Zynga carries out planned games shutdown, including “Petville”

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Social games publisher Zynga Inc confirmed on Monday that it has carried out 11 of the planned shutdowns of 13 game titles, with “Petville” being the latest game on which it pulled the plug.Zynga in October said it would shut down 13 underperforming titles after warning that its revenues were slowing as gamers fled from its once-popular titles published on the Facebook platform...

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Analysis: For tech investors, it’s hard to know when to bolt

(Reuters) – When Hewlett-Packard Co agreed to buy British software company Autonomy in August last year for $ 11.1 billion, two well-known investors made diametrically different bets on how the big deal would play out.To short seller Jim Chanos, who had been raising red flags on Autonomy for years and had started shorting shares of HP in 2011, the deal was another nail in the coffin of the Silicon...

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Boston Cop Rescues Drowning Woman

A Boston police officer is being hailed a hero after he jumped into the frigid cold water to rescue a drowning woman.Cell phone video showed police officer Edward Norton plunging into Fort Point channel Friday afternoon during a torrential downpour to rescue the unidentified woman who’d reportedly fallen in by accident.Norton, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, says he didn’t...

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Facebook Shrugs Off Instagram’s New Class Action Lawsuit

For Instagram, there’s good news and there’s bad news about the class action lawsuit just filed against them. Bad news first: Somebody just filed a class action lawsuit. Good news: the lawyers from Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, have plenty of practice getting rid of these pesky things. That might explain why they’re so dismissive about the legal inconvenience a group of disgruntled Instagram...

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Facebook Poke App Is Frustrating as Hell

Facebook Poke: Startup ScreenPoke, the new iPhone app from Facebook, lets you send short messages, photos and videos to friends that automatically self destruct after a few seconds. If you have the Facebook app on your phone already, logging in is effortless.Click here to view this gallery.[More from Mashable: 2012′s Biggest Winners and Losers]I was never a big poker on Facebook. When I joined the...

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RIM loses BlackBerry subscribers for first time

TORONTO (AP) — Research In Motion‘s stock plunged in after-hours trading Thursday after the BlackBerry maker said it plans to change the way it charges fees.RIM also announced that it lost subscribers for the first time in the latest quarter, as the global number of BlackBerry users dipped to 79 million.In a rare positive sign, the Canadian company added to its cash position during the quarter as...

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Samsung Galaxy Muse is like an iPod Shuffle that Syncs with Your Phone

In perhaps the most awkwardly titled tech press release ever, Samsung Mobile announced the launch of the new Samsung Galaxy Muse, a device which appears to have nothing to do with “CORRECTING and REPLACING and ADDING MULTIMEDIA” but everything to do with being a music player crossed with a smartphone accessory.​Say goodbye to iTunes?While most handheld music players (and smartphone or tablets with...

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Cisco hires bank to sell home wireless router unit: report

(Reuters) – Networking equipment company Cisco Systems Inc has hired Barclays to sell its Linksys home router unit, a report said on Sunday.The business, which Cisco acquired for $ 500 million in 2003, will likely be valued for less because it has low margins, according to Bloomberg.The sale is part of Cisco’s strategy to shed its consumer unit and focus on its software and technology services businesses.Last...

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Pope needs help sending out blessing in first tweet

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – After weeks of anticipation bordering on media frenzy, Pope Benedict solemnly put his finger to a computer tablet device on Wednesday and tried to send his first tweet – but something went wrong.Images on Vatican television appeared to show the first try didn’t work. The pope, who still writes his speeches by hand, seems to have pressed too hard and the tweet was not sent...

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‘Dishonored’ tops a diverse year in video games

The video game universe in 2012 is a study in extremes.At one end, you have the old guard striving to produce mass-appeal blockbusters. At the other end, you have a thriving community of independent game developers scrambling to find an audience for their idiosyncratic visions. Can’t we all just get along?Turns out, we can. For while some industry leaders are worried (and not without cause) about...

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California PUC Finalizing Free Cell Phone Service for the Poor

As noted by KGO, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) intends to approve a free lifeline cell phone plan that benefits California‘s poor and homeless residents. Funding for initial setup will come from the federal government.What are the initial details of the plan?Qualifying Californians pay an initial $ 20 fee to sign up for a monthly cell coverage plan. It offers 250 free minutes as...

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Apple, Samsung face off in court again

SAN JOSE (Reuters) – Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics squared off again in court on Thursday, as the iPhone maker prepares to convince a U.S. district judge to ban sales of a number of the Korean company’s devices and defend a $ 1.05 billion jury award.Apple scored a sweeping legal victory in August at the conclusion of its landmark case against its arch-foe, when a U.S. jury found Samsung had copied...

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New iPad mini orders will be delivered in time for Christmas

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No Grammy love for Justin Bieber, One Direction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Irate fans of Justin Bieber and boy band One Direction took to social media on Thursday to voice their outrage after being snubbed by the Grammys for a chance to win the biggest honors in the music industry.Indie-pop band fun and rapper Frank Ocean led the 2013 nominations, tying with The Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, Jay-Z and Kanye West for six nods. But The Recording Academy...

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U.S. agency backs Apple in essential patent battle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Google unit Motorola Mobility is not entitled to ask a court to stop the sale of Apple iPhones and iPads that it says infringe on a patent that is essential to wireless technology, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Wednesday.In June, Judge Richard Posner in Chicago threw out cases that Motorola, now owned by Google, and Apple had filed against each other claiming patent...

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Is Facebook planning to develop its own games? Revised Zynga terms open the door

As Zynga (ZNGA) continues its free fall into irrelevancy with layoffs and its one-hit social games, the gaming company has revised its contract with Facebook (FB) to free it from being “forced to launch games exclusively on the Facebook platform” and “obligated to use Facebook Credits for Zynga game pages,” according to AllThingsD. The change of terms filed with the SEC also...

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Thousands touched by photograph of New York cop helping shoeless man

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A photograph of a New York City police officer crouching by a shoeless panhandler to give him a new pair of boots on a cold night in Times Square has drawn a deluge of praise after it was published on the police department‘s Facebook page this week.By Thursday afternoon, nearly 394,000 people had clicked a button on the department’s Facebook page to indicate that they “liked”...

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Obama takes “fiscal cliff” battle to Twitter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama opened a new front on Wednesday in the battle between Democrats and Republicans over the best way to avoid the year-end “fiscal cliff” – Twitter.The web-savvy Obama administration launched a social media campaign that asks Twitter users to add the “#my2k” hashtag to messages with examples of what $ 2,000 means to them.The amount is roughly what a middle-class...

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Nintendo Unveils Wii Mini for the Canucks

Nintendo‘s pushing the new $ 299 Wii U console hard (and has already sold 400K units in the process), but in at least one region, the gaming company has a new back-up plan: The $ 99 Nintendo Wii Mini.[More from Mashable: Wii U Sells 400,000 Units in First Week]The new smaller, black box with red trim is a simpler game console. It offers no Internet access and cannot play older GameCube console games....

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$1,499 Gaming Laptop is Ready for Steam on Linux

Alternative, Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu haven’t historically carried much weight with PC gamers. Very few PC games have been made for Linux, over the years, ever since the company that was porting AAA gaming titles to Linux (Loki Games) went bankrupt in 2001. And while it’s possible to use a “compatibility layer” such as Wine to run Windows PC games in Linux, the results are mixed at...

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