Articles by Peter Suciu

Video streaming service Roku has added an integrated news service powered by AOL to its home screen, the company announced Thursday, giving users quick access to news content including videos from AOL partners such as The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, BBC News, CNET, GlobalPost and Entertainment Tonight ...

After months of buildup, the launch of Sony's PlayStation 4 video game console is now just a day away The US$399 console will go on sale at 12 a.m. on Friday, and Sony predicts that sales will exceed 3 million by the end of the year. While preorders will likely dominate the first day transactions, Sony has announced that it is ready with a steady s...

Google Glass will soon allow users to hear as well as see through the augmented-reality eyewear thanks to new audio capabilities the company announced on Tuesday. A new set of features will allow users to scan playlists, search for songs and -- with the addition of stereo earbuds, also due in the coming weeks from Google -- listen to music in high...

Netflix and YouTube together now account for more than half of all North American fixed network data traffic during peak hours, according to a Sandvine Internet traffic trends report published Monday Netflix now accounts for 31.6 percent of downstream traffic in North America, while YouTube accounts for another 18.6 percent. Peer-to-peer file-shari...

Microsoft on Friday announced the first wave of entertainment apps for its upcoming Xbox One video game console, which will arrive in stores Nov. 22 In the United States, the announced apps for the Xbox One include streaming-video offerings from Amazon Instant Video, ESPN, Fox Now, Hulu Plus, Machinima, Netflix, Redbox Instant by Verizon, the NFL o...

After setting its IPO stock price at US$26 per share, Twitter on Thursday made a strong public debut in which trading opened at $45.10 per share -- 73 percent above the IPO price That opening price valued the social media company at more than $31 billion based on its outstanding stock, options and restricted stock that will be available after the I...

Dish Network on Wednesday announced that it will close its 300 remaining Blockbuster stores by early January and will end its Blockbuster By Mail service by mid-December 2013. The company cited increased competition from digital and on-demand entertainment Dish acquired Blockbuster in April 2011 for US$320 million. At the time, it announced that it...

Amazon on Wednesday announced a new program that will enable independent bookshops and other small retailers to earn extra money by selling Kindle devices and accessories Dubbed "Amazon Source," the program gives retailers a discount on Kindles and accessories for resale as well as 10 percent of the revenue from every Kindle book purchased on the d...

Activision on Tuesday released Call of Duty: Ghosts for the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii U and PC. The game will be released later this month for the upcoming PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Ghosts is the latest arrival in the popular first-person franchise, which has generated billions of dollars in sales and has been an annual ...

BlackBerry shares fell more than 13 percent Monday morning on news that the company has abandoned its plan to sell itself to its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings. Instead, it has entered into an agreement whereby Fairfax and other institutional investors will invest US$1 billion in the company. That transaction is expected to be com...

Travelers on domestic flights in the U.S. will soon face far fewer restrictions on their in-flight use of mobile gadgets thanks to new rules announced Thursday by the Federal Aviation Administration Previously, travelers were required to shut off all devices with an on/off switch until the aircraft reached 10,000 feet, which typically was about 10 ...

The National Security Agency has tapped fiber-optic cables that connect Google's and Yahoo's overseas servers and accessed vast amounts of data including email and other personal information, according to a Wednesday report in The Washington Post Included in the data culled by the NSA is information on hundreds of millions of users, many of whom ar...

Nintendo on Wednesday reported a net loss of about US$81 million (8 billion yen) for the quarter ending Sept. 30 and blamed the dismal results at least in part on disappointing sales of its Wii U video game console The company had reported a profit of roughly $87.5 million the previous quarter....

Netflix has already produced original content including Emmy-nominated House of Cards, but now it looks like the over-the-top streaming service may be interested in producing feature films destined for the silver screen as well Specifically, instead of taking an approach such as HBO's or Showtime's and making made-for-TV features, Netflix hopes to ...

There's a four-story barge floating on San Francisco Bay with a mysterious purpose but a fairly clear link to Google Now docked near Treasure Island, the former U.S. naval base, the structure was generating no end of speculation on Monday, with suggestions that it could be anything from a floating data center to a brand-new store for Google Glass....

Twitter has set the price range for its highly anticipated initial public offering at between US$17 and $20 per share, according to a document filed on Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission The company plans to raise as much as $1.61 billion by selling between 70 million and 80.5 million shares. With some 544.7 million shares outstan...

TiVo was one of the first to enable consumers to time-shift their TV viewing via DVRs, and now the company is targeting place-shifting capabilities as well with out-of-home streaming via the TiVo Roamio Pro and TiVo Roamio Plus DVRs The two Roamio devices were launched earlier this year, but on Thursday the company announced that the functionality ...

There has been no shortage of questions and concerns about BlackBerry's ongoing viability in recent months, but this week brought some good news for the once-dominant mobile phone maker at last. Specifically, just 24 hours after releasing its BlackBerry Messenger chat app for Android and iOS devices, downloads had already topped 10 million Followin...

Google Glass may currently be the name most associated with Internet-connected eyewear, but Microsoft is apparently hoping to make its own mark on the nascent category. Specifically, the company is now testing prototypes of a smart glass technology of its own, according to a Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal There are few details available ...

LG last week filed for trademarks on three names that contain the word "Chrome," sparking widespread speculation that the company is planning to launch an array of devices that run Google's Linux-based Chrome OS "ChromeOne," "ChromeDesk" and "ChromeStation" were the names LG snapped up, and for all three LG listed the device class as "laptop comput...