The "real-time Web" is booming. From Twitter to Facebook to new search engines that discover information posted just seconds ago, it seems the 2010 Web will be fueled by our desire for instant gratification.
The "real-time Web" is booming. From Twitter to Facebook to new search engines that discover information posted just seconds ago, it seems the 2010 Web will be fueled by our desire for instant gratification.
It was a big year for technology: Twitter and Facebook's popularity exploded, while new smartphones, e-readers and a host of other gadgets cropped up to compete for our plugged-in affection.
BlackBerry customers throughout North America were without e-mail and Internet services for more than eight hours after a widespread outage that lasted until early Wednesday.
Can Hewlett-Packard's motion-tracking webcams see black people? It's a question posed on a now-viral YouTube video and the company says it's looking into it.
In January, sales were up 13 percent over the year before, reported industry analyst the NPD Group, and that trend continued in February, with a 10 percent boost over 2008.
Engineers didn't make huge improvements to technology in 2009. The year's big tech names -- Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- all existed before January.
Engineers didn't make huge improvements to technology in 2009. The year's big tech names -- Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- all existed before January.
With the coolness of a card shark at the final table of the World Series of Poker, Matt Bergin pulls the hood of his brown sweatshirt over his head and concentrates on the task at hand.
The popular microblogging site Twitter was hacked briefly by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army, but the site was quickly restored after the incident early Friday.
In case you've not been paying attention -- or somehow missed those carols that have been playing at the mall since the week before Halloween -- Christmas is next week.
If you ask someone if they want something green for Christmas, they're likely to ask for tens and twenties. But some of us wouldn't mind getting gifts that are good for the planet as well as our lifestyles.
California-born Dave March has always had a passion for cars and boats.
Users of BlackBerry phones in North America reported widespread interruptions in sending and receiving e-mail Thursday.
YouTube this week announced the biggest viral video sensations of 2009, with Scottish singer Susan Boyle topping the list.
There are many ways to measure how Windows 7 is doing. There are reports on new PC sales, tallies of boxed copy sales, and surveys of planned enterprise adoption, to name a few.
Sometimes terrible movies -- the ones with such bad acting, dumb dialogue and cheesy special effects that they're unintentionally hilarious -- are the ones we remember the most.
A dazed boy's musings after a trip to the dentist's office had a good run.
Gadgets are not soft and cuddly, and there are no downloadable upgrades for slobbering mutts. But with enthusiasm for pets growing unabated, and technology digging ever deeper into our lives, the two seemingly unrelated worlds increasingly touch.
Astronomers announced this week they found a water-rich and relatively nearby planet that's similar in size to Earth.
Now that video game sales have eclipsed Hollywood box office revenues and sales of music CDs, you can bet your bitmaps some extraordinarily good games were released in 2009.
Nothing says "happy holidays, America," like smartphone apps you can stare at instead of talking to those pesky family members in the living room.
Comcast rolled out a Web-based on-demand television and movie service on Tuesday that gives customers access to more than 2,000 hours of television and movies.
Nearly one-sixth of teens who own cell phones have received nude or nearly nude images via text message from someone they know, according to a new survey on "sexting" from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The past 12 months have been a banner year for cyber crime. And that could be bad news for the future of e-commerce.
Yahoo's Victor Tsaran knows how much time Web designers spend agonizing over color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he started Yahoo's accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was needed to create accessibility features.
When reading this article, you will most likely fall into one of two groups.
The Twitter phenomenon, in which anybody can tell his or her followers anything -- in 140 characters or less -- now has a payoff that can go beyond the thrill of self-publishing.
In the next 10 years, the way people interact with computers will wildly change. Hand gestures will be as common as the click of a keyboard, and an assortment of documents will be selected not with a mouse, but with a scan of the eye.
Scientists are claiming to have found the "silver bullet" that will enable the cheap, easy printing of electronic components and transform the way we use computers.
This week, winter storms dumped more than 18 inches of snow on parts of the Midwest before swerving toward Canada.
In a city where one can hardly see the horizon because of an almost constant cloud of filth and pollution, many Hong Kong residents have long given up on the idea of a clean, green life.
