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We've looked at personal tracking products before, including stolen-phone locators and a breadcrumb-tracking, mugging-alarm combo for Google's Android mobile operating system. Where some of these kinds of products have disappointed is that they have needed daily user intervention to make them functi...
Western Digital subsidiary HGST has found a novel way of packing more storage capacity into a standard 3.5-inch hard disc drive: filling it with helium instead of air. The 6-TB Ultrastar He6 HDD is the highest-capacity drive in the world, according to the company. HGST has achieved this by packing s...
In Vancouver, B.C., three entrepreneurs opened what appears to be the world's first ATM that is able to exchange Bitcoins for official currencies. The machine looks like a normal ATM and resides in a popular coffee shop. It exchanges Canadian dollars for Bitcoins, the virtual and controversial onlin...
Play-i on Monday launched a crowdfunding campaign to support the development of robots designed to teach young students the fundamentals of computer programming through play. Play-i is working on two robots, Bo and Yana, that can help teach kids as young as five basic computer science skills. The ro...
Back in 2011, in the dark, pre-tablet days of the netbook, Motorola introduced a phone and laptop combo called the "Atrix." The then-powerful 4G, dual-core AT&T phone slotted into a unique receptacle on the back of the optional laptop's clamshell hinge -- a bit like a game cartridge slides into ...
LG Electronics has swung into the curved smartphone market with the launch of its LG G Flex. Surfacing on the heels of Samsung's Galaxy Round, which curves horizontally, the LG G Flex curves vertically, and the shape is optimized for the average face. The design apparently boosts voice and sound qua...
Many of us are about to face higher winter heating bills this winter. Some suppliers, like the predominant British Gas in the UK, are raising prices by up to 8 percent. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, meanwhile, reckons on a staggering 13 percent increase this year for those using mainly...
Jeroen de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Twente, has developed a prototype storage system that might last for up to 1 million years. This might be needed if the planet were devastated by a natural disaster, or as a reference for future intelligent life on Earth -- or for visiting alie...
Unbounded Robotics unveiled the UBR-1 on Monday, a $35,000 platform designed to provide engineers with functional robot hardware to aid development of apps for the device. The company is a spinoff of Willow Garage, the robotics maker that launched the PR2, a $400,000 robot that in addition to functi...
Demo's fall conference took place last week, and it didn't disappoint. This show has proven to be both a great and an expensive experience for me every year. Great because the technology shown is often truly amazing; expensive because I almost always end up buying one or two items, and my taste tren...
Adidas on Wednesday introduced the miCoach Smart Run, its new fitness-based smartwatch for runners, just a day after rival Nike introduced the latest update to its own Nike+ Fuelband SE tracker. Paul Gaudio, vice president of Adidas Interactive, demonstrated the new fitness tracker at the GigaOM Mob...
Indian Saroo Munshi Khan used Google Earth to track down his long-lost family 26 years after accidentally falling asleep on a train. In a tale that's almost too Hollywood to believe, then 5-year-old Saroo reportedly took a break from searching for change with his brother in Berhanpur, India, and hop...
Sony announced Tuesday that its SmartWatch 2 and its Xperia Z1 and Z Ultra smartphones, introduced in Europe and Asia earlier this year, are now available in the U.S. Sony beat rivals Apple and Samsung to market with its SmartWatch, and is now selling an updated model. At a price point of $200, the ...
Do you remember the scene in an early Star Wars movie where R2-D2 and Chewbacca played a holographically generated, Jedi 3D board game while killing time in their light freighter? Full-color, three-dimensional game pieces were projected onto the board. Chewbacca wasn't a particularly good loser, and...
Here in Silicon Valley we are currently worried about a major transportation strike, and I doubt many on either side yet realize that this is likely to accelerate the move to automate most of the related jobs. There is little doubt the problem we are currently seeing here will be virtually gone in a...