internet

In 2011, Loris Elementary School in Loris, S.C., was ranked 41st in the state among grammar schools with similar demographics. By 2012, it had risen to 19th.

What happened? According to the White House: technology.

Many of the students at Loris Elementary School are from low-income families that don't have the means to give their children all of today's high-tech devices, according to the Obama administration. That's why in 2012 the school decided to introduce a technology blended learning program complete with laptops, software, and Internet access. It's apparently made a difference.

President Barack Obama … Read more

How many trees does it take to print out the entire Internet? Some environmentalists really, really don't want to find out.

They're protesting plans by artist Kenneth Goldsmith to print out the entire Internet in honor of programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz -- and then display the results in a giant rented art space in Mexico City.

"I didn't know him at all, but like millions of others, I was touched by his work and life," Goldsmith tells Crave of Swartz, who committed suicide early this year, at 26. Swartz had faced $4 million in fines and 50 years in prison for his alleged role in making MIT academic journal articles and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers, public. … Read more

Pandora on Wednesday is launching a new platform, called tv.pandora.com, that will make it easier to stream its Internet-leading radio service on televisions through set-top boxes and the TVs themselves.

At least, in theory.

Initially, the new platform is available just on gaming consoles XBox 360 and Playstation 3. Other partnerships -- such as those with TV makers like Sony or Samsung -- are still waiting in the wings.

The move to migrate Pandora more to the living room comes alongside the company's continued struggles to get its advertising dollars growing as quickly as listeners -- and … Read more

One of the most closed-off countries in the world has finally started to roll out Internet for its citizens. The Cuban government has officially opened 118 public Internet centers across the country, according to the Associated Press.

Up until now, computers with Internet access were sparse on the island. Besides a few universities and employers offering access, some of the only places to get online were tourist hotels that charged up to $8 an hour for erratic Wi-Fi, according to the Associated Press.

The Cuban government estimates that only 2.9 percent of the country's citizens get online, according … Read more

Revenue generated by online advertising hit a new record in the U.S. last quarter.

Total first-quarter sales hit $9.6 billion, up 15.6 percent from the $8.3 billion seen in the first quarter of 2012, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The latest numbers reflect an ongoing shift to Internet advertising on the part of marketers as revenue continues to grow by double digits.

"Consumers are turning to interactive media in droves to look for the latest information, to connect with their social networks, and simply to be entertained," IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg … Read more

If you really need to watch your Internet bandwidth, you need ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter. Unlike online bandwidth meters, ShaPlus monitors your Internet bandwidth instead of testing your connection speed. ShaPlus is designed to stay open in the Windows system tray, with a more detailed (but still compact) display for the notification area or anywhere on the desktop you care to drag and pin it. This free tool keeps track of your bandwidth use for the current session, the day, and the month. You can set it to track your billing period and even to stop tracking between specified times. Recent … Read more

The worldwide Internet population is growing rapidly -- and that growth might have something to do with mobile devices.

Speaking today at the AllThingsD D11 Conference, Mary Meeker, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Meeker, reported that 2.4 billion people around the world are on the Internet -- an 8 percent year-over-year gain. Still, only 34 percent of the world's population is online. In the U.S., the Internet population penetration sits at 78 percent, according to Meeker.

Perhaps the biggest news from Meeker's presentation was the staggering growth in … Read more

As consumers are buying more smartphones, their listening of digital radio stations and other live programming is growing fast, says TuneIn.

The Internet radio service on Wednesday announced that its 40 million monthly active users have listened to more than a billion hours of programming in the first four months this year. That works out to about 6.25 hours per user, per month. How this compares to the same period last year the company won't say, though it noted it's a new record.

TuneIn's also got a new $25 million round of funding led by Institutional … Read more

There's much more to climbing Mount Everest than the trek to the summit, mountaineer David Breashears would tell you.

To help emphasize that point, the filmmaker and explorer has teamed up with Microsoft to build an interactive examination of the mountain and the Greater Himalaya region, which have enthralled imaginations since Edmund Hillary made his successful ascent of the Everest summit 75 years ago this week.

Everest: Rivers of Ice is a new Web site open to the public on Tuesday night built in HTML5 and CSS3 for touch screens. Created by the Internet Explorer 10 team, Microsoft Research, … Read more