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Microsoft has announced a new deal with Time Warner Cable that will bring 300 live TV channels to the Xbox 360 console as long as you are an Xbox Live Gold member.

Time Warner Cable subscribers can now watch their favorite shows right from the console, "including favorites like AMC, BBC World News, Bravo, Cartoon Network, CNN, Comedy Central, Food Network, HGTV and more."

Making the TV experience different than a standard cable box is the ability to control the channels using your voice thanks to Kinect.

"TWC TV is a significant addition to Xbox 360, bringing our customers their favorite entertainment in one place--enhanced TV experience, games, movies, music, sports and entertainment apps," said Blair Westlake, corporate vice president, Media & Entertainment Group at Microsoft. "Our partnership with TWC enhances all that is available on Xbox 360 today, which will we continue expand. We're thrilled to offer TWC TV to U.S. Xbox Live members and Time Warner Cable subscribers."

Earlier this month, Facebook introduced video-sharing features to Instagram, allowing over 100 million users to share 15 second clips enhanced by Instagram's famous filters.

Vine, owned by Twitter, and currently the most popular way to share video clips via mobile devices, seems to have taken a severe hit to traffic following the launch.

According to Topsy research, "the number of links to Vine videos on social networks fell by nearly half a million the day after video was added to Instagram."

At the same time, an extra 300,000 Instagram links were shared.

Yesterday, a week after the app was updated, there were "50% more Instagram than Vine links being shared on the net." The numbers are significant, but it remains unclear whether they will stick.

Vine allows for 6 second clips and is deeply integrated into Twitter.

According to a new report, the joint owners of Hulu have extended the deadline for bidding to next week.

Supposedly, the deadline was pushed to allow DirecTV more time to line up potential financing for their bid, which will be $1 billion.

Hulu has been up for sale for most of 2013 by its owners Disney, News Corp and NBCU (Comcast).

While there have been many bidders, the report claims the final round will be between DirectTV, Peter Chernin (with AT&T) and Guggenheim Digital.

This means Yahoo, which lowballed $800 million, is out of the running, along with Time Warner and others.

Reminiscing about the "old days" during an interview, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak called the first Macintosh device "lousy."

In 1982, Apple's CEO John Sculley began to have issues with Steve Jobs, who was working on the "Lisa" PC project. Sculley moved Jobs over to the Macintosh project, to work with Woz.

"The Macintosh should've been a whole different product, not a mouse-driven GUI machine like it was, and the Lisa, he should've just waited five years, and then it would've been ready," Woz added. "Steve really took over the [Macintosh] project when I had a plane crash and wasn't there.

Lisa needed more memory than the Macintosh did, and since 1 MB cost the equivalent of $10,000 in today's dollars, Jobs did his best to make the first Mac as cheap as possible.

"What he did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product. The Macintosh failed, really hard, and who built the Macintosh into a success later on? It wasn't Steve, he was gone. It was other people like John Sculley who worked and worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away," Woz added.

T-Mobile USA has announced today that it has purchased 4G spectrum from regional carrier U.S. Cellular.

The wireless spectrum covers the Mississippi Valley and should allow T-Mobile to expand their LTE network to 29 more markets and 32 million more people.

The biggest markets in the valley are St. Louis, Nashville, Kansas City, Memphis, Lexington, Little Rock-North Little Rock, Birmingham, New Orleans and Louisville.

In its press release, the company says the deal will cost them about $308 million in cash.

The deal must still pass FCC approval but is expected to close later this year.

CyberLink Corp. has announced its new Media Suite 11, an all-in-one multimedia suite for media playback, digital content creation and disc burning.

The Media Suite 11 pack integrates the best of CyberLink's products, including PowerDVD, PowerDirector, PhotoDirector, Power2Go, MediaShow and PowerProducer.

"CyberLink Media Suite 11 includes the latest versions of our innovative software and is designed to serve all of the diverse needs of today's digital home. In essence, Media Suite 11 provides a one-stop solution for every member in the family." said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink.

"Media Suite 11 also grants compatibility with Window 8, and further extends the support from traditional desktop software to touch-friendly Windows 8 Modern UI apps, merging media entertainment and creation from PC to mobile."

