Google is part of a global consortium that plans to install an undersea cable linking the U.S. and Japan to provide faster and more reliable Internet to Asia. The search giant hopes its “FASTER” project will make Google services more accessible to billions of people.
Barnes & Noble has decided to team up Google in an effort to reclaim its King of Book Retail title from their mutual rival Amazon.
Starting today, the two companies are partnering up to bring same-day delivery of books from local Barnes and Noble to customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, giving both companies an answer to Amazon’s same-day offerings.
Buying a home can be seriously stressful, but mobile app Zillow has been providing folks with great real estate information on local homes for a while now. I’ve used it several times to compare prices across homes I was interested in buying, as well and to just check out the kind of home my friends can buy, because I’m pretty nosy like that.
The Zillow app just updated with a fantastic new feature, too: instant mortgage pre-approval. This is a huge deal, as being pre-approved can make sure that your offers on homes, especially in hot markets like San Francisco and New York, are taken seriously. Pre-approved home loans are a great way to make that happen.
Having shut down Justin.tv on the back of a reported $1 billion Google acquisition, live video game streaming service Twitch is now blocking copyrighted music.
Twitch uses software called Audible Magic which scans videos for music that is owned or controlled by Audible Magic clients. This could take the form of either in-game or background music. Live broadcasts will not be scanned.
“The Audible Magic technology will scan for third party music in 30 minute blocks,” reads a blog post from Twitch. “[I]f Audible Magic does not detect its clients’ music, that portion of the VOD will not be muted. If third party audio is detected anywhere in the 30-minute scanned block, the entire 30 minutes will be muted.”
Scrolling to the bottom of every spam email in search of that tiny “unsubscribe” link is among my least favorite Internet chores, but Google is finally making it a lot easier to never receive spammy emails from all the brands, social networks, and Nigerian princes you’ve courted over the years.
To bring you one step closer to a clutter free inbox, the company announced on its blog this morning that Gmail users will now see a new “unsubscribe” link anytime they receive a bulk email.
As revealed by Steven Levy in his great book In The Plex, in the early days of Google one of the founders’ ideas for advertising the new search engine was to project a lazer image of the Google logo on the moon.
That idea obviously didn’t happen, but a new Easter Egg for Google Maps on PC does at least let users explore the surface of the moon, alongside that of Mars, to celebrate the second anniversary of the Curiosity rover touching down on the Red Planet’s surface.
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Microsoft is hoping to appease Chinese workers who are unhappy about its massive layoff plans by offering them a free smartphone. Up to 300 employees can claim a free device every day, but only if they agree to resign.
Samsung vowed to end child labor in its supply chain once and for all with its new ‘zero tolerance’ policy on child labor, but after coming down hard on Dongguan Shinyang Electronics this summer for employing under age workers, the Android maker has decided to just enforce 30% of its policy.
Pebble today added three new additions to its popular smartwatch lineup, but they’re not the all-new Android Wear competitors you may have been hoping for. Instead, they’re actually original Pebbles with fancy new paint jobs — and they’re only available for a limited time.
Google today rolled out a new Chrome beta for OS X — officially dubbed Chrome Canary — which finally takes advantage of the 64-bit processors built into the latest Macs. The change should mean better performance when browsing the web, but it isn’t quite ready to become your daily driver just yet.
New images of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Alpha indicate it will be even thinner than Apple’s iPhone 5s. The handset’s rear-facing camera protrudes out of its back somewhat — just like the Galaxy S5’s — but overall, the device could well be the slimmest Samsung smartphone to date.
Up until the present, the various paintjobs of our phones have existed primarily as a means of personalization. In the near future, they could well be the way that our phones are charged.
A new study by the UK’s University of Sheffield is investigating the possibility of spray-painted solar cells which could be used to power anything from smartphones to electric cars.
While the energy generating effectiveness of paint-on solar cells was just one percent a couple of years ago, Sheffield University currently gets about 11 percent efficiency versus 19 percent at optimal performance.
