Articles by Walaika Haskins

Tuesday was D-Day for Mozilla with the scheduled launch of the third version of Firefox, its open source Web browser. The company had billed the day as "Download Day" and aimed its sights on setting a Guinness World Record for the most downloads of an application in a 24-hour period Over the weekend, I dutifully I pledged to download the new browse...

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) announced Monday the rollout of the latest firmware update for its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld gaming console. The system software update version 4.00 brings Google search to the XrossMediaBar (XMB) interface, the result of a new partnership between the hardware heavyweight and the king of online search...

The GPU (graphics processing unit) universe grew Monday with releases from two major providers targeting distinct functions and markets Nvidia announced the availability of the inaugural chips in its new Geforce GTX 200 line of graphic processors. The GTX 280 and GTX 260 have 1.4 billion transistors and 192 to 240 processor cores.

Console gaming sales continued at their record-breaking pace in May, according to sales figures released by the NPD Group Friday. The video game industry raked in a total of US$1.12 billion on sales of accessories, hardware and software for the month. That's a 37 percent increase over the same period in 2007 It was also a banner month for Sony's Pl...

A new report released by the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation Thursday found that the U.S. has maintained its lead in the science and technology arena The study was co-authored by Titus Galama, a management scientist at RAND, and James Hosek, a RAND senior economist....

Palm and Verizon Wireless announced a deal Thursday that brings the device maker's popular Centro smartphone to Verizon subscribers The Centro's debut on Verizon comes some nine months after Palm launched the device on Sprint's wireless network and about five months after it became available to AT&T customers. The handset, which is available to Ver...

If you've ever wondered what goes on in the inner sanctum of a prospective employer or wondered how your salary compares with others in your field, a new Web site launched Tuesday could have the answer. The site, Glassdoor.com, allows current and recent former employees to anonymously report their salaries; provide detailed company reviews and rat...

A high-ranking European Union official urged the use of open standards and open source software Tuesday during a speech in Brussels at a conference Tuesday hosted by OpenForum Europe In order for companies to compete fairly against each other in the technology industry "standards are more important than ever," said Neelie Kroes, European Union comp...

Wiki and social software firm Socialtext has put its own spin on the spreadsheet. The new offering, SocialCalc, is a multi-user, wiki-based spreadsheet program intended to simplfy version control, reduce errors and increase productivity, Socialtext said SocialCalc joins offerings from Google and others as an alternative to Microsoft's Excel, aimed ...

HP kicked off the summer with a slew of new and revamped products at its Connecting Your World conference in Berlin Tuesday. Among the 50 products that will soon make their way onto store shelves is HP's TouchSmart all-in-one desktop PC, an ultra-thin laptop from Voodoo PC, a one-billion color monitor and 16 other notebook computers....

Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente announced plans for a pilot program that would exchange health information between the insurer's My Health Manager service and the HealthVault personal health records service The partnership comes amid a push to give people greater control of and access to their medical records. The move by technology companies inclu...

AOL announced Friday it is setting up its Platform-A Internet advertising service in Europe. The expansion is part of the Time Warner unit's effort to extend the reach of its advertising business worldwide by the close of 2009 The move comes less than one year after Time Warner flipped its AOL script in the U.S., shifting roles from being Internet ...

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has a new day job: game developer. The former justice's latest pursuit came to light during her keynote address Wednesday at the Games for Change Conference held at Parsons The New School For Design in New York Designed for seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders, "Our Courts" will be an online interact...

AMD has released a new mobile processor platform, its latest contender as it battles for market share with archrival Intel. Codenamed "Puma," the offering includes Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile processors with ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series Graphics and wireless networking hardware from Atheros, Broadcom and Ralink....

Qore, an interactive monthly program, will launch on Sony's PlayStation Network on June 5, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) announced Tuesday Available the first Thursday of each month, Qore is the current console generation's version of the disk give-aways many PlayStation 2 owners may remember. The discs periodically accompanied issues ...

In the two weeks following the launch of Nintendo's "Wii Fit" for its popular Wii video game console, consumers have found the exercise game challenging -- challenging to find, that is Trying to locate the US$90 game/controller combo at retailers such as Amazon.com, Best Buy, Circuit City and GameStop will give Wii owners all the exercise they need...

Taiwanese chipmaker Via Technologies announced its new line of low-powered Nano processors, formerly codenamed "Isaiah," Thursday. The new processor family offers up to four times the performance of Via's C7 processor line while featuring the same power requirements, the company said Aimed primarily at the low-cost PC and ultra mobile PC markets, t...

In a demonstration of its efforts to bridge the chasm between Web-based applications and client, or native, applications, Google announced changes to its Google Earth 3-D mapping software as well as Google Gears Wednesday at its annual I/O software developer's conference in San Francisco For webmasters, Google launched its new Google Earth Browser ...

When HD-DVD maker Toshiba conceded the high-definition DVD format war in February, Blu-ray's backers may have hoped that sales of the Sony-championed format would see a big boost. However, while Blu-ray may have triumphed over HD-DVD, sales for the device have not exactly skyrocketed An April 30 report from The NPD Group, a U.S. sales tracking firm...

Cisco on Wednesday unveiled a new hardware platform and four applications it said will help enterprise IT departments effectively manage their mobility services across a broad spectrum of mobile networks The core component of Cisco Motion is the Cisco 3300 Series Mobility Services Engine (MSE), a single appliance-based platform with an open applica...