Articles by Kris Holt

CTIA-The Wireless Association and major mobile manufacturers, providers and operating system makers have entered a voluntary agreement to include antitheft measures in smartphones The security and safety of mobile users is the top priority for the industry, according to CTIA, and the agreement is intended to protect consumers from smartphone theft ...

The FBI is planning to have a fully operational facial recognition system in place by this summer and may be well on its way to reaching that goal The system will be able to query a database of photos to identify individuals based on their appearance even if they do not have a criminal record, reported Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the...

T-Mobile has decided to end overage fees for its mobile customers The company is abolishing overage charges for customers on every consumer plan, and its chief executive, John Legere, has laid down the gauntlet to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint to kill off such charges as well....

Amazon on Thursday released its annual letter to shareholders, revealing a smattering of tidbits about what's happening in the company now and what's in store for the future The running theme throughout the letter is innovation. The entire company innovates with the customer in mind, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote, touching on its ethos of failing ear...

Facebook is ditching the private messaging function in its main mobile application in favor of having the entire messaging experience take place inside the dedicated Messenger app The company launched the dedicated messaging app on iOS and Android in 2011, and later debuted it on Windows Phone....

While Smart cars may be good for the environment and financially beneficial to owners, more so than other vehicles, those benefits are wiped out when a gang of vandals tips one over A group of as many as eight people dressed in black tipped over four of the cars in a San Francisco residential area this week.

Stanford researchers have created a new game controller that can measure a player's emotions. Eventually, developers may be able to use this information to adjust the video gameplay experience, depending on a player's level of engagement The prototype consists of an Xbox 360 controller with the back panel removed. Researchers replaced it with a 3-D...

Though the current incarnation of virtual reality entertainment has its roots in gaming, potential applications for the Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus extend far beyond video games. Jaunt is one company hoping to expand the possibilities of virtual reality through development of an end-to-end solution for creating cinema-quality VR experi...

BlackBerry has decided to part ways with T-Mobile "BlackBerry has had a positive relationship with T-Mobile for many years," said CEO John Chen. "Regretfully, at this time, our strategies are not complementary and we must act in the best interest of our BlackBerry customers."

FireChat, an iPhone app designed for anonymous hyperlocal communication, could change the way we connect with one other: It does not require an Internet connection or even a cell signal to work ...

Sony has launched a high-end tablet targeted at businesses, which allows users to annotate and draw on documents on an e-Ink screen The company is pitching the Digital Paper device as a solution for increasing productivity and streamlining collaboration in paper-heavy environments. It's targeting the legal and higher education sectors, along with c...

Facebook last week announced more detailed plans to bring affordable Internet access to every person on the planet Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, revealed some fresh details about the work Facebook's Connectivity Lab is carrying out to build drones, satellites and lasers geared to providing connectivity for everyone as part of the ...

Twitter has bolstered its photo-sharing capabilities with the addition of two new features: the option to add up to four photos per tweet, and a function allowing users to tag up to 10 other people in a photo. Both features are designed to make photos more social When a user shares multiple photos in a tweet, the images will automatically create a ...

eBay's board of directors this week urged shareholders to reject Carl Icahn's plan to spin off PayPal as a separate company "Our shareholders and our customers are best served by keeping PayPal and eBay together," the board said in a letter to investors. "No other payments competitor has achieved PayPal's success -- because no other competitor has ...

Facebook has agreed to acquire Oculus VR, maker of the Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming hardware Facebook will pay around US$2 billion for the company. That figure includes $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock, valued at $1.6 billion based on recent average trading price. There is a provision for an additional $30...

LG Electronics on Monday unveiled a light bulb designed to illuminate consumers lives in a more intelligent way The Smart Lamp, which can be controlled by an iOS or Android device over Bluetooth or WiFi, debuted in LG's home market of South Korea.

Although they previously came to an arrangement regarding stronger broadband service delivery, Netflix and Comcast last week sparred over the issue of Net neutrality in a public forum Net neutrality -- or "open Internet" -- is the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers and governments. ISPs should ...

The mobile game Flappy Bird seemed dead and buried, but a tweet from its creator suggests it may yet rise from the ashes -- perhaps not quite like the phoenix In response to a Twitter user asking whether the game would return to Apple's iTunes App Store, Dong Nguyen responded, "Yes. But not soon."

Sony debuted Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 console, at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The project is in active development with a view to a future commercial launch. A software development kit also is under development Morpheus features a head-mounted unit with a visor-like display, wh...

Google and Viacom have settled a long-running copyright suit, after a federal judge twice threw out the case "Google and Viacom today jointly announced the resolution of the Viacom vs. YouTube copyright litigation," the companies said Tuesday in a brief joint statement. "This settlement reflects the growing collaborative dialogue between our two co...