Latest stories · Page 197

While Oculus Rift may be the biggest name in virtual reality right now, Sony may take over the spotlight at CES next year. Sony’s own virtual reality headset was rumored to show up at the Tokyo Game Show 2013 but was never seen. Now, fueled by tweets from Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida, rumors are begi

The popular 60-watt and 40-watt incandescent light bulbs will stop being produced in the U.S. on the first day of 2014. This means that once suppliers run out of stock for those light bulbs, consumers will be forced to purchase more energy-efficient alternatives. The problem is that only 40% of cons

In order to compete with Samsung, its rival South Korean company, LG is equipping its newest flagship phone, the G3, with a 1440×2560 quad HD display which is a fancy name for 2K resolution. While the size of the G3’s screen is unknown, it’s rumored to have a 16-megapixel rear camer

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile phone operator, has been pressuring Samsung to get it’s new mobile operating system up and running by January 2014. Today, a smartphone running Samsung’s mobile OS, called Tizen, was spotted in an FCC filing after previously making an appearance o

Sales of the PS Vita actually rose during the PS4’s launch week in the UK. The numbers state that the Vita’s sales rose by 68% during launch week, and rose again by an additional 65% in the following week. According to Sony’s Senior Product Manager, Ben Law, Vita sales are apparently seeing strong w

Hulu will pass the $1 billion mark in revenue for 2013, marking an increase of nearly one-third over its 2012 revenues. This according to a post last week on Hulu’s official blog. Since 2010, the television and movie-streaming service’s revenue has more than tripled, and revenues are up

Security firm RSA has denied it entered into a contract that it knew would give the NSA a backdoor into its BSAFE security system. Last week,it was claimed that the NSA paid RSA $10 million to make an algorithm called “Dual EC DRBG” the preferred, or default system in BSAFE. The security

Dual SIM phones aren’t exactly common in the US. While there are some, most phones sold are of the single SIM variety, and in most cases are typically locked to a particular carrier. However what if you wanted an unlocked phone to take with you to a different country where you could insert a SIM [&h

It was a couple of years ago when companies such as HTC and LG attempted to released 3D smartphones. Safe to say that while both phones were somewhat novel in nature, they did not exactly catch on and become big hits, but it seems that Toshiba thinks that there is still a place for 3D […]

Around 80 percent of new contributions to Wikipedia are abandoned before they’re submitted. The organization thinks a lot of writers get cold feet because, since its creation, Wikipedia has deliberately prevented them from being able to save their articles without publishing them: you either w

In order for e-commerce to work, a region needs to not only have the right infrastructure, but a cohesive network that retailers can use to tap into the various markets. Unfortunately for Southeast Asia, the region lacks both the proper infrastructure and a cohesive network. Even more unfortunate is

In the days since Spotify rolled out free mobile access to its on-demand music service, the company has seen an explosion in user interest. Earlier this week, Spotify saw its app download rate jump 400 percent since announcing its new free mobile streaming feature. The boom in user downloads has led

An unnamed source tells TmoNews that T-Mobile is planning an initiative that would pay off subscribers’ early termination fees if they switch from a rival carrier to T-Mobile. Specifically the source said that the company is planning “a project codenamed ‘Houdini’ which will give switchers up to $35

Ordinary wood logs burning in a fireplace or important piece of cinematic history? Netflix put a twist on the familiar burning fireplace on television and released a trailer to gear up for its availability on the streaming service. The trailer starts out to look like a preview to a dramatic film wit

With a good week or two left before the rumored end of year production schedule,Toshiba has announced the availability of its TransferJet product. This pair of USB and micro-USB sticks is supposed to be Toshiba’s answer to the problem of quick and easy transfer of files between a mobile device and a

Pandora could have some music licensing troubles come January 1st. After a court ruling Wednesday, a number of major music publishers will now be able to broker their own streaming deals with Pandora, rather than having their streaming rights handled in bulk by another company. If one of those big p

China is reportedly trying to acquire the US military’s latest technology, but according to Reuters, it’s not using traditional methods of espionage to do so. The world’s most populous nation has eschewed the use of spies and shadowy double agents, deciding instead to recruit a mas

There will be over 285 million big brand tablets in use by the end of the year, a new report from ABI Research shows, from well-known devices makers including Apple, Samsung and others. Apparently the report does not include cheaper tablets made by less known players in the tablet business, also kno

Drone deliveries could be the next big thing when it comes to courier services. Just ask Amazon with their Amazon Prime Air program, as well as UPS and DHL who are looking into the possible integration with their existing services. How about FedEx who has long claimed to deliver to the world on time

After a year of big localization efforts that saw the service properly arrive for users in the UK, Japan, France, and a number of other markets, Pinterest ha sannounced that those in Russia, Poland, Turkey, Slovakia and the Czech Republic can now access its apps in their local tongue. This takes its

