Patent wars dominated tech news in 2011. One in particular, between Samsung and Apple spanned the globe and with suits and countersuits in the US, South Korea, Australia and a number of nations throughout Europe. Things don't look like they'll be much different in 2012. Patents came about with best of intentions: rewarding and protecting ingenuity, but can they actually do more harm than good? A large part of the battle between Apple and Samsung arose from the fact that ...

USB 3.0, the blazing-fast data transferral medium which promises theoretical speeds of 625MB per second will migrate to tablets and smartphone by the end of 2012. Sick of the standard 5-10MBps transfer rates of USB 2.0? Imagine an iPhone which can pump 600Mbps or more. That future is now. At CES 2012 Rahman Ismail, CTO of the USB Implementers Forum spoke of the inherent speed of USB 3.0, “What takes 15 minutes will roughly take 1 minute and 10 seconds,” Ismail ...

The smartphone game market, ever the beacon of success, is expected to rocket from US$2.1 billion to US$4.8 billion by 2016. Freemium, paid content, episodic titles, casual and hardcore games, the list of smartphone games is overwhelming by nature and offers something for every audience. A report by Charlotte Miller, Analyst with Juniper Research and author of the whitepaper, details more, and outlines how the mobile games market has blossomed. The rise of social gaming Farmville, a model of accomplishment, is the ...

The Arab Spring, the Slavic Spring and the Iranian Twitter revolution all proved how deeply engrained the use of social media is in emerging market countries. But did you know that their rate of engagement with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is growing a whole lot faster than that of developed markets? Social media penetration is on the rise in emerging markets. A recent report from research and analysis site, eMarketer.com, looking at three studies from Pew Research ...

Google has announced the integration of of its social networking platform, Google+, into its core product -- the search engine. The internet giant announced that it will be releasing three new features, namely personal results, profiles in search as well as people and pages. "We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three ...

In his latest book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, Jeff Jarvis traces the relationship between privacy and "publicness" and examines how it has been affected by a number of "new" technologies ranging from Gutenberg’s printing press and the Kodak camera to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Through the book, Jarvis argues that technology has always created fears about privacy throughout history. Today there are many advocates for privacy but ...

Since the advent of the web and the introduction of internet radio stations, traditional radio has had to rethink the way content is reached and used by consumers. Accessible from anywhere where there is an internet connection or on your phone, the way we listen to radio isn’t limited to, well, a radio anymore. Yahoo!Music Here you can listen to over 250 radio stations from any browser on PC or Mac. Genres include pop, rock, country, jazz, indie and many more. By ...

Almost every game is now online-enabled, but the likes of Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 lack the gentle interaction and community aspect of massive multiplayer online games, better known as MMO’s. We’ve picked the very best of the current crop of MMO’s. World of Warcraft Eight years of success and hundreds of updates have produced an MMO which the competition continues to lovingly emulate. Its latest update, Cataclysm increased the level cap to 85 and recently, WoW became free-to-play. Cost: Free to ...

Razer, creators of the gaming peripherals such as gaming mice, have released a teaser trailer for a PC with a “new form factor,” deftly named “Project Fiona”. All signs point to Project Fiona being the much-anticipated reboot of the Razer Switchblade, a gaming tablet which was rumoured to come out in 2010. Project Fiona employs a variety of “revolutionary technologies” which are yet to be released. The preview video shows it running high-resolution graphics far beyond the kind of a standard ...

Given that the week between Christmas and New Year's Day is usually very slow in the tech blogging world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jeremiah Owyang’s linkbait post about the end of the “Golden Age of Tech Blogging” got its fair share of attention when it came out. My old boss Marshall Kirkpatrick and former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy already wrote some pretty good rebuttals of Owyang’s ideas, but I want to add a few thoughts to this ...