Microsoft Corp surprised the tech world with the unveiling of a prototype hologram visor that can bring the Minecraft video game, Skype calls and even the landscape of Mars to three-dimensional life. The veteran tech pioneer, which long ago lost the mantle of the world’s most inventive company, is making a bold play to regain that title in the face of stiff competition from Google Inc and Apple Inc. Virtual or enhanced reality is the next frontier in computing interaction, with Facebook Inc... 

ARM has created a course to teach IoT skills to students at University College London (UCL) The course is designed to encourage graduates in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) to seek careers in IT. The IoT Education Kit will teach students how to use the Mbed IoT operating system to create smartphone apps that control mini-robots or wearable devices. Students are expected to be interested in building their own IoT business, or joining IoT-focused enterprises like ARM. The course... 

South Korean smartphone maker LG Electronics Inc said on Thursday that it has not experienced any overheating problems with Qualcomm Inc’s new Snapdragon processor that is powering a curved-screen device going on sale later this month. “I am very much aware of the various concerns in the market about the (Snapdragon) 810, but the chip’s performance is quite satisfactory,” Woo Ram-chan, LG vice president for mobile product planning, told reporters at a press event for the company’s... 

For a while, the rumor mill has manufactured hell on earth yarns claiming that Samsung is set to buy the Canadian smartphone maker Blackberry. The deal always seems to fall through, and in any event has never happened. However the Financial Post has found evidence that this time Samsung is actively pursuing a plan to take over or buy a significant stake in BlackBerry. The story is still a rumour because both companies have denied such a plan may be in the works, but a document obtained by the Financial... 

Google has put in place the framework for its own cellular service by acquiring capacity on the networks of Sprint and T-Mobile USA, according to news reports. The sprawling search company would sell the service directly to consumers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources. Tech news site The Information reported on the deals earlier this week. Google is heavily involved in mobile through its Android operating system, the world’s most widely used mobile OS, as well... 

A new alien-planet–hunting telescope has just come online in Chile, and it could help scientists peer into the atmospheres of relatively small planets circling nearby stars. The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS for short) — located at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Paranal Observatory — is designed to seek out planets two to eight times the diameter of Earth as they pass in front of their stars. Such a planet will cause the light of the star to dip ever so slightly when... 

Facebook Inc said it has put measures in place  to clamp down on “hoaxes” and fake news stories that can spread rather rapidly  on its 1.35-billion member online social network. The company said it had introduced an option to allow Facebookusers to flag a story as “purposefully fake or deceitful news” to reduce the distribution of news stories reported as hoaxes. Facebook said it will not remove fake news stories from its website. Instead, the company’s algorithm,... 

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will not use Qualcomm Inc’s  processors for the next version of the South Korean technology giant’s flagship Galaxy S smartphone, according to Bloomberg. Such an outcome would be a blow for Qualcomm’s prospects for 2015, with the company already having guided for weaker-than-usual annual revenue growth in a five-year outlook issued in November. Samsung, the world’s No.1 smartphone maker, has been one of the U.S. company’s top customers. Qualcomm’s... 

The European Space (ESA) has deployed a private, on-premise cloud platform designed to serve its community in Europe. The infrastructure is partly based on a custom version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The ESA Cloud needs to be constantly available to the space agency’s large user base, ensuring high levels of reliability and flexibility and the management capabilities of a modern IT environment, according to Red Hat. Hosted applications include software development and testing, satellite... 

Over the last few years, the industry has seen budget polarization on an enormous scale. The cost of AAA development has ballooned, and continues to do so, pricing out all but the biggest warchests, while the indie and mobile explosions are rapidly approaching the point of inevitable over-saturation and consequential contraction. Stories about the plight of mid-tier studios are ten-a-penny, with the gravestones of some notable players lining the way. For a company like Ninja Theory, in many ways... 

Scientists are finding more evidence of a galactic “skeleton” lurking inside the appendages of the Milky Way, and studying these massive “bones” could help researchers get a better idea of what our galaxy looks like from the outside. In 2013, researchers first suggested that long, thin, dense clouds of gas may form inside the spiral arms of the Milky Way, creating a sort of galactic skeleton that traces the shape of these massive structures. At the time, only one such “bone”... 

IBM will favor purchases that strengthen its cloud services, the company’s CFO said Tuesday, as it seeks ways to expand its business after 11 straight quarters of declining revenue. “Most of our acquisitions will probably be on an ‘as a service’ basis, as opposed to an on-premise model,” CFO Martin Schroeter said during IBM’s quarterly earnings call, in response to a question. “That’s the nature of the market and where we have a lot of opportunity,... 

Internet users in the U.S., France Germany and other nations are increasingly concerned about the impact technology has on privacy, and feel legal protections are insufficient. In 11 of the 12 countries surveyed as part of a report published by Microsoft, respondents said that technology’s effect on privacy was mostly negative. Most concerned were people in Japan and France, where 68 percent of the respondents thought technology has had a mostly negative impact on privacy. A majority want... 

In addition to having its own bag of digital tricks, the U.S. National Security Agency reportedly hijacks and repurposes third-party malware. The NSA is using its network of servers around the world to monitor botnets made up of thousands or millions of infected computers. When needed, the agency can exploit features of those botnets to insert its own malware on the already compromised computers, through a technology codenamed Quantumbot, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported. One of the secret... 

Canonical has announced a new version of the Ubuntu operating system designed to bring a united front to the Internet of Things (IoT), after a preview alpha was trialed late last year. The super-stripped down, lightweight Snappy Ubuntu Core is designed to allow developers to create IoT applications quickly and easily and release them securely across the network. This means that many devices with firmware that would have been unpatched after vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed can now be updated quickly,...