Latest news

The blockbuster game Angry Birds is making its way to the final frontier, space.

Rovio has announced via a "teaser" trailer that the next version of the game will be based on space. Angry Birds Space will launch on March 22nd, presumably for Android, iOS and PC (if not for all platforms).

There is not too much more info on the game but says it is a "completely new game with innovative new gameplay, but with some of the familiar Angry Birds elements that fans already know and love."

Since its release in 2009, all variations of Angry Birds have been downloaded over 500 million times.

More info here: http://space.angrybirds.com/teaser1/

Microsoft has revealed a new logo today for Windows 8, one that features a single-color design and will be based on the Metro user interface.

The new logo has an angled window, which Microsoft says will give a sense of motion "aligning with the fast and fluid style you'll find throughout Windows 8."

Design consultants Pentagram came up with the new look, and the firm wanted to move away from the current logo which they believed looked more like a flag than an actual window. Says Microsoft of the decision: "'Windows' really is a beautiful metaphor for computing, and with the new logo we wanted to celebrate the idea of a window, in perspective."

Metro, which is part of Windows 8 for PCs and tablets, is touch-friendly and feature tiles rather than the icons connecting to apps that have been seen since the original Windows with GUI.

Windows 8 is expected to be available in the fall, with a consumer preview being released in the next month.

Global publishers Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, among others, have taken down the popular ebook file sharing sites library.nu and ifile.it.

The alliance of publishers say the two sites had "created an internet library" with over 400,000 unauthorized ebooks available for free.

Operators of the sites are said to have brought in over $10 million in advertising, subscriptions and donations

The other publishers who were part of the alliance that sent the successful cease-and-desist letters are Georg Thieme; HarperCollins; Hogrefe; Macmillan Publishers Ltd; Cengage Learning; John Wiley & Sons;the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson Education Inc; Oxford University Press; Springer; Taylor & Francis; C H Beck; and Walter De Gruyter.

International Publishers Association (IPA), which helped coordinate the events, added (via TheBookSeller): "Today, the international book industry has shown that it continues to stand up against organised copyright crime. We will not tolerate freeloaders who make unjustified profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due reward. This is an important step towards a more transparent, honest and fair trade of digital content on the Internet."

Nintendo Wii owners now have access to the Hulu Plus catalog of movies and TV shows.

For the standard price of $7.99 per month, Wii gamers can subscribe to the streaming service, which has current-season and back catalog of shows from ABC, NBC and Fox.

"Wii offers the most entertainment fun for everyone in the family, with an impressive selection of streaming movies and TV shows in addition to an unparalleled lineup of games that can't be played anywhere else," said Tony Elison, Nintendo of America's senior director and general manager of Network Business. "The Wii console is the hub of the living room, and with the addition of Hulu Plus, millions of households now have even more options for streaming premium TV shows and movies."

Adds Pete Distad, VP of Marketing and Distribution at Hulu: "We want to be everywhere, on every screen where people want to watch their favorite shows and discover new ones on their own schedule. Wii is not only one of the most important entertainment devices in the living room, but one of the most heavily anticipated and requested platforms by users and subscribers. Teaming up with Nintendo gives millions of households across the U.S. an immediate way to access some of their favorite current season shows on-demand in their living room through Hulu Plus."

Swype's latest beta finally makes the popular virtual keyboard available to Android 4.0 users.

Additionally, the beta offers downloadable languages for tablets and should have more accuracy improvements, as well.

Finally, the update adds Dragon Go, which is an equivalent of Siri for Android.

Swype allows users to create words on the virtual keyboard by "swiping" their fingers from character to character to create the words instead of having to hit each virtual key individually.

Get the beta here for your 4.0 device: http://beta.swype.com/

According to research firm iSuppli, Amazon has stormed into 14 percent market share of the tablet market.

The move came only in the Q4 2011, where the Kindle Fire was released in November.

