C
    Courteney Palis

    Courteney Palis

    Contributor

  • Pinterest 101: 9 Tips To Get You Started

    Pinterest has grown up fast. While the Pinterest craze has extended far and wide (a few mega-fans have even thrown real-life Pinterest parties), there are still plenty of people who have yet to use the site. For those of you who fall into this category and would like to learn more about how to set yourself up on Pinterest, we've compiled nine tips to help you start pinning right away.

  • How To Spot Twitter Propaganda

    Georgia Tech's Cristian Lumezan, Nick Feamster and Hans Klein discovered that Twitter propagandists, or "users who consistently express the same opinion or ideology," tend to send high volumes of tweets in short periods of time, retweet without adding much original commentary, retweet others' content fairly quickly and coordinate with others to send duplicate or near-duplicate tweets on the same topic at the same time. To come up with these findings, they studied nearly 100,000 tweets from the 2010 Nevada Senate race (hashtagged #nvsen) and the 2011 debt ceiling debate (hashtagged #debtceiling).

  • REPORT: Which Of Your Favorite Sites Are Protecting Your Data From The Government?

    Online privacy is no small issue nowadays, with millions of users across the world depending on Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to protect their personal data no matter who asks for it -- including the government. In a new report released this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) evaluated 18 major web companies to discover which of them will work hardest to protect your data, should the government come a-knockin' at their doors. Fortunately, after reviewing the companies' terms of service, privacy policies, published law enforcement guides, and privacy protection histories, the digital rights advocacy group found that, across the board, Internet companies are working harder to be more transparent with users about how their data is protected and when it might be shared.

  • Amazon Just Patented WHAT?

    What sets Amazon's electronic gift-giving system apart from other services is a feature that allows digital gift-givers to wait until a recipient has accepted their present before paying for it. As Business Insider points out, Amazon's now-patented gift-giving system works in a way similar to Karma, a gift-giving app that Facebook just recently purchased. What do you think of Amazon's idea?

  • Windows 8 Release Preview Now Available For Download

    Windows fans, rejoice! The latest preview of Windows 8 is available for your testing pleasure. Microsoft announced on May 31 that the Windows 8 Release Preview, the company's final prerelease of the forthcoming OS, is now available for download in 14 different languages. In February, Microsoft made available a Consumer Preview of Windows 8.

  • Google To Make Merchants Pay For A Spot On Shopping Search Results

    Looks like Google's free shopping search results won't be free much longer. According to Search Engine Land, the service will require merchants to bid for a listing on the search engine itself and for a spot on Google Shopping boxes, which will feature these paid-for shopping search result listings in a box labeled "Sponsored" at the top of Google's regular search results page.

  • Which Smartphone Users Are The Biggest Data Hogs?

    According to a new report released on May 30 by tech research and consulting firm Analysys Mason, iPhone users make up a whopping 80 percent of the top 10 percent of heaviest data users. The report also revealed that in the group of smartphone users who fall in the 70th percentile or above in terms of data usage, iPhone users pop up three times as frequently as HTC device users, the next biggest data consumers. For two months, Analysys Mason tracked the smartphone usage of more than 1,000 people in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Spain using an on-device monitoring app offered by mobile research company Arbitron Mobile.

  • Exploring Historic Sites From Across The Globe

    Google has officially announced the World Wonders Project, which will offer on-the-ground 360-degree views of 132 historic sites from 18 different countries. Since it launched its Street View project back in 2007, Google has brought far-off places like the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica's Half Moon Island to laptop, tablet and smartphone screens across the world.

  • New iPhone Data Plan Announced

    The ubiquitous iPhone is extending its reach in the smartphone market yet again, this time hitting prepaid cell phone service provider Cricket, a subsidiary of Leap Wireless. Cricket announced on May 31 that it will begin offering the 8GB iPhone 4 and the 16GB iPhone 4S starting June 22, becoming the first prepaid cell phone carrier to offer the device.

  • Aaron Sorkin Shares Early Details About Upcoming Steve Jobs Biopic

    Acclaimed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin earned himself an Academy Award in 2011 for "The Social Network," a feature film that dramatized the founding of Facebook. Now, Sorkin is once again re-immersing himself in the tech world as he tackles the life of venerable Apple co-Founder Steve Jobs for an upcoming biopic. Taking the stage at AllThingsD's D10 Conference on May 30, Sorkin offered a few early details about the state of the Steve Jobs project.

