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Tired of being on the go and having to search for an outlet you can use to recharge your phone? If researchers at Nokia and at the Queen Mary University of London are successful in their new joint endeavor, you might never have to think of hugging the wall while charging your phone ever again. [&hel

The State of Wyoming is closing its data centers and moving all of its data to the cloud, according to a report, in one of the biggest shifts by a state to offload its computing resources. According to the report, from InfoWorld, Wyoming has begun shifting all of its data to the cloud, to things [&h

Intel has scooped up the LSI Axxia networking chip business from Avago Technologies for $650 million in cash. Intel announced the acquisition on Wednesday, which sees it acquire Axxia Networking Business’ ARM and PowerPC-based processors destined for enterprise and wireless network hardware. I

In an announcement at this year’s Computex, Newegg said that it would be expanding to six new markets by the end of June, though this was changed to August later on. The e-tailer, known for offering PC hardware components at attractive prices, is now available in India, Ireland, Netherlands, N

Sony is hoping to boost digital record sales with a new iPhone app that offers a discounted album every 24 hours. Prices are slashed by as much as 70 percent in the Album of the Day app, and all purchases are made through iTunes. “Every 24 hours, Album of the Day offers you one album […]

It seems Comcast has a new method of dealing with customers who want out. YouTube user Aaron Spain uploaded a video on Monday titled “Comcast put me on hold until they closed,” which was quickly picked up by Reddit. After several no-shows by Comcast’s technicians to set up service

More than a year after Edward Snowden first spilled the beans on the NSA’s digital surveillance practices, you wouldn’t think that he had much left to reveal. In an interview with Wired, however, the former spy has revealed that the agency is building an autonomous online defense system

Make way for more content coming to Pinterest: today the platform is adding Vevo music videos, which you can search for, share, and watch on Pinterest itself, on your own Pinboards, those of your friends’ or on Vevo’s. The companies are not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, a spokesperon f

Tired of the Uber and Lyft drama? There’s another taxi app you should be paying attention to. GetTaxi, also known as Gett, just announced a big $150M funding round, reports Israeli news site Globes. The announcement comes two months after competing service Uber raised $1.2 billion in funding. Taxi h

If you want to get more women involved in your community, throwing the equivalent of a sketchy online beauty contest and labeling it “chivalry” probably isn’t the way to do it. Fledgling smartphone maker OnePlus learned that lesson this morning. Just hours after launching a contest that encouraged w

Electric Imp, a startup that builds Wi-Fi modules and cloud for connecting devices has raised $15 million in Series B financing from a slew of investors, including Chinese contract manufacturer, Foxconn. Other backers include PTI Ventures, Rampart Capital, and returning investors Redpoint Ventures a

Siri is a lot of things to a lot of people, but we don’t think we’ve ever seen it as a potential accomplice to murder before. 9to5Mac has a nice roundup of news surrounding the trial of a Florida man whom prosecutors are alleging murdered his roommate and then asked Siri for some advice on […

Samsung is ditching plastic in favor of metal on its new smartphone, abandoning what some critics have called a cheap aesthetic. The tech company’s new high-end smartphone, the Galaxy Alpha, will go on sale in September. It has a metal frame on the four edges of the phone, Samsung said Wednesday, an

AdStage, a startup whose co-founder and CEO Sahil Jain said he plans on “bringing a real SaaS model to the ad tech space,” is announcing that it has raised a $6.25 million Series A. The company debuted at last year’s Launch conference, promising customers an easy way to create ads that run across Go

Amazon on Wednesday unveiled a new mobile-payment service that could bring the online retail giant into local businesses and threaten rival companies like Square and eBay’s PayPal. Amazon Local Register would allow local businesses to accept credit and debit card transactions from a smartphone

As Spotify reportedly inches closer to an IPO, the company continues to build out its presence as an e-commerce platform for artists to market themselves and generate revenue beyond basic music royalties. Today, it is turning on an integration and partnership with BandPage, a company that lets music

Things are really looking up for mobile security player Lookout. Lookout, based in San Francisco, has raised $150 million from a bevy of well known investors, it announced Wednesday, including lead T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Goldman Sachs, and Bezos Expeditions. Lookout’s W

This is a floating Bluetooth speaker. It’s suspended above its base thanks to an electromagnet and can play music from any Bluetooth source. It’s called the Om One. It also looks really cool. If you want one of your own, Om Audio is launching a crowdfunding campaign at its website where

Siri was incredibly cool when it first came on the iPhone 4s out back in 2011 but times have changed and our expectations are much higher for what a digital personal assistant can do for us. Wired has a huge in-depth new report on a startup called Viv Labs, which was cofounded by three engineers [&h

Yahoo has picked up a dizzying number of startups since its Tumblr acquisition in May 2013, and today it added one more with Zofari. The startup currently offers an Android and iOS app that helps you find new spots to explore. Part of the experience is what Zofari describes as “Pandora for places,”

