Vivendi SA, the company with a 61 per cent stake in Activision Blizzard, has purportedly called in the assistance of both Barclays and Goldman Sachs to help facilitate and broker the sale of the publishing house, though to whom, is currently unknown. One of the rumours circulating around sites like …
Read More »YouTube introduces auto face blurring
YouTube has announced new privacy pro feature that allows video uploaders to blur the faces of everyone in a video with just a simple click. According to the blog post detailing the feature, the idea is to allow anonymity for those that need or deserve it. Examples given include children …
Read More »Google targeted in copyright infringement case
While many companies have been centered in the sights of copyright lobbyists over the past few years, one of the biggest that performs the same sort of search functions as many a torrent site, Google, seemed to skate by with ease – presumably because in most instances its staggering financial …
Read More »Foxconn to build $1 billion Indonesian facility
Electronics manufacturer Foxconn, is set to open a new fabrication plant in Indonesia, that will purportedly cost around a billion dollars to build. However once created, it's said that it will open up a million jobs for the local inhabitants. This would be a welcome investment in the region, where …
Read More »Hate Facebook Timeline? Vote with your wallet
Here at KitGuru, we run regular polls to know what you, dear reader, think. Sometimes the results are predictable and sometimes they are balanced. But every now and then, we get a huge surge in opinion – and it's all leaning one way. The single biggest emotion/response to Facebook's new …
Read More »Streetview revisits the Antarctic
Following on from the Amazon river safari and its whistlestop tour of certain Antarctic areas in 2010, Google's Streetview has now added a host of new images to its library, making it possible to further explore the region. Now available are shots of Shackleton, Scott's Hut, the South Pole telescope, …
Read More »Target Components announces record revenues
In a world full of doom and gloom, it's nice to see a little rainbow glow coming from Castleford. With today's announcement, Target Components can draw a positive line under its efforts in recent years, to combat the nation's negativity and offer something a little more chirpy. KitGuru peers through …
Read More »Research shows 80% of companies block cloud services
Research conducted by Varonis Systems Inc. (http://www.varonis.com), the leading provider of comprehensive data governance software, has found that while 80 percent of companies do not allow their employees to use cloud based file synchronization services, 70 percent of companies would use these services if they were as robust as internal …
Read More »Aria cooks up new combos to stimulate market
Jack and Coke, Cheese and Onion, Thelma and Louise. Some things are just better in combination with each other. The cooks down at Aria have been analysing what it is that customers actually buy (as opposed to what combinations you think they will be interested in) and created a new …
Read More »Valve to push forward Linux game development
Valve have been working hard on getting STEAM ported to Ubuntu. They have also placed focus on Left 4 Dead 2 as a first, ‘showcase' title for the platform. The popular software company talked about this recently on their blog. Phoronix were the first to break the story back in …
Read More »Anyone can now order multiple Raspberry Pi units
Customers wishing to get their hands on the $35 Raspberry Pi mini ARM PC have had to register their interest with their partners up until today before they could place an order. Fortunately for everyone else, from now on it will be considered as a general delivery item which means …
Read More »Microsoft Office 2013 ‘most ambitious release’ to date
Microsoft have been showcasing their upcoming Office 2013 release. Quirky CEO Steve Ballmer has described the upcoming release as the companies ‘most ambitious release' to date. The software is targeting mobile devices, social networking and cloud computing. With a user base of a billion people worldwide, it is also the …
Read More »ISP says file sharing back to normal, despite Pirate bay block
The largest internet service providers in the United Kingdom were ordered at the end of April to bloc access to the Pirate Bay file sharing website. The BBC filed a report today which highlights that the action has had little effect on file sharing. Not really a shock to us …
Read More »Tablets to outsell laptops within 4 years
The move from desktop to laptop was gradual. Given that we've had portable computing solutions since 1981, it took until the last part of 2008 before the laptop became the dominant PC life form. The latest research shows that Apple's forte will take a lot less time to pass laptops. …
Read More »Torrent trackers down themselves in protest
Two of the biggest BitTorrent trackers in the world, OpenBitTorrent (OBT) and PublicBitTorrent (PBT) have gone offline to protest a silence by the makers of Utorrent, over a money saving protocol enhancement – or lack thereof. Being not-for profit trackers, both OBT and PBT are sensitive to waste, especially when …
Read More »AMD slashes high end graphics prices