In a city where one can hardly see the horizon because of an almost constant cloud of filth and pollution, many Hong Kong residents have long given up on the idea of a clean, green life.
Eric Schmidt's presence at a swanky music industry gathering was an illustration of how far digital technology has come and the power it has amassed.
The word "green" has become a vague and overused marketing term for something that's supposed to be good for the environment.
Apple has sent a clear message to any developers who try to game its iTunes App Store. Software developer Molinker has been kicked out, along with more than 1,000 of its iPhone applications.
Real-time is a top 10 Web trend for 2010, I proposed in this column last week. Now the stage is set: Google this week launched real-time search, bringing live updates from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more into a scrolling pane in your Google search results.
A large pop-up box will greet Facebook users logging on to the social-networking site on Thursday, asking them to modify their privacy settings.
It was a mammoth deal that, in the heady days of the dotcom boom, seemed like a perfect union.
The future of social networking, the real-time Web and a host of apps and gadgets were the talk of the annual Le Web conference as it opened here Wednesday.
Would you like to let AT&T know when your iPhone has dropped a call? Well, now there is an app for that.
Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone.
Google announced Monday the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results.
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won $40,000 in a high-tech scavenger hunt on Saturday by discovering the location of 10 red weather balloons.
Debra Guenterberg doesn't have to go to a horror movie to get spooked. She says she's been living a nightmare for the past 13 years.
Facebook has joined forces with five Internet groups to help protect kids, the social-networking site said.
Twitter creator Jack Dorsey's Square application, which is like a smartphone PayPal for credit cards, has attracted lots of warranted attention for its potential to enable peer-to-peer and merchant credit card transactions in the real world far beyond what's capable today in most countries.
What better way to reinvent one of the most popular video game franchises of all time than by adding simultaneous multiplayer fun?
It's the story that wouldn't go away.
On Saturday, thousands of people nationwide will search the skies in a high-tech scavenger hunt designed to test how far-flung groups can use the Internet and technology to work together.
As 2009 draws to a close, the Web's attention turns to the year ahead. What can we expect of the online realm in 2010?
Microsoft's Bing took a major step forward Wednesday in adding rich mapping and image data to its search engine, but until it assembles more data, pretty pictures aren't enough to beat the Google Maps juggernaut.
When a racist image of first lady Michelle Obama surfaced from the ugliest corners of the Internet last week to top Google's image search results, the episode shined a spotlight on the mysterious workings of search engines.
The ubiquitous iPhone has more than 100,000 apps that can do everything from tell you the weather in Nome, Alaska to give you headlines from The New York Times to order you a burrito from Chipotle.
Microsoft said on Monday that it is looking into reports that its latest security updates are causing some serious problems for certain users.
Facebook users will soon lose the ability to join a network of friends who live in the same area but will gain the widely desired ability to control who sees every piece of information they post.
Fourteen years ago, Mark Horvath was in crisis. The former exec was living on the streets in Hollywood, California, where for a dollar he let people take a photograph of his pet iguana, named Dog.
From catamarans made out of plastic bottles hoping to cross the Pacific Ocean to the recession-busting extravagance of billion-dollar superyachts, 2009 has been the year of crazy boats.
Bernard Bailyn, the Harvard historian who won a Pulitzer for his 1967 book "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," wrote about the critical role pamphlets played in 18th century America.
An inmate wrestles with his fear, boredom and remorse.
OK, so if you're reading this you've probably just finished your yearly, post-Thanksgiving rugby scrum of consumerism.
An online debate over global warming science has broken out after an unknown hacker broke into the e-mail server at a prominent climate-research center, stole more than a thousand e-mails about global warming and posted them online.
There's been a lot of talk in 2009 about the next generation of wireless technology, known as 4G wireless broadband, but the current generation of 3G wireless technology is far from dead.
Joe Wilkins knew there was only one way to give his supercharged, alcohol-injected Hemi-engined hot rod more power: Put a jet engine in the trunk.
Joe Wilkins knew there was only one way to give his supercharged, alcohol-injected Hemi-engined hot rod more power: Put a jet engine in the trunk.
