Articles by Walaika Haskins

Skype and the mobile network carrier 3 announced on Monday they have launched a handset model to be sold in Europe. The new service will allow Skype users to make free Skype-to-Skype calls as well as send free instant messages from a mobile phone to other Skype users "no matter where they are," the company said "Skype is now truly mobile. This hand...

Uruguay recently became the first country to order the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation's so-called US$100 Laptops, devices designed for children in developing nations. The only problem? The laptops, 100,000 of which were reportedly ordered by the nation, cost just about twice as much as the foundation originally thought they would The new $1...

October seemed as though it would be a banner month for the recording industry after a Minnesota jury ruled in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the first peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing lawsuit to go to trial. The jurors demanded Jammie Thomas, a single mother who the RIAA claimed had shared copyrighted audio files, pay US$222,000 in damages. The award appeared to vindicate in the industry's years-long battle to put an end to illegal downloads by any means necessary...

In a blog post Thursday, Mozilla Labs announced it has begun an endeavor with the ultimate goal of creating an environment for PC users in which Web applications function on the desktop the same way and with the same ease of use as desktop applications The first application to come from the project is Prism, formerly known as "Webrunner," software ...

The Poker Players' Association (PPA) took its fight to reform online gambling laws to lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week when more than 100 poker players took to the capitol. Professional poker players including Vanessa Rousso, Howard Lederer and Victor Ramdin joined PPA executives in Washington, D.C., to drum up support for two bills currently moving through the legislative process...

Facebook members can now access the social networking site on the go -- as long as they have a BlackBerry smartphone. Facebook Cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and Research In Motion President and Founder Mike Lazaridis demonstrated the new service Wednesday during the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Show in San Francisco "Facebook is one of the fastest...

IT industry titans including Microsoft and Symantec announced Tuesday at the RSA Conference Europe the formation of the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode), a non-profit organization solely dedicated to fostering greater trust in information technology products and services by advancing proven software assurance methods The g...

Dell on Tuesday announced the XPS 420, "a premium multimedia PC" designed to let users go semi-pro in editing their pictures and videos and posting them online with the pre-configured system "Our goal is to help people turn their digital lifestyle dreams into reality, whether its viewing family moments and memories, telling your story with photos a...

Maintaining a solid lead among hardcore gamers in its competition with Sony, Microsoft has seemingly decided to train its sights on Nintendo and the threat posed by the Wii. On Monday Microsoft announced the immediate availability of the Xbox 360 Arcade, a bare-bones system that includes the Xbox 360 console as well as five best-selling arcade games, a package that appears to target the Wii in both price and content...

Friends, colleagues, organizations and teams will soon be able to use a new service designed to help them share, organize and find information with Twine.com, Radar Networks announced Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Twine is the first mainstream application of what the company called the "Semantic" Web "We've worked for several years...

MySpacers who want a little more drama in their lives will be able to get their fill from a new Web series launched on MySpace TV Monday. Sponsored by Ford Motor, "Roommates," an original scripted series, will roll out over the next nine weeks with daily weekday updates on the world's most popular social network "Whether it's network television sho...

September was a very good month for the console game industry, which recorded US$1.36 billion in total sales in the U.S. for both video game hardware and software, according to the NPD Group The big winner for the month was Microsoft's Xbox 360 exclusive, "Halo 3," which sold 3.3 million units. The title perhaps also helped Microsoft move an additi...

Sony continued its seemingly weekly shuffle of models and pricing Thursday, this time shifting focus to stateside and announcing the imminent arrival of the 40 GB PlayStation 3 as well as lower pricing for the 80 GB model. The news comes after similar changes were made first in Europe and then in Japan in the first two weeks of October Gamers anxio...

Consumers shopping for touch screen-enabled mobile handsets this holiday season will soon have to wade through a whole slew of the newfangled devices as every week seems to bring another announcement from carriers. In keeping with the trend, Sprint unveiled its new Touch phone developed by HTC "Touch by HTC is unlike any other wireless device becau...

Millions of MySpacers will be able to jazz up their profile pages with streaming videos and select audio material from Sony BMG artists, MySpace announced Tuesday. The deal between the No. 1 social networking site and Sony, the second largest recording label, will make content from artists including Britney Spears, Beyonce Knowles and Bruce Springsteen available via the artists' MySpace profile pages...

Wii owner wannabes hoping for a dip in pricing for the holidays will have to wait a while for the Nintendo console to drop below it US$249 retail price, the company said Thursday. George Harrison, Nintendo's U.S. marketing chief, quashed any hopes for a lower price citing the continued strong demand for the Wii in an interview with Reuters Nintendo...

Mobile phone carrier Sprint Nextel announced plans Wednesday to offer the BlackBerry Pearl 8130, the latest Pearl from smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM), in November. It is one of four handsets from Sprint that will make their debut in the coming weeks The addition of the Pearl will give Sprint users the "complete BlackBerry smartphone expe...

Microsoft kept to its schedule in rolling out its October "Patch Tuesday" updates, which included four "critical" fixes -- two deemed "important" -- that in total address nine flaws. The security updates range from crucial patches for the Kodak Image Viewer to Microsoft's Outlook Express and Windows Mail applications to Word to an RPC (remote procedure code) flaw...

Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) price shift spread to its home territory in Japan Tuesday with a price cut on its 20 GB (gigabyte) and 60 GB PS3 models, the company announced. In addition, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan (SCEJ) said it will make the latest 40 GB model available to Japanese gamers The announcement comes less than a week after Sony Comp...

IBM and Google disclosed on an initiative the two technology heavyweights hope will help computer science students and researchers learn more about and gain experience in what has come to be known as "cloud computing." Ultimately, the goal is to create a new generation of software developers able to write software that will fully take advantage of the capabilities of parallel computing...