Articles by Renay San Miguel

Samsung used all the marketing and showmanship power at its disposal Thursday to take the wraps off its new Galaxy S4 smartphone, which highlights new ways for users to interact with a mobile device while improving the hardware that forms the foundation of its Galaxy product line "We've taken technology and innovation to help us get closer to what ...

So now we know why Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have been so busy recruitingformer Google big brains: They coveted their mastery of algorithms, their sure-footedness in navigating mountains of Web-based data The result? Facebook Graph Search, announced Tuesday by Zuckerberg. Those whowere quick to ask for invites will soon get to play with the beta...

And you thought Apple was the only Teflon technology company out there. Despite a brief six-year lifespan filled with privacy complaints and user gripes over neck-snapping design changes, Facebook just signed up User No. 500,000,000. Businesses continue to pile onboard the Mark Zuckerberg express, thanks to the powerful recommendation engine that ...

How's this for tying together Old Spice's winning social media strategy and Apple's current iPhone problems: While the cologne and deodorant company is ending the week smelling like a rose, Steve Jobs' tech colossus is in danger of stinking up the joint Follow along with me as I attempt to marry the two top tech stories of the past few days. Both i...

It may be hard to believe in our current overheated cable news climate, but in the days and months after Sept. 11 -- and in the weeks following the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- CNN was actually doing its best to provide in-depth reporting and analysis of the Middle East. CNN International's Octavia Nasr was a key player for the network during that time. I know this for a fact because as an anchor for CNN Headline News, and fill-in anchor for CNN, I shared the set with her on several occasions, seeking her input on how America and the West were being covered by Middle East-based media outlets such as Al-Jazeera...

Even though I had no intention of ever buying a Kin (apparently like everybody else out there), I'm still pissed off at Microsoft for killing their latest attempt at the mobile phone market The Kin One and Two now share a dubious distinction: They got less time than Conan O'Brien to build and develop an audience. True, there wasn't a lot of groundb...

"Orders for the iPhone 4 Top 600,000, Apple Says," according to a New York Times headline last Wednesday. Now that's a headline guaranteed to grab the nearest Mac fanboy, technology enthusiast and even casual geek by the lapels and slap the caramel mochaccinos right out of them. And if things hadn't fallen apart for Apple and AT&T during the iPhone pre-order process this week, several key groups would have been spinning that breaking news amongst themselves thusly:...

As director of marketing for the Qualcomm division that manufactures the Mirasol display technology, Cheryl Goodman is racking up the frequent flyer miles, thanks to the boom in the e-reader/tablet computer market. She's the one who educates journalists and analysts about Mirasol's promise of color e-reader screens, along with lower power consumption, better viewing in sunlight and a smaller environmental footprint...

The auditorium darkens, the audience members put on their 3-D glasses, and a screen fills up with point-of-view images of sci-fi warfare -- futuristic soldiers leaping from one military platform to another in special weaponized jetpacks, raining death and destruction A scene from a potential sequel to James Cameron's "Avatar?" No, just another atte...

You don't have to be an Apple fanboy to rave about the coolness on display during a typical Steve Jobs keynote presentation. Sure, like any good speaker or stand-up comic, Jobs knows where his guaranteed applause/laugh lines fall during the hour or so he's on stage, and he's well aware of who will be doing most of the laughing, oohing and aahing. It's better than a '60s sitcom laugh-track. But he's also playing to the rafters somewhat; knowing that there will be plenty of after-the-fact coverage of his keynotes, Jobs throws in new takes on technology that will truly impress the mainstream audience, not just the tech-savvy Mac acolytes...

If you're a parent of young children and you've sat through any number of bad "family" movies during a crowded matinee, then you've probably thanked Disney/Pixar for conjuring up the likes of Buzz Lightyear and Woody, Nemo and Dory, Mike and Sully, Mr. Incredible, Wall-E, Lightning McQueen and Remy the gourmand rat Of course, those same parents are...

It will probably come as a surprise to the millions of people who have already purchased one, but the Apple iPad is just another PC, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who made the comments this week during a recent on-stage interview at the D8 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif "Of course it is," Ballmer told Wall Street Journal tech ...

Talk about dealing from a position of strength: Apple and Steve Jobs enter next week's Worldwide Developers Conference as kings of the tech industry hill, makers of must-have consumer products and generators of must-read technosphere headlines "Strength" might be the last word you would choose to describe Jobs if physical appearance alone is the st...

Claiming it was scared into reality by the Chinese hacking attacks of late last year, Google is phasing out employee usage of the Windows operating system due to security concerns, according to a report in the Financial Times At least that's the cover story being provided by unnamed Google employees quoted in the FT article. An official response fr...

It has become the PowerPoint slide seen around the world -- or at least the World Wide Web, and specifically those websites and blogs that pay close attention to technology and the smartphone market. A Microsoft presentation at the ReMIX trade show in France this week boasted a slide showing that tech market research firm IDC predicts 30 million Windows Phone 7 devices sold worldwide by the end of 2011...

Thanks to advances in computer-generated technology, the images simply jump out at you from the TV screen, as all good commercials should: massive sheets of orange fabric covering up the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and unfolding down the sides of buildings on the Las Vegas Strip, dropping from the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, being unfurled by shiny happy people all along an East Coast beach. The late British singer-songwriter Nick Drake's "From the Morning" lulls you into accepting all this as just another day in the U.S. right before the voice-over announcer brings us to the point with the (ahem) blanket statement: "AT&T covers 97 percent of all Americans."

You might think that someone at Microsoft is a big fan of Dr. Seuss; naming the new Windows Phones the "Kin One" and "Kin Two" certainly conjures up images of critters that would assist the Cat in the Hat in wreaking havoc on Sally and her brother's house. But it's really Kin as in kinship; people joined by common ancestry (as Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines it), or in a more tech-savvy sense, younger users joined by the common desire to share every bit of information they come in contact with via their smartphones...

Try Googling the phrase, "Is Facebook losing members over privacy?" You'll see seven of the top eight search results answering in the affirmative, as various headline writers take advantage of recent controversies regarding the world's biggest social network and its customers' profile data A deeper look into those stories, however, shows the headin...

The location-based service company Glympse has its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. You certainly don't need the company's iPhone app -- which lets people track their friends' locations on smartphones in real-time on maps or satellite imagery -- to know that. But it may seem lately as if Glympse has been all over the media map, courtesy of its recent move to integrate its service with the world's largest social network, Facebook...

Was it only four years ago that the anti-Facebook crowd was backlashing against the concept of the News Feed? Time sure flies when you're accusing the world's biggest social network of invading its users' privacy Forget about the current spasm of criticism; hating on Facebook has been the default setting for a sizable portion of the technosphere --...