Latest news

As a fan of the Star Wars saga, this writer is excited to see the latest in the series and the first spin-off related to the main story.

Per Disney: "Watch the official second trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, in which Jyn Erso leads a group of unlikely heroes to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire's ultimate weapon of destruction. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story arrives in theaters December 16, 2016."

According to new regulatory documents, Bed Bath and Beyond paid just $11.78 million for the once popular online retailer One Kings Lane, just a fraction of what the company was previously valued.

The retailer was launched in 2009 and was one of the popular "flash sale" sites of the time. The company raised over $200 million in venture capital and was valued as high as $800 million in 2014.

After the fall of the flash sale culture, One King Lane's sales collapsed and it appears that Bed Bath and Beyond used a few days of profit to swoop up the site and its employees, likely in an effort to bolster their own website.

Samsung's battery catastrophe with the Galaxy Note7 smartphone is going to cost billions of dollars. The company has not only had to issue recall two times but had to stop the production and the selling of the model altogether. Now it seems that even this is not the entire extent of the damage.

Recently a survey asked current Samsung customers about their feelings towards Galaxy phones after the battery issues. Majority were still willing to stick with Samsung but a huge portion, nearly 40 percent, are going to look into competitors' devices when the time comes to replace their phone. Not surprisingly there's been an increase as a survey found after the first recall 34 percent were looking to change their smartphone brand.

Of these 40 percent nearly a third were thinking of switching to Apple's iPhones and the rest were going to look at other Android manufacturers.

Clearly this is not a good sign for Samsung which is trying to do some damage control with $100 vouchers for the people that stick with them. Hopefully, for Samsung, the people will see the problems as a one off and move on. As time goes by people will surely forget.

Internet radio giant Pandora has unveiled a new logo and a new paid tier, Pandora Plus.

Pandora Plus allows listeners to pay $5 per month and go ad-free, in addition to adding offline listening, the ability to replay more tracks, and significantly more skips. Plus will also replace Pandora One, which removed ads but did not add the other features.

The company is also expected to announce a $10 tier later this year that will offer unlimited streaming similar to that of Apple, Google, Spotify and now Amazon.

Pandora has 78.1 million users, the most of any online music service, but nearly all were on the company's free ad-supported tier. Spotify, on the other hand, has 40 million paid subscribers at $5 or $10 per month and Apple is up to 17 million users in less than 18 months.

After Google launched their Pixel smartphone last week exclusively to Verizon (for U.S. carriers) there were worries that the carrier would not update the Pixel to the latest version of Android in a timely matter, but it appears that is not the case.

Said Verizon: "First and foremost, all operating system and security updates to the Pixel devices will happen in partnership with Google. In other words, when Google releases an update, Verizon phones will receive the same update at the same time (much like iOS updates). Verizon will not stand in the way of any major updates and users will get all updates at the same time as Google."

Google seconded the notion: "OS updates and monthly security patches will be updated on all Pixel devices (Verizon and non-Verizon versions) simultaneously."

Pixel fans can relax now.

Amazon's oft-rumored Music Unlimited service has gone live, available to Prime members for $79 per year, or $7.99 per month if you choose that route.

The on-demand streaming service will rival Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music and others, including tens of millions of tracks from the majors and "hundreds of indies." The service also has curated playlists, recommendation engines, lyric integration, offline downloading and apps for iOS, Amazon, Android, PC and Sonos.

As an all-in for their ecosystem, if you own the voice-powered Echo, you can get the service for $3.99 a month, a steal compared to rivals.

In addition, owners of one of Amazon's voice-controlled Echo devices will be able to get the service for just $3.99 per month.

Samsung has frozen all sales of their much-maligned Galaxy Note7 smartphone as reports of the device exploding continue despite a recall and replacements.

U.S. carriers had begun allowing immediate no-questions-asked exchanges for any phone, and airlines had banned the device while on passenger planes. All of this happened after Samsung had already recalled earlier versions of the phone but the fires kept on coming.

"Consumers with either an original Galaxy Note7 or replacement Galaxy Note7 device should power down and stop using the device," said Samsung, effectively closing the books on the handset. Samsung had already recalled 2.5 million faulty Note7 devices.

Google has said that its popular Chrome browser will be less memory-intensive following a new update in early December.