During the same time period, Apple's market share fell from 64 percent to 57 percent, despite a huge growth in iPads shipped.

Additionally, the firm says potential buyers spent their money on the iPhone 4S rather than a new iPad, and the firm expects Apple to make a large push this quarter, especially if the iPad 3 is released.

For the quarter, Amazon shipped just under 4 million Kindle Fire and Apple shipped 15.4 million iPads. While shipped does not automatically amount to actual sales, it is safe to assume that most of the iPads sold and that a significant portion of the Kindle Fire did.

In the market share race, Samsung's Galaxy Tab line came in third with 8 percent and Barnes & Noble's new Nook tablet came in fourth at 7 percent.

The HTC Dev unlock tool is now expanded for even more consumers.

HTC smartphone owners can use the tool to unlock the bootloaders on their device, legally, making it easier to add custom ROMs.

The new devices to be supported by the tool are the Hero, Legend, Eris, MyTouch 3G, and myTouch 4G. There are now 58 different devices that are supported, with more to be added into the future. Most of the devices on the list are newer devices but the company promises older devices will continue to be added.

HTC added the Droid Incredible, Desire Z, T-Mobile G2, Aria, ChaCha, and Status a few weeks ago.

CEO Peter Chou noted last year that all new devices would have unlocked bootloaders, following criticism from the developer community.

Microsoft has announced it has begun rolling out a system update that will fix the color space issues seen in video playback.

Over the past two months, more and more gamers have complained of issues with the video playback, which showed up after the Dashboard update in December. Last month, Microsoft promised a fix and has delivered.

Says Xbox's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb:

"I wanted to let you know that the team has just released a system update for the Xbox 360 over Xbox LIVE. Starting today when you sign in to Xbox LIVE you'll receive a prompt to accept this mandatory update. If you are signed into LIVE already, you may be signed out and asked to accept the update and you'll be back online in a few moments.

This update will increase performance and is part of our continued effort to provide the best possible Xbox LIVE experience. In this update, we are providing a fix to a color issue that some were experiencing, and it will be immediately notable in the dashboard. The fix is also being applied by partners to their apps on Xbox LIVE, which we expect to roll out over the coming months."

Apple has given developers a preview of their upcoming operating system, Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

Says Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing: "The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better. The developer preview of Mountain Lion comes just seven months after the incredibly successful release of Lion and sets a rapid pace of development for the world's most advanced personal computer operating system."

The new OS will integrate popular iOS apps like Messages, Twitter, Notes, Reminders and the Game Center.

Additionally, Mountain Lion will be compatible with iCloud and have AirPlay mirroring, allowing Apple TV owners to easily stream content to their TVs.

Messages will replace the current iChat and will the new defacto app for sending messages, photos and videos from their computers.

By releasing the new OS soon, Apple hopes to take a bit of thunder away from Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8, which will be available on PCs and tablets in the fall.

Kobo has announced it will sell its Vox tablet in Best Buy stores in the U.S.

The tablet currently competes with the Kindle Fire in the 7-inch category which may already put the tablet in an un-winnable situation.

Kobo released the Vox in October, but the system was met with criticism from users who found the tablet lacking and laggy.

Since the Vox's release, however, Kobo was acquired by Rakuten, which has been called on occasion "the Amazon of Japan." Rakuten promised to turn the tablet into an ecosystem similar to that of the Fire, which is deeply integrated with Amazon's shopping, music, movies and Cloud platforms.

The Vox features a 7-inch 1024 x 600 resolution display, an 800MHz processor, 8GB of internal storage, 7 hours of battery life, and 512MB of RAM.

Last year, Sony succeeded in their bid to buy out Ericsson's share of their jointly owned Sony Ericsson handset and mobile device company.

The deal cost Sony $1.05 billion euros and also included a patent cross-licensing deal. More importantly for Sony, gaining full ownership of Sony Ericsson cleared the way to integrate the company's devices into Sony's online entertainment network and offer a broad range of Sony owned content from companies like Sony Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment.

