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Reports that Google is working on special glasses that will stream information to a display in one lens in real time have once again surfaced The glasses will hit retail shelves by the end of the year, The New York Times reported....

Sony officially launched its PlayStation Vita handheld gaming console in the United States on Wednesday, a week after it was made available online in a premium bundle ...

Some developers are making more money by showcasing their wares in Amazon's Appstore instead of Google's Android Market, according to research from Distimo. The mobile analytics firm looked at the 110 apps available in both online stores that generated at least US$200 per day in revenue during the last week of January. Of those, 42 earned more mon...

Research In Motion has released its first update for the BlackBerry PlayBook's operating system. The debut of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 adds -- finally -- some essential features to the tablet, such as a native email client, calendar and contact functionality.

I spent the best part of last week cruising up and down Silicon Valley, checking in with customers and would-be clients. The consensus from this non-scientific survey is that business is better than OK, and most people are expecting this year to be the best in a while. Of course, there is a cloud -- literal and figuratively -- to go with that silver lining. After all, we're bouncing off a long fall to what's still a soft bottom...

If you spend endless hours at a keyboard crunching words, avoiding distractions is essential. Sometimes, the worst offender in causing distractions comes from all the bells and whistles in the word processor itself. That is where WordGrinder comes to the rescue....

Quite a lot has been written about the importance of due-diligence in a cloud environment. Sometimes the importance of security and compliance-related vetting in the cloud is easy to justify, like when you're evaluating an off-premises public cloud hosted at a new service provider. Other times, executives might take some convincing, like when you're talking about an internally maintained private cloud, before they see the value. ...

The United States National Security Agency has cautioned that the Anonymous hacker community might be able to cause a limited power outage through a cyberattack, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has warned of the potential attack during meetings at the White House and in other private sessions, acco...

Barnes & Noble released a new Nook Tablet Tuesday, shaving US$50 off the price and reducing the storage by half. The new price, $199, matches Amazon's Kindle Fire. The new Nook emulates the Fire on a number of fronts -- price and 8 GB storage. The new Nook comes with a 1 GHz dual-core processor and a slot for a microSD card that will hold up to 32 GB.

Google is tracking users of the Internet Explorer Web browser without their knowledge, Microsoft has asserted After news emerged last week that Google had bypassed the privacy settings of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft researchers began looking into whether the search giant was also playing fast and loose with IE's settings....

The U.S. Department of Transportation has proposed guidelines that advise automakers to disable certain in-vehicle electronic features. The DOT wants to crack down on any action that requires drivers to give the task more than a two-second single glance, or 20 seconds of total glance time, to control The suggestions encouraged automakers to make su...

Avaya has provided a sneak preview of several healthcare IT-based mobile applications it will be rolling out later this year at the 2012 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition now under way in Las Vegas. These include Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant, Avaya Flare Communicator for iPad, and other collaborative service offerings in telehealth and social media...

The Obama administration's program to modernize federal information technology operations is now in its second year, and the momentum for reform is continuing at a high level. "We are seizing on the power of 21st century technology to consolidate data centers and moving to lightweight, shareable technologies, such as cloud computing, while also di...

Canonical expects to start rolling out the first phase of Ubuntu's new heads-up display (HUD) in the April release of Ubuntu 12.04. But HUD will supplement Unity, Ubuntu's default desktop interface introduced last year, rather than fully replace it The move to radically change the desktop's default interface is being made out of necessity, accordin...

Google's privacy practices came under fire again last week for undermining the privacy practices of someone else. Namely, Apple Apple is one of the few browser makers that turns off by default a website's ability to push third-party cookies to a Web surfer....

Yelp, the online local review service, expects to sell 7.15 million shares in its IPO, at US$12 to $14 each. The total potential take is $100 million. The company will list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "YELP." Yelp's price target values the company at roughly $778 million, about nine times last year's sales. That c...

Nimble has introduced a new Software as a Service social CRM platform designed to enable social engagement. Nimble 2.0 empowers companies to get closer to their customers through listening and engagement, helping them turn their social communities into customers for life, according to the company. Features include social discovery, improved usability and marketing integration...

Last week, Cisco raised an objection to the Microsoft acquisition of Skype, saying it would hurt video conferencing interoperability -- even though, in this space, you could argue Cisco is not the poster child for interoperability. Coincidently, I met with the CEO of LifeSize last Thursday, and he saw this Microsoft acquisition as a huge opportunity. LifeSize is the poster child for video-conferencing interoperability. ...

These days, cybercriminals are successfully circumventing advanced security controls with the precision of a sniper. In the crosshairs are banks, financial institutions, governments and enterprises. In a recent Gartner survey, 76 U.S. banks indicated that malware-based attacks were a growing problem and that fraudsters were able to defeat defenses such as advanced profiling systems, risk-based authentication and even most strong authentication methods...

The hacker group Anonymous has struck again -- this time taking down the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's consumer protection business center website as well as one touting National Consumer Protection Week. In their place was a German language video mocking ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement....