WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tom Wheeler, nominated to become the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, pledged to divest stakes in AT&T Inc, Dish Network Corp, Google Inc and dozens of other tech and telecoms companies if he is confirmed. Such divestments are common for nominees to avoid conflicts of interest. Wheeler's plan was disclosed in an agreement posted online by the Office of Government Ethics. Wheeler is now a venture capital investor at Core Capital Partners and chairs the FCC's Technology Advisory Council. ...
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A  Texas startup has developed a “smart rifle”that barely needs to be aimed. The maker of the gun, being shipped to stores this week, brags that “even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes.” The company, TrackingPoint, has said its “world’s...
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(Reuters) - Sony Corp plans to appoint Chugai Pharmaceutical Co Chief Executive Osamu Nagayama as chairman, the Nikkei reported. Nagayama's appointment will be finalized on June 20 at a board meeting to be held immediately after a shareholders' meeting, the business daily said. Outgoing chairman Howard Stringer, who served as Sony's CEO between 2005 and 2012, will retire in June, the Japanese paper said. (Reporting by Aditi Shrivastava in Bangalore; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
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LONDON (AP) — A clutch of Twitter accounts and a blog maintained by the Financial Times were hacked Friday, the latest in a series of cyberattacks claimed by the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-government group which has regularly targeted media organizations it sees as sympathetic to the country's rebels.
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Google CEO Larry Page spoke about peace in the industry during the Google I/O 2013 keynote, but that doesn’t mean Google has plans to slow its various attacks on rivals’ turf. Forbes contributor Peter Cohan laid out the five areas where Google is launching its “assault” on chief competitor Apple, and he discussed exactly how Google is hurting the world’s most valuable company in each area. Among Cohan’s five fronts are smartphones, where Google’s Android platform has overtaken the iPhone as the most popular handset operating system in the world; tablets, where strength in numbers will soon help Google top Apple’s market share once again; and innovation, the “most important front where Google is trouncing Apple.” Because the company is assaulting Apple
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(Reuters) - Yahoo Japan Corp said on Friday night it suspected that up to 22 million of its user IDs may have been "leaked" and it detected an unauthorized attempt to access the administrative system of its web portal Yahoo Japan, the Kyodo news agency reported. The leaked information does not include passwords and data necessary for identity verification to reset passwords, the agency said. The company detected the access attempt at around 9 pm on Thursday, Kyodo reported. Yahoo Japan checked its system after severing access and found traces of an attempt to steal user IDs, according to ...
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All this and more in Rob Walker's Weekend Linkdown!
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Earlier this week, BlackBerry announced the arrival of BlackBerry Messenger for Android and iOS. A new report suggests that the messaging service will have some limitations, however. According to TrustedReviews, BBM will not be available for the iPad or for Android tablets at launch. Vivek Bhardwaj, head of the BlackBerry software portfolio, reportedly told the website that BBM will be limited to iPhones running iOS 6 or higher and Android smartphones. “Smartphone is our real focus and again it comes back to what BBM is,” he explained. “If you look BBM and the engagement and the activity, it’s because it is mobile, because people are on the go.” While the executive didn’t rule out tablet support in the future, he
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SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — The Canadian government is trying to lure Silicon Valley tech workers who are frustrated by U.S. visa policies, just as Congress wrestles with a long-sought overhaul of America's immigration system.
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After a handful of dismal quarters during which Nokia lost billions, the vendor has recently shown signs of life. But not in the United States. Nokia’s first big attempt at a comeback in the U.S. was the Lumia 900, and the company returned later in 2012 with the Lumia 920. Neither phone was received with much enthusiasm from consumers. In the Lumia 900′s debut quarter, Nokia shipped 600,000 total Lumia phones in the U.S. When the Lumia 920 launched in the holiday quarter last year, Nokia’s U.S. Lumia phone shipments totaled 700,000 units and then slid to just 400,000 units in the following quarter. Nokia now returns with its third flagship phone for the U.S. market — the Lumia 928 — and it’s changing
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By Neha Dimri (Reuters) - Shares of Tableau Software Inc rose as much as 58 percent in their trading debut as investors expect the rising interest in big data to power the data analysis software maker's growth. Tableau's revenue has jumped more than 800 percent to $127.7 million since 2008 as more companies use data analysis tools to manage efficiency and gauge customer preference. ...
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Samsung and Apple have fought over market share and patents, and they may soon start fighting over supply chains. Samsung traditionally built its products using internal supply lines, but as its devices became increasingly popular the company has been forced to seek outside help. Reuters reports that Samsung has reached out to some of Apple’s key supply chain partners about helping the company manufacture its products. With the two companies fighting for supply lines, Samsung’s presence could increase Apple’s cost and lead to component shortages that might disrupt Apple’s future products. “The next round of the post-patent battle for them will be over component supplies,” said Lee Sun-tae, an analyst at NH Investment & Securities. “Who wins access to the best
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By Brett Wolf ST. LOUIS, May 17 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - U.S. authorities have seized two accounts linked to a major operator in the booming Bitcoin digital currency market, Tokyo-based exchange Mt. Gox. The move may prevent the firm from facilitating the purchase and sale of Bitcoins in U.S. dollars at a time when use of the currency and its value has mushroomed. Bitcoin, which unlike conventional money is bought and sold on a peer-to-peer network independent of any central authority, has grown popular among users who lack faith in the established banking system. ...
