Category: Biz Tech

San Franciscans have long blamed the technology sector for rising rents. Now, a study from real-estate company Trulia backs them up. Rents are rising faster in U.S. tech hubs than in the rest of the country, Trulia said in a report released Thursday. In January, it said, rents rose 3.3 percent in the nation's 100 biggest metropolitan areas in January, but they rose by an average of 5.7 percent in the 10 biggest tech hubs. The report blamed the high prices on

The lone developer of the smash hit Flappy Bird has created an update that fixes problems that have frustrated many players. Now the game will be more accessible to players, and it won’t be quite as frustrating. While the game has proven addictive, it has also made players want to toss their phone out the window after lots of bird crashes. Creator Dong Nguyen of dotGears Studios said the game has beenmaking about $50,000 per day in ad revenues and he does not

Final approval for .abudhabi and .dubai web addresses may be only months away, with experts predicting widespread uptake. The global authority that controls the launch of new domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), is in the final stages of approval for the two. It is hoped that by linking the web addresses to the geographical location of a website, it will boost online business and bring more attention to the country. The .abudhabi and .dubai addresses are owned

LinkedIn announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Bright, a data-focused job search service, for $120 million. The deal marks LinkedIn's largest acquisition yet. Bright launched in 2010 and used data science to match up job seekers with employers. The service analyzed thousands of data points from resumes and job listings to come up with a Bright Score that indicated how good a match users are for particular jobs. "We're trying to map every skill to every job to every occupation clarification

Google Inc suffered a service outage on Friday that briefly took down Gmail, the email service used by hundreds of millions of people and many businesses across the globe. Google, which first acknowledged the outage at 11:12 a.m. Pacific Time (1912 GMT), said a little over an hour later that the problem with Gmail had been resolved. As of late Friday, the company did not offer an explanation for the outage, which affected users in at least India, Britain and the United

By Mohammed N Al Khan The race is on to become the first person to go to Mars – and Khalid Al Jaaidi is well and truly on the starting line. The 21-year-old designer has been shortlisted along with 1,058 applicants for the Mars One mission. More than 200,000 people applied for the chance to be part of Earth’s first colony on another planet, and Khalid feels he was picked for his natural ability to adapt to different situations. “I want to be

The genetic testing for breast cancer made famous by Oscar winning Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie would now be locally available for UAE residents, thanks to the first genome testing lab set to open in Abu Dhabi. Angelina Jolie had rocked the Internet and the medical community earlier this year with a disclosure through New York Times that that she had tested positive for a faulty BRCA1 gene carrying risk of cancer and decided to undergo a preventive surgery to reduce the

Today hospitals and health systems worldwide are facing a plethora of challenges; these include aging populations, evolving disease profiles, increasing demand by patients for quality care, mounting cost pressures and an uneven distribution of expert resources. In addition, healthcare delivery is shifting from a focus on specific health episodes to a continuum approach, with a greater emphasis on education and prevention. Luckily, however, technology may hold the key to addressing many of these seemingly overwhelming changes. In effect, the adoption of IT

A surgeon in China says he has constructed an extra nose out of a man’s rib cartilage and implanted it under the skin of his forehead to prepare for a transplant in probably the first operation of its kind. Surgeon Guo Zhihui at Fujian Medical University Union Hospital in China’s southeastern province of Fujian spent nine months cultivating the graft for a 22-year-old man whose nose was damaged. The striking images of the implant — with the nostril section facing diagonally upward

Doctors at RAK Hospital marked the opening of a new era of intervention in congenital heart disease for this part of the world by carrying out an Atrial Septal Defect (ASD)   Closure without surgical intervention on a young adult by the technique of Device closure ASD device (Amplatzer septal occluder) is a relatively new non-surgical technique used to treat patients with atrial septal defect in which patients are born with “hole” in the heart.  It is the commonest defect encountered in

Apple Inc. is poised to announce record opening-weekend sales as throngs of excited customers waited through long lines in Sydney, Tokyo, London and San Francisco to pick up the latest iPhones. Sales for the iPhone 5s and 5c started yesterday with crowds in Sydney and extended through stores in the U.S., Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the U.K. In London, the line at the Regent Street Apple store stretched for a mile. The demand has analysts

Iranians gained direct access to Facebook and Twitter for the first time in four years because of a technical fault, an Iranian official said on Tuesday, denying suggestions the government had lifted a ban on social media. On Monday evening, several Iranians said they gained access to their accounts without having to get round a government firewall, leading them to hope that authorities had relaxed a ban in place since anti-government protests in 2009, some of which were organised on social media. But Abdolsamad

