In the future, your doctor may prescribe you a videogame.
In a groundbreaking new study at the University of California, San Francisco, scientists found that older adults improved cognitive controls such as multitasking and the ability to sustain attention by playing a specially designed videogame - and that the effects can be long lasting.
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Chinese phone maker Xiaomi Inc. has become famous in China because of its blowout product releases, and Thursday's introduction of the company's new smartphone and smart television didn't disappoint.
Amid a carnival-like atmosphere, the phone company's devoted fans - some adorned with glow sticks - overflowed into the aisles as Xiaomi founder and Chief Executive Lei Jun described in detail the specs of the company's two new products to peals of applause.
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On immigration reform, this has been a slow summer for Congress. After reform passed the Senate in June, it languished in July. While Washington then went on recess, and now has shifted its focus to Syria, what has the rest of the world been up to on economic advancement?
Germany spent the summer rewriting 40 percent of its immigration laws, significantly easing the bureaucratic hurdles impeding talented, foreign-born engineers and professionals from contributing to the economy there. It will now be easier than ever for U.S.-educated graduate students to start new businesses ... in Germany.
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Pandora Media Inc. named Brian McAndrews, a former aQuantive and Microsoft Corp. executive, as its new chief executive and chairman, a move that comes six months after Joe Kennedy said he would be stepping down from the Internet-radio company's helm.
Shares jumped 2.8 percent to $21.99 after hours Wednesday.
McAndrews's appointment is effective immediately. Pandora said that in the search for a new CEO the board had sought a candidate who could build on the company's leading position in Internet radio and accelerate its fast-growing advertising business.
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Linux continues to dominate data centers. IBM wants more of that action to take place on its hardware.
The computer giant on Tuesday plans to pledge that it will spend $1 billion over four or five years on Linux and related open-source technologies for use on its Power line of server systems, which is based on the internally developed chip technology of the same name.
IBM has long been one of the biggest backers of Linux. It made another celebrated $1 billion pledge in 2000 to support the technology as it was beginning to gain a foothold in businesses.
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Nielsen has long been a kingmaker in the TV industry. Its ratings data, which tracks viewership of shows, determines how advertisers shell out some $66 billion annually. But the company has been slow to adapt to new technologies and expand its reach to other media services, industry critics say. Now Nielsen is making some significant moves.
Next week Nielsen will announce plans to augment its TV ratings data with information on viewing on tablets and smartphones, meeting a major demand of media companies that say they aren't getting credit in the current system for viewing on mobile devices. The change won't take effect until next fall's TV season, however.
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A senior BlackBerry Ltd. executive who was in charge of the largely unsuccessful PlayBook tablet is leaving the company.
David J. Smith, an executive vice president in charge of mobile computing, has resigned for personal reasons, a BlackBerry spokesman said. The move happened within the past few weeks, said a person familiar with the matter.
The spokesman added that Mr. Smith "continues to come into work every day and is committed to working with BlackBerry through a proper transition."
Mr. Smith couldn't immediately be reached.
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Qualcomm Inc.'s fiscal third-quarter profit jumped 31 percent as the company reported strong growth in its sales of its wireless chips.
The company also raised the low end of its full-year revenue guidance and lifted its earnings view. It now expects per-share income of $4.48 to $4.56 on revenue of $24.3 billion to $25 billion. Qualcomm had previously projected earnings of $4.40 to $4.55 a share on revenue of $24 billion to $25 billion.
The San Diego-based chip maker has been one of the main beneficiaries of the growing popularity of smartphones, as it supplies wireless processors for a broad range of customers that include Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. and collects money from license payments tied to its technology.
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HTC Corp. posted its first quarterly net loss since listing in 2002, as an expensive effort to revive its brand through its high-end HTC One smartphone has so far failed to boost sales.
As with former smartphone market leaders like Nokia Corp. and BlackBerry Ltd., HTC has found it difficult to hold its ground against fast-growing Samsung Electronics Co. and low-cost Chinese rivals. The Taiwanese smartphone maker previously warned it was expecting a loss for the third quarter due to high manufacturing and marketing costs for the HTC One while sales shrank.
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Computers seem to be replacing humans across many industries, and we're all getting very nervous.
But if you want some reason for optimism, visit your local supermarket. See that self-checkout machine? It doesn't hold a candle to the humans - and its deficiencies neatly illustrate the limits of computers' abilities to mimic human skills.
The human supermarket checker is superior to the self-checkout machine in almost every way. The human is faster. The human has a more pleasing, less buggy interface. The human doesn't expect me to remember or look up codes for produce, she bags my groceries, and unlike the machine, she isn't on hair-trigger alert for any sign that I might be trying to steal toilet paper. Best of all, the human does all the work while I'm allowed to stand there and stupidly stare at my phone, which is my natural state of being.