The search giant has been actively working on reducing Chrome's severe need for all your RAM, but as fans know, it still takes a significant amount. The upcoming Chrome 55 update will include a new, upgraded JavaScript engine that will reduce memory, at least on JavaScript-heavy sites.

Google says in testing, popular sites like NYT, Reddit and YouTube all used 50 percent less RAM on average than the current Chrome 53.

If the test results have similar real-world results starting on December 6th, Google will have at least one happy web user: me.

Spotify and Apple Music have signed new deals with music rights management service Dubset, bringing unofficial remixes to the two most popular streaming services.

For the time being, it seems that short-form mixes are available but long-form mixed content is still unavailable as of writing. Spotify confirmed it was coming but did not give a time frame.

Additionally, full DJ sets are coming at some point too, with Dubset CEO Stephen White excitedly saying "Mixes are coming next!"

Dubset works by using Gracenote's audio fingerprinting database, thus providing rights holders with royalties even if their song is only sampled for a small piece of the mix.

"Content owners have been very supportive. The publishing and label deals we have under license provides a large catalog to work with," White added. This "allows some of the content that until now has only been on YouTube and SoundCloud to come to these great paid services where content owners will get paid!"

Google has updated their Google Suite package (formerly GAPPS), making the "Hangouts" app now optional for OEMs.

Reads Google's email to devs: "Today, we are announcing that Google Duo will replace Hangouts within the suite of core GMS apps, and Hangouts will become GMS Optional for telephony products. This change will take effect on December 1, 2016."

Duo is Google's cross-platform FaceTime competitor.

Now, the headline may be a bit alarmist, but there will be little incentive for OEMs to include Hangouts when there are plenty of rivals that may pay better to have their messaging app pre-installed. Google does say Hangouts will be supported for business and personal, at least for now.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said this week that entry to China is very unlikely in the near future.

When asked why the company is not in China yet (the world's largest Internet market), Reed noted that regulators recently shut down movie stores from Disney and Apple and that it is still very tough to break through in the censored nation.

"It doesn't look good. We're figuring our way out (in China), but we're really focused on the rest of the world. There is so much opportunity for us in India, Poland, Turkey and Latin America and Vietnam," added Hastings.

Google has announced a "pop-up shop" in NYC to showcase their new "Made By Google" hardware.

The store will be set up at 96 Spring St. starting on October 20th, marketing their Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, the Google Home and Google WiFi home accessories and their new VR headset - the Daydream View.

There is evidence that other pop-ups are on the way, and visiting popup.withgoogle.com has a new "Visit Us" tab that it currently empty but will likely not be in the near future.

With the start of their retail experience, Google appears to be taking a page out of Apple's book.

Kodak quickly posted and then deleted a tweet teasing an upcoming smartphone.

The one-time film giant teased the launch for October 20th, showing off the side of a brushed steel frame and a power button with the Kodak logo.

Kodak released their IM5 phone last year and as expected nobody bought it. This phone appears to be higher end, but there is also zero chance it will sell.

According to a new report, the spy tool that Yahoo installed last year to scan hundreds of millions of emails on behalf of the NSA and FBI was a "poorly designed" malware that engineers actually flagged as a rootkit.

The bombshell report dropped last week and even though it is unclear why Yahoo was served with the confidential order, it has been reported that the government was "looking for a specific digital signature of a communications method used by a state-sponsored, foreign terrorist organization."

Sources claim that the malware was flagged by Yahoo's internal security during a routine checkup. "They assumed it was a rootkit installed by hackers," said the anonymous ex-employee source. "If it was just a slight modification to the spam and child pornography filters, the security team wouldn't have noticed and freaked out. It definitely contained something that did not look like anything Yahoo mail would have installed. This backdoor was installed in a way that endangered all of Yahoo users."

A high-severity security alert was issued within Yahoo's internal tracking system and it got to CIO Alex Stamos who at that point was told that it was installed on purpose. The alert was then "covered up" and "closed...fast enough that most of the [security] team didn't find out."

Microsoft has sent press invites to an event on October 26th where the Redmond giant will unveil new Surface hardware.

Additionally, the company will show off some Windows 10 updates and is also expected to announce some Xbox-related news, as well.

Many in the industry expect a Surface all-in-one PC, and there are also likely to be Surface branded wireless keyboards and mice unveiled. There are not expected to be any updates to the Surface Pro tablet line or Surface Book notebook.

The future of Windows 10 will be on full display no matter what, so expect to hear a lot about what is coming next year.