As of today, the acquisition has been completed. As the press statement reads, "this marks the completion of the transaction jointly announced by Sony and Ericsson on October 27, 2011, and makes Sony Ericsson a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony."

The company will be renamed Sony Mobile Communications "with the aim of accelerating convergence between Sony's lineup of network enabled consumer electronics products, including smart phones, tablets, TVs and PCs."

Following in the commercial successful footsteps of fellow comedian Louis C.K., Jim Gaffigan will release his standup special "Jim Gaffigan: Mr. Universe" exclusively as a digital download in April.

The special will be taped later this month, and will sell for $5 via Gaffigan's website. 20 percent of each purchase will be donated to charity, as well.

Late last year, Louis C.K. decided to skip a DVD distributor and edit and release his standup special "Louis C.K.: Live at the Beacon Theater" on his own website for $5, with no DRM or other restricitions. The "experiment" was so well received that C.K. made over $1 million profit in just two weeks. The comedian donated a substantial amount to charity and gave bonuses to everyone in his team as a show of appreciation.

Gaffigan credited C.K. for the idea, and added some humor, as well: "If no one buys the special or if lots of people steal it then I suppose I will lose a lot of money and have egg on my face. But then again, I have four kids, so I am always losing money and usually have egg or some kind of food on my face so it might just feel normal."

One day after the WSJ reported that Apple is actively considering building a smaller, 8-inch iPad, experts are refuting the claim.

The CEO of Rapid Repair, Aaron Vronko says there is little chance Apple will create a smaller form factor iPad: "I think a smaller iPad would be questionable. "because Apple has been able to appeal to [iPad] developers with its single screen format." Rapid Repair fixes broken iOS devices. Vronko also believes Apple's marketing efforts would have been a waste if they introduce a smaller iPad: "Apple has gone to considerable lengths to define and separate its primary products -- iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Mac -- by, among other things, screen size. To introduce a smaller iPad would muddy the waters, something Apple has spent substantial effort to avoid."

That being said, Vronko also says he does not believe Apple will make a substantially larger iPhone, like its Android rivals.

Cisco has confirmed today it will appeal the European Commission's approval of Microsoft's purchase of Skype.

Last year, the software giant acquired Skype for $8.5 billion, in an effort to integrate the extremely popular VoIP into its Lync suite of applications and platforms. Skype offers users a way to chat via voice, text or video.

Cisco says Microsoft should "support standards for interoperability with other collaboration platforms," says IW. The company does not oppose the merger, says their counsel, but does want more strict conditions imposed on Microsoft.

Says Cisco: "Microsoft's plan to integrate Skype exclusively with its Lync Enterprise Communications Platform could lock-in businesses who want to reach Skype's 700 million account holders to a Microsoft-only platform."

More specifically, Microsoft and Skype do not use the H.264 video codec or the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) standard.

CBS has confirmed it is in talks to produce a show directly for Netflix.

Says CEO Leslie Moonves: "We are talking to Netflix about a potential deal to produce a show for them. Until they are doing 22 hours a week of premium content, we do not look at them as a competitor, but rather another place to put our content."

Netflix will be producing five original programs by 2013. The first of which, "Lilyhammer," is available now.

Later this year, Netflix will debut "House of Cards," starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher. Netflix had to outbid rivals like HBO and offer major incentives to the companies behind the political drama which is expected to be a hit. Additionally, the fourth season of the cult classic "Arrested Development" will be hitting the service in early 2013.

The last two shows have not been purchased yet, but they are expected to be the prison comedy "Orange Is the New Black" and the thriller series "Hemlock Grove." Says Netflix spokeman Steve Swasey: "By 2013, we'll have five original content programs. We're dabbling in original content with a pretty good mix of dramas, comedies and quirky series. We're excited about it."