Nicholas Kolakowski

Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader will make its debut in the bookseller’s brick-and-mortar stores in Dec. 7, later than anticipated, and in limited quantities. However, Barnes & Noble is promising that all stores will have demonstration units, as the company seeks to wrest market share away from Amazon.com and other e-reader manufacturers during the holiday […]

Quick, what has been the No. 1 search query entered into Microsoft‘s search engine, Bing, in 2009? If you guessed “swine flu” or “stock market,” you’d be close. The biggest trending topic on Bing for the past 11 months, however, was Michael Jackson. According to Microsoft, the search engine’s top 10 trending topics for 2009 […]

Online spending on Black Friday, the traditional day-after-Thanksgiving beginning of the holiday shopping season, was up 11 percent over a year ago, according to research company ComScore. Shoppers gravitated toward Amazon.com and Apple’s online store, as well as the online sites for Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy. Black Friday 2009 pulled in $595 million in […]

12 iPhone Apps to Help You Survive Black Friday by Nicholas Kolakowski Name: ShopperPrice: $0.99 This app lets you keep shopping lists for multiple stores, add pricing and quantities, calculate sales tax, add phones and notes to a list, and create lists either through an auto-complete feature or else by scrolling through a built-in catalog […]

Amazon.com announced Nov. 24 that it has added a native PDF reader to its Kindle e-reader device, letting users store and display documents on the device. In addition, the company announced on its Kindle Website that the e-reader’s battery life has been increased by 85 percent, now offering a week’s worth of power on one […]

Microsoft has reportedly approached Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. about delisting its Websites from Google in exchange for cash, according to an anonymous source speaking to the Financial Times. New Corp. apparently initiated the rumored discussions. Murdoch has publicly suggested in recent weeks that he would make New Corp.’s paid content invisible to Google, which would […]

Smoking is apparently hazardous not only for your health, but also your MacBook’s. The Consumerist blog has posted two accounts of Apple customers who turned in their computers for service only to be told that the Applecare warranties were voided due to secondhand smoke. In both cases, Apple employees reportedly refused to work on the […]

Microsoft’s Bing may be gradually expanding its share of the search market, but the search engine-and by extension, Redmond-finds itself under fire from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. In a Nov. 20 column, Kristof accused Microsoft of “craven kowtowing” to the Chinese government by offering “sanitized pro-Communist results” for politically sensitive search terms such […]

Thanks to what it calls high demand, Barnes & Noble announced on Nov. 20 that people ordering its Nook e-reader after that date would have to wait until the first week of January 2010 for their devices to arrive. While that news is perhaps a good sign for the health of the e-reader market overall, […]

Microsoft offered a first glimpse of much of its future this week, using its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles as a high-profile platform for the release of the beta versions of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010, Visio 2010, Office Mobile 2010 and Office Web Apps for businesses. Many of the keynote addresses […]

New RIM BlackBerry, Sony Phones Offer Big Cameras, Bigger App Stores by Nicholas Kolakowski No Title Research In Motions new BlackBerry Curve 8530 aims at consumers instead of business users, with an advanced media player for music and video, and multimedia capabilities, in addition to standard-issue features such as access to BlackBerry App World. No […]

Google’s Chrome Operating System may not be available to end-users until late 2010, but Microsoft has a response to its rival’s release of the OS to open source for developers on Nov. 20. The Chrome OS is browser-based, and will run on netbooks as a Web-centric alternative to traditional desktop-based operating systems built by companies […]