Asustek raised its tablet shipment target for 2012 by a whopping 67 percent this week, thanks to better than expected demand for the Nexus 7 tablet. Asus CEO Jerry Shen told investors that the company had planned to ship 3 million tablets this year, but the figure was revised upwards to 5 million. Asus sold 600,000 and 800,000 tablets in the first and second quarter respectively, but in the third quarter the company will ship more than 2 million. “We found that the launch of the Nexus 7 benefits... 

AT&T hopes its new flagship retail store on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago will be the start of something good for the telecom giant. The 10,000-square-foot store opens at 600 N. Michigan Avenue on Saturday in a section known as the Magnificent Mile, putting it near high-end fashion clothiers and gift shops. While AT&T has more than 2,300 retail stores nationwide, this one will be larger than most and will allow customers to interact with products as well as purchase them in the Apple store... 

Three book publishers will shell outmore than $69 million to U.S. states to settle charges they collaborated to fix prices of e-books. Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers and Simon & Schuster have agreed to an antitrust settlement with the attorneys general of 54 U.S. state, districts and territories, Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen announced Wednesday. The three publishers also agreed to change the way they price e-books going forward, Jepsen said in a press release. The... 

Canonical wants to establish itself as a force in the Linux server and cloud computing markets. The company, which has long been known as a champion for the expansion of Linux into the consumer and developer markets, said that Ubuntu will also play a part in the next generation of cloud computing platforms. Speaking in a keynote address at the 2012 Linuxcon North America convention in San Diego, Canonical VP of cloud Kyle MacDonald told attendees that the company sees itself performing particularly... 

Twitter Inc will begin allowing advertisers to directly target users based on the interests they have tweeted about, the social media company said Thursday. No longer content to be a “dumb” bulletin board, with 400 million micro-messages posted daily, Twitter has moved to a strategy of actively sifting through what each user is reading and tweeting in order to discern every individual’s interests. Founded in 2006, Twitter is hoping to catch up to other consumer Internet companies... 

Astronomers have for the first time discovered two alien planets whirling around a pair of stars: a complete solar system with twin suns just like Luke Skywalker’s fictional home world Tatooine. Most stars like our sun are not singletons, but rather come in pairs that orbit each other. Scientists had found planets in these binary systems, so-called circumbinary planets with two suns like Tatooine in the “Star Wars” universe. To find more circumbinary planets, astronomers analyzed... 

We got word that AMD is preparing to talk about a rather interesting processor around IDF 2012. The Intel Developer Forum this year kits off on September 11 and AMD plans to snag a few journalists and show them parts like Trinity desktop parts and the rest of the Virgo platform, next generation Vishera AMD FX cores, but the new Hondo 40nm processor could be the most interesting part AMD has to show off. Hondo was confirmed in AMD’s official roadmap a while ago and made an appearance back in February,... 

TomTom plans to launch a navigation app for Android smartphones in October, the company stated on Wednesday at the IFA trade show in Berlin. The app will put the Dutch company into direct competition for the first time with Google Navigation and others that have been making inroads into the portable navigation market with Android smartphone apps. Unlike Google’s software, the TomTom app won’t be free but the company hopes it will be able to attract customers with features like offline... 

Tivo Inc  reported better-than-expected quarterly results on higher subscriptions of its trademark digital video recorders at Virgin Media Inc, sending Tivo’s shares up as much as 5 percent in after hours trading. While TiVo continues to sell its set-top boxes, it also licenses its digital video recording technology to cable operators such as Virgin, Charter, DirecTV, Ono, RCN and Suddenlink. “The number of Tivo subscriptions across the globe grew 41 percent year-over-year this quarter,... 

Samsung Electronics on Wednesday became the first mobile phone maker to announce a smartphone using Microsoft’s latest mobile software, making its surprise, hurried announcement just days before the highly anticipated launch of Nokia’s version. The brief announcement at a Berlin electronics show comes amid expectations that smartphone makers may turn increasingly to Windows devices after a U.S. jury decided many of Samsung’s Google Android-based phones infringed Apple Inc patents. The... 

With not a great deal of note happening in the arid console space this summer, gossiping about next-gen consoles has proved an irresistibly fertile way of passing the time at industry gatherings. It’ll be a “quantum leap”, Alan Wake developer Remedy chirruped excitedly to this site last week. Which was in stark contrast to the underwhelmed shrug I got from a middleware company I chatted to off the record at Gamescom, familiar with both Orbis and Durango. Seven years on from the... 

What a sweet cosmic find! Sugar molecules have been found in the gas surrounding a young sun-like star, suggesting that some of the building blocks of life may actually be present even as alien planets are still forming in the system. The young star, called IRAS 16293-2422, is part of a binary (or two-star) system. It has a similar mass to the sun and is located about 400 light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus. The sugar molecules, known as glycolaldehyde, have previously been detected... 

Lexmark International has exited the inkjet printer business and is laying off 1,700 people as part of a restructuring plan to improve profitability. Lexmark’s restructuring will result in job cuts mainly tied to the inkjet business, including 1,100 manufacturing positions, the company said in a statement Tuesday. As part of the restructuring plan, the company is shutting down an inkjet supplies manufacturing facility in the Philippines by the end of 2015, and eliminating other inkjet development... 

Intel has teamed up with Microsoft’s rival VMware to deliver a platform for “trusted cloud.” The technology will mix Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and VMware’s vSphere 5.1, platform for building cloud infrastructures. Intel said its hardware-enhanced security capabilities integrated directly into the processor combined with vSphere 5.1 would provide a hardened and high-integrity platform to run business-critical applications in private and public cloud environments. Intel... 

Smartphones are selling much quicker than previously predicted by IHS iSuppli and will make up more than half of global mobile phone shipments next year. The company updated its prediction Tuesday. Just last year, IHS iSuppli said smartphones would not hit the halfway point of global cell phone shipments until 2015, said Wayne Lam, an analyst for IHS. IHS now expects smartphones to make up 54% of the overall cell phone market in 2013. They will comprise 46% of the total this year and represented...