Archive for April, 2008

Blu-ray player sales down despite end of format war

Looks like it wasn’t the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle that was keeping potential customers away from high-definition video players after all.

The NPD Group released some of its retail sales tracking data Wednesday that showed sales of Blu-ray standalone players (not a PlayStation 3, combo player, or PC with Blu-ray drive) had mostly decreased since the […]

Robots to swarm English village in military contest

Swarm Systems will enter autonomous quadrotor micro air vehicles weighing less than 2 pounds.
(Credit: Swarm Systems)

A village in England will host a robot hide-and-seek exercise next month, when 11 teams drawn from private companies and universities compete to sniff out snipers, roadside bombs, and other hidden dangers while relaying real-time images to a command […]

iPod survey is back open

The iPod survey is back up and running, please take a minute or two to share your thoughts on the iPod if you haven’t already.

News.com survey
Click here to take CNET News.com’s iPod survey

Due to an overwhelming response yesterday in just a few hours, we had to close our iPod survey before we could […]

Seagate: 1 billion hard drives and counting

Seagate has come a long way in the data storage business, from its 5MB ST506 hard drive in 1979 to its latest 1TB Barracuda introduced last year. And today the company announced that it is the first manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives.

If you can’t visualize that many storage devices, picture this: You […]

Switching, virtualization, and more at Interop

Attendance is down at this year’s Interop. I’ve heard about companies issuing travel bans on employees and vendors pulling out at the last minute due to budget constraints. Nevertheless, the networking industry is making the best out of it. Some of the early highlights for me include:

1. Switching, switching, and […]

OMG! The Webby Awards are coming!

NEW YORK–On Tuesday night, Webby Awards executive director David-Michel Davies welcomed a crowd of media and tech enthusiasts to the nightclub-like Nokia flagship store in midtown Manhattan for a pre-Webby cocktail hour. The specific purpose was to draw attention to the “Peoples’ Voice” division of the awards, which take place on June 10; many […]

Valve releases “Gold Rush” TF2 update

Fans of Valve’s first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 are getting a treat today, with the company releasing the long-awaited “Gold Rush” update for the game that brings a few new elements to the highly-regarded multiplayer game, including new gameplay modes, weapons and achievements for the Medic class.
Perhaps the most significant part of the update […]

SAP’s Business ByDesign taking the slow road

SAP announced that its on demand enterprise suite Business ByDesign roll out is moving slower than previously expected. The company said that it would take 12 to 18 months longer than the original target of 2010 to reach $1 billion in revenue and touch 10,000 customers in […]

Confirmed: Mister Wong acquires Lifestream.fm

It’s gossip no more: As rumored, the Germany-based social bookmarking site Mister Wong has acquired the social-media feed aggregator Lifestream.fm for an undisclosed amount. The news was originally reported on digital-media blog Mashable.
There’s a history here. Mister Wong previously acquired Websnapr.com and Pixer.us, which were both created by Lifestream.fm founder Juan Xavier Larea.
Technology from […]

Microsoft helps police bypass security in Windows

Supposedly prompted by the growing use of encryption software by cyber criminals, Microsoft has developed a new tool to help law enforcement bypass any type of security built into the Windows operating system. Dubbed Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), the tool is a USB mass-storage device intended for use in police raids to […]