Looks like the fight for Skype is over. Just last week, reports surfaced that both Google and Facebook were looking at joint deals with the VOIP company, but now Microsoft has apparently finalized a buyout – for $8.5 billion, according to AllThingsD.
Follow-up: Microsoft Makes Skype Purchase Official: What You Should Know
If the …
Without so much as a rumor or whisper, the Amazon Cloud Player suddenly works on Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
You didn’t miss the party—there wasn’t even an announcement. It just sort of happened over the weekend. Amazon may be causing its share of commotion these days, just not when it decides to let its free music locker …
It may not be a shiny gold inverted-V that clips to your shirt (or if you’re Ferengi, inside one of your capacious earlobes) but a new underwater translator could soon allow divers to make sense of dolphin sounds, and here’s the shocker: even speak back in crude dolphin-ese.
Science fiction often obsesses over how we’d chat with …
HP announced several new things today. Do you want to hear about all of them or not? Just the interesting ones, you say? Okay, fair enough. The most interesting things aren’t even computers! I know, right?!
There are three computers, though: the 13.3-inch ProBook 5330m measures an inch thick and starts at $800, the new 12.5-inch …
Valdez, Alaska’s annual Fly In & Air Show gives working Alaskan bush pilots a chance to show off their skills and hardware in the Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) competition. This year’s event has an interloper – a teenager from Virginia who isn’t even a licensed pilot.
STOL is a necessary skill for Alaskan bush pilots who must …
The New Yorker‘s iPad app is one of the nicest tablet versions of any print magazine: published every Monday at the same time as its paper-and-staples equivalent, it features additional pieces of writing, photography and video, poets reading their poems aloud, and bonus cartoons, among its electronic bells and whistles. (It even includes …
At last! Finally someone has come up with a pair of brain-controlled furry robot cat ears for the masses.
This crazy contraption is necomimi, the first experimental prototype from a team in Japan calling themselves neurowear.
It’s not just decorative. Under those fuzzy ears are sensors that monitor your brain activity. When you …
Thanks to tightened legislation, border crossing in the Arizona desert has become more difficult (read: dangerous) than ever before. But under such consequences, the trekkers are getting more innovative in the methods by which they avoid detection–according to the New York Times, they’re using SMS texts to coordinate their darklit …
Twitter has found itself at the center of a legal battle in the U.K. this weekend after one Twitter user apparently “outed” celebrities who have legally prevented news outlets from reporting specific rumors and/or stories.
According to the Register, there are around 35 “superinjunctions” in place preventing British news outlets from …
Google’s flagship Android phone has finally landed on Sprint as the Nexus S 4G. It went on sale over the weekend for $200 through Sprint and $150 at Best Buy.
Announced at the CTIA conference in March, the Nexus S 4G is similar to the model that launched on T-Mobile in December, but with support for Sprint’s WiMax 4G network. The …
Engineers in South Korea are working on a system that converts sound to energy, with one potential real-world application of the technology being cell phones that recharge themselves as people speak into them.
We won’t see a fully functioning solution like this in the near future, but the team demonstrated that “a prototype of the …
The future of online news is social… and surprisingly casual. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released results of a study into audience behavior for the top 25 news sites in the U.S., and those results underline existing wisdom and offer a new idea of who is reading their news online, and how often, …
