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As most of us know by now, the Bitcoin is a digital currency, a virtual currency. It is not controlled by any central governmental authority and, as such, is not subject to a government-directed devaluation. Those who hold Bitcoins as an investment should be especially wary because it has experienced wide fluctuations in value due to the market forces surrounding such a monetary unit.

Dish Network on Wednesday announced that it will close its 300 remaining Blockbuster stores by early January and will end its Blockbuster By Mail service by mid-December 2013. The company cited increased competition from digital and on-demand entertainment Dish acquired Blockbuster in April 2011 for US$320 million. At the time, it announced that it...

AT&T and Verizon have quietly been building a strong TV business. In fact, I read last week that where they offer service, they have almost the same market share as the cable television company leaders like Comcast, Time Warner and Cox. That's an incredible accomplishment. Telecom is changing. If you pull the camera back, the entire communicatio...

Ubuntu's latest desktop OS release, Ubuntu 13.10, is more of a plain-Jane release than its "Saucy Salamander" nickname might otherwise suggest.This release comes six months after the Raring Ringtail release, which was also a bit of a yawner in terms of offering any must-have-the-upgrade enthusiasm. Like the last release, Ubuntu 13.10 also does not...

Social media are becoming an ever-increasing part of marketing. If you've been finding one-user, consumer-oriented clients for Twitter and Facebook cumbersome for your business, it may well be time to move over to a social media management tool like Hootsuite These kinds of tools allow you to manage more than one social network; schedule posts like...

Los Angeles is moving forward with a plan to establish a high-speed fiber network across the entire city, according to a report from Ars Technica. Beginning next month, the Los Angeles Information Technology Agency will issue a request for proposals to bring access to a high-speed fiber network to every residence, business and government entity in...

Amazon on Wednesday announced a new program that will enable independent bookshops and other small retailers to earn extra money by selling Kindle devices and accessories Dubbed "Amazon Source," the program gives retailers a discount on Kindles and accessories for resale as well as 10 percent of the revenue from every Kindle book purchased on the d...

Few if any countries have been more outspoken, incredulous and chest-thumping over U.S. spying revelations than Brazil Last summer, after Edward Snowden's leaks had made the rounds, Brazilian lawmakers proposed a law that would require e-businesses to store data in Brazil (and only Brazil). Then, after it was revealed that the U.S. had spied on Br...

Mammoth tomes about high-tech entrepreneurs with a secretive bent are almost a sure bet to stir up a hornet's nest of controversy when they're published. That's certainly been the case with Brad Stone's The Everything Store about CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon. The twist here is that the critic in the point position for Amazon is Bezos's wife, MacKenzie...

T-Mobile U.S. ended its third quarter of 2013 with roughly a million more customers than it had at the end of the preceding quarter, it announced in an earnings report on Tuesday Included among those new customers were 648,000 branded postpaid net customers for the quarter. T-Mobile now counts 45 million people as its customer base....

The troubled launch of HealthCare.gov has been costly for President Obama and Democratic supporters of the entire Affordable Care Act program, also known as "Obamacare." The difficulties surrounding the launch have spurred broader criticism about the federal government's management of major IT deployments Estimates of the government's financial inv...

Insecurity and the Internet of Things, Part 1: Data, Data Everywhere In early September, the United States Federal Trade Commission's first action involving security and the Internet of Things came to fruition. The commission came to a settlement with Trendnet, which makes Internet-connected video cameras, over the firm's lax security practices....

Activision on Tuesday released Call of Duty: Ghosts for the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii U and PC. The game will be released later this month for the upcoming PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Ghosts is the latest arrival in the popular first-person franchise, which has generated billions of dollars in sales and has been an annual ...

Around a fifth of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way are orbited by Earth-sized planets capable of sustaining life, suggests a study of data obtained by NASA's Kepler spacecraft and the W. M. Keck Observatory Those planets -- between Earth-sized and twice as large -- are orbiting their stars in the so-called habitable zone -- that is, the range of...

Google on Monday introduced a new social media feature called Helpouts, a real-time channel that's designed to let businesses and individuals give and get help over live video Powered by Google's Hangouts video chat platform, Helpouts can be used to offer instruction in a wide range of areas, from fixing a garage door to removing a computer virus t...

Google's Niantic Labs on Monday announced that it was lifting the invitation-only restriction on its augmented reality game Ingress. The game launched in beta about a year ago, and interested players needed an invitation code to participate. Now all Android users can download the free massively multiplayer game from Google Play....

Tesco, a UK-based supermarket giant, is installing hundreds of screens that will scan shoppers' faces while they wait in line at its gas stations. The information gathered from the shoppers will then be dished to advertisers Tesco struck a deal with Amscreen, which makes OptimEyes, a system that works by using a camera and TV-style screen. The came...

IBM's recent Enterprise 2013 conference in Orlando, Fla., was the Systems and Technology Group's inaugural event focusing on high-end business solutions. So it was no surprise that the CIOs, partners and IT practitioners -- data center admins and managers -- who work with IBM's System z mainframe and Power Systems platforms were thick on the ground.

Mobile CRM Design, Part 1: Different Devices, Different Rules Now that mobile app developers have the basics of user-friendly design down, we've moved into the m-commerce industrial age, according to Pradeep U.N., Symphony Teleca's vice president and global head of design and innovation. [*Correction - Nov. 12, 2013]...

We've looked at personal tracking products before, including stolen-phone locators and a breadcrumb-tracking, mugging-alarm combo for Google's Android mobile operating system Where some of these kinds of products have disappointed is that they have needed daily user intervention to make them functional. The personal attack alarm required turning on...