CyberLink Media Suite 11 provides the following solutions and features:

• Easy-to-use – Media Suite 11's unique PowerStarter interface integrates shortcuts to frequently used features in the standalone software, allowing users to easily uncover and access the tasks they want to perform.
• Play & Organize - Watch movies and HD videos beyond HD quality with the world's No.1 media player, PowerDVD 13. Users can organize videos and photos with MediaShow 6 and convert videos and watch them on over 100 devices with MediaEspresso 6.7.
• Edit & Share – Create HD home videos in ultra fast speed with multi-award-winning video editing software, PowerDirector 11. Edit, adjust and enhance photos with highly praised PhotoDirector 4 and author Hollywood-style Blu-ray and DVD discs with PowerProducer 6. The Media Suite 11 Ultimate version also includes over $100 of premium content designed for video editing purposes. Users can also access more than 350,000 free effects, templates and photo presets from CyberLink's unique DirectorZone service.
• Burn & Backup – Burns 256-bit data encrypted BDXL, Blu-ray and DVD discs with Power2Go 8. Users can also esign and print disc labels with LabelPrint 2.5 burning and backup software.
• Windows 8 mobile apps – Media Suite 11 Ultimate also includes 3 touch-friendly mobile apps, further extending the entertainment and creativity from PC to mobile devices.
  • PowerDVD Mobile playback provides versatile HD video performance with subtitle support.
  • PowerDirector Mobile allows users to instantly create and share videos.
  • PhotoDirector Mobile, a new solution that provides a wide range of photo editing, enhancement and adjustment tools with the touch-friendly user interface.

Turkish authorities are cracking down on social network users who posted insults about officials, or incited riots using popular social networking services.

According to the Associated Press, Turkey's deputy prime minister said on Thursday that authorities were investigating people for allegedly insulting officials or using Twitter, Facebook and other services to fuel riots during the month of June.

Protests over government policies broke out in Turkey in June, unprecedented in size and hard to suppress. While the mainstream media in Turkey appeared unwilling (at least at first) to cover the unrest, possibly due to intimidation, social networks filled the void of information.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had referred to Twitter as a menace among other insults, saying it was being used to spread lies about the government.

Since then, Turkey reportedly asked Twitter to open a representative office in the country, reportedly to make gaining information on users easier. It seemed, at the time, to be condemning Twitter relative to Facebook, which there seemed to be suggestions of cooperation with.

Sony's Shuhei Yoshida has told Japanese daily Famitsu that PS4 gamers will need to pay to play PS3 games online due to the resource investment in the service.

Currently, PS3 owners can play games online for free and smile smugly at Xbox 360 owners who need an Xbox LIVE Gold Membership to do the same. However, when the PS4 was unveiled, it quickly became apparent that the days of free Online Play were coming to an end.

"The main pillar for the PS4 will be online play. We're developing many new ways to play and connect which requires a large investment of resources," Yoshida said, translated by Kotaku.

"Considering the cost, to try to keep such a service free and consequently lower the quality would be absurd. We decided that if that's the case, then it would be better to receive proper payment and continue to offer a good service."

Toshiba has announced a new series of 4K Ultra HD TVs, available in 58-, 65- and 84-inch models.

With 4K TVs, a sobering price tag is to be expected in these early days. The 58-inch model has an MSRP of $4,999, which bumps to $6,999 for 65-inch and $16,999 for 84-inch. Sobering indeed.

The L9300U Series are powered by Toshiba's proprietary CEVO 4K Quad+Dual Core Processor, to deliver the highest quality 4K image processing, including Resolution Restoration to restore clean near 4K image quality from less than 4K content.

"While the content creators work to create more 4K content and figure out how to distribute it, consumers can still enjoy the clearer, more natural and lifelike images on a 4K Ultra HD TV," said Scott Ramirez, vice president of product marketing and development, Visual Products, Toshiba America Information Systems, Digital Products Division.

"This year, consumers can enjoy Blu-ray Discs with near 4K resolution thanks to powerful upscaling technology; however when choosing a brand, they should choose one that has high-quality processing and proven engineering skill to optimize the 4K experience right, like Toshiba."

Vine for Android has been updated to include the ability to use front-facing cameras, and it also has an added Upload Manager for unsubmitted posts.

Vine is a popular mobile app that lets users record and post video footage no longer than 6 seconds and share/embed them into updates posted to social networking services such as Twitter, who bought Vine in October 2012. It was available for iOS when purchased by Twitter, which then released the first version of Vine for Android earlier this month.

Now the Vine for Android app has been updated for performance and to add some new features:

• Front-facing camera
• New upload manager for unsubmitted posts
• Improvements to settings
• Improvements to camera loading time and support for more devices
• Speed improvements overall
• Bug fixes and UI improvements

While the Nintendo Wii console once led Microsoft's Xbox 360 console by over nine million in lifetime sales in the U.S, it is likely to lose its American crown this year.