  • Barack Obama's 'Perfect' Tweet

    Barack Obama can now add "master tweeter" to his resume. Obama took to Twitter from Iowa on May 24 to answer a few questions regarding Congress's to-do list for the summer, and, despite the stressful challenge of having to answer difficult questions in a mere 140 characters, he managed to have a little fun with the process.

  • Is This What Apple's New Maps App Looks Like?

    Just a few weeks back, 9to5Mac reported that Apple would most likely be replacing Google Maps with the company's own in-house 3D-equipped maps program for its upcoming iOS 6 -- and now there might be pictures to prove it. Tech news site Boy Genius Report has obtained exclusive photos supposedly showing (blurry) bits and pieces of Apple's new iOS 6 Maps application running on an iDevice. The pictures could also just be super close-up shots of a Google Images search for "maps" -- it's hard to say from the bits and pieces pictured in BGR's slideshow.

  • PHOTOS: Instagram Like You've Never Used It Before (And Probably Never Will)

    A huge part of what makes Instagram so popular (it had more than 40 million users as of last month) are its easy-to-use filters, which allow any ol' picture-snapper to turn their regular photos into unique creations.

  • Here's When Apple Will Make Its Next Big Announcements

    The date's already been set for Apple's much-anticipated Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but the company has managed to drum up even more hype with the release of the event's official schedule, which includes a time for the keynote address, during which the company usually unveils its newest products and plans. According to Apple Insider, the company will hold the keynote at 10 a.m. PT on Monday, June 11, the first day of the conference. As PCWorld points out, chances are that Apple will announce the arrival of an updated 15-inch MacBook Pro, some upgrades to iCloud and maybe even the release of iOS 6.

  • Facebook May Snap Up Software That Recognizes Your Face

    Facial recognition may be in Facebook's future. According to Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, the social network may currently be in negotiations to acquire Face.com. Furthermore, the deal may cost Facebook somewhere between $80 and $100 million, reports Israeli tech blog Newsgeek.

  • Will You Be My Facebook Friend? No.

    With more than 900 million users on Facebook, users are bound to run into a few types of people they wish they wish they would have never friended to begin with. To help avoid friending the wrong people, we've compiled a list of five types of Facebook users to never add as friends. Is there a type of Facebook user you think people should avoid friending?

  • Early Reviews For The Galaxy S III Are In: How Did The Superphone Fare?

    While the Samsung Galaxy S III isn't set to hit shelves in the U.S. until sometime in June, the international version of the device will be available in Europe on May 29. Samsung recently let a handful of critics spend some time with the non-U.S. version of the phone, and the reviews have already hit the web. When the Galaxy S III debuted in London on May 3, Samsung announced that the device would run on Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich) and that it would come equipped with a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display, a quad-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and either 16GB or 32GB storage.

  • Amazon Promises To Improve Working Conditions

    At Amazon, things are going to cool down a little. Jeff Bezos, CEO of the online retail giant, said at the annual shareholders meeting on Thursday that Amazon would be spending $52 million to retrofit its warehouses with air conditioners. Bezos's announcement comes some eight months after a report in The Morning Call, a Pennsylvania newspaper, that detailed the working conditions at an Amazon warehouse in Lehigh Valley.

  • Apple Adds New Features To App Store

    Earlier this year, Apple hit a huge milestone with 25 billion app downloads of the more than 500,000 apps  in Apple's App Store and over 10,000 in its Mac App Store. According to TheVerge, the address book app Cobook was the very first "Editors' Choice" pick on the Mac App Store.

  • Everything You Need To Know About The Space Capsule That Just Made History

    Elon Musk's spacecraft manufacturing company SpaceX made history today at 9:56 a.m. ET, when its Dragon capsule was captured by the International Space Station's robotic arm. DragonX is the first privately owned space vessel to berth at the International Space Station. Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, began the SpaceX Dragon capsule project way back in 2005 and developed the craft in four and a half years for about $300 million.