The FBI has been accessing private webcams for years, and even knows how to do so without triggering your device’s warning light, seemingly allowing agents to secretly record targets without them knowing. A new report from The Washington Report reveals hackers are performing similar tricks on unsusp

LG already has a big 77-inch curved Ultra HD OLED TV, but why stop there? The Korean company has just announced that it will be unveiling a 105-inch version at CES next month, but with a twist: this one uses LCD instead of the more expensive OLED, courtesy of improved TFT technology for an even back

Though the newly-titled Pillars of Eternity has yet to debut, Obsidian Entertainment is already working on ideas for its next crowdfunded roleplaying epic. “What I’m trying to figure out is, how could we make something that is more like a Skyrim for PC – forget console for now – with the

The new look of Flickr is ready to surface in other spots on the web, now that Yahoo’s photo site has rolled out a new style for embedded photos. Enabled by default if you’re using the preview UI, the new embed code pulls in extra data like title and the owner’s username as an over

Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, today announced the upcoming limited preview of its China Region for the AWS cloud computing platform. This will be the fourth AWS Region in Asia Pacific and the tenth Region globally. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select

Flipkart’s payment solutions subsidiary, Flipkart Payment Gateway Services, has launched the customer version of its payment gateway PayZippy. This service will allow online consumers to store their card information and use it for making online payments on merchant sites. Consumers will then n

Apple has updated the iBookstore with the ability to gift iBooks on OS X and iOS. As with the App Store, simply click the down arrow next to the price of the book to select “Gift This Book” from the contextual menu. On iOS, you just tap the Share button to bring up the share sheet which

The city and county of San Francisco teamed up with Earthlink and Google nearly a decade ago to build what was planned as a citywide Wi-Fi network, only to see Earthlink retreat from its municipal Wi-Fi business in 2007. The citywide system was never built. Now San Francisco is taking another shot a

Ever published a tweet that you wish you had taken time to edit before putting it out there on the internet? Unfortunately as it stands, there is no way to edit a tweet, save for actually deleting the entire thing, but word has it that Twitter is currently working on an edit function that will [&hel

It was recently reported that Samsung could be preparing a phone called the Samsung Galaxy Core Advance, which is not only the successor to the Galaxy Core from earlier this year, but is also a phone that is targeted towards the elderly or those who might be disabled. Well Samsung has since unveiled

Do you have a stack of tripods at home, or maybe you just have one of them, stuck at the back of the coat closet and generally never getting used. Or maybe you don’t even have a closet to keep it in, and you just keep tripping overt it on the way to make you […]

Scientists have claimed that seawater could be used fuel up US Navy’s ships after they vowed to cut their petroleum use in half by 2015, and produce at least half of its jet fuel using alternative sources by 2020. Analytical chemist Heather Willauer is leading a study at the Naval Research Lab

After becoming the first robot to successfully land on the Moon in nearly 40 years, China’s Yutu rover has started taking photos. The first picture shows the Chang’e-3 lander, its companion on its lunar journey. The probe took a small set of its own photos since landing yesterday, includ

We’ve known for a while now that Amazon breaks even on Kindle Fire HD sales, which means the company begins to turn a profit the second someone boots up a Kindle and buys an item from its ecosystem of apps, music, movies and more. A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners reveals how

After giving 30-day free trials a shot, Amazon has a new master plan to get its Kindle Fire HDX tablets under as many trees as possible this holiday season: a nine-month financing option. You’ll be able to pay just 25 percent of the tablet’s purchase price up front, with another quarter due every ni

Recently there have been a lot of rumors circulating that Verizon is looking to sell its unwanted A-block spectrum to T-Mobile U.S., the fourth largest mobile carrier in the country. It is reported that the deal might be announced as early as next week as the final details are in the process of bein

Last week quite a lot of Yahoo Mail users started complaining about issues when trying to access the service. Soon after that, the company confirmed that one of its Mail servers was acting up, and that the issue had proved to be much harder to fix than anticipated. Yahoo assured users that it had te

Valve has just rolled out a public beta version of SteamOS to the masse. Just in case you were wondering what the heck SteamOS is all about, it happens to be an open-sourced Linux-based operating system, and Valve claims that your experience with it would be most satisfying if you already happen to

NASA has been taking advantage of its Neutral Buoyancy Lab near the Johnson Space Center in Houston to run a some new space suits through the wringer. The suits are a modified version of the launch and reentry Advanced Crew Escape System that NASA started employing back in 1994. The tweaked versions

The spam machine is busy. And it’s not just attacking the social web, it’s taking over the entire Internet. According to study by Incapusla, creator of a web-based firewall application, human traffic accounts for less than 40 percent of all web traffic. That means more than half of the traffic on th