Tech Buzz

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...

Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, one of the world's most vilified workers-rights violators, confirmed reports that it is manufacturing Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 on the backs of university interns. Chinese media broke the story, asserting that thousands of students from an engineering program at t...

A Tesla S caught fire last week. I have a lot of experience with cars, with lithium-ion batteries -- and with both cars and batteries catching fire. For a time, I was the lead battery analyst in the U.S., and my house nearly burned down when a lithium-ion battery pack decided to fail while charging....

Both BlackBerry and Microsoft have been in far stronger positions with regard to personal technology. At one time, Microsoft was contending for leadership in smartphones against Palm and BlackBerry, and BlackBerry took leadership only to lose it to Apple and then Samsung. Microsoft put tablets on th...

The Chaos Computing Club, a group of German hackers, claimed to have cracked Apple's new iPhone fingerprint scanner. The scanner is one of the distinguishing features of Apple's new iPhone 5S. It was not immediately clear whether CCC's claims were true, but two prominent iPhone security experts repo...

A couple of years ago, I wrote on the beginning of my long-term plan to eventually retire in Belize. My wife and I just came back from our latest update trip. Our house plans are nearly finished, and we should start building within 12 months. There have been a lot of impressive improvements since we...

BlackBerry is preparing to lay off 40 percent of its workforce in an effort to slash costs, according to a Wednesday report. The news came on the same day that BlackBerry launched its Z30 smartphone, a 5-inch, all-touch smartphone that the company said is its biggest, fastest and most advanced smart...

Nokia has tweeted that it's doing something having to do with innovation on Oct. 22, but it won't say what or where. However, there's heavy speculation that the company set that date to unveil its much-delayed Lumia 1520 phablet. The phablet is rumored to have a 6-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel HD screen. I...

A Google Street View car dinged a pair of public transport buses and a truck in Bogor, Indonesia. The Google driver hit one bus and then tried to skedaddle when the driver got angry, police reported. Alas, the getaway was thwarted when the Street View vehicle hit a second bus -- and then a truck, ac...

This year, Intel held its IDF during the same week as Apple's iPhone launch, and it's not the first time these events have coincided. However, I could count the number of times Intel has had something more interesting to present than Apple on one hand -- and have five fingers left over. That was tru...