Although Samsung’s commercials often mock Apple and its devices, the South Korean company has been known to use Apple products as its inspiration. In fact, it has been so inspired by iOS devices in the past that it was recently found guilty of ripping them off and forced to cough up $119 million in damages.
That doesn’t appear to have deterred Samsung from copying again, though. Leaked images of its upcoming Galaxy Alpha smartphone suggest the device could be the company’s biggest iPhone knockoff to date.
While most of Square-Enix’s games for mobile tend to be ports of the developer’s past hits, it also occasionally releases original games too — often with spectacularly great results.
The latest of these games is set to Chaos Rings III, a sequel to 2012’s Chaos Rings II — coming to Android, iOS and PlayStation Vita this winter. Announced over the weekend on Famitsu, the game is set to arrive in Japan on October 16.
One of the world’s top tech companies is suing Samsung for patent violations, only this time its not Apple.
Microsoft announced this afternoon that it filed a lawsuit against Samsung in the U.S. District Court of Southern District of New York, for not paying up on cross-licensed intellectual property from Microsoft that its been using in smartphones since 2011.
Dong Nguyen’s runaway viral hit mobile game, Flappy Bird, is back in a new form, but this time it’s only on Fire TV, Amazon’s answer to the Roku and Apple TV devices.
The new game, titled Flappy Birds: Family, is available now on the Amazon App Store, and seems to only work on the Fire TV as of this moment.
The game seems to have the same basic gameplay as the original (tap or click a button to flap the bird’s wings and avoid pipes), but adds ghosts as a new obstacle and a new multi-player feature.
“Flappy Birds now are on Amazon Fire TV,” says the app description, “with incredible new features: Person vs Person mode, more obstacles, more fun and still very hard. Enjoy playing the game at home (not breaking your TV) with your family and friends.”
HP is probably the last company you’d expect to make a genuinely good-looking smartwatch, but it appears to have done that with a little help from Gilt and fashion designed Michael Bastian. The company’s upcoming wearable, which it teased for the first time today, will deliver a custom operating system that’s compatible with both Android and iOS.
Snapchat is currently in talks with investors over a round of funding that could value the company at a mind-blowing $10 billion, according to sources for Bloomberg. That’s a little over half the $19 billion Facebook paid for WhatsApp, but double the $5 billion market cap currently held by BlackBerry.
BlackBerry finally gave in and brought its famous BBM messaging service to Android and iOS last year, but it wanted to remind us that it still had a smartphone platform of its own by giving its apps a nasty BlackBerry 10 style user interface. Upcoming BBM updates will change that, however, with a new makeover that brings a more native user experience.
If you haven’t already paid to upgrade to TuneIn Radio Pro, then chances are you won’t be doing so anytime soon. The popular internet radio app just got a massive price increase from $3.99 to $9.99 for no apparent reason, making its free, ad-supported counterpart look like an even more attractive option.
The U.K. is set to allow self-driving cars to use public roads as of January 2015. Currently they are allowed on private roads only.
The Department for Transport had previously claimed that driverless cars would be trialled on public roads by the end of 2013, while the country’s Treasury announced a plan to create a £10 million ($16.9m) prize to fund a city to test autonomous vehicles.
Apple filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals yesterday, dropping its cross-appeal of Judge Lucy Koh’s verdict in its lawsuit against Samsung, and officially ending Apple’s pursuit of a product ban for the rival company.
Popular torrent sharing network The Pirate Bay is finally easier to access on your smartphone thanks to a new mobile site. It’s almost identical to the desktop version and offers all the same features, but it is optimized for smaller displays.
Oyster, the all-you-can-read e-book subscription service that finally made its debut on Android earlier this month, is now even more accessible. From today, Oyster users can enjoy titles in a web browser on almost any device — including your Mac or PC.
BlackBerry users have been warned that calling the emergency services will not charge their phone battery after some were fooled by bogus information that was circulated online. British Police have reminded users that unnecessary calls waste resources and could put lives in danger.
