most popular items from their social media feeds, launched to the public last week The aggregating network made its debut in 2012, but until last week, it required an invitation to join. Now anyone can use the service, which is spearheaded by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams....

Microsoft, which has been mocking Google's searching of Gmail subscribers' emails with its "Scroogled" campaign, is fielding criticism for having itself searched the email of a Hotmail user The search, which came to light last week, was conducted after Microsoft found that an employee, Alex Kibkalo, who worked for it in Lebanon, had stolen proprie...

Pandora last week said it would increase its monthly charge for new users who sign on to its ad-free service by US$1 a month. Starting in May, the price for users who want to pay month by month will be $4.99. Existing Pandora One monthly subscribers will not experience a price increase at this time and will continue to pay $3.99 per month....

Oh, there have been some good National Security Agency revelations. Like the one about the NSA tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone. Or the one about the NSA planting agents inside fantasy worlds in World of Warcraft, or impersonating Facebook in a global quest to spread malware....

Although they previously came to an arrangement regarding stronger broadband service delivery, Netflix and Comcast last week sparred over the issue of Net neutrality in a public forum Net neutrality -- or "open Internet" -- is the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers and governments. ISPs should ...

What really surprises me about the book Haunted Empire, which predicts the decline of Apple, isn't that Apple fans don't like it. That's a given -- Apple fans only want positive books and stories. It is the level of effort that has gone into killing this book, and how much that apparently has accelerated sales. There is an old saying that the only thing better than bad publicity is no publicity, and Apple's effort seem to be driving this book onto the best sellers' list. ...

CRM is sometimes described as the place where all your customer data resides. That's a nice image -- all that helpful data, chilling in its own hangout. That data works for you, though -- if you're just storing it, it isn't doing you any good That's why it's important to think about what you want to do with and learn from that data. We talk a lot a...

Energizing Education through Open Source: Using Open Source Software to Enhance LearningBy Christopher WhittumISBN: 978-1-4834-0444-8Pages: 144Price: US$21.95Available at Lulu.com, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.A new book on open source education teaches school leaders and parents why kids need to see coding as more than cool. Energizing Education thr...

It's been eight years since Twitter first began to impose its 140-character regime on the social world, and to celebrate, the company this week launched a new, nostalgically minded tool At First-Tweets.com, Twitter users now can fondly reminisce about -- and, of course, tweet and share -- what they said the first time they ever took to the twitters...

Alibaba is putting some skin in the mobile-messaging game with a US$215 million investment in Tango; the companies announced the funding on Thursday Mobile messaging apps are hot. Facebook recently scooped up WhatsApp for $19 billion, and Japanese e-commerce titan Rakuten recently acquired Viber for $900 million.

China's state media seems to have the ear of U.S. tech companies. Amazon's China unit closed down a third-party store after state media criticized Amazon for selling fake cosmetics. Amazon's China unit took the accusations seriously, it said, promising to "strengthen the process of scrutiny."

IBM on Thursday launched a set of software and consulting services to help fight fraud and financial crime The so-called smarter counterfraud initiative draws from more than 500 fraud consulting experts, 290 fraud-related research patents, and the US$24 billion IBM has invested in its Big Data and analytics software and services capabilities over t...

I'm usually not a prediction sort of guy because it'scosmically silly -- we're tiny little humans on a tiny littlerock spinning in a very large universe. Yet here I am, looking at2014 and the latest batch of smartwatch efforts from Samsung, Google,Motorola and LG Here's what I see: All of these manufacturers and creators arecharging forward into th...

Working with the Android OS on a desktop computer environment takes personal computing in a new direction. How many will follow it remains to be seen The release of Android-x86 version 4.4-RC1 (KitKat-x86) by the Android-x86 Project brings the viability of an Android distro as an alternative desktop several steps closer, but it is still a work in p...

The mobile game Flappy Bird seemed dead and buried, but a tweet from its creator suggests it may yet rise from the ashes -- perhaps not quite like the phoenix In response to a Twitter user asking whether the game would return to Apple's iTunes App Store, Dong Nguyen responded, "Yes. But not soon."

Microsoft's tip of a news event next week triggered an avalanche of prophecy that the long-awaited version of Office for the iPad was about to be released. Microsoft is billing the event in San Francisco on March 27 as a "briefing and news focused on the intersection of cloud and mobile computing." While Microsoft officially withheld further detai...

Sony debuted Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 console, at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The project is in active development with a view to a future commercial launch. A software development kit also is under development Morpheus features a head-mounted unit with a visor-like display, wh...

NCAA March Madness Live by NCAA Digital is an iOS app available in the iTunes App Store for free....

There has been quite a bit of media speculation on the loss of Malaysia Flight 370. However, many important questions simply are not being answered yet. One that many people are wondering about is this: Why didn't anyone on board that plane call or text message anyone? During the last week I have appeared on many news shows -- NBC, CNN with Wolf B...