With some rocky sales results predicted for Q2 2012 and no Chief Sales Office in place, AMD has been looking to add stimulus for the (traditionally) quietest quarter of the year. KitGuru has its channel price movement ear to the ground and this is what we've heard from the herd. …
Read More »Boeing 787 Dreamliners to be outfitted with Android entertainment systems
While Android is most commonly attributed to smartphones and tablets, it often pops up in other devices. One of these devices will be the entertainment system in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner passenger jets. Two models will be available to outfitters, the the Panasonic eX3 and the Thales TopSeries Avant. Details for …
Read More »Apple TV may feature Retina Display
The news of Apple releasing a television set hasn't been that exciting for me, well until I heard that they may be incorporating the high grade retina display into the upcoming models. But will this be cost effective? According to Raymond Soniera, the founder of DisplayMate technologies, Apple may adopt …
Read More »Ford recall 10,000 Escape SUV’s to change the carpet padding
Ford Motor have issued a recall for 100,000 2013 Escape SUV's. The problem? They need to fix carpet padding that could interfere with braking. Ford say that the carpet padding is wrongly positioned and it could reduce space around the pedals and cause drivers to hit the side of the …
Read More »Nintendo admit that ‘interest in 3D is on the wane’
Do you own a 3D television? Do you find that it transforms your movie experience? If so, it would appear that you are one of the minority. Studios and production companies had hoped that 3D would have shaken the market by now, but sales figures indicate that not many of …
Read More »RIM hit with $147M Enterprise Server patent infringement
The woes of Research In Motion seem to keep rolling in, as latest reports indicate they now have to pay out $147 million in damages for infringing on patents owned by Mformation Technologies. A jury determined at the weekend that RIM's Enterprise Server infringed on Mformation patents and awarded damages …
Read More »AMD, Intel and nVidia work in parallel on new supercomputers
If you believe that competition is a good thing, then the US Department of Energy is going about the problem of ‘How best to construct tomorrow's super computers' in the right way. KitGuru dons flip-flops and heads off to consider the impact of PetaFlops. While PC labs across the world …
Read More »US of A begins converting phone boxes to hotspots
In cities across the globe, public phone boxes are cultural icons. From the classic 1929 Mackenzie Trench design (which Dr Who uses to jaunt around the universe) to the iconic red boxes seen across London, we have been used to seeing them everywhere. But what happens when we no longer …
Read More »OldTweets acts as social time machine
OldTweets was launched this week, providing users with the opportunity to look back to the first year of social network Twitter, to see what early adopters were talking about. While this might seem like a very dry way to spend your time, it has some interesting aspects that are worth …
Read More »nVidia hacked – warns users to change passwords
After a malicious attack on its forums last week, it appears that graphics giant nVidia is still fighting gremlins on a major scale and, at the time of writing, was not ready to let people back in. KitGuru uses good old spy satellite technology to uncover more of the truth. …
Read More »Digg sold for $500,000, worth $160m at peak
Digg, the once rising star of the social news industry has been sold for only $500,000. Betaworks, a New York based technology development company bought the website however according to breaking news on the Wall Street Journal, it will not be retaining any of the staff. Digg was founded in …
Read More »Hackers gain access to 450,000 Yahoo accounts, post details online
Hackers have posted 450,000 user names and passwords online, stolen from Yahoo Voice, according to the Guardian newspaper. Similar attacks have taken place against other online services, including Android forums and Formspring. Users are being advised to change their passwords to protect the accounts as soon as possible. The Yahoo …
Read More »SSD companies target share of $50Bn market
IDC loves tracking stuff. When it's not too busy counting the PCs, laptops and tablets that are flying through the world's retail channels, it has smaller divisions that apply the same kind of ‘must know it all' mentality to other markets. Dan Vesset runs the Business Analytics effort and, right …
Read More »File share admin arrested for selling user info
The administrator of several Italian file sharing websites has been arrested after selling on the information of some 300,000 of his users. While the sites themselves were shut down last November, with such a number of users between them, the owner who went by the online pseudonym of Tex Willer, …
Read More »PC sales drop worldwide – Ultrabook sales ‘little impact’
Worldwide computer sales have dropped by 0.1% from the second quarter a year previously. The total sales were 87.5 million in Q2 according to Gartner research. Hewlett Packard are still the No 1 PC vendor worldwide, with 14.9% total share of the market. Lenovo claimed 14.7% which is a healthy …
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