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News

• If you can't find a seat at Starbucks, blame IT

  Unless you're a Yahoo employee, theres a very good chance you are working from home or at a coffee shop at least part of the week, according to Forrester Research.

• CES 2013: Diary of a CES Noob, Day 2

  As old CES hands like our own Keith Shaw advised, Tuesday was orders of magnitude more busy than Monday. Now the show had a crush of people to go with its gargantuan physical scale. All the booths were put together and running, everyone's gear was on display - the effect was overwhelming.

• CHARGE: Power-related gift ideas for the holidays

  While battery technology makes slow advances, at least we have other ways of keeping our gadgets up and running when either at home or on the road.

• 17 Starbucks stores get wireless charging in Boston

  Seventeen Starbucks stores in the Boston area are taking part in a wireless charging pilot program that will allow customers to recharge their phones by placing them on the charging surfaces of tables.

• Starbucks mobile payments perk past 26M transactions

  Starbucks said 26 million smartphone transactions were made to buy its coffee and other products in less than a year since it started using a mobile payment app, making it the nation's largest mobile payment program.

• Starbucks employee fired for posting YouTube video

  A Starbucks employee has been fired for posting a video on YouTube that pokes fun at his employers and customers of the coffee chain.

• NFC will be worth the wait, analysts say

  Starbucks said this week it has seen plenty of customers interested in using smartphones to pay for their coffee.

• HTML5 isn't solving mobile dev issues yet

  HTML5 will likely make mobile development easier but not for some time, a group of wireless experts said Monday.

• Starbucks shares lessons of going mobile

  An Android app and the ability to order a drink from a mobile phone are coming soon, an executive from Starbucks said as he shared lessons and tips from his company's experience offering mobile applications.

• We'll pay by smartphone, but let's not pay for dumb security

  It's a new dawn, people! As of today, you can walk into just about any Starbucks store and pay for your latte using nothing other than a (free) iPhone app, coupled to an existing Starbucks card account. That's right -- the day of mobile electronic payments is here at last! Ta-dah!

• Starbucks extends mobile payments to 7,500 stores

  Starbucks Wednesday began allowing iPhone, iPod Touch and BlackBerry mobile payments for its coffee at thousands of its stores.

• Firesheep not evil, says snooping tool's maker

  The security researcher who created the Firesheep snooping tool defended his work today, saying it's no one's business what software people run on their computers.

• Spending Review: Business CIOs are optimistic for the future

  Private sector CIOs appear to be optimistic that the UK government's comprehensive spending review will not have a knock-on effect in their own patch.

• How 'smart antennas' could boost Wi-Fi performance

  We've all had the problem of going into a crowded Starbucks and suffering through a substandard Wi-Fi signal, most likely caused by too few access points and too many end users. But what if Wi-Fi antennas could do a better job of detecting how many devices were in a given room and could push data out to them more rapidly on a one-by-one basis? That's what researchers at Gonzaga University are trying to accomplish by testing "smart antenna" technology in their new research lab that just received a federal research grant worth nearly $1.2 million from the National Science Foundation. In this interview, we ask Gonzaga electrical engineering associate professor Steve Schennum to outline the basics of smart antenna systems, to describe how they'll improve Wi-Fi performance and to describe how a smart antenna lab would help out small wireless companies.

• In-flight Wi-Fi turbulence: Travellers reluctant to pay

  In 2008, the number of commercial aircraft that offered in-flight Wi-Fi service totaled just 25, according to market researcher In-Stat. By the end of 2010, however, In-Stat predicts that number should reach 2,000 planes.