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Withings, a small French electronics company made waves last year when it introduced the Activité, a $450 Swiss-made smartwatch and fitness tracker.

Despite great critical review, the watch's price tag kept the average consumer away and the company will look to try to remedy that situation with the release of the Activité Pop, a mostly scaled-down version of its more expensive brother but with all the same perks.

The Pop still looks attractive as a wearable, and could easily pass as a casual watch in all three colors (beige, blue and gray) and Withings has already promised more band styles. For $150, the watch has a silicone band and PVD coated stainless steel casing with mineral glass compared to the $450 watch's calf leather band, stainless steel case and sapphire glass.

Just like its brother, the watch tracks your steps, monitors your sleep and vibrates to notify you when you've reached your goals. On the watch face, there is a 0-100 indicator letting you know how you are progressing every day. The phone syncs with your iOS device for the time being. The watch is water resistant up to 30 meters and comes with a watch battery that lasts 8 months, meaning no need for a daily charge.

Seagate has introuduced the world's slimmest USB 3.0 external hard disk drive, the Seven.

The device is a ridiculously slim 7mm thick, and the drive is cased in an all-steel chassis that looks very sleek compared to most bland hard drives. There was little more details given except that under the hood is a 5mm Angsana drive and that the capacity is 500GB. Hopefully, the transfer speeds can match the style.

Seagate says the Seven is special to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Seagate's launch of the first mass-produced 5.25-inch HDD.

The drive will be available later this month for $99.99.

Xiaomi, the world's third-largest smartphone maker and one of the planet's largest privately-held companies, sold 61.12 million smartphones last year, bringing in $12 billion in revenue.

CEO Lei Jun on Weibo released the figures, which show huge growth for the four-year old company. In 2012, they sold 7.2 million units, followed by 18.7 million in 2013. Weibo says the company has internal expectations of 100 million phones sold for 2015. Thanks to such massive growth, the company recently raised $1.1 billion from investors that value the company at $45 billion.

Initially selling just in China, Xiaomi has expanded to seven Asia companies, with more expected in 2015. There have been reports linking the company to launches in Mexico, Brazil and Russia, opening up the company to hundreds of millions of new consumers.

Xiaomi has become popular by selling powerful, stylish phones for rock-bottom prices, with all of their unlocked devices selling for $150-$350, well below the unlocked price of $700 for the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S5, for example.

The company has razor thin margins due to the aggressive pricing, but remains lightly profitable as they sell services and build their ecosystem. The company also has a small marketing budget and low overhead, which helps keep costs down.

After months of limited alphas, Videolan's VLC media player is now available in the Windows Phone Store as a more complete beta.

The app is notable for its widespread compatibility for video and audio formats and it also brings native MKV support.

Reads the company's quick blurb: "VLC media player is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project. VLC media player supports most audio and video compression formats, files and streaming protocols."

VLC is the most popular media player for PC among the tech crowd, and has been popular for mobile devices, as well, despite issues getting into the iOS App Store.

Due to international laws that vary by country, not all Netflix subscriptions are created equal.

A few more tech-savvy users have found ways to get around the lesser catalogs of their country's Netflix using proxies, VPNs and other workarounds to get access to the full American library of streaming content.

According to one popular VPN (virtual private network), Torguard, there has been a large spike in errors for users trying to access American Netflix through their service from other countries. "This is a brand new development. A few weeks ago we received the first report from a handful of clients that Netflix blocked access due to VPN or proxy usage. This is the very first time I've ever heard Netflix displaying this type of error message to a VPN user," said TorGuard's Ben Van der Pelt.

Others that are using custom DNS settings are out of luck if they use the Android app, since Netflix just updated the software to block such workarounds by forcing Google DNS, as well.

While relatively few have been affected, so far, this could be just the beginning of a wider-spread crackdown on unauthorized Netflix usage.

Alcatel has introduced their latest smartphone, the Pixi 3, a device that is compatible with three major operating systems.

The name may seem familiar to Palm/WebOS fans, and Alcatel decided on the name after acquiring the Palm brand and its licenses late last year.

There will be 4 versions of the Pixi 3, starting with a 3.5-inch 3G model for the very budget-conscious, followed by LTE models at 4, 4.5 and 5 inches. All of the phones will be able to run Windows Phone, Android, or Firefox OS.

Alcatel has released Android, Windows Phone and Firefox devices in the past but it remains to be seen how seamlessly it integrated all three in one device.

The company has their own booth at CES, so we should have plenty of more info starting on January 6th.

Acer has decided that the Chromebook market has devices that are just too small.

The company will soon be releasing its new Chromebook 15, the first Chrome OS notebook with a 15-inch display (15.6 to be exact).

Design-wise, the notebook looks exactly like the company's smaller Chromebook 13, except that it will be easily the heaviest Chromebook on the market, at 4.85 pounds.

For your money, you get to choose between 1080p or 366 x 768 display resolution (non-Touchscreen unlike the Chromebook 13), and either a new Intel Core i3 or a Celeron processor. The notebook has USB 3.0, USB 2.0, an SD reader and an HDMI port. Other options are 32GB or 64GB internal storage (SSD) and 2GB or 4GB RAM.