For most of the past week, when someone typed "Michelle Obama" in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.
If Rupert Murdoch gets his way -- and he's not simply bluffing -- you may one day need to "Bing it" rather than "Google it" to find news stories online.
With the holiday shopping season upon us, recession-minded retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart have created apps that let people buy products directly from their smartphones.
If that dreamy blind date seems too good to be true, or the guy at the bar with a martini and a pencil-thin moustache looks a little sketchy, the truth about them -- or at least some of it -- could be found on your phone.
Like a well-placed power-up, the right gift can light up the eyes of that video gamer in your life.
For the past few years, holiday cheer has been in short supply for electronics retail chains.
"The LHC is back," the European Organization for Nuclear Research announced triumphantly Friday, as the world's largest particle accelerator resumed operation more than a year after an electrical failure shut it down.
Online auction giant eBay apologized Sunday for a daylong glitch that inactivated the search function on its Web site, and said it will compensate sellers for their losses.
Heir and maverick adventurer David Mayer de Rothschild is planning a voyage across the Pacific Ocean on a boat made of reclaimed plastic bottles.
Three alleged members of the hacker gang Kryogeniks were hit with a federal conspiracy charge Thursday for a 2008 stunt that replaced Comcast's homepage with a shout-out to other hackers.
Astronauts aboard the international space station and space shuttle Atlantis woke up to a worrying sound -- alarms indicating a fire and dangerous loss of pressure, NASA said Friday.
Among a certain (mostly young, mostly female) segment of the population, this weekend's news is all about one thing and one thing only: the opening of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon."
Google today unveiled more details of Chrome OS, a lightweight, browser-based operating system for netbooks.
Microsoft Windows continues to dominate the PC market with a 90 percent market-share stronghold, but when it comes to smartphones, Microsoft is getting beat up worse than a mustachioed villain in a Jackie Chan movie.
The explosion of Craigslist's online classifieds. The death of Napster. The "Twitter Revolution" in Iran.
As 2009 draws to a close, with Twitter undoubtedly this year's media darling and Facebook continuing on its path to global domination, you may wonder which social-media service will become tech's poster boy in 2010.
With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft showed Wednesday it's trying to retake the browser initiative.
The California Energy Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to become the first state to impose energy efficiency standards for televisions. The agency estimates the move will save consumers $1 billion a year in energy costs.
The world's biggest social networking site has brushed off criticism by a senior UK police officer responsible for preventing online bullying that it is failing to combat abuse.
Space Shuttle Atlantis has blasted off, on its way to the international space station. The annual Leonid meteor shower peaked Tuesday. And NASA just found water on the moon.
In a case that would have been impossible even five years ago, bad-girl rocker Courtney Love is being sued for libel by a fashion designer for allegedly slamming the woman on Twitter.
It's prone to cause drama in the online world.
A year after its release, Google's open source Android operating system has become a sensation.
Major countries and nation-states are engaged in a "Cyber Cold War," amassing cyberweapons, conducting espionage, and testing networks in preparation for using the Internet to conduct war, according to a new report to be released on Tuesday by McAfee.
The center of the Pacific Gyre, an area of spiraling ocean currents, has accumulated large amounts of waste and debris that gets trapped by the large clockwise flow of water between North America and Japan.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, more than 25 years after he was treated for Hodgkin's disease, a spokesman at his company Vulcan Inc. told CNN on Monday.
When he was 17, George Hotz poured hundreds of hours of his summer vacation into a special project: learning the iPhone's secrets. His unpaid labor eventually paid off.
With Veterans Day, the continuing investigation into the shootings at Fort Hood and talks continuing on future U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan, the military has been all over the news this week.
Hjalti á Lava was searching his iPhone for a Bible app when he stumbled across Church Online, a service of Web site LifeChurch.tv. Soon he was regularly logging into the Oklahoma-based cyber-church -- some 4,100 miles away from á Lava's home in the Faroe Islands, west of Norway.
Dell said Friday that it's ready to enter the smartphone business with the Android-based Mini 3.
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