Devices known as Stingrays, which can secretly track and record phone users by mimicking cell phone towers, have been a hot topic in law enforcement and civil liberties circles for some time. Now, the FCC is set to take a closer look at who is using them. In a letter reported Monday by the Washingto

EverString, a big data startup that helps companies identify prospective sales leads and new clients though predictive analytics, has raised $12 million in a series A funding round. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which also included existing investors Sequoia Capital and IDG Ventures. Wh

You know those high-speed cameras used to film mesmerizing ultra slo-mo videos? They’re downright slow compared to this one developed by researchers from The University of Tokyo and Keio University in Japan. The 12-man science team has just revealed an extremely speedy camera that can take pic

Pay-per-use cellphone plans are sometimes befuddling — the rates can change depending on whether you’re calling or texting, or how much cash you put on your account. T-Mobile thinks it can end this confusion with its new, much simpler Pay as You Go plan. As long as you plunk down at leas

The White House has hired a team of digital experts to overhaul US government websites and infrastructure in order to avoid future disasters similar to the HealthCare.gov scheme. The US government announced the creation of the team dubbed the “US Digital Service” on Monday, according to

HTC is bringing the One M8’s more affordable sibling, the Desire family of smartphones, to the US. The HTC Desire 816 will debut on Virgin Mobile on Tuesday for $299 without a contract. HTC will sell the Desire 610 and Desire 816 on its own website. The company also teased more Desire smartpho

The California state Senate on Monday passed a bill crafted to protect against smartphone theft by requiring manufacturers turn on a “kill switch” when a device is first activated, something Apple currently employs in iOS as an opt-in feature. California’s legislative push to requi

In addition to the standard Galaxy Note 4 model that it’s expected to unveil next month, Samsung may also unveil a special version of the Note 4 that will supposedly feature a wraparound display that we’ve read about in leaks and patent applications. And instead of Galaxy Note 4, Samsung may end up

A crew of space enthusiasts, including a former NASA employee, used their knowledge of satellite technology along with some spare parts to control an abandoned NASA satellite. It’s the perfect maker project with Kickstarter money providing the funding, eBay as the source of parts, an old MacBo

Tougher EU data protection rules are planned for adoption late this year or early next. Yet as things stand an overwhelming majority of cloud providers would foul of one or another of the new measures. The General Data Protection Regulation, likely to be enforced from 2016 or 2017, replaces the 1995

Do you think that Samsung might have actually overstretched themselves when it comes to rolling out new smartphones that will cater to just about every single user group or budget? Apparently, the Tizen-powered handset that saw 17 different SKUs just a couple of months ago, has been delayed yet agai

Two Iowa heavyweight investors have backed an Iowa City startup that provides virtual pharmacy services. TelePharm CEO Roby Miller told The Des Moines Register that Iowa entrepreneurship icon John Pappajohn and Iowa state Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter have invested a total of $2.5 milli

Yahoo’s Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos told Black Hat attendees last week that the company would be rolling out end-to-end encryption for email some time in 2015. The search company is taking a similar approach to Google to tackle enhanced security issues for communications, ev

BlackBerry has largely played it safe this year. It didn’t try to bounce back in the device market early on when it was still trying to fix its financial woes. Instead the company teamed up with Foxconn to release a low-end device aimed squarely at emerging markets. Thus the BlackBerry Z3 was born a

Earlier this year we started hearing rumors that Samsung is working on a device with a metal body. The company has always stuck with plastic for its flagship Galaxy S series and this rumor led many to believe that perhaps this year the company might stray from tradition. It did not and then we start

This might raise a few chuckles over at BlackBerry. Recently both companies took swings at each other in a bid to call out each other’s claims on security offered by their mobile devices. BlackBerry describes itself as a market leader in security and boasts many certifications from government agenci

LG has confirmed that it has plans to provide an official bootloader unlocking solution for those who wish to install custom ROMs and other third-party tweaks on their LG smartphones and tablets. The company warns, however, that “it will take some time.” Some smartphone manufacturers offer a small n

For the past couple of months now there have been rumors about a new BlackBerry Blend feature that will supposedly make its debut with BB OS 10.3. Rumor has it that the BlackBerry OS 10.3 gold candidate release is only a few days away which would then be followed by the public release of this [&hell

In mid-June, the U.S. government relaxed its previously strict rules on high-definition satellite imaging, allowing mapping services like Google Maps to scale up to a higher resolution. DigitalGlobe led the charge in changing the U.S. ruling in part because of its upcoming Worldview-3 satellite, whi

Earlier this week, Finland’s F-Secure looked into claims that Xiaomi was secretly sending data from its MIUI-powered phones back to its servers, and it turned out to be true. Despite having not added any cloud accounts, F-Secure’s brand new Redmi 1s, Xiaomi’s budget smartphone, sti