The U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had some tough questions for Tim Cook, CEO of computer giant Apple which stands accused of tax avoidance to the tune of billions of dollars. Questions like: "Why the hell do I have to keep updating my apps on my iPhone all the time and why you don't fix that?"
The conventional wisdom among Silicon Valley's functional equivalent of Morning Joe is that the plebeians will want what Facebook has to offer. But just who are these "millions" of realpeople who should run out and buy the HTC First loaded with Facebook's new Home software?
There is more than a silver lining to Mark Zuckerberg's most blatant jump into your mobile life: Facebook Home actually offers some key user interface experiences that are way better than their counterparts on other Android phones — and even the iPhone.
Bloomberg (not the man) has added tweets to Bloomberg Terminal, its Wall Street information machine, hoping to fix, in one fell swoop and in a week when the SEC stepped in on social media, all of the headaches that Twitter has been giving the markets.
Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that Facebook is neither building a phone nor an app — because those aren't good enough. Here's your first look at Home, a full screen's worth of Facebook greeting you as soon as your turn on your device. And then there are "chat heads" and "cover feeds" and more. Oh, and it's for more than just one phone.
Netflix has finally announced a Memorial Day release for 15 episodes of Arrested Development, a beloved sitcom with a devoted audience that the streaming service uncancelled for exactly that purpose: a long weekend of obsessive binge-watching that is now a proven money maker. Here's why appointment television just got a lot more addictive.
Some $2 billion over budget and a year behind schedule, Steve Jobs's extravagant spaceship-shaped Apple headquarters dream, Campus 2, is turning into more of a nightmare than the office of the future — and investors don't like it.
Hacker News today surfaced this Angel Fire page that looks like it was created by a 15-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, which we hope is the case because it would be a wonderful little look into a hacker's humble beginnings.
The tech gadget crowd, generally pretty good at reporting rumors as rumors, is taking the leaks related to the Facebook phone as the real deal.
The man who sold College Humor and Vimeo to IAC for a ton of money thinks selling tech start-ups to a big company for a ton of money is "always a failure," leaving a pretty narrow road to success that includes zero real companies.
In honor of today's 40th anniversary of the first official cell-phone call, take a fond — if clunky, and sometimes fuzzy — look back at the tipping point when everyone got a phone for herself, and when phones started to get "cool."
Forget making the world more open and connected. Facebook has a more pressing, arguably more difficult task ahead: creating advertisements that its billion users both "like" and actually like. And Mark Zuckerberg is finally speaking out about it.
Baseball and the Final Four are upon us, and the NBA and NHL postseasons are heating up with the Spring, even if football is months away. But no matter how much you're enjoying the singular benefits of your favorite sport, America's sports-padded cable TV packages are still forcing you to subsidize football — even in April.
Apple must really want us to know that something, anything great is on its way, because the leaks keep on coming, perhaps because of competition that is both looming (in the form of Facebook this week) and that's already arrived (hello, Samsung!).
Apple CEO Tim Cook's public apology and his company's consumer friendly change to its Chinese iPhone warranty policy Monday was met with approval by China's state run media today — along with what sounds like a warning to "other American companies."
The tech blogger masses are treating the leak to the Android Police as the real deal version of Facebook's forthcoming phone, and since the social network hasn't been particularly secretive about the launch, it's safe to say this is probably a legitimate look at the gadget in some stage or another.
Advertently or not, The New Yorker this week presents a sort of Goofus-and-Gallant account of the kinds of media organizations to emerge in the digital age: Henry Blodget's news aggregator Business Insider and hipster clothing store-turned-magazine-turned-advertising empire Vice.
After weeks of anti-Apple rhetoric from China's state run media outlets complaining about iPhone customer service standards, Apple CEO Tim Cook has not only written a formal apology but even gone so far as to change the Chinese iPhone warranty policy.
Is it a day of unrelenting pain, or 24 hours of pure delight? Are the naysayers missing the point, or are the pranksters to be condemned? We discuss, in another round of Cocktail Crossfire.
As per usual, Google put out various, elaborate April Fools' Day jokes, which only reminded everyone how much time and money the tech company has to spend on projects that aren't core products like, ahem, Google Reader.
Tech companies are always buying up smaller tech companies for what sounds like a lot of money, but it's hard to know how much money is really a lot of money without some everyday context. That's why we built the handy new Atlantic Wire Startup Acquisition Calculator.
If Facebook leaks everything about their big phone event a week before their big phone event, does Facebook's big phone event need to exist?
After three months of headlines from China to the White House and every geek haven in between, this week introduced the world to the cyber attack that may or may not be slowing down the entire Internet, followed by the digital assault on American Express. Yes, 2013 is already the year there were too many hacking incidents to keep track of, and, no, they're not all the same.
Princeton alumna and parent Susan A. Patton has some advice for the ladies on the letters-to-the-editor page of today's Daily Princetonian, and it's terrible advice, since there are much better elitist institutions in which to go rich husband hunting — and right in the Ivy League!
There has been a wave of skepticism about the severity of this month's "biggest ever" denial-of-service attack, and, well, it's OK to be a little scared of the enormity of this thing. Just not that scared.
