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It appears Lenovo is getting ready to bring smartphones to the U.S. market. After acquiring the IBM Thinkpad line of computers, this company has gone from virtually unknown in the United States to one of the heavy hitters. Now Lenovo is entering the smartphone business. Will it be successful? In China, Lenovo is a strong brand name. Since its acqu...

One of the advantages of carrying a smartphone is that it's an all-arounder, and one of its killer features is that it can function as a personal media player. It's functionality that an iPod or MP3 player would have provided a few years ago -- and Sony Walkman before that. The principal difference between a smartphone and a classic MP3 player is ...

Amazon announced this week that it has ordered five original television series, including two live-action comedies and three children's shows. ...

Seven months and countless complaints after Microsoft launched Windows 8, it has announced that Windows 8.1, aka "Blue," will restore the much-missed Start button Microsoft also will deliver a host of new features and functionality in Blue, and make it easier for people to navigate the operating system using a mouse and a keyboard....

Fanhattan unveiled its new Fan TV set-top system at D11 on Thursday. It aims to streamline the television and digital entertainment experience by integrating several media platforms into a single streaming box ...

Google unveiled a new Gmail design to give users more organizational control over a cluttered in-box The revamped in-box is an option; users who like the approach can separate their email into four tabs: primary, promotions, social and updates....

Mary Meeker, aka the "Queen of the Internet" and one of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' star analysts, has issued her latest report on Internet trends. The 117-slide presentation is more of an opus than a typical report, providing a wealth of data on current digital trends and the direction they are heading. Mobile and social media play a domina...

SoftBank has reached a national security agreement with U.S. authorities, perhaps clearing the way for the Japanese company to purchase Sprint Nextel U.S. officials have expressed concerns about potential ties between SoftBank and Chinese telecommunications firms like Huawei.

Amazon on Tuesday announced a feature that lets users access websites using their Amazon account information. The goal of Login with Amazon is to reduce sign-in friction by providing secure credentials to websites, apps, games and other online access points on the Web, as well as on Android and iOS devices ...

Siebel saved my life. Not really but sort of. By the early 1990s, I had been selling software for what seemed like a lifetime and dealing with the typical frustrations of life in sales. There weren't enough leads, and there was always more work to do than you could squeeze into a day. I kept records on legal pads and file folders, and I had a Rolodex that I would never update because it was way too much work. And then there was forecasting. ...

Facebook is enmeshed in yet another brouhaha over its advertising policies, but this time it's not the users making a fuss -- it's the advertisers Major clients such as Nissan and Nationwide recently pulled the plug on their Facebook campaigns after their ads showed up next to objectionable, sometimes downright hateful, content.

Chrome Experiments has debuted two very innovative games this week, suggesting that Google might be in play to break into the casual game market, even taking on the likes of Nintendo and other portable game developers. At first glance that might be a valid assumption, but the shortcomings of these offerings suggest Google might have something different in mind.

Chinese hackers were accused of stealing the designs for more than two dozen U.S. military weapons systems in a report appearing Monday in The Washington Post The system designs pinched by the hackers were for systems critical to the country's missile defenses and its combat aircraft and war ships, the paper said....

Well, President Obama will definitely have something to talk about Beijing announced that China will conduct its first "digital war games," a proclamation that will likely do nothing to allay United States concerns about China's propensity for hacking and cyberespionage....

Making money from accessing the vast amounts of information collected by the U.S. government has been the basis for many commercial enterprises. The widespread use of Census Bureau data alone has been a great business resource for decades -- with a relatively new twist as a component of Google Maps Now the U.S. government has undertaken a major ef...

I was recently discussing Watson -- the IBM super silicon brain that won Jeopardy! -- with a reporter writing an article. Around the same time, I was also looking into Google Glass, the wearable computer that enables people to record what they see and to see what they're recording through a teeny tiny screen mounted on a frame over their eyebrows. It's all very Buck Rogers or Dick Tracy or Special Forces -- or just so last week, depending on your worldview...

The Exaile music player hits a high note as a solid performer with trimmed-down features that make it elegant yet easy to use....

The days of reliance on real estate agents to tell us which homes are available are long gone. The same raw data that the agents used to have an exclusive on is now fed to anyone who wants it. Now all you have to do is choose your source. Here's a look at the top five real estate apps in the Chrome environment....

Samsung piqued media interest this week with an invitation to a June 20 event in London, where it is expected tounveil its latest Galaxy smartphones and tablets, along with new entrants in its ATIV lineup of Windows devices In appears Samsung is hedging its bets and covering the bases with both Android and Windows-based devices. What exactly the li...

Tablets continue to gain momentum in the worldwide marketplace. The category is forecast to grow nearly 60 percent, surpassing laptop shipments this year and all PC categories by 2015, according to two reports released Tuesday by IDC. Lower prices and smaller screen sizes are among the drivers for increased shipments and the resulting sales. The m...