Microsoft's Xbox One outsold all others during the month of December, continuing its trend of outselling all other game consoles within the U.S.
LG’s says display's wrinkles won't affect performance and can be gently rubbed out.
Google wants more developers to integrate their Android apps with its storage service Drive, and has released a new API that aims to make it easier. While Drive integration on Android was possible in the past, the new API offers developers better performance and more features, Google developer advocate Magnus Hyttsten The native, Java-based . The API includes the ability to temporarily use storage on the device if it is not connected to a network. The upshot for developers is that they don’t have to worry about failed API calls when the phone is offline or experiencing network connectivity problems, according to Hyttsten. Data stored locally will then be automatically transferred to Drive by Android’s sync scheduler when connectivity is reestablished.
Acer reported another net loss at NT$7.6 billion (US$251 million) for the fourth quarter, as senior executives at the struggling PC maker agreed to a 30 percent cut to their salaries. It’s the third consecutive quarter for which Acer has reported a net loss, as the PC market continues to shrink. During the fourth quarter, the company’s revenue reached NT$86.7 billion, down from NT$101.5 billion a year earlier. Part of the fourth quarter net loss was due to a write-off of NT$1.3 billion related to raw materials inventory and other costs, Acer said on Friday.
NTT DoCoMo has put on hold its plans to launch a smartphone with the new open-source mobile operating system, a spokesman said Friday. “We’re revising our plan to release it this fiscal year, but haven’t decided to abandon it,” said Jun Ootori, a spokesman for the Japanese telecommunications giant. “The conditions surrounding the Japanese smartphone market and the timing aren’t good right now,” he added. “We haven’t decided anything about the future but we are working with members of the (Tizen) association. We haven’t decided on a launch.” Tizen is a Linux-based OS for smartphones, tablets, and other devices that has been seen as an alternative to Google’s Android. It also has the backing of Intel and Samsung Electronics.
Neiman Marcus apologized on Thursday for a data breach that compromised payment card numbers, saying Social Security numbers and birth dates appear to be safe. Online shoppers are believed to have not been affected by the breach, and customer PINs (personal identification numbers) are not at risk since the retailer does not require PINs at its stores, the high-end retailer on its website. ”We have taken steps to notify those affected customers for whom we have contact information,” wrote Neiman Marcus CEO Karen Katz. Neiman Marcus learned about the breach in mid-December from its merchant card processor after unauthorized card activity occurred following purchases at its stores. It hired a forensics firm which confirmed on Jan. 1 the company’s network had been attacked.
Citing disappointing holiday sales of its Wii U and 3DS game devices, Nintendo cut its earnings forecast for its fiscal year ending in March to a net loss. The video-game giant warned on Friday of a net loss of ¥25 billion (US$240 million) for the year, instead of the ¥55 billion net profit it had forecast last April. The company posted a ¥7.1 billion net profit for its 2013 fiscal year. Nintendo blamed the let-down on weak sales of high-margin games during the year-end period, which it in turn attributed to slower-than-expected hardware sales.
Some 100 American Eagle clothing stores may not need greeters anymore: Soon they’ll be saying a different kind of hello on your smartphone, advertising the latest deals. On Thursday, the retailer announced a partnership with , a company that makes a transmitter that can communicate with smartphones using Bluetooth low energy signals. To go with it, Shopkick also makes a mobile shopping companion app for iPhones and Android devices. For people who have the transmitters that have been placed in some of their most high-traffic stores in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities.
