Microsoft offers a glimpse Tuesday at a new-generation Xbox as videogame consoles evolve into home entertainment centers and adapt to competition from smartphones and tablets.
A tented stage has been set up at the technology giant's headquarters in the city of Redmond in Washington State for an "Xbox Reveal" event to play out just weeks before a major annual E3 videogame conference in Los Angeles.
Full StoryYahoo! announced Monday it would acquire blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, saying the two companies "share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas."
The two firms confirmed weekend reports of the tie-up, in a deal which helps the struggling Internet pioneer connect with Tumblr's youthful users.
Full StoryIndia's Just Dial search engine launched Monday an initial public offer to raise up to $174 million, marking the biggest share offering so far in 2013 and one of the largest by an Indian Internet firm.
The Mumbai-based local business search firm, which began operations in the mid-1990s as a telephone-based directory and moved later to the Internet, is offloading one-quarter of its equity in the initial public offer (IPO).
Full StoryFacebook loves to talk about its ridiculously high number of users. Yes, Facebook has a whole lot of accounts, but many of them aren't humans. eMarketer released an analysis of Facebook's audience, and it turns out more than 10 percent of Facebook's reported monthly users are not human. Over 100 million active Facebook users are pets, objects or brands.
At the end of March, Facebook announced that it has 1.11 billion monthly active users. eMarketer found that only 889.3 million of those users were humans.
Full StoryYahoo is considering buying Tumblr, according to two separate reports on AllThingsD and Adweek. It's eyeing the one social network it can afford that would make Yahoo feel young again.
AllThingsD reports that Yahoo would consider an investment or corporate alliance in addition to outright buying all the Tumblogs; Adweek is more confident, stating that "Yahoo is in serious talks" to buy Tumblr. Both cite a valuation of $1 billion. The site, known for cat GIFs and amateur porn, expects to turn its first profit this year.
Full StoryA clutch of Twitter accounts and a blog maintained by the Financial Times were hacked Friday, the latest in a series of cyberattacks claimed by the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-government group which has regularly targeted media organizations it sees as sympathetic to the country's rebels.
A few of the FT's dozens of Twitter feeds and blogs broadcast messages supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad and attacking Syria's opposition. One described the Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra as terrorists and linked to a graphic video of a hooded man shooting kneeling prisoners in the back of the head.
Full StoryPakistan is set to become the fifth Asian country to use China's domestic satellite navigation system which was launched as a rival to the U.S. global positioning system, a report said Saturday.
The Beidou, or Compass, system started providing services to civilians in the region in December and is expected to provide global coverage by 2020. It also has military applications.
Full StorySeveral government Internet sites have come under "coordinated and simultaneous" cyber attack, an information security spokesman in the oil-rich kingdom reported on Friday.
The spokesman said among them was the interior ministry website brought down for an hour on Wednesday after being targeted in a so-called denial of service attack from "hundreds of IP addresses in different countries".
Full StorySonic the Hedgehog is rolling with Nintendo.
Sega says it will exclusively release the next three games starring the popular blue critter on Nintendo platforms. The first title will be called "Sonic Lost World" and is set for release on the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS later this year.
Full StoryYahoo! on Thursday began spicing up its online news pages with real-time comments fired off at the globally popular messaging service Twitter.
"Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to bring tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed," Marissa Mayer, Yahoo! chief executive, said in a blog post.
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