When the Nintendo Wii first launched in 2006, the Xbox 360 had been on the market for a year in the United States. At that point, there were three million Xbox 360s in the home of gamers. However, the cheaper Wii console which had eaten up attention due to its motion control gaming came along and quickly started to eat into Microsoft's lead.

Month after month you simply couldn't stop the Wii from dominating the hardware sales charts. It was simply a given that the Wii would win the month, every month, the Xbox 360 would come second, and for a while, the PS3 would finish way behind.

But as time went on and the novelty of the Wii reduced, and with the cost of both the Xbox 360 and PS3 coming down while the games got more plentiful and better, it was only a matter of time before the tables would turn.

In May 2010, there were over nine million more Wii consoles in the U.S. than Xbox 360 consoles, but that's where the decline of its American reign began. Starting in June 2010, the Xbox 360 has outsold the Wii every single month. In November and December 2012 alone, 1.75 million more Xbox 360 consoles were sold than Wiis.

With the launch of the PlayStation 4 console set for the holiday season, Sony is reassuring PS3 owners of potential buyers that the console has years left.

In an interview with Japanese Weekly Famitsu, translated via Kotaku, Sony Japan president Hiroshi Kawano and his counterpart at Sony Worldwide, Shuhei Yoshida, were asked about the continued life of the PS3 console following the launch of the PS4 later this year.

"It's been seven years since the release of the PS3 and the console continues to sell at a constant pace, plus we have many upcoming titles." Kawano said. "We have no intention of immediately shifting from the PS3 to the PS4."

He added: "With the 2014 launch of our cloud service in the US allowing users to play PS3 games on the PS4, some people may switch consoles from the PS3 to the PS4. But that'll be a gradual process, and to say 'we're releasing a new console, so trade in your old ones for it' would be a maker's ego talking, plain and simple."

Sony continued supporting its PS2 console for years following the release of the PS3 also. After the PS3 was launched, the Japanese electronics giant promised ten years of support.

Naughty Dog has apologized for an "honest mistake" that led to real-world phone sex numbers being visible in its mega-popular 'The Last of Us' game.

The developer has pledged to remove the numbers as soon as possible. They were spotted by a reader of gaming news site, Kotaku, from the game's virtual Pittsburgh. They appear on a bulletin board in an ad for pest control.

The problem is, the numbers in the real world are for phone sex services. Oops!

"That was an artist's mistake," creative director Neil Druckmann said. "What happened was, they put some phone numbers in the game and then they thought they could just change the area code to 555, then it's invalid because it's what they do in movies. But I guess that doesn't work when you have a 1-800 in front of it."

Actress Ellen Page also accused Naughty Dog of ripping off her likeness in the game, while an artist attacked Naughty Dog for including a redesigned MBTA map he made without permission.

The European Commission has revealed results of tests that show European broadband Internet speeds run an average of 25 percent slower than advertised.

When you buy broadband Internet services, you are given a theoretical maximum speed that you are going to get with the service. On a cabled broadband network, for example, this limit would be set in the modem/router you are provided via configuration updates from your ISP.

Whatever the method in defining the maximum speed across services, there are many reasons why service could be subpar to your expectations, such as network congestion or the limitations of remote servers.

Still, you rightfully expect a reasonable return for your monthly payments. The European Commission had research conducted on the performance of Internet services offered to consumers throughout the bloc, to see how performance stacks up against advertisements.

The report is based on three billion pieces of data from nearly 100,000 households in Europe, that ran 75 million tests. It showed that the average speed in Europe is 19.7Mbps, with cable providers doing the best to deliver promised service at 91.4 percent the advertised speed.

Foxconn has revealed a smartwatch that will be compatible with Apple's iPhones.

Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) is the Taiwanese mass manufacturer of electronics goods, typically on contract from large multinational corporations. Apple is one of its largest customers, with Foxconn churning out iDevices to feed a global demand.

With rumors circulating that Apple is developing an iWatch that will wirelessly interface with iPhones, iPads and possibly other Apple gear, Foxconn appears set to beat it to the market.

At a shareholder meeting, Hon Hai executives showed off a prototype watch that works with Apple's iPhone. It can monitor health stats from the wearer - heartbeat and respiration - and feed the data back to the iPhone. It also can be used to view messages and notifications from the iPhone, just like Sony's SmartWatch 2 can pair with NFC-compatible Android devices.

"With such a device, you can keep your phone in your pocket and simply check all kinds of messages on your watch," Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou told shareholders.

Pic Source: Want China Times