Latest stories · Page 181

Pandora has been fighting tooth and nail against potential songwriting royalty increases, and it appears that this tenacity is largely paying off. A court has ruled that the streaming radio service should pay the same 1.85 percent royalty rate that it has paid for years, resisting both Pandora&#8217

For a brief moment, watching movies via BitTorrent was just as easy as watching something on your Netflix queue. The app Popcorn Time came out of nowhere a week ago with a slick interface that boiled down the messy torrenting experience into something simple. All you had to do was download the free

Late this week, Canadian Bitcoin holders filed a class-action suit against defunct online Bitcoin exchange MtGox. The suit named MtGox, its affiliates, and its two major shareholders, Mark Karpeles and Jed McCaleb, as well as Japan’s second largest bank, Mizuho Bank, where MtGox kept an accoun

Since Hugo Barra left Google for Xiaomi last year, everyone has had their eye on Xiaomi to see what they are up to. And they know it. It’s been rumored for a while that the OEM would be producing a 5.5-inch phablet known as the Redmi Note. Now just because it has the word “Note” […]

Produced and directed by Rob Thomas, “Veronica Mars” happens to be the first movie made by the fans themselves. The movie, which is based on the critically acclaimed ‘Veronica Mars’ TV series, hit the theaters on March 14, 2014. Interestingly, the movie has been released just 366 days after Rob Thom

It is almost axiomatic in Washington, that the bureaucracy buries news of which it is not proud with a release late in the day on a Friday afternoon. Though it is a bit harsh to say so, one suspects that the Department of Commerce felt that way about its announcement yesterday that the United States

Sony Canada raised the PS4 console price from $399.99 to $449.99, with similar increases applied to peripherals and first-party games. Market watchers should have seen it coming. At current exchange rates, $399 Canadian is only $359 USD, so technically Canadians who managed to get their hands on the

PayPal took quite a bit of criticism over the past year for its handling of crowd-funded projects. The situation would often go something like this: A person or team would set up a crowd-funded project or campaign on one of the various sites that offers such a service and it would use PayPal as the

Last week, everything was very different in the mobile landscape in France. France’sdisruptive telecom company Free was about to make the best strategic move I had ever seen. Yet, it all fell apart today. While it’s a boring industry, the acquisition of SFR is a story of secret agreements and betray

International Business Machines Corp has not relinquished its customers’ data to the U.S. government and would challenge any orders to do so, the company said in a blog post on Friday. The post by the world’s largest technology service provider is the latest backlash by a tech company ag

When Edward Snowden starts his official fanclub, he shouldn’t expect Bill Gates to sign up. The richest man in the world isn’t much of a fan at all, it turns out. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gates outlined his view of Snowden in the context of his methods, and privacy itself. Answering the q

A recent Statista survey of more than 3,000 smartphone owners asked them whether they planned to stick with their current brand the next time they bought a new device. Unsurprisingly Apple fans were the most loyal, as 76% said they planned to stick with the iPhone. Samsung came in second place, with

Passwords are the bane of every computer, mobile phone and internet user’s existence. We need them for pretty much everything: for banking, for social media, and for accessing our data. Using the same password for everything is not only a security issue, but may not even be possible, thanks to diffe

Samsung has unveiled a trio of new tools to help blind people make their way through the world with its Galaxy Core Advance smartphone. The three accessibility tools – Ultrasonic Cover, Optical Scan Stand and Voice Label – are designed to be affordable add-ons for the Core Advance.&

Just because the data costs come at a premium doesn’t mean the accompanying 4G-ready mobile hardware has to, too. It appears EE is looking to use this principle to attract further customers to its super-fast network, with Engadget reporting that the network has its own cheap-as-chips LTE hands

Several apps out there can turn your smartphone into a smart remote control with the help of some other hardware. One of those apps is the Peel Smart Remote app. Peel has announced some interesting new milestones for the application. Peel announced this week that the Smart Remote app has passed 50 m

Neil Young wants to start a revolution against the MP3, against the CD, poorly made vinyl, and poor audio quality in general. He wants people to hear the music the way it was made. So at SXSW, Young introduced Pono. In Hawaiian, the word means righteous or goodness. For the world of sound it’s

Google will see a surge in mobile advertising revenue in 2014 even as revenue from desktop web ads continues to decline, according to a new report from research firm eMarketer. eMarketer estimates that globally, Google’s total net advertising revenue will jump 14 percent to $43.5 billion in 20

Australian startup Friends for Hire lets friendless people hire other people to be their friend. The service is about to launch on March 22, according to iT Wire Co-founder Josh Blundell described the site to Business Insider: “It’s definitely not a dating website. It’s for people

The price of an Amazon Prime membership was raised Thursday, but only half as much as the online retailer had said it was considering a month ago. Amazon announced the annual membership will now cost $99 a year, up from $79. A student membership will cost $49 annually. In February, Amazon said it wa

