Microsoft is working on a real-time Skype translation tool that could go a long way toward eliminating language barriers once and for all, and you can preview it right now. Skype announced on Monday that people who signed up for its Skype Translator preview program can start using it right now on any devices they own that run on Windows 8.1.
2014 has been an amazing year for wild-and-crazy GoPro videos and it looks like 2015 could be even crazier. The Wall Street Journal reports that GoPro is working on a line of consumer drones that have GoPro cameras equipped and that would let GoPro fans take amazing aerial videos.
With the release of iOS 8.1 on Monday, iPhone users for the first time got to use Apple Pay, the mobile payment platform that's secured with the help of Apple's Touch ID fingerprint scanner. A new video posted on YouTube now shows us just what we can expect when we use Apple Pay to buy things in retail outlets — in this case, a meal at McDonald's.
We haven't really seen any indication yet on how the Federal Communications Commission feels about the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, but some key appointments made this week show us it could be in for a rough ride. Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports that the FCC has appointed two people to its Comcast-TWC merger review team who have in the past been highly critical of major proposed mergers.
U.S. regulators are apparently considering whether to take a fresh look at wireless and wireline networks and whether to apply the same net neutrality rules to both fixed and wireless Internet traffic, Reuters writes.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said last week that he and his team "don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated" and then suggested that everyone hates Comcast because other companies such as TV studios are constantly forcing it to raise its customers' prices. However, one story flagged by Consumerist actually shows perfectly well why Comcast is one of America's two most hated companies and it has nothing to do with higher cable prices.
Just over a year ago, T-Mobile looked like a dead carrier walking — after its plan to merge with AT&T fell through, it kept shedding subscribers and looked doomed to wither and die. What a difference a year of "Uncarrier" initiatives makes: Business Insider flags a new report from UBS that charts T-Mobile's extraordinary comeback over the last year that has seen its service revenue growth go from -9.6% in Q4 2012 to -1.1% in Q4 2013. While T-Mobile would probably prefer to post positive and not negative quarterly service revenue growth, that's still an impressive turnaround for a carrier that looked like it was on death's door at the end of 2012.
People, what is it going to take for you to finally ditch Windows XP? Microsoft has already sent out plenty of warnings to XP users letting them know support for the platform will end on April 8th. However, if the threat of getting nailed by countless new strains of malware isn't enough to get you to upgrade from XP, Microsoft is now sweetening the offer with $50 worth of free stuff... but the catch is you'll have to buy a new computer with Windows 8.1.
More than a year ago, developer Maxis and publisher EA launched a refresh of SimCity, one of the iconic games of the 1990s that was a cherished staple of early computer gaming. However, like a lot of things EA touches, the new SimCity was a disaster from day one. The game's always-on digital rights management system that forced players to play the game online quickly crashed EA's servers and made the game unplayable during its launch week.
Microsoft starts previewing one of its coolest products ever