Google testing new navigation design borrowed from Chrome   Google is testing a new version of its home page that eliminates the controversial navigation bar that has sat atop its services for two years, the company said. The version now being tested requires users to click a grid icon borrowed from Chrome OS for links to Gmail, Google...

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Samsung hires judge who ruled against Apple as legal expert    A judge who favored Samsung in a recent court case is now working for the company. But apparently that's perfectly OK in the U.K. U.K. Judge Robin Jacob served on the bench last year in a case that forced Apple to publish an apology notice asserting that...

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Apple wants to make super-secure magnetic mount for iPad     Apple wants to make a magnetic stand for iPads that will hold the tablet securely in place, while also allowing for quick removal when needed, according to a patent application published today. Spotted by Patently Apple, the application includes images of various tablet mounting situations, including inside...

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What is the best high-end Windows 8 tablet?   At least several times each week, we get a reader inquiry via e-mail or Twitter asking which of the current crop of Windows 8 tablets is the best. The answer isn't so simple when you consider that tablets running full Windows 8 (as opposed to Windows RT: don't get...

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Ubuntu Touch beats Firefox OS to win best of MWC from CNET    BARCELONA, Spain--We've seen lots of interesting hardware at Mobile World Congress, and yesterday when the team met to talk about what product should get our best of show award, there were plenty of gadgets in the mix. Asus' Padfone Infinity was in the running, along...

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Engineers troubleshoot Curiosity computer glitch Space radiation may be to blame for corrupted memory used by the Curiosity Mars rover's flight computer, resulting in software glitches that interrupted the flow of science data Wednesday and prompting ground controllers to switch over to a back-up computer Thursday, NASA officials said. Engineers are reviewing telemetry and diagnostic tests using ground...

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Tim Cook doesn't like Apple's falling share price, either   If you're an Apple shareholder and pretty pissed about the company's recent stock drop, you can at least take comfort in knowing you're not alone. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said today during the electronics giant's annual shareholder meeting that he knows people are upset about the stock...

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Coming to an e-book or car near you: the Web     BARCELONA, Spain--You're used to the Web on your PC. You're getting used to it on your smartphone. So what's next? Publishing and automobile industry players have just begun spinning up efforts at the World Wide Web Consortium, said W3C Chief Executive Jeff Jaffe in an interview...

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Google Launches Zopfli To Compress Data More Densely And Make Web Pages Load Faster Google just launched Zopfli, a new open source compression algorithm that can compress web content about three to eight percent more densely (PDF) than the standard zlib library. Because Zopfli is compatible with the decompression algorithms that are already part of all modern web browser....

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Cloudflare Partners With World’s Leading Web Hosts To Implement Its Railgun Protocol, Speeds Up Load Times By Up To 143% Cloudflare, the content delivery network and website security company that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2010, just announced that the majority of the world’s leading web hosting providers now support itsRailgun web optimization protocol to provide advanced caching services and...

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Survey: Most Developers Now Prefer HTML5 For Cross-Platform Development According to a new survey commissioned by Telerik’s Kendo UI, the majority of developers now prefer to work with HTML5 instead of native apps for their cross-platform development. Half of the 5,000 developers surveyed in the company’s 2013 Global Developer Surveyalso said that they developed apps using HTML5 in 2012 and 90% of them...

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Microsoft Launches IE10 For Windows 7, Starts Auto-Upgrading IE9 Users And Launches New Ad Campagin This sure took a while, but Microsoft just announced that Internet Explorer 10 is now finally available for all Windows 7 users worldwide. Previously, the release version of IE10 was only available on Windows 8, though the company did launch a preview version for Windows 7...

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Watch Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, & Others In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code Code.org, the new non-profit aimed at encouraging computer science education launched last month by entrepreneur and investor brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, has assembled an all-star group of the world’s most well-known and successful folks with programming skills to talk about how learning to code...

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Spotify Inks Its First In-Car Deal, Will Stream Music To Ford Via SYNC AppLink  Smartphones have long been an important distribution platform for music streaming service Spotify, and today it is taking that to the next level of mobility: today it is announcing a deal with Ford to provide in-car streaming music services, via Ford’s new SYNC AppLink service...

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Bloomberg, Top Tech Investors Plan Virtual March For Immigration New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a handful of Silicon Valley’s top technology investors are planning a nation-wide social media campaign to pressure congress to pass immigration reform. The so-called “virtual march” will attempt to galvanize thousands of netizens to email, tweet, and facebook their leaders to come up with...

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Google’s plan to eat Amazon’s lunch and dominate retailing Marc Andresseen, the kingmaker of Silicon Valley,  is fond of pointing out that “software is eating the world.” Google’s recent purchase of Channel Intelligence, a data management platform for retailer inventory, underscores its unstated, Borg-like goal of slowly gobbling up every industry it encounters. This particular move, though, is a...

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Nokia Expands Its Windows Phones To More Price Points With $180 Entry Level Lumia 520 And $330 Mid-Range Lumia 720 Nokia has just announced two new Lumia smartphones at its Mobile World Congress press conference – broadening its Windows Phone 8 portfolio to five devices and filling in some of the pricing gaps in the mid and lower end of...

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