Just like Apple does with previous-generation iPhones when new models arrives, HTC will also keep the previous flagship around once the All New HTC One arrives, Phones Review has learned. Apparently a source “close to a popular mobile phone retail chain” in the U.K. has seen the new model and has al

The prevailing skepticism about tech IPOs is that frothy valuations sans profits are contributing to a bubble. Yet King Digital Entertainment, maker of the highly addictive game Candy Crush Saga is one of the few big mobile companies posting hefty revenues and profits ahead of its own IPO. While riv

Making what could be the first inroads into mainstream retail for solar energy, the Silicon Valley’s leading solar power provider is now offering its services at Best Buy stores. Yes, that’s right — those once-thought-defunct, big-box electronics stores are, as of Wednesday, home to SolarCity, the n

Mozilla says that thanks to the upcoming Unreal Engine 4 from Epic, the Web is significantly closer to the goal of Web-based games that rock at the speed of native code. Just in time for the annual Game Developers Conference to be held in San Francisco next week, the joint Mozilla and Epic project d

Starbucks has unveiled a new iPhone app that will allow customers to tip from their smartphone, a move that flexes the coffee giant’s digital muscle and could help line baristas’ pockets with money from the millions who use mobile devices to pay for their lattes. Right now all tipping at Starbucks i

If you do a lot of video editing, you may be familiar with Red Giant, maker of many useful post-production tools and plugins. Now you can access its offerings through a new subscription service called Universe, mirroring what Adobe did with Creative Cloud. Instead of purchasing individual licences f

Opera Mini, which so happens to be the browser version that casts a glance at older devices which happen to still run on Java-based platforms, has been given an update to bump up the version number to version 8. This is not just new wine in an old wineskin, but rather, it will boast of a restyled [&

It might look like a quirky plastic model of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, but this model is in fact a 3D ‘acoustic cloak’, created using just a few perforated sheets of plastic. The device reroutes sound waves to create the impression that both the cloak and anything beneath it are not t

Think you can find Earth-threatening asteroids faster than NASA? Then there is a contest designed just for you: the space agency is calling for citizen scientists to find new and improved ways to track down space rocks. And this isn’t just for the good of all mankind, there’s $35,000 in

Canonical tried stepping into the smartphone market with the Ubuntu Edge. The crowdfunded smartphone couldn’t raise enough money, so it never saw the light of day. The company has been focusing its strengths on bringing Ubuntu to mobile phones. It has partnered up with several OEMs who have committe

It seems oddly poetic that a team of female entrepreneurs is hatching a plot to upend the e-reader industry with a brand new iPhone app called Rooster. And the world of literary fiction is one in desperate need of upending. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2012, less than half of

Alipay, the online payment subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba, and Internet titan Tencent are both set to expand further into the financial sector with the launch of new online credit cards on Tuesday. In a statement sent to the Global Times Tuesday, Alipay said it is joining with China CITIC Ba

Alibaba has agreed to pay $804 million for a majority stake in ChinaVision Media Group, a Hong Kong firm specializing in TV and film production. This could very possibly mean that Alibaba may soon be taking steps to produce content in collaboration with ChinaVision. After all, throughout last year,

It looks like the Chinese really love what HTC has done with the Desire 816. That’s because the new midrange phablet has already seen 450,000 pre-orders in China in just three days. That’s certainly a lot, and the 500,000 threshold should be passed very soon. Because of the great response to the Des

Amazon’s oft-rumored music streaming service will apparently limit how much a subscriber listens to a given song. The online retailer “is hoping” to offer an on-demand service as a perk for Prime subscribers, though limiting playbacks doesn’t sound like much of a perk at all. Amazon and record compa

Hundreds of striking workers at an IBM server factory in China have decided to leave their jobs, disappointed with the U.S. company and the wages they will get once Lenovo takes over the factory. IBM plans to transfer ownership of the Chinese factory, as part of its proposal to sell its x86 server b

Early-stage mobile payments app Flypay has announced it has closed £1m from venture capital firm Entreé Capital to support its roll out across the UK. London-based Flypay is a free-to-use app which claims to end the “10 minute restaurant bill chase” by making it easier and quicker to pay for a bill

The Raspberry Pi developer board has turned out to be a very popular device for DIY users. The Pi can be used for just about any project that the user can think up. Element 14 has announced that it has a new accessory for the Raspberry Pi available in the form of a new Wolfson audio card. The audio

Intel could soon bring to market a faster version of its Thunderbolt connector technology with a throughput of 50Gbps, but the company is biding its time until there is a need for faster connectors. Thunderbolt technology connects computers to peripherals like external hard drives at much faster spe

A large fire at a key South Korean factory is feared to put a dent on the production quantity and schedule of the Galaxy S5. The fire, which lasted six hours and required 300 firefighters to put out, started around 7 AM. The factory, which is located in Anseong, South Korea, is one of Samsung’