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Google Glass might not be the next iPad, but future versions of wearable computing devices like Glass are widely expected to be the next major consumer electronics revolution. There are still several technology hurdles preventing the proliferation of wearables, such as awful battery life and relatively poor display visibility, but one Brooklyn-based startup is looking to kill two birds with one stone. Lumiode founder and CEO Vincent Lee recently spoke with MIT’s Technology Review blog about his company’s work in the field of LED displays. “Unlike most displays, which have a light-emitting backplane and use filters to make the individual color pixels that collectively form images, Lumiode’s technology uses the light-emitting diodes as the pixels,” wrote Technology Review’s Rachel Metz. “They are
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sonic the Hedgehog is rolling with Nintendo.
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Our #FollowFriday interview with Ken Jennings, champion of both Jeopardy! and tweeting
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The early reviews of Google Fiber are in from Kansas City and one of the most attractive features of the service seems to be how it makes Netflix irresistible. The buffering annoyances that consumers take for granted vanish as Google Fiber feeds movies and shows instantly to eager Silicon Prairie dwellers. What’s more, the recently launched Google Fiber TV app offers video on demand for iPad. This direction is fascinating because of the hottest trend in US consumer behavior: broadcast television audience collapse. TV show audiences have been falling for a long time, but recently the decline has turned into a plunge. According to Goldman Sachs, ratings in the 18-49 year demo dropped by a hideous 17% last winter, the steepest drop ever.
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The United States Department of Defense on Friday approved the use of Apple devices running iOS 6 on its networks, Bloomberg reported. The iPhone will compete with BlackBerry 10 and Samsung KNOX devices, which received approval earlier this month. The Pentagon has continued to test alternative platforms to give employees flexibility when choosing a work phone. The DoD even has plans to create a mobile app store that can handle as many as 8 million devices. There are currently more than 600,000 mobile devices in use at the agency, 470,000 of which are older BlackBerry smartphones. There are currently more than 40,000 iPhones and 8,700 Android devices in use, however most of them aren’t connected to military networks except for testing
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sonic the Hedgehog is rolling with Nintendo.
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On the global stage, BlackBerry is still hurting — for the first time ever, Microsoft’s Windows Phone market share topped BlackBerry in the first quarter this year to take the No.3 spot in the smartphone platform war. We’re still very early on in BlackBerry’s comeback attempt though, and progress is being made in some key markets. Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt points to BlackBerry’s home turf in Canada as one of the markets where the vendor has seen good early response to its new BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 smartphones, and BlackBerry’s progress thus far has been impressive according to his figures. In a recent research note, McCourt says that BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market fell to an embarrassing 6% in Canada to close
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Is It Quantum Computing or Not?
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Google is always on the hunt for new ways to boost revenue from search ads, the company’s primary money-maker, and it may have just begun to scratch the surface of a huge opportunity. Amid the numerous announcements made during Google I/O 2013, Google said that developers can now create geofenced ads that automatically display in Google Maps when a user is approaches a certain location. So, for example, a Starbucks ad with a coupon might pop up on the screen as a user walks or drives past a Starbucks coffee shop. According to industry watchers, this could end up being a huge deal. “If you can better target a customer and have a higher ROI (return on investment), then from an
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By Tom Bergin LONDON (Reuters) - Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. will be called back to the British parliament to clarify how its activities in the UK justify its low corporate income tax bill, two lawmakers told Reuters. Amazon will follow search giant Google, which attended another grilling by parliament's Public Affairs Committee (PAC) over its tax affairs on Thursday. A Reuters report earlier this month raised questions over Google's earlier assertions that its UK-based staff don't sell to customers. ...
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LONDON (AP) — The Financial Times says that several of its blogs and Twitter feeds have been compromised by hackers. The Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-government group which has repeatedly attacked Western media organizations, has claimed responsibility.
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The Galaxy S4 is Samsung’s fastest-selling smartphone ever with shipments topping 6 million units in two weeks. Samsung co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun revealed on Friday that sales of the Galaxy S4 into channels will likely pass 10 million units next week, The Korea Times reported. The executive noted that it is selling much faster than the Galaxy S III, which took 50 days to reach the 10 million mark. The Galaxy S4 will hit the same milestone in less than a month. Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone is equipped a 5-inch full HD display, a 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 processor and a 13-megapixel camera. The device also includes 2GB of RAM, a microSD slot, NFC, up to 64GB of internal storage and a handful
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