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After releasing its BlackBerry Messenger chat app for Android and iOS devices to considerable fanfare last fall, BlackBerry on Thursday announced that it had expanded the app's functionality on those platforms with two key features Previously available only to users of BlackBerry's own mobile platform, BBM Voice and BBM Channels are now part of the...

Never mind the Seattle Seahawks completely smoking the Broncos -- Super Bowl XLVIII may go down in history as the turning point for iBeacon. Apple's iBeacon is an indoor positioning system based on Bluetooth Low Energy technology. Its proximity-detection capabilities enable it to send relevant information -- including, most enticingly, targeted ad...

The Linux desktop offers distributions for many diverse interests and specialties. Distro Astro is for astronomy enthusiasts.The latest version, Distro Astro 2.0, is dubbed "Pallas." It was released Nov. 20, 2013, at the South East Asian Young Astronomers Collaboration conference in Bandung, Indonesia. It is a major upgrade focusing on refinements...

Google's Android and Apple's iOS led the global smartphone operating system market in 2013, a year in which worldwide shipments surpassed 1 billion units for the first time, according to IDC The two OSes accounted for 93.8 percent of global smartphone shipments for the year. Both still found room to grow: Together, they made up 95.7 percent of the ...

In any city or dense urban environment, getting around can be ahassle. Owning a car is expensive, and parking it can be a nightmare -- never mind actually driving it. Enter URB-E, a new foldable electronic bike/scooter invention thatbrings the sit-down ride of a powered bicycle to thefoldable kick scooters that children ride around suburbanneighbo...

After months of being courted by both Comcast and Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable has agreed to be purchased by Comcast for US$45.2 billion in stock The deal, if approved by the United States Department of Justice and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, will create the biggest broadband provider in the country, with 33 million cus...

Despite having been declared dead, China's moon rover is showing signs of life. After two weeks of gloomy silence, the Jade Rabbit appears to be up and running again ...

Americans are living in an increasingly digital and mobile world, according to "The Digital Consumer," the latest study published by research firm Nielsen The report determined that Americans now own an average of four digital devices, with average per-person content consumption of 60 hours per week across devices.

Microsoft cited an "error in our system" for quirky results given to users making searches in Chinese on the company's Bing search engine Chinese-language searches outside of mainland China were yielding results that mirrored those inside mainland China, where Bing filters in accordance with the whims of Beijing. This resulted in wildly different r...

Quality and reliability problems have been increasing with the new digital services from the cable television industry. I am a customer of both Comcast and Time Warner Cable and have noticed the issues, and it's safe to assume other cable-TV providers are having similar problems. This may cause further harm to the cable TV industry. Can it fix what is broken in time?...

The right diving gear makes all the difference. Here's what's trending in underwater technologies Scuba divers always have relied on gear that lets the essentially fragile, air-dependent human body descend into oceanic depths. While air tanks, regulators, buoyancy control devices and dive computers have been around for years, digital technologies a...

Linux on the desktop may have missed its adoption timeline, but Linux in the cloud is a win-win proposition for the post-PC movement Linux shows signs of becoming the go-to cloud platform. Microsoft's Azure may be the only real threat to Linux's cloud dominance, as all other major cloud software platforms are based on Linux and open-source software...

Mozilla on Tuesday gave its users a heads-up that their browsers would be getting a new feature called "Directory Tiles." Aimed at new or infrequent Firefox users, Directory Tiles fills what has been empty online real estate on the Firefox browser. A new user logging in, or a user returning to the browser after some time will be confronted with a ...

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been more active than a kid on a sugar high. The company on Wednesday announced a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to advance personalization and mobile technologies That was the same day Mayer told employees in a closed-door meeting that Yahoo would be partnering with Yelp, The Wall Street Journal reported....

Researchers have developed a new technique for printing live cells by drawing inspiration from an ancient Chinese method of woodblock printing Scientists have been experimenting with different methods of printing cells, including using inkjet printers to build 3D cell layers. The method has been successful in several instances, including a recent s...

"Very big NTP reflection attack hitting us right now. Appears to be bigger than the #Spamhaus attack from last year. Mitigating." That Monday evening tweet from Matthew Prince, the cofounder and CEO of CloudFlare, signaled what's being touted as the largest distributed denial of service attack ever launched on the Internet....

While the U.S. and France haven't exactly been chums of late when it comes to tech, the two countries are teaming up for a new mission to explore Mars The plan is to send an unmanned lander to Mars to study the interior of the planet. The mission will launch in 2016, with the lander touching down six months later....

Federal agencies spend considerable portions of their budgets on their legal offices. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded a US$1.1 billion multiyear contract in 2013 for a wide range of information technologies and legal support services Yet legal staffs across the federal government are struggling to productively use many of these ...

The United States National Security Agency's salivary glands no doubt started working overtime when it became apparent that technological advances were moving the world toward an Internet of Things -- a world where everything would be connected to everything else wirelessly or over the Web Almost two years ago, David Petraeus, then director of the ...

Microsoft on Monday released Power BI for Office 365, a business intelligence application for its Office 365 Enterprise subscribers. Power BI packages together several features that help business users access information from such sources as Windows Azure and elsewhere. They can then use that data to generate business intelligence models, graphs, ...