The base price is $250, but it remains unclear how much a 1080p, Core i3, 4GB, 64GB model will set you back.

Acer will reveal some great new PC monitors at the upcoming CES event next week, including a gaming monitor with an edge-to-edge frameless design.

The Acer XG270HU claims to be the "world's first gaming monitor with an edge-to-edge frameless" design for its 27-inch, 2,560×1,440 pixel, 144Hz refresh rate display. Acer promises 1ms response time without ghosting and smearing. The frameless monitors are a great evolution for gamers or traders or others who require multiple monitors and would like seamless transitions between the monitors.

XG27OHUs have HDMI, DVI and DisplayPort ports and Acer has added EyeProtect and ComfyView tech to reduce eye strain and reflection from any external light sources.

Shipping in March, the monitor will be available globally. The price has not yet been revealed.

Alcatel OneTouch has announced the launch of their first smartwatch, a budget-friendly device that it will show off at the CES event next week.

The aptly named "Watch" will be circular, come with different straps, dozens of watch faces right out of the gate and include "apps that allow users to monitor daily activity."

Most notably, the company says the Watch will cost "a fraction" of the price that its competitors sell watches for, meaning the device will sell for under the $299 standard price of high-end devices like the Moto 360 (with metal straps) and most likely much less than the $349 base price for the Apple Watch.

While it remains unclear what specs power the device, it appears from the press photos that it does not run on Google's Android Wear platform but rather a proprietary operating system. We will know more on January 6th.

Last year, Apple introduced their upcoming Apple Watch, a sleek smartwatch that the company hopes will bring the smart watch out of the niche and into the mainstream.

There has been a big question since their announcement, however: How many watches will Apple sell in the first year?

Industry analysts seem to be as confused by the question as the common observer is, with wildly different estimates. The watch is the first truly new product from Apple since the iPad (which transformed the tablet market) but there are questions about whether the watch can be nearly as successful as its brother products the iPhone and iPad.

BI has put together a nice chart on which firms are expecting what, with Morgan Stanley's being the craziest (60 million is NOT happening) and Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray with the low at 10 million.

It is important to keep in mind that the Apple Watch starts at $349, likely placing it well out of the price range for the non-techie casual device owner that already has a $700 iPhone and a $500 iPad.

Sony has told that it will be adding free extension to PlayStation Plus members' subscriptions. The down time was caused by a DDoS attack that targeted both Sony's and Microsoft's servers.

Sony thanks the patience of its customers and will be reimbursing the lost subscription time and more. The extension will be five days and will easily cover the lost time – although not the Christmas gaming. Extension will be added automatically.

In addition Sony has decided to provide a discount for any games, TV shows, or movies in one cart purchase. This 10% discount will be given later this month.

Even if the compensation seems like a rather minor one Engadget estimates that the cost of just the extended subscription time to Sony is over $5 million.

A group calling itself H4LT has released the Xbox One software development kit (SDK) to the Internet, meaning we could be seeing homebrew apps in the near future.

The group first teased screenshots of the November Durango XDK (Xbox Development Kit) and has now linked a 478MB .rar file that is available via Mega or torrents.

"We leaked it to the community because if something is shared then...progress is achieved faster than alone. The SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One," said a team member in an interview. There is no current exploits known, but with hundreds (or thousands) of eyes on the prize, we could hear something soon.

According to a new report, Martin Scorsese's blockbuster 'The Wolf of Wall Street' was the most pirated film of 2014.

The movie, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio playing real-life fraudster Jordan Belfort, was downloaded illegally over 30 million times, edging out Disney's billion dollar smash hit 'Frozen.' The figures come via piracy-tracking firm Excipio, who says the figures were much higher than in past years.

In third place was Robocop, although the figures include the original 1987 version and the 2014 reboot.

Full list:

Infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay could be finally on the verge of a comeback, three weeks after a raid potentially took the site down for good.

TPB has started a new counter that is counting down to February 1st, with the promise that a big announcement is coming. The counter was previously counting the time since the December 9th raid that took down the site.

Since TPB's domain came back alive two weeks after the raid, there have been a few cryptic messages posted, a link to 'The Interview' and then the counter.

Also of note, the javascript that is used to show off the fireworks running in the back of the counter have the name "allishere.js" perhaps hinting that backups of TPB are available.

Now that the year 2014 is almost in the past, it is time to take a quick look at the past year and wish all of you a happy new year for 2015!

Mobile revolution is reality

It has been evident that some of the most interesting technological development during the last few years has happened in mobile technology or in closely-related cloud services. This year finally underscored this fact for traditional online publishers, too, when suddenly, all over the world, websites started to realize that their audiences are rapidly moving to mobile.

For some of AfterDawn's services, this is already the reality -- one of our sites already has more than 50 percent of its traffic from mobile. And this trend is not going to end, but rather, will accelerate in the future. Thus, all websites must decide if they want to be relevant in coming years and adapt accordingly: responsive design, mobile apps, etc. are going to be even more important in future.

HIGH.FI news aggregator service

Our biggest new service of the year was a news aggregator service called HIGH.FI – a service that aggregates and categorizes news headlines from all over the world and presents those in chronological order.