Like smartphones and music players, the digital video and photography category has exploded with cameras over the past few years. Rather than focusing on every model and device with an X number of megapixels, we’ve focused our attention on new ways and gadgets that incorporate photography or video in new or different ways.
AIM, AOL's seminal instant messenger app, just received a preview update to pull it out of obscurity and compete with other more popular chat apps like Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Skype and a slew of others that aggregate disparate clients and boast features like video and picture-sharing.
Facebook and Skype have broadened the scope of their technical integration to make it possible for two people to do a video chat - one using the Skype interface and the other using the Facebook interface.
These days, smartphones with speedy Web connectivity are easy to find, so consumers should be able to get by with just a roomy data plan, dumping voice service in favor of VoIP. But is that practical? To see how feasible cutting voice service is, I decided to go VoIP-only for a week, on the new T-Mobile/Walmart prepaid plan that offers 5GB of 4G data on T-Mobile's HSPA+ 14.4 network for a measly $30 per month.
Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox 8, adding Twitter search to the browser and patching eight vulnerabilities.
Yahoo's improving stock price following a CEO shakeup makes the Internet portal ripe for a sale, and speculation is flying about industry titans that may bid for the company.
Entertainment companies seeking to trace people who are illegally file sharing may be interested in new research that could identify filesharers through their Skype accounts. A research team has figured out how to link online Skype users to their activity on peer-to-peer networks, a correlation that could represent a major threat to users' privacy.
Microsoft announced today that it has mostly wrapped up its acquisition of the Internet communications company Skype. The $8.5 billion deal has received approval from the major regulators, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union, although a few holdouts remain--Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan--which are expected to fall into line shortly.
As it wrapped up its acquisition of Skype, Microsoft again assured users that it would continue to develop versions for platforms other than Windows.
Microsoft said Friday that it has closed its US$8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, the Internet telephony provider in Luxembourg, and the company will function as a new business division within Microsoft.
Antitrust regulators in the European Union today approved Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, the online telephone and chat giant.
A complaint by a small Italian firm to the European Commission could derail Microsoft's acquisition of Skype.
Skype has released version 2.5 of its application for Android, which allows Android-based tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Motorola Xoom to use its video calling feature, it said in <a href="http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/09/skype_25_for_android_adds_more.html">a blog post on Wednesday.</a>
Skype is working to fix a security hole in its iOS app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows a hacker to steal a person's entire address book. The vulnerability, located in the app's chat message window, can be exploited with JavaScript code. It was pointed out by security researcher Phil Purviance of AppSec.
Skype announced that it is acquiring GroupMe for an undisclosed sum. Acquiring the young mobile group messaging service expands Skype's arsenal of communication tools and gives Skype (and by extension Microsoft once the purchase of Skype is complete) tools to compete with the Huddle feature of the Google+ mobile app.