Tech Buzz

I was watching "The Daily Show" the other night and Jon Stewart walked through the failures of the Obama administration, concluding that anyone who did this badly couldn't be reelected if not for the Democrats' secret weapon. He then showed Mitt Romney as that secret weapon, along with a number of t...

Despite government-imposed bans, Facebook and Twitter have tens of millions of users in China. Facebook use in China has reportedly swelled to 63.5 million people, a roughly eightfold increase over the 7.9 million who used the site two years ago. Twitter, meanwhile, has nearly 36 million users in Ch...

A number of European languages could eventually vanish from the Internet, suggests a new study conducted by European nonprofit META-NET. Languages such as Icelandic, Latvian and Lithuanian don't have enough speakers to gain traction as popular languages on the Web. The report goes so far as to say ...

Having already mapped Antarctica and the North Pole, Google has added panoramic images of coral reefs on Google Street View. Google gathered the materials through the Catlin Seaview Survey, a project designed to study the health of coral reefs. Scientists with the Catlin Group, based in Bermuda, use...

Foxconn Technology, the Taiwanese electronics maker typically linked with Apple products and workers' rights violations, said it closed a Chinese plant Monday following a fight between factory employees. Foxconn said that several people from the Taiyuan plant, which employs nearly 80,000 people, wer...

Sometimes if you stand back a moment, which is what I have to do, you suddenly see broader trends, and what I'm seeing now is that the planets seem to be aligning for a Microsoft decade. However, I'm reminded that the difference between chance and luck is the difference between a hundred bucks landi...

The media tablet market is poised for robust growth -- driven in large part by the emerging 7.x-inch form factor, according to new figures from IHS iSuppli. Tablet shipments will reach 126.6 million units this year, the firm predicted, which amounts to a 56 percent annual increase. The largest port...

Last week at Intel's Developer Forum, I was on a panel of folks -- led by renowned futurist Briand David Johnson -- who are trying to make sure future products are better at taking into account the people they are designed for. This purpose was connected to one of the major points made by Dr. Genevi...

Acer has suddenly postponed the launch in China of a smartphone called the "Acer CloudMobile A800." When journalists went to the expected launch in Shanghai, Acer reportedly told them it had been canceled for internal reasons. Acer and Google are not commenting publicly -- and neither company respon...

With Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2012 conference ready to kick off next week, there is little doubt the company has several new products ready to debut. Just in case, though, CEO Marc Benioff made sure the CRM world would be primed for the news. In a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch founder M...