Who would believe that Intel’s chips for consumers—specifically —would be the bright spot in Intel’s earnings report? While there’s no reason to believe that Intel’s fourth-quarter earnings contradict the conventional wisdom that the PC market is on the wane, optimists might point out that’s exactly what happened. Stacy Smith, Intel’s chief financial officer, said that Intel saw PC sales for the fourth quarter at higher levels than what the chipmaker tracked a year ago—and disclosed aggressive plans to push into the Android tablet market in 2014. All told, —a 3 percent increase to $13.8 billion over last year’s fourth-quarter figure. Profits were just about flat at $2.6 billion, versus $2.5 billion a year ago, missing analyst estimates by a penny a share. “Given the PC market was in the toilet and the phone and tablet division didn’t financially perform well, they did well in 2013,” Pat Moorhead, principal with Moor Insights & Strategy, said in an email. “In 2014, Intel will need to turnaround mobility, defend the datacenter from AMD, ARM, and Broadcom, and gracefully enter the growing Internet of Things client market.”
The stolen credit card numbers of millions of Target shoppers took an international trip—to Russia. A peek inside the (point-of-sale) terminals is revealing more detail about the methods of the attackers as security researchers investigate one of the most devastating data breaches in history. Findings from two security companies show the attackers breached Target’s network and stayed undetected for more than two weeks. “The intrusion operators displayed innovation and a high degree of skill in orchestrating the various components of the activity,” according to a Jan. 14 report from iSight Partners, a Dallas-based information security company.
A court in Southern California has dismissed what was apparently the first-ever traffic citation issued for wearing Google Glass while driving. Cecilia Abadie was stopped for speeding in late October. When a California Highway Patrol officer approached her, he noticed she was wearing the Google Glass device and for that. Section 27602 of California’s vehicle code bans video screens in the view of the driver, with the exception of GPS-style car navigation devices. On Thursday, a court commissioner in San Diego dismissed the Google Glass ticket, saying he could find no evidence that the device was in use while Abadie was driving, according to several local news reports.
The slow pace of change in the flash-manufacturing industry means that prices of SSDs will likely hold steady compared to 2013, but price hikes could be in the offing. In short, expect to spend about 75 cents per gigabyte (GB) on an SSD in 2014, according to Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis. The average capacity drive that makers produce should be about 200GB—relatively tiny as far as consumer storage goes, but in line with corporate policies that call for keeping data on corporate servers where it can be managed. And while some manufacturers try to differentiate their products through technologies that can improve performance, it’s not clear how much they’re succeeding. That’s forcing SSD manufacturers into direct competition, where price is the differentiating factor. The bottom line is that SSDs still are a capacity game: people buy the largest amount of storage they can within their budget, and they ignore the rest, Handy said.
Many capable SSDs are out there, but don't overlook a relative newcomer: Toshiba's Q Series Pro. Toshiba's drives are among the very fastest we've tested, and in an unusual development, we saw no drop in performance in its smaller capacities. Throw in heavy online discounts, and you have an excellent bargain in a top-performing drive. The Q Series Pro drives are only 7mm thick, so they'll fit in just about any laptop that supports a 2.5-inch drive. The controller is Toshiba's own TC358790XBG, as is the 19nm Toggle-mode MLC NAND. In our tests reading and writing a single 10GB file (using a 16GB RAM drive on our test bed), each of the three capacities Toshiba sent us—128GB, 256GB, and 512GB—proved excellent performers. Toshiba's drive delivered very high performance when reading and writing a single 10GB file (click to enlarge). Until now, the rule as been that the smaller the capacity, the slower the drive (because of fewer chips and fewer channels), but the Q Series blew that up and then some. The 128GB drive actually ended up being the fastest capacity we tested, although the difference was so small as to be statistically irrelevant.
With Spotify dominating the streaming music scene, Beats hopes to bring a better music curation system to the party.
Filing is no easier in the digital age. Now we have electronic receipts stashed in email messages or on cloud services or on our phones, in addition to the paper documents stuffed in file cabinets and perhaps left in little piles here and there around our homes. Digitizing most documents helps, but you can better manage even the things that remain stubbornly on paper—birth certificates, deeds, and the like—with the help of digital filing utilities (and of course, digital backups of important documents never hurt). Here are three proven methods for indexing and storing your documents, whether you want to or to keep them in paper form, so that they’re easier to store now—and to find later. For digital data, offers an advantage over other cloud storage services: It indexes your files the same way Google does the Web, to make everything you save there searchable. Google Drive also lets you access and search your documents on the go via iOS (shown below) or Android apps. As with Dropbox and similar cloud-based storage services, you can share files and folders with other people on Google Drive. Files are marked private by default and are shared only when you decide to share them. You can access your files online on your PC through a browser, in the downloadable desktop app, and via your iOS or Android device.
