It’s a big money day in tech news, as two separate billion dollar transactions have been announced. Early this morning, AOL announced the sale of 800 patents to Microsoft for $1.056 billion in cash. “The agreement with Microsoft represents the culmination of a robust auction process for our patent portfolio,” said Tim Armstrong, AOL’s Chairman […]
So, remember when Microsoft bought Skype back in May? The Android and iOS communities all buzzed with rumors that Skype’s development may slow down or even disappear on other mobile platforms, favoring integration with their own Windows Phone products instead. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, as Skype has released numerous updates for other platforms since […]
Googlighting, Microsoft’s latest Google-bashing attempt, has resulted in another commercial by the corporate giant. This time, Microsoft specifically attacks Google’s line of cloud services, including Google Docs and Gmail through a mock interview and singing parody. Microsoft’s Google Man steps into the office of a CEO, trying to sell Google’s cloud collaboration software to be […]
Rumors are circulating the internet, like they do, about the next-gen Xbox console lovingly but stupidly dubbed the “Xbox 720”. Among those rumors is talk about how much more powerful the game system will be. Of course, it’s going to be stronger than the Xbox 360, but “six times more powerful” is a pretty vague […]
Privacy. Perhaps the most central worry to putting our lives out on the internet, the issue of privacy within email, social networking, and search has been put on center stage once again with Google’s revision and unification of its myriad privacy policies across services. Google’s new privacy policy, which will apparently have the same user […]
It has been some time since the folks at Microsoft had as much buzz about something as they presently do about Windows 8. The still-unreleased touch-centric operating system feels like a potential winner. That is, unless someone does something bone stupid, like price the hardware for it way out of the range of the average […]
LG is the latest in a string of Android phone manufacturers to strike a patent deal with Microsoft over portions of the Chrome and Android OS. With this agreement in place, Microsoft now profits from 70 percent of all Google-based smartphones sold in the United States. Other manufacturers paying Microsoft for their Android phone sales […]
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer acted as the keynote speaker for the first day of CES 2012, with Ryan Seacrest as his co-host/interviewer. What an awkward combination! Thankfully, what they discussed was more interesting than that bizarre pairing. The new phones look beautiful (HTC Titan II with no specific release date, Nokia 710 and 800 in Canada […]
As part of Microsoft’s latest update to Xbox 360, you must first sign off on a new terms of use agreement, which contains a mandatory arbitration clause for U.S. users. That means if you sign off on the clause, you can’t sue Microsoft for any damages. Of course, if you don’t sign off on the […]
Remember July of last year, when the U.S. Copyright Office said it was totally cool for you to jailbreak your iPhone and there wasn’t squat Apple could do about it? It’s time for the rest of the tech industry to shake in their collective boots, because the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group that was at […]
