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Cellphones have become a primary way for people in the U.S. to access the Web, according to a recent survey released by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project Seventeen percent of of cellphone owners surveyed said they surfed the Web primarily with their phones rather than computers. Using their phones was a matter of convenien...

Zynga made a number of announcements at its Unleashed event in San Francisco Tuesday, most of them aimed at the same goal: making its services "stickier" to its players "Social games have become a crowded marketplace," Scott Steinberg , digital game consultant and principal in TechSavvyGlobal.com, told TechNewsWorld. "It's hard to sustain interest ...

Twisted infrared light beams have propelled wireless data transmission to a dazzling 2.56 terabits per second via a system developed by a multinational team of researchers led by the Optical Communications Laboratory at the University of Southern California. The process, called "orbital angular momentum" (OAM) multiplexing, essentially twists beam...

A neural network built over the years by researchers from Stanford University and Google has managed to teach itself to recognize faces and cats The network consists of 16,000 processors on a cluster of 1,000 computers. After being exposed to 10 million images downloaded from the Internet, the network software learned to recognize human and cat fac...

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., reportedly has had a change of heart over splitting his US$50 billion media enterprise in two and is willing to give the idea serious consideration. The company has confirmed news reports that it is mulling the pros and cons of a split. If it proceeds, it will most likely separate the publishing oper...

I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman. Next year it will be called "E2 Social" and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara, which will become known as "E2 Innovate." There's good symmetry here. I can't think of another purely social show or one focused on innovation. Most shows today are vendor-sponsored, which is good but different...

7-Zip and p7Zip belong to a family of file compression utilities that are among the best available for Linux/Unix. So you would think that the development communities would offer to Linux users what is available in similar compression apps on the Windows and Mac platforms. Think again!...

When Microsoft announced recently that Internet Explorer 10 will have its Do Not Track (DNT) feature turned on by default, it seemed those concerned about online privacy would hail the move as a step in the right direction Consumer advocates and other groups had been agitating for such a feature for some time. They eventually banded together to urg...

Vizio on Tuesday announced the release of its Co-Star Stream Player set-top box, which includes Google TV and the OnLive gaming service. The company known for affordable televisions first revealed the device at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in January While this is the company's first foray into set-top box territory, it could also prove t...

For every step Facebook takes toward improving consumer privacy and information control, it seems to take about five giant steps back. The latest example is the unilateral change it made to users' listed email addresses: It converted them to @facebook.com, and messages now go to the Facebook email in-box rather than to their original destinations. Other listed email addresses are now hidden...

Facebook rolled out a new mobile social discovery tool recently, only to deactivate it hours later and pull it from its iOS and Android apps The service, which Facebook called "Find Friends Nearby," was designed to help Facebook users find other users who were in the same vicinity. Before the company disabled the app, users could visit a URL on the...

With every passing week, reports on box-office receipts come with the same anxiety as industry watchers, film companies, content owners and theater managers assess if the current year will meet or exceed the previous one. Successes like "The Hunger Games" are tempered by disappointments like "John Carter," and embedded within each lackluster debut is the hope of compensatory revenues through later release windows, including cable, streaming, VOD, DVD/Blu-ray, and now "cloud copies."

Microsoft has agreed to pay an eyebrow-raising US$1.2 billion in cash for the startup Yammer, presumably in the expectation that it will gain a much needed boost in social media expertise In the immediate term, Yammer will remain a standalone service for its 5-million-plus customer base. Microsoft will also pair the application with complementary o...

The month of June has not been kind to Microsoft hardware partners. Last week, Redmond revealed that it's getting into the Windows tablet game with the introduction of the Surface, meaning it will compete for sales with its own allies.

To test the 1-gigapixel AWARE-2 camera his team developed, David Brady, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, took it out to Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in eastern North Carolina and took a few snapshots of tundra swans "Normally, with bird photography you're rushing to point the camera in the right directi...

Bowing to fan outrage over the controversial ending of "Mass Effect 3" earlier this year, BioWare is releasing an "extended cut" version of the last game in the space epic trilogy ...

Research In Motion could be looking to offload its BlackBerry handset business to survive. The company's executives are considering selling the handset-manufacturing business or even a stake in the whole company, according to numerous press reports over the weekend RIM had hired JPMorgan Chase and RBC Capital Markets to help evaluate the company's ...

Google will unveil a 7-inch tablet based on the Nvidia quad-core Tegra 3 processor and running Android 4.1, aka "Jelly Bean," at the Google I/O developers conference this week, according to Gizmodo Australia The device will reportedly be dubbed the "Nexus 7" and be built by Asus....

Facebook recently started running ads on Zynga's website, one of several moves the social network has made recently to expand its advertising reach Some Zynga users now see Facebook's Sponsored Stories ads, which display certain brands or businesses that those users' Facebook friends have "liked." Users log into Zynga with their Facebook accounts, ...

Microsoft announced its Surface tablet just last week, and already the whispers have begun. It's going to be WiFi-only, some rumors say. Its battery isn't quite as good as the iPad's, according to others. Price has also been subject to speculation, and one report has indicated Redmond will price the device between US$600 and $1,000....