A woman was pulled over for speeding, but when an officer realized she was wearing Google Glass, he added the felony charge of watching a TV monitor while driving. Now a court has ruled that there was no proof the head mounted screen was turned on.
The tiny device, which could make a dramatic difference to the lives of diabetics, monitors the levels of glucose in the wearer's tears, though actual crying is optional, and transmits the information to the wearer's smartphone.
Facebook's new personalized trending future is designed to get people talking about interesting things that are happening in the world, as well as to keep Facebook users informed of the news and other trending topics.
Regardless of which page or organic position your site appears in Google's search results pages, specific positions on the page aren't isolated or reserved for different weightings of the algorithm to give different signals different priority.
Personal assistant Google Now, which monitors your web searches and alerts you about things such as the weather, flights, and traffic as well as providing various event reminders, has previously been available only on Android devices.
Regularly scheduled daily, monthly, quarterly, and semi-annual PPC tasks will ensure that you miss less opportunity to respond to change and increase your return on investment. This guide will help your PPC accounts perform at the optimal level.
Russian search giant Yandex has announced a deal with Facebook giving them direct access of public data. Posts will pop up in Yandex’s blog search results, where it will join results from other blogs and social networks including Twitter.
Google's search share was at near record levels in the U.S. in December, while Bing also continued its pattern of slowly growing its share, according to the final 2013 installment of comScore's monthly look at U.S. search engine rankings.
In a recent interview, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman discussed what his company has been doing for the past two years to combat fake reviews, and how the Yelp team studies fake reviews, seeking commonalities and abnormalities they can filter for.
Search is everywhere, which means organizations must produce high-quality and authoritative, yet informatively entertaining, content that is device agnostic and encourages a uniquely human social echo for it to be deemed search engine optimal.
A survey of holiday shoppers finds that Google paid search results that included pictures of products influenced 31 percent of online purchases, while online reviews and ratings influenced 48 percent of online shoppers.
True to (its own) form, Twitter has released not one but a couple of news updates at once: it is partnering with Epsilon to offer new ways to target ads via tailored audiences, and is also rolling out a redesigned web interface.
The new official Google Publisher Plugin makes it simple to verify a WordPress site for Webmaster Tools with one click, and is also designed to make it very easy for webmasters to add AdSense code to a WordPress blog.
A U.S. court has ordered customer review website Yelp reveal the names of seven of its anonymous reviewers. The order follows a lawsuit filed by a carpet cleaning company which suspected that some of the reviews placed online about it were made up.
Gain a stronger view of user engagement (and get closer to actual bounce rate) with this step-by-step tutorial on how to implement adjusted bounce rate via Google Tag Manager, a free tag management system that lets you quickly deploy tracking tags.
January is when B2B advertisers need to embrace their oddball status and grab the New Year by the horns. Here's how you can ramp up those campaigns in January and Q1 to capitalize on the other side of the seasonality coin.
Getting your face on Google's search results pages via authorship is getting harder. New authorship algorithms aim to display photos for authors Google considers relevant and interesting and cut down on pictures of lesser quality authors.
Adobe has announced integration between two key products in their Adobe Marketing Cloud service: Adobe Campaign (for analytics) and Adobe Experience Manager (for content). In addition, Adobe also announced several enhancement to the products.
YouTube just revamped its commenting system again, still linking to but not totally removing it from Google+, despite receiving major criticism when it switched the system over to its social arm. Here's a look at what's new.
Google Images has made a great change to its search results. Users can now search for images with specific usage rates more easily. This will be extremely helpful when trying to find images that you can safely use for publishing on your own sites.