Media

Twitter's latest buy: Big data startup Lucky Sort

Twitter's shopping spree shows no signs of letting up. Today, the social-networking giant said that it has acquired big data startup Lucky Sort.

Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said in a blog post that his company's "goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize, and visualize by building elegant and user-friendly tools for text analysis."

Neither Twitter nor Lucky Sort said precisely how the startup will be integrated into Twitter's larger plans, but Pepper said in his post that several members of his team would be moving to San Francisco to become … Read more

Closed-captioning glasses get big rollout to cinemas

Google Glass isn't the only pair of high-tech specs making a splash on the personal viewing scene. Sony Entertainment Access Glasses are about to give deaf moviegoers a way to watch first-run films with closed captions at the theater.

The glasses project closed captions at the bottom of the viewer's eyesight. The text is sent via a wireless system to a receiver that feeds the data to the glasses. Regal Cinemas also is offering an audio headset option for the blind, providing descriptive audio tracks to match what's happening on screen.… Read more

Bill Gates: Steve Jobs was better at design than I was

When the sense of personal competition has gone, when time has passed, the memories become more acute and more accurate.

During Bill Gates' interview Sunday night with Charlie Rose on CBS's "60 Minutes," Microsoft's chairman released some emotion when speaking of visiting Steve Jobs during the Apple CEO's last days.

He said they're talked about what they'd learned and about families.

He said the conversation wasn't melancholy, but it clearly is an emotional memory for Gates.

When it came to business, Gates admitted that Apple "put the pieces" together on … Read more

Gingrich to world: Rename the cell phone

It's time this country addressed the real issues.

Things cannot go on the way they are and cometh the hour, cometh the man. That man is Newt Gingrich.

No, the great Republican doesn't want to impeach the President, repeal Obamacare and institute conscription for everyone aged 15 and older.

Well, those aren't his current priorities. Instead, he believes that for America to progress we need to call the cell phone something else.

Please, this is serious.

In a video posted to YouTube on Friday, Gingrich made his case, while waggling his encased cell phone.

"If it'… Read more

Suspected ID thief exposed by food porn on Instagram

Those who steal your identity digitally are not nice people.

On the other hand, they are still people. Which often means that -- somewhere -- they have online enthusiasms which still take them over and reveal their own identities to the outside world.

IRS investigators say that a predilection for food porn created a digital footprint for a suspect whom they were trying to trace.

As Florida's Sun-Sentinel reports, the investigators were in pursuit of a man who was said to have 700,000 stolen IDs available for sale.

It seems that he was quite good at keeping his … Read more

Earbuds, freight train a fatal mix for pedestrian, police say

Electronics give people the opportunity to live in a world of their own.

Sometimes, though, this may not end well.

A train struck a man who was walking on the railway tracks in Joppa, Md., Thursday.

Police say the freight train approached him from behind. Its conductor said he sounded the horn.

That seems to have had no effect on 37-year-old Kevin Scott Street. For, police say, he was wearing earbuds.

According to CBS Baltimore, Street was struck by the 20-car freight train just after noon.

Edward Hopkins, a spokesman for the Hartford County Sheriff's Office explained to The Baltimore Sun: &… Read more

Chattanooga to Iron Man: Pardon us, but you're a liar

"It isn't choo-choo. OK, punk?"

These were the pained, spittle-emitting words of the elders in Chattanooga, Tenn., on seeing "Iron Man 3."

Well, they weren't the exact words, but these that I've selected seem to accurately express the Chattanooga sentiment on witnessing Robert Downey Jr. become frustrated at the city's allegedly slow Internet service in the movie.

I have before me a missive from the city's representatives demanding a Google Hangout with Downey Jr., the producers, the directors, and anyone who claims to have been involved in creating such a horrid … Read more

Intel employee sues over alleged 'Kick Me' sign

I am not sure how much intelligence it takes to pin a "Kick Me" sign on someone's back, but one imagines it doesn't befit Intel.

Perhaps that's why an employee of the company's New Mexico plant is suing in federal court, after someone allegedly pinned such a sign to his back and then more than one person actually kicked him.

The Associated Press reports that Harvey Palacio went to a senior member of staff named Randy Lehman to ask whether there was a sign on his back.

He claims in a lawsuit that Lehman … Read more

W3C proceeds with Web video encryption despite opposition

The World Wide Web Consortium has decided to go ahead with a technology that will let companies like Netflix stream encrypted video using Web sites -- against the wishes of the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and 25,600 petition signatories.

The Web standards group announced the move Thursday, to nobody's surprise. Entertainment-industry players had approached the group three years ago to discuss the technology, Microsoft has been helping develop it, and Google already has built the specification, called Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) into Chrome.

The standard doesn't actually handle encryption and digital rights management (DRM) to … Read more

Share original content with Flipboard Android 2.0

Flipboard, the popular news-reading app, is making it easier for people to add -- and track -- their original content to Flipboard with the latest magazine curation features for Android devices.

The magazine curation feature, which lets users collect articles around a specific theme or subject matter into a Flipboard magazine is now available for Android phones and tablets, and online as a Web-based editing tool that also provides metrics.

Flipboard introduced the magazine curation feature for iOS in late March, gaining 6 million users since the launch. It's network of 56 million users have created 1 million magazines … Read more