Gadgets

After re­leas­ing a re­vised fi­nan­cial fore­cast for FY 2011 that pre­dicts an an­nu­al $1.3 bil­lion loss, its third in the last four years, NEC an­nounced it will cut around 10,000 jobs. Bloomberg Businessweek re­ports President Nobuhiro Endo an­nounced the cuts, re­veal­ing most of the cuts will come from the com­pa­ny's mo­bile-phone hand­set busi­ness, with 7,000 of them ex­pect­ed to be in Japan. The com­pa­ny re­port­ed­ly had 115,840 em­ploy­ees as of March so there should be a few folks left around to keep (...)

Dean Takahashi on the re­lent­less­ness ma­chin­ery of Zynga's game-cloning op­er­a­tion, where­by it min­i­mal­ly mod­i­fies others' work and sues those who treat it like­wise. Nimblebit drew some blood last week when the de­vel­op­er of Tiny Tower cast a stone at Zynga, via an in­fo­graph­ic, for copy­ing Tiny Tower in an up­com­ing mo­bile game called Dream Heights. Buffalo Studios is us­ing the same tac­tic tonight as it calls out Zynga Bingo for be­ing a copy­cat of Buffalo’s pop­u­lar Facebook game Bingo Blitz. (...)

At first glance the col­lec­tion of Berlin Chaos Chairs might not seem like they have a much in com­mon, but take a closer look and you’ll see that they share what you might call a “com­mon ances­tor.” Unique cuts and sim­ple changes in sur­face fin­ish­es trans­form an or­di­nary chair in­to end­less vari­a­tions that how­ev­er dif­fer­ent, are al­so pro­por­tion­al­ly and struc­tural­ly iden­ti­cal. Designer: EWID Yanko Design Timeless Designs - Explore won­der­ful con­cepts from around the world! Yanko Design Store - (...)

If there’s been one com­plaint my con­tacts in­side large CE com­pa­nies have had, ca­reer-wise, it’s been the in­abil­i­ty to rise far in the hier­ar­chy. While there are clear ex­cep­tions to this rule, the com­plaint has al­ways been that suc­ceed­ing in Asian com­pa­nies has been con­tin­gent on (lit­er­al­ly) speak­ing the lan­guage and know­ing the rules of the road, as it were, cul­tur­al­ly. When Sir Howard Stringer took the reins at Sony, it looked like this ten­den­cy had been bucked. However, with the (...)

Barnes & Noble’s fifth-gen­er­a­tion “e-read­ing de­vice” will re­port­ed­ly launch this com­ing spring. Mentioned in pass­ing with­in a New York Times pro­file of the strug­gling book­seller, it is un­clear if the de­vice in ques­tion will be a new me­dia tablet or a stan­dard eRead­er. With Barnes & Noble’s cur­rent-gen­er­a­tion col­or tablet hav­ing just been an­nounced this past November, how­ev­er, a re­fresh of the com­pa­ny’s E Ink-equipped Nook Touch in the spring seems more like­ly. Barnes & Noble first (...)

You might think the 200 marked runs at Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort in British Columbia would be enough for most skiers. But just be­fore Christmas, my two teenage boys, a friend and his two teenage sons, and I scoped out a large­ly un­touched stash of snow in an area called Flute Bowl. No chair­lifts scaled that part of the moun­tain, so we hit the slopes ear­ly, made our way over to Flute Bowl, kicked off our skis, and hiked 45 min­utes to the top. It was a cloud­less day, and on the ridge, (...)

<img align='left' src="http://pho­tos.mac­nn.com/news/1201/youtube-afterthesmoke.jpg" bor­der='0' width='176' height='120' /YouTube's an­ti-pira­cy screen­ing has both come un­der fire and got­ten some re­lief on Friday. The sys­tem is now known from an anec­dote at Vice to gen­er­ate false pos­i­tives if enough of a song is im­prop­er­ly at­tribut­ed to the wrong group. When Universal-backed group Yelawolf took a sam­ple from an After the Smoke track and had its adap­ta­tion leaked, the Universal take­down (...)

One of the biggest new ad­di­tions to Windows 8 that we knew about ear­ly on is that it was mov­ing be­yond the x86 pro­ces­sors from Intel and AMD. Joining the par­ty is ARM, whose chip ar­chi­tec­ture pow­ers a stag­ger­ing num­ber of mo­bile phones, tablets, me­dia play­ers, plug com­put­ers, en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient servers, and set top box­es. Microsoft [...]

Sony has un­veiled three new dig­i­tal cam­eras that will hit stores in March. The three cam­eras have more in com­mon than the launch date all fea­tur­ing five times dig­i­tal zoom lens­es and new Exmor R CMOS...

SmileOnMyMac has re­leased an iPad ver­sion of PDFpen, its pop­u­lar PDF an­no­ta­tion and edit­ing soft­ware for Mac OS X. The iPad ver­sion of PDFpen brings an ad­vanced set of PDF edit­ing fea­tures to iOS such as the abil­i­ty to add text, im­ages, sig­na­tures, com­ments and an­no­ta­tions to PDF doc­u­ments, make changes to ex­ist­ing ed­itable text blocks and im­ages and fill out PDF forms. Advanced an­no­ta­tion fea­tures in­clude high­light­ing, un­der­scor­ing and (...)

On its face, match­ing iPad text­books with col­lege stu­dents seems al­most per­fect. But Apple's plans for its new iBook­store, from the way it's struc­tured book pur­chas­es to its de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy for mul­ti­me­dia e-books, doesn't seem like it's well suit­ed for the col­lege text­book mar­ket at all ? if it even has that tar­get in mind.