The likes of "Gangnam Style" reverberate across the grounds of Samsung's flagship cellphone factory, the Gumi complex just south of Seoul — and the K-Pop blares all day long, which kind of sounds like a mellow version of torture, at least to Americans.
The first earnings report from BlackBerry since its new phone launched isn't all bad news—the company reported $94 million in profit and $1.2 billion in revenue—but there are some alarming figures like the 3 million customers the company has lost over the last three months.
It takes Dave Morin of Path just those short responses in a Vanity Fair interview about his iPhone to encapsulate all the money that young tech execs throw around, with or without a business model. It's enough to make you want to throw your phone at the wall.
Adria Richards has publicly commented on her firing for the first time. And, well, she sounds pretty upbeat about where that conversation is headed next, considering she just lost her job after an onslaught of Internet harassment.
The largest known hack attack of its kind brought the Internet to a crawl for users all over the world, but don't blame the hackers — the outage all stems from an increasingly vulnerable, decade-old problem with the "Internet's basic plumbing" that can be easily fixed.
In a shameless attempt to win skeptics over, Google has included the betterment of penguins, firemen, and veterans among the first uses for Google Glass.
After three straight days of anti-Apple articles in the state run newspaper People's Daily, China's propaganda push is having unintended effects, making the government look like the enemy in a fight it keeps on picking.
It took Facebook about six months to start using all that offline shopping data for more than just "research" and start putting all our rewards cards info to good, lucrative advertising use.
T-Mobile is the first major carrier to drop subsidies for its phones just ahead of the rumored announcement that it will finally start carrying the iPhone starting this afternoon a move that's not likely to attract many new customers.
The people of Reddit aren't taking kindly to a straightforward new plea from the site's co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, questioning whether acts of sexism on the site have served to "belittle and ostracize" its female audience.
Because Harvard is paying for a service called Tivli, the Ivy Leaguers can burn through HBO's Girls, Game of Thrones, and a bunch of other cable TV content for free. Unfortunately, the ultimate student streaming model doesn't sound like it's built for the rest of us.
As if the streaming video business couldn't get any more crowded, streaming music giant Spotify is trying to disrupt its way into on-demand Internet TV content. Which sounds like a profoundly bad idea, until you think about House of Cards and how to work a content deal these days.
Never mind that Dell buyout deal proposed by founder and CEO Michael Dell in early February, activist investor and professional company shaker upper Carl Icahn with the help of Blackstone has put a better offer on the table, he confirmed in a letter today
Don't worry, the writer behind today's offensive-to-women-in-technology-Internet-thing, "The 40 Hottest Women in Tech" slideshow over at Complex, thinks the slideshow is crap, too.
Just for some Friday terrorizing, the Internet has resurrected this terrifying website Let Me Tweet That for You that lets you fake a tweet from someone else, which is about as potentially scary as it sounds—unless you know how to spot a forgery.
Now that rumors suggest Google and LG are both planning on jumping into the smart watch war to compete with Samsung and Apple it's time to stop thinking of this thing as a time-telling piece.
The cloud-based email startup SendGrid confirmed in a blog post Friday that it fired developer relations "evangelist" Adria Richards because of a tweet she sent about what she thought was sexist behavior at the PyCon developers conference, setting an unfortunate precedent for a tech industry with diversity problems but no shortage of "dongle" jokes.
In what would be the most exciting single development for cord-cutters and their quality television since Hulu launched six years ago, the head of HBO hinted Thursday at the development of viable, legitimate standalone streaming service for people who don't pay for cable TV — any cable TV, not just premium. It might even be pretty cheap.
Today in the tech world's warped view of gender "norms": The cloud-based e-mail service SendGrid just fired developer Adria Richards, apparently for reporting sexual harassment after hackers made it clear they didn't approve of her complaining.
As if a story about women's butts couldn't get any more tantalizing, Lululemon CEO Christine Day more or less just asked the owners of the struggling workout-wear company's defective yoga pants to bend over in skin-tight, possibly see-through leggings and have someone inspect their butts.
The mystery hacker has released more Bush paintings, "confidential memos" sent to Hillary Clinton about Benghazi, and access to a high-profile tech figure's address book. The hacking world loves it, but no one can find him. How come?
Google has finally announced its note-taking "Evernote" killer Google Keep, which looks great and useful from this little video preview, but there is a lingering worry that like other beloved products (ahem: Reader) Google might go ahead and kill this one off someday, too.
In light of todays $99 Kindle Fire HD tablet rumor, would it even make financial sense for Amazon to put out a $99 tablet—how low can Amazon go? Let's investigate.
Some people who spend their time checking up on these things, noticed that Google removed Digg from its search results, which led them to conclude some shady things about the link aggregator. But really, the whole thing wasn't that big of a deal.
Instead of going after its usual foe, Microsoft's attack-hungry marketing department has transformed Samsung and the uber-popular Galaxy S III into its latest tech enemy — just another indication that Apple's no longer king of the smartphone makers.
Google's official execution date for the beloved RSS feed isn't until July 1, but the search company has already started erasing Reader's presence, removing it from the drop-down bar and its list of services it offers.
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