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Thechikkottukavu Ramachandran's take-home salary would be the envy of many investment bankers. With his majestic ten-and-a-half-foot frame, the elegant Kerala resident is said to earn Rs 1 crore by working just seven months a year. Little wonder then that he's a Facebook star. Except that the 48-year-old Ramachandran is a large elephant, and a wildly popular fixture in most ceremonial temple processions in the state. His popularity also has much to do with a unique phenomenon: the recent proliferation

NATASHA LOMAS - Trying to raise $32 million via crowdfunding always looked overly ambitious. And indeed it has proved to be so. Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge Indiegogo campaign to build a smartphone designed for converged computing has fallen considerably short of its target, ending with the fixed funding project receiving nothing at all — which, when you’ve got pledges worth around $12 million, has got to hurt. The campaign ran from July 22 to August 21. The Edge, which promised to be both a high end Android

Earlier this week, security researcher Khalil Shreateh discovered a Facebook bug that allowed a hacker to post on anyone’s wall — even if they weren’t that person’s friend. While he was able to prove to Facebook that his bug was legit (despite an initial response that it wasn’t a bug at all), Facebook wasn’t too happy with the way he did it: by using the bug to post on Zuckerberg’s otherwise friends-only wall. Security research can be a pretty tough balancing act.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to ban the use of dotless domain names. In a resolution issued earlier this week, the non-profit organization defined dotless domains to mean "consist of a single label and require the inclusion of, for example, an A, AAAA, or MX, record in the apex of a TLD zone in the DNS." In plainer terms, this means Internet users won't be seeing Web addresses that look like, "http://insert name here." The basic URL

Small businesses are more prone to be attacked by cyber attacks, according to a  study. Many small businesses b server from inside their own networks, without much awareness about how to secure them properly. Their primary concerned is the daily running of their business, which makes insecure servers a prime target for cyber attacks. A recent case is a good example of how these attacks work. On May 30, Trend Micro’s assistance was requested after an unidentified company (which we’ll call Company

Now might be a good time to become accustomed with Windows 8 if you’re still a holdover Windows XP user. Computerworld reports that hackers have started storing up any fresh Windows XP exploits they find and are preparing to unleash them on unsuspecting XP users as soon as Microsoft stops supporting the operating system next year. Microsoft security expert Jason Fossen tells Computerworld that hackers who discover new exploits over the next few months may be able to charge twice

Dubai: Emirates, Etihad Airways and Gulf Air experienced delays on Tuesday morning after their passenger check-in and reservation system crashed. The passenger check-in and reservation system, designed by Sabre, experienced a worldwide outage at around 8am local time and lasted for two hours. Sabre software is used by more than 300 airlines around the world and some 100 airports worldwide were affected by the outage. Sabre is commonly used among international airlines, including Virgin Australia, United Airlines and American Airlines. A spokeswoman for

New figures have revealed an addiction to technology amongst UAE residents, with 71% stating that they could not live without their laptops or smartphones. Commissioned by dmg events Middle East as it gears up for the December launch of the region's largest consumer lifestyle event - The Life & Style Show UAE - the survey provides unique insight into the attitudes of UAE residents towards all-things tech. It also comes at a time when the UAE's consumer electronics industry is booming,

LG Display has agreed to pay $380m (£246m) to settle an LCD panel price-fixing case in the US. The company denied doing anything wrong, but said it had agreed to a settlement to avoid "the expense and burden of protracted litigation". It was the largest amount paid by any of the 10 companies that have settled the case, including Toshiba, Samsung, Sharp and Hitachi. They were accused of fixing the prices of LCD panels between 1996 and 2006. The money will go to US

If you're an audiophile who waxes nostalgic when it comes to the classic Walkman audio cassette and CD players -- you're in luck. There's a new Sony (SNE) Walkman out, though if you're in America, you may need to pack a passport to purchase one legally. The Japanese consumer electronics giant has been following Apple's (AAPL) iPod footsteps through Asia and Europe in recent years in its attempt to update its iconic brand. The Sony Walkman F800 is an impressive successor

Netflix is more popular among couch potatoes than investors a year after its polarizing decision to raise U.S. prices for video subscription services. The unexpected twist that Netflix unveiled a year ago Thursday triggered mass customer cancellations and a sell-off in its stock, which has wiped out more than $11 billion US in shareholder wealth. Netflix Inc. has bounced back this year to revive its subscriber growth. But even after a recent rally, its stock remains more than 70 per cent below