Nicholas Kolakowski

Sales of video game software declined 23 percent in April from the same period in 2008, while video game hardware sales declined around 8 percent, according to research company NPD Group. Even though those numbers indicate that players are setting aside their Wii controllers and letting their “Rock Band” instruments gather dust in order to […]

A partnership between Sybase and Samsung SDS will base the Samsung SDS Enterprise Mobile Service on the Sybase Unwired Platform. The Samsung SDS Enterprise Mobile Service “is comprised of a cloud computing technology-based mobile infrastructure and backend integration with various enterprise applications, such as ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.,” said a joint statement released by the […]

Google made a few changes to its Google News service, incorporating YouTube videos and a few aesthetic adjustments into the page, a day after many of its services went dark for 3.5 hours due to a system error. The Google News site now includes a “Featured Video,” as well as a small YouTube tab beside […]

Microsoft Virtual Earth’s 3-D aerial imagery is being paired with OnStar’s GPS location service, enhancing the latter in delivering location information to emergency responders. “If you’re in a rural or remote area, and you go off the road, with 3-D you’d be able to see the terrain of the area, and where the trees are, […]

Google is performing a short-term experiment involving its users’ health-related searches. The company, claiming it wants to better refine its health-search-related processes by “understanding how people search when they’re feeling sick,” wants to start differentiating between users searching for health-related topics purely for research purposes and those searching for those topics in order to find […]

Microsoft Virtual Earth, OnStar Pair for 3D Maps by Nicholas Kolakowski No Title Microsoft suggests that OnStar chose Virtual Earth as a platform partially because of its ability to integrate with specialized applications, such as OnStar’s Automatic Crash Response and Emergency button presses. No Title Microsoft Virtual Earth, which powers the company’s Live Search Maps, […]

Google experienced slowdowns and outages to its Google News and Gmail services on the morning of May 14. Users of those services reacted in a variety of ways. On Twitter, which has a search function that allows for a near-real-time survey of what people are microblogging on various topics, users alternately shrugged off the outage […]

PandaLabs announced May 14 that has uncovered a variant of the Boface worm known as the Boface.BJ.worm that uses Facebook to trick users into purchasing fake anti-virus software. The malware analysis and detection laboratory, run by Panda Security, estimates that roughly 2 million Facebook users could be infected with the worm, which is variant No. […]

Oracle has purchased Virtual Iron, designer of server virtualization software for cost-conscious businesses. The latest Oracle acquisition should come as a surprise to few. In March 2009, rumors drifted that Oracle was close to acquiring Virtual Iron, after the release of a research report by Katherine Egbert, an analyst with Jefferies & Co., who wrote […]

Craigslist will remove its Erotic Services category “in seven days,” replacing it with a category titled Adult Services for which entries will be individually reviewed before being posted to the popular online classifieds Website. Postings in the new category will cost $10, with the option to repost for $5. Craigslist cited a number of sources […]

Google plans to reshoot all images of Japan for its Street View service, an offshoot of Google Maps that allows users to navigate a location at eye-level, after complaints that the original photos violated the collective privacy. The new images, to be taken at some unannounced future point, will incorporate lower camera angles. Google collects […]

Apple has issued an update for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that includes general operating system fixes to security, video playback and other areas. According to Apple, the product versions affected by the Mac OS X 10.5.7 update are Mac OS X 10.5, 10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, 10.5.4, 10.5.5 and 10.5.6. The update can be installed […]