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From USA Today: Imagine coming home and, with the push of a single button, turning on the lights, turning up the thermostat and flipping on the TV. Another button might shut off all the lights and turn down the thermostat when you leave. Starting next month, Best Buy will sell a “ConnectedLife.Home” package that features …
From the New York Times: The day after Christmas, prices on big screen TVs went down and Raul Axtle pounced. Mr. Axtle and his 16-year-old son, Shaheen, headed to a Best Buy electronics store in Emeryville, Calif., to buy the TV that Shaheen had decided was the perfect screen for displaying video games, a 40-inch …
From InformationWeek: A phenomenon as monumental as the Internet should have an ailment of its own. Indeed, the Web appears to be breeding its very own disease, a medical syndrome recognizable by a quickening of the heart, profuse sweating, and furious clicking and bashing of the mouse. In extreme cases, the ailment can be identified …
From the Globe and Mail: Hold onto your sleigh-reins: Santa has gone interactive. In either a blatant manipulation of a beloved Christmas legend or a genius attempt to bring children and parents together this festive season, one of the world’s largest instant-messaging operators has taken last year’s ‘e-mail Santa’ campaign to another level. MSN has …
From MSNBC: By his own admission, James Pacenza was spending too much time in Internet chat rooms, in some of them discussing sex. He goes so far as to call his interest in inappropriate Web sites a form of addiction that stems from the post-traumatic stress disorder he’s suffered since returning from Vietnam. Whatever it’s …
From the New York Times: On Thursday, Kevin Poulsen, senior editor for Wired News, noted in his blog, a milestone in the number of records that have been compromised in data breaches since the ChoicePoint breach nearly two years ago: “Rapid-fire announcements this week by U.C.L.A. (800,000 records) and Aetna (130,000) moved the total to …
From CNN: The University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system. Only a small percentage — “far less than 5 percent” — of the records in the database …
From E-Commerce News: How did CEO Steve Jobs rescue Apple and create the most important consumer product of the 21st century (so far)? The answer will not be comforting to those who work for relentless, hard-driving, impossible-to-please CEOs. According to Levy, the iPod became The Perfect Thing and a marketplace blockbuster because of Jobs, in …
From the New York Times: Imagine paying $580 million for an ever-expanding heap of personal ads, random photos, private blathering, demo recordings and camcorder video clips. That’s what Rupert Murdoch did when his News Corporation bought MySpace in July. Then imagine paying $1.65 billion for a flood of grainy TV excerpts, snarkily edited film clips, …
From TechRepublic: Industry lore likely is wrong to attribute to IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson the famous misjudgment that there’s a world market for five computers. But Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos thinks the idea will pan out eventually. “The world needs only five computers,” Papadopoulos said on his blog. He then listed …