Nicholas Kolakowski

Microsoft’s week involved some tweaks to Hotmail, a few crucial security patches for Patch Tuesday, and a revival of Yahoo-acquisition rumors. Earlier this week, Bloomberg and Reuters offered opposing views of whether Microsoft planned to make a bid for Yahoo. Bloomberg’s report claimed Microsoft had no serious plans to bid for the Web-portal company, clashing […]

Renewable Energy Here is a Segway with a solar panel, just one of many examples on the CEATEC show floor of renewable-energy devices meant to power technology. Ultrabooks Of the laptops present on the show floor, the majority embrace a light-and-thin ethos, in keeping with what seems to be a worldwide trend. Seen here, a […]

TOKYO – The mobility revolution, which proved so successful for Korean and Taiwanese companies such as Samsung and HTC, is a focus of concern for Japanese companies exhibiting here at the CEATEC conference. For years, Japan boasted an international reputation as a technology innovator, largely on the strength of its hardware. However, the game has […]

Did Apple just misstep with the iPhone 4S? That seems to be the opinion of some tech pundits, who took to the blogosphere within hours of Apple’s Oct. 4 unveiling to vent their disappointment in the newest update to the popular iPhone franchise. “Apple no longer has a leading edge, its cloud service is even […]

It’s hard to overestimate the effect that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whose death was announced Oct. 5, had on the technology industry as a whole. His company’s innovations in tablets and smartphones kicked off the current rush toward mobility that will almost certainly define the space for years to come. Apple’s Website now opens […]

Robots Not all Japanese robots are meant to be cute. This wearable one developed by Cyberdyne and powered by Intel monitors the users brain signals and uses that to operate the mechanical legs. Otellini Intel CEO Paul Otellini offered a brief address to CEATEC attendees. The best years of Japanese innovation are ahead of us, […]

Microsoft has no plans to acquire Yahoo, according to a new Bloomberg report. Bloomberg drew its news from “two people familiar with the matter,” who refuted an earlier report from Reuters that the software giant was seriously considering a bid for the Web-portal company. That Reuters report suggested that Yahoo’s market value stands at $18 […]

TOKYO-It’s notoriously hard to predict what technologies will escape the lab and into the real world. For every hundred prototypes shown off to the media with massive coverage and expectations of greatness, maybe 99 never hit a store shelf. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, for example, a handful of manufacturers demonstrated […]

TOKYO – At Japan’s CEATEC conference, one theme echoes through the presentations and keynote addresses: how the country’s tech firms can reclaim the same spirit of innovation that first established their names. Japan is also wrestling with an anemic economy and the aftereffects of a massive earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. The companies at […]

Microsoft is tweaking Hotmail, aiming to remove endemic clutter from its users’ inboxes. These new tweaks, which are scheduled to roll out in coming weeks, target what the company called “graymail,” which include newsletters plus updates from social networks and Websites. Hotmail’s latest graymail-killing features include a new newsletter-filtering function, which is paired with a […]

TOKYO-Technology companies in the United States may have curtailed some of their green IT efforts-particularly in the area of energy-consumption monitoring-but it seems those companies’ efforts are alive and well in a more international context. Toshiba and Intel have both used presentations at the CEATEC conference outside of Tokyo to detail their efforts in the […]

Mango Windows Phone Mango began rolling out to consumers Sept. 27. However, it could take several weeks for all phones to update. Accounts and Groups Mango now bakes Twitter and LinkedIn accounts into its user interface, feeding you messages from those social networks in addition to Facebook. You can also create specific Groups of contacts, […]