Two in three retail computers on sale are laptop computers. Notebook shipments rose 57.7% during the firstthree week of the holiday shopping season in December compared to last year. 65% of all computers sold at stores surveyed by Current Analysis including Best Buy, Radio Shack, Circuit City, CompUSA, and Staples were noteooks. Notebooks are more […]

China is beginning to standarize all mobile phones sold in its country to use a computer’s USB port for recharging its battery. This will simplify the way consumers recharge their cell phones without the need for specific AC adapters. The law has not been enforced yet by the Chinese government. But will this lead to […]

With Vista’s scheduled worldwide release date being January 30, 2007, people will soon find out what their personal likes and dislikes for the new OS will be. When Vista is finally released, it will be more than five years after the release of Windows XP, making it the longest time span between major releases of […]

Unlike the NextEngine Desktop 3D Scanner which costs $2,495, this software is free and can be used with some gadgets you may have laying around the house. According to the Institute for Robotics and Process Control (Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany) who created the software, “All you need is a PC, a camera (e.g. […]

ModeLabs of France has unveiled three new eco-friendly cellphone concepts. All the concepts rely on the inherent movement of their users to automatically regenerate power and signal the possibility of using smaller batteries or even eliminating them entirely. The most advanced model is the “YoYo”, ModeLabs says. Designed to be worn around your neck, the […]

Google is set to get some new competition in the Internet search business, and this time it isn’t from a well-known company such as Microsoft or Yahoo!. Instead, Jimmy Wales, founder of the popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, is turning his attention to online search and applying the same principles that made Wikipedia so successful. The […]

Google has published its annual Zeitgeist report, showcasing what people searched for this year. Not surprisingly it’s heavily biased in favour of the US audience, but nevertheless it makes for some quite interesting reading. It’s all based on Google.com traffic. Overall, the top searches in 2006 were: 1. bebo 2. myspace 3. world cup 4. metacafe 5. radioblog […]

The Memory Ball Alarm and Radio is cool because it uses a giant magnet to change the stations, period. It has a crisscross on top which is not used to swap murders, but to change the channels on the radio by rolling the magnetic pinball to a new programmed spot on the grid. Allows up […]

The “professionally paranoid” Peter Gutmann at Auckland University has ripped into Windows Vista Content Protection (VCP) and written a paper, well, a web page then, called A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection that makes for worrying reading. I’ve seen a number of pieces on the Digital Rights Management “features” that Microsoft has built […]

It’s about damn time the Books on Demand Machine has actually come to pass, and at only $50,000 USD per unit, we can expect to see them pretty much everywhere. They can print books of up to 550 pages, you choose the font size yourself (so if you wanted a very tiny Anna Karenina you […]

Is nothing sacred these days? Once just an easy way for your gran to get her shopping back from the supermarket, the shopping trolley has had a makeover - into a powerful sound system. It’s now known as the Mskyo and was created by German design team Claassen and Partner. Looks-wise it hasn’t changed much […]

Sales at Apple’s iTunes Store fell 65% in the first six months of 2006, according to a survey of U.S. iTunes debit and credit card purchases conducted by Forrester Research. The number of monthly iTunes transactions dropped 58% in the first half of 2006, while the average size of purchase also declined by 17%, the […]

Google is reportedly in talks with a South Korean software company and its U.S. subsidiary ThinkFree, a maker of browser-based office productivity software compatible with Microsoft Corp. file formats. ThinkFree of San Jose, California, is a subsidiary of Haansoft, which is based in Seoul. Haansoft’s Chief Executive Officer, Baek Jong-jin, said he met twice this […]

U.K. telco BT has developed an interactive TV technology where viewers can vote via SMS messages to change the course of a show’s events in real-time, ZDNet UK reported. A version of the “shape-shifted” TV technology will be utilized on “Accidental Lovers,” a romantic comedy set to debut in Finland later this month. Viewers will […]

Nayio Media on Wednesday launched its melody-based music search tool, which can identify tunes consumers hum into a computer’s microphone. The Web-based service cross-references the hummed tune with Napster’s library of more than 3 million songs and delivers a list of potential matches, each accompanied by a direct link to where consumers can listen to […]