TECHNOLOGY

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsGoogle today announced the availability of two features exclusive to Android 2.2 (FroYo): Voice Actions and Chrome-to-Phone. Voice Actions is an app that vastly expands Android's speech-to-text functionality, and Chrome to Phone is a Chrome extension and Android app pairing...

Tony Abbott, the Australian opposition leader, proved that he was not lying when he said he's "no Bill Gates." At a "town hall" session at Rooty Hill RSL, the man who is positioning himself to become Australia's next prime minister seemed to have no idea that there is a debate about creating an R18+ rating for video games.

The Australian share market was lower at midday following a poor performance on global markets overnight and a slight increase in the domestic unemployment rate.

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsThe other night, I got quite the shock. A good friend, who is a Windows enthusiast and IT administrator/consultant, informed me that he had dumped Windows 7 for Ubuntu. I didn't see that coming. For one, he's a Windows fan. For another, I would rate Windows 7 as nearly Microso...

Australian telecommunications carrier Optus has recorded its strongest growth in five years with its net profit in the three months to June showing steep increase.

Pay TV operator Foxtel said on Thursday that its operations’ saw a double-digit jump in 2009/10 amidst slow downs in attracting new subscribers for Australia’s biggest cable network.

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsStill stinging from a court decision in June which threw out its $1 billion suit against video site YouTube, entertainment company Viacom filed an appeal Wednesday in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York.The original suit was filed in 2007, and a...

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsThursday, CBS interactive launched a mobile Web app called TV.com Relay, which lets users "check in" to the TV shows they happen to be watching and earn badges for their activities just like popular location-based games Foursquare and Gowalla. Unlike those location based se...

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsMozilla has made the third beta of Firefox 4 available for download and testing this week, and the popular browser has received two major updates: one is very visible, one is not. The less outwardly visible improvement in Firefox 4 beta 3 is the improved JavaScript engine, ...

Australia's telecommunications giant Telstra (AZX: TLS) today announced a 4.7 per cent decline in full-year net profit and forecast lower earnings in the year ahead.

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsSprint's second WiMAX phone, the Samsung Epic 4G will be available on August 31 in Sprint, Radio Shack, Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores for $249.99, the wireless operator announced Thursday.Beginning August 13, customers will be able to reserve an Epic 4G on a special page on ...

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsApple released iOS 4.0.2 for the iPhone and iPod touch, and iOS 3.2.2 for the iPad on Wednesday, effectively closing the PDF flaw which allowed hackers access to the internal code of those devices. The exploit was central to the jailbreakme.com hack released earlier this month....

By Joe Wilcox, BetanewsThey say that the devil is in the details. But some things are so evil, the horned harbinger of deceit and doom is an obvious and menacing presence. The Google-Verizon proposal for an "open Internet" is the worst kind of evil, because Google so ardently asserts that "you can m...

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsWednesday, Google officially announced the release of Chrome 6 beta, the most recent of the search company's popular desktop browser.The user interface has been tweaked and simplified even further in this version. All of the options are under a single menu, and the navigati...

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsAT&T and Facebook are the two latest companies to speak out on the net neutrality proposal put out by Google and Verizon on Monday, and their opinions of the deal appear to be on different sides of the argument.At an investor conference, AT&T consumer and mobile chief Ralph de ...

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsWireless telecommunications company Ericsson announced on Wednesday that it has delivered its two millionth radio base station. The accomplishment is significant because it illustrates the speed at which wireless networks are growing thanks to the high demand for mobile bro...

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsDirecTV Wednesday announced that Google will become the advertising sales representative for "a broad selection of advertising inventory on several cable networks" that the satellite TV company carries. It is the second major satellite partnership Google TV Ads has establis...

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsKDE released a new version of Plasma Workspaces for Desktop and Netbook on Tuesday, the environment serves as the default workspace for more than twenty Linux distributions, including Mandriva Linux, openSUSE, and Slackware.This version has received a handful of changes bot...

Google confirmed that police visited its Seoul offices to seize information related to an investigation surrounding its Street View product.

Google has countered its announcement that it was discontinuing the Wave by saying that Android smartphone activations have reached 200,000 a day.

Amazon, the online retailer, introduced its reduced-price Kindle into the increasingly competitive e-reader market as it attempts to fend off new competitors.

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsE-reader company Plastic Logic today officially announced the cancellation of the Que e-reader product it showed off at CES 2010 in favor of working on a more up-to-date second version.The company debuted its E-reader concept in 2006, and showed off the first working protot...

Larry Ellison, Oracle's Chief Executive Officer, says that Hewlett-Packard's (HP) board was wrong to force CEO Mark Hurd to resign.

The more you depend on your iPhone, the more you would need to bring it along for your next overseas business trip. However, if you bought your iPhone on a contract, things might not be so simple.

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsSecurity researchers at Kaspersky Lab announced the first malware for the Android operating system to be classified as a Trojan-SMS, the most widespread type of malware on mobile phones. The malware is disguised as a media player application with the standard Android .APK f...

By Ed Oswald, BetanewsOracle CEO Larry Ellison sent an impassioned e-mail to The New York Times Monday, criticizing the HP board for their move to dismiss CEO Mark Hurd following an investigation into sexual harassment claims. While those claims have been disproven, it uncovered other questionable b...

An employee of Foxconn, a Chinese factory recently beleaguered by suicides and allegations of poor treatment of workers, fell from a high building and was killed.

A dispute over administrative passwords for the City of San Francisco's computer network landed Terry Childs, a city administrator, a four-year prison sentence for violating California state laws against hacking.

By Tim Conneally, BetanewsSeptember first, Netflix instant streaming will get a ton of new content from Viacom, Paramount Pictures, MGM Studios, United Artists, and Lionsgate Films thanks to a deal between Netflix and Studio 3 Partners' joint venture Epix, the companies announced Tuesday.According t...