Archive

Anki on Monday introduced Cozmo, a little robot powered by an advanced artificial intelligence. Cozmo promises to be far more interactive than any toy robot that has been released to date. Although the multidisciplinary team of roboticists, animators and game developers who designed Cozmo had play i...

Square on Wednesday announced that it had registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission for its long-expected initial public offering. A startup that specializes in electronic payments, Square has been operating in the red. It plans to raise up to $275 million in its IPO, it disclosed. Howe...

An Apple shop recently dumped Apple for Dell following a surprising revelation. Over most of the last two decades, the only time I've seen a move like this was when some change in IT forced it, and a lot of staffers subsequently would quit. This move was largely user-driven. Then, last week, one of ...

Oculus VR on Monday unveiled a new project at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Oculus Story Studio will produce movies in virtual reality. It presented its first example of the genre on Monday evening -- a 4-minute experience called Lost. Oculus, which was founded in 2012 and quickly...

Apple is a company that bucks trends, that does things its own way, that manages its business through highly tuned cycles. One thing Apple barely does at all, though, is offer any sort of special deal or sale price. Not even on Black Friday. Or Cyber Monday. Or just because. Heck, when Apple celebra...

Nvidia on Wednesday debuted its GRID Visual Computing Appliance, a device that lets businesses deliver ultra-fast GPU performance to any Windows, Linux or Mac client on their network. The GRID VCA is a GPU-based system that allows complex applications, sending graphics output to the network and ena...

Disney caught the attention of the console video gaming universe on Tuesday with the launch of "Disney Infinity." The new initiative combines collectible real-world action figures with onscreen gaming, following the lead of Activision's cross-platform "Skylanders" franchise. By leveraging the compan...

They say it's a small world after all, but in the Magic Kingdom, it appears to be a FUD-filled world as well. How else to explain a recent episode of "Shake It Up" on the Disney Channel? Asked to diagnose a misbehaving PC, a stereotypically geeky character asks, "Did you use open source code to save...

With Steve Jobs' passing, last week was a sad one for the technology industry, which owes much of its current success to him and will remain forever diminished by this event. Even as people talk about his uniqueness, they also don't seem to get that he can't be replaced like you would replace a sho...

Steve Jobs' long battle with cancer came to a sad end Wednesday. The Apple cofounder, chairman and former CEO started his company from a garage, revolutionized the technology industry many times over, got fired from his own business, then came back years later to turn it into the most valuable publi...

I've covered or worked in companies that have been led by iconic CEOs for most of my life, including Disney, IBM, Microsoft and Apple. Each of those firms went through a painful transition after the departure of its iconic CEO. After Steve Jobs was fired years ago, Apple nearly failed -- until he ca...

Six major high-tech firms have agreed to toss out the no-solicitation agreements they had reached concerning competitors' employees. The secret anti-trolling agreements came to a voluntary end on Friday as the Department of Justice announced a settlement with Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and ...

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 ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. Would he have changed his mind if The Great Gatsby had received the 3-D IMAX treatment -- with Jay Gatsby as an alien bootlegger and Nick Carraway as avenging Ivy League superhero? After burning bright and flaming out fast in the 1...