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Beginning in 2005 and ending last summer, the computer systems of Nasdaq, OMX Group, J.C. Penney Co., Carrefour SA and around a dozen other companies were breached by hackers, resulting in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey, who made the charges public on Thursday, called the case the largest hacking and data-breach scheme ever prosecuted in the U.S. in terms of the number of hacks and the amount of funds taken, the WSJ's Chad Bray reported. The investigation is continuing, prosecutors said.
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Activision Blizzard Inc. said it has reached an agreement to buy back nearly $6 billion worth of Vivendi SA's holding in the company, ending months of negotiations over the fate of the videogame giant.
Santa Monica, Calif.-based Activision said Thursday it will buy 429 million shares for about $13.60 per share, reducing Paris-based conglomerate Vivendi from being majority shareholder. Activision said it would fund the purchase with $1.2 billion in cash on hand from its domestic accounts and approximately $4.6 billion in debt financing from banks including J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
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Barnaby Jack, the hacker known for making an ATM literally spit out cash, died Thursday, days before he was set to show how to disable a pacemaker from 30 feet away at Black Hat, the large annual hacker conference. He was 36 years old.
Jack was the director of embedded security research at security firm IOActive. He had previously worked at a variety of security firms, including McAfee.
The San Francisco Medical Examiner's office confirmed the death Friday but didn't yet know the cause.
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Omnicom Group Inc. and Publicis Groupe SA, the world's second- and third-biggest advertising companies, respectively, are near a deal to merge, people familiar with the situation said, creating what would be a $30 billion behemoth.
If a deal is completed, it would be billed as a merger of equals. The two companies each have a market capitalization of about $16 billion. Omnicom Chief Executive John Wren and Publicis CEO Maurice Levy are expected to be co-CEOs of the combined company, the people said. An announcement could come as early as Sunday, the people said.
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Hackers were able to force a shutdown of U.S. equity markets in a simulated cyber attack on the U.S. financial sector, suggesting industry and government could do more to harden the financial system against external threats.
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which represents the largest global financial players as well as smaller firms, is expected to release on Monday the results of its "Quantum Dawn 2 exercise, in which about 50 government and private-sector entities responded to a simulated financial system attack.
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Charter Communications Chief Executive Tom Rutledge said he has been "surprised" by the number of customers opting to take Internet broadband service only, which amounts to more evidence of online video gaining on traditional TV.
Mr. Rutledge hinted at that issue in his comments, made on an analyst conference call for Charter's third-quarter results, when he attributed the growth in "broadband-only customers" in part to changing consumer tastes. He said, however, that the trend was largely due to the inferiority of Charter's television service, which had suffered in recent years in part because the company underinvested in its services while going through a bankruptcy reorganization.
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Steve Ballmer paced his corner office on a foggy January morning here, listening through loudspeakers to his directors' voices on a call that would set in motion the end of his 13-year reign as Microsoft Corp.'s chief executive.
Microsoft lagged behind Apple Inc. and Google Inc. in important consumer markets, despite its formidable software revenue. Mr. Ballmer tried to spell out his plan to remake Microsoft, but a director cut him off, telling him he was moving too slowly.
"Hey, dude, let's get on with it," lead director John Thompson says he told him. "We're in suspended animation." Mr. Ballmer says he replied that he could move faster.
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A new worker's revolution is rising in China and it doesn't involve humans.
With soaring wages and an aging population, electronics factory managers say the day is approaching when robotic workers will replace people on the Chinese factory floor.
A new wave of industrial robots is in development, ranging from high-end humanoid machines with vision, touch and even learning capabilities, to low-cost robots vying to undercut China's minimum wage.
Over the next five years these technologies will transform China's factories, executives say, and also fill a growing labor shortage as the country's youth become increasingly unwilling to perform manual labor. How the transformation plays out will also go a long way in deciding how much of the electronics supply chain remains in China.
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The co-founder and technical guru behind Yandex NV, Russia's largest Internet search engine, is in a coma with no signs of brain activity, the company's chief executive said Thursday.
Ilya Segalovich, who has been battling cancer, is on life support, CEO Arkady Volozh said on a conference call. Earlier Thursday, Yandex announced that Mr. Segalovich, 48 years old, had died.
"Last night, the family of Ilya [Segalovich] announced that he died. In the morning, the information came through that Ilya is hooked up to life support. We are awaiting official information and for now are abstaining from comments," the company's spokesman said in an emailed comment following the call.
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