Does Swatch desperately need an iWatch rival?
Despite dismissing smartwatches in the recent past and denying that it’s working with Apple on future iWatch versions, Swatch is actually developing its own smartwatch, The Wall Street Journal has learned, hoping to better compete against the wide range of devices already available in stores — and particularly against the upcoming Apple iWatch, a looming threat for the company.
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Netflix opposes Comcast-TWC merger in gigantic 256-page FCC petition
Netflix has filed a 256-page petition with the FCC asking the regulator to deny the proposed Comcast–Time Warner Cable because it would cause “serious public interest harm.”
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Flappy Bird creator finds out how brutally hard the app market is
Last February, the world was consumed by Flappy Bird mania. The retro-looking, infuriatingly hard mobile game from Vietnam became the top app in 80 countries, generating tens of millions of downloads and a media frenzy that drove its creator to remove the app from iTunes completely. The Flappy Bird genius, Dong Nguyen, claimed the app was too addictive for some consumers and he could no longer sleep because of its gigantic success.
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Thousands of Android phones are being hijacked by terrifying ransomware
Android users beware — another major malware threat has taken the mobile world by storm. According to San Francisco-based security firm Lookout, nearly 900,000 Android phones have been targeted by a form of ransomware called “ScarePackage” in the last 30 days, The New York Times reports.
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A flop for the ages: Fire Phone estimated to have sold 35,000 units at most
As many people have predicted, Amazon’s Fire Phone looks like a flop of the first order, although we’ll never know for sure just how big of a flop it’s been since Amazon wisely won’t release sales figures for the device. To make up for this lack of concrete data, The Guardian’s Charles Arthur has done some guess work using data provided by both Chitika and ComScore to come up with an estimate for Fire Phone sales and the numbers are even uglier than we could have imagined.
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Watch a man weep tears of joy when he finds out he’s getting Google Fiber
What was the happiest day of your life? The day you got married? The day you saw your newborn child for the very first time? The day you graduated college and knew you had a bright future ahead of you? Not for this man. For this man, the happiest day of his life appears to be when he found out he’d finally be able to ditch his current Internet provider for Google Fiber.
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Hilarious Google Now trick fools your phone into adopting a British accent
Ever wish that your Android smartphone could sound a tad more posh? Well now there’s a way. YouTube user shadow321337 has posted a new video that shows how you can trick Google Now into adopting a British accent in the easiest possible way: By speaking to it in a British accent.
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On social media, you’re more than just a critic
Judgmentalism has been a staple of societal life for longer than I’m even capable of understanding, and as such, folks have been handing out criticisms for just as long. It’s common practice for creators to look down on other creations, and moreover, to bestow opinions on current events without ever being asked. It’s an issue that has surely been around for some time, but it feels as if social media has only served to add fuel to the proverbial fire.
Talking heads of the tube were bad enough, but at least there were only a smattering of those. Now, we have billions of those same heads, and unlike television, their words remain linkable, searchable, and retweetable ad infinitum.
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Man jailed for 33 months for pirating ‘Fast and Furious 6′
The British justice system can occasionally deliver as stern messages as any Texas or Mississippi municipality. A judge in the idyllic town of Wolverhampton has just sentenced a 25-year old man named Philip Danks to 33 months in prison for recording “Fast and Furious 6” at a movie theater and distributing a pirated version of the film. The judge explained his harsh decision by referring to the “bold, arrogant and cocksure” manner of the accused. That seems to be an apt description, since Mr. Danks promoted his illicit endeavor in his Facebook profile.
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Comcast thinks you’re even stupider than Verizon does
Verizon isn’t the only Internet service provider that thinks very little of our intelligence. Ars Technica has found that Comcast has admitted to the state regulators in New York that it levels penalties against some customers in select areas who use up more than an allotted amount of data per month… but it insists that these plans do not constitute data caps.
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