Articles by Kris Holt

Salesforce.com has taken an interesting step in stemming the fallout from its recent hackathon by deciding to award a second prize of US$1 million to another team of developers At the Dreamforce software conference last month, Salesforce.com held a Salesforce1 Hackathon, in which more than 4,500 developers were encouraged to build apps using the co...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is looking to the skies for his company's latest splashy venture, with a plan to start making deliveries by drones within the next five years The initiative, Amazon Prime Air, will allow the company to make deliveries via the unmanned devices within a half-hour of ordering in some cases. Bezos revealed the plan during a 60 Min...

2014 may be the year when tablets muscle into dominance in the computer marketplace Next year, tablets will account for almost 50 percent of total client personal computer shipments globally, according to estimates by Canalys. Desktops, notebooks and tablets having a diagonal screen size of at least 7 inches are categorized as PCs.

Samsung has unveiled the latest model in its line of phablets, the Galaxy Grand 2, bearing a string of enhancements over its predecessor The company's latest device has a 5.25-inch screen with a 16:9 ratio. The TFT (thin-film-transistor) screen is 0.25 inches larger than the previous model and has a 1280 x 720 resolution, compared with the 800 x 48...

In his first meeting with investors since taking over as Intel's chief executive officer in May, Brian Krzanich presented a road map for the company's future Intel will make a stronger push into mobile devices, expand its foundry business to build processors for other chip makers, and move into additional new markets, Krzanich indicated last week.

Scientists may have just created the most water-resistant artificial material in the world Many of those who study hydrophobic materials -- water-repellant surfaces in both nature and laboratories -- had found themselves at an impasse with a theoretical limit on the amount of time it takes for water to rebound from a surface. However, a team of res...

Just one week after its biggest rival hit the market, Microsoft's new console, the Xbox One, will go on sale with a series of splashy events to mark the launch. From the stroke of midnight on Nov. 22, a new war will be under way, with all three major consoles of the new gaming generation in the market ...

Samsung has claimed Galaxy Gear smartwatch sales exceeded 800,000 in the last two months, but it is unclear how many of them are actually on consumers' wrists. The company unveiled the Gear in early September as a companion device for several models in its line of Galaxy smartphones and tablets.

Sony's first new console in seven years, the PlayStation 4, has finally hit the market. It started retailing Friday, but the launch was not without its glitches ...

The furor around popular technology startups shows no sign of letting up. The latest big-money rumor centers on Snapchat, the company behind the eponymous 2-year-old smartphone messaging app that has yet to earn a cent. Its would-be suitor, Facebook, reportedly made an all-cash US$3 billion offer in recent weeks. However, Snapchat turned it down T...

Netflix has refreshed its user interface for game consoles, smart TVs, set-top boxes and Blu-ray players, striving toward a unified user experience across all devices The company, which has more than 40 million subscribers, created the new look specifically for larger screens. The interface presents browsers with three large images for each movie a...

The upgraded Roomba robot vacuum cleaner promises to make consumers' lives a little easier The iRobot Roomba 880, which is now available in North America, features the new AeroForce Extractor system. Its brushless extractors counter rotate, lift dirt, break down debris, and require less maintenance, according to iRobot. The accelerated airflow betw...

The third fire in five weeks in one of Tesla Motor's Model S cars could prompt safety regulators to take a closer look at the electric vehicle ...

A French court has ruled that Google must automatically block links to nine images of Max Mosley participating in an orgy, according to press reports. Mosley is the former president of the International Automobile Federation The company reportedly must find a way to prevent all links to the images from appearing in its image search results for a pe...

Around a fifth of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way are orbited by Earth-sized planets capable of sustaining life, suggests a study of data obtained by NASA's Kepler spacecraft and the W. M. Keck Observatory Those planets -- between Earth-sized and twice as large -- are orbiting their stars in the so-called habitable zone -- that is, the range of...

Western Digital subsidiary HGST has found a novel way of packing more storage capacity into a standard 3.5-inch hard disc drive: filling it with helium instead of air. Now, it is bringing the first product of this type to market The 6-terabyte Ultrastar He6 HDD is the highest-capacity drive in the world, according to the company. HGST has achieved ...

A consortium of technology companies is suing Google and Android manufacturers in its first patent lawsuits after it outbid the search giant for thousands of patents previously owned by Nortel Rockstar, owned by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Sony and EMC, has accused Google of infringing on seven patents relating to technology that matche...

A project to build a super-high-speed transportation system in California is gaining traction. JumpStartFund on Thursday revealed its users had voted to select the official name, "Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc.," for the company undertaking the challenge Marco Villa, Ph.D., former director of mission operations for SpaceX, and Patricia ...

Lenovo's newest product engineer got a higher-profile introduction to the world than many of the company's other employees. Perhaps that's because he's also famed actor and investor Ashton Kutcher Lenovo announced its multiyear partnership with the Two and a Half Men star at the launch event for the company's latest tablet. Kutcher will work with e...

Motorola's making a big splash with the launch of Project Ara, an ambitious, open source hardware initiative that allows consumers to customize their entire phone, down to the specific components and display ...