trends

Tesla Model S: 1st Car of the Year with no internal combustion engine

The 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year has all the features you'd expect from a vehicle that has earned that honor. It has a light body, advanced design, a roomy cabin, and plenty of load capacity. What the Tesla Model S doesn't have is an internal combustion engine.

Motor Trend heaps praise on the Model S, saying it drives like a sports car and sashays like a supermodel working a Paris catwalk. I never thought about a car being able to sashay, but it's certainly an evocative comparison.

This all-electric supermodel starts at $58,570 and has a range of 265 miles. That's not enough for a cross-country road trip, though a new network of Supercharger fast charging stations could make it more practical for long journeys.… Read more

CNN turns to Zite for its real-time zeitgeist

Ever since CNN bought personalized mobile news aggregator Zite a year ago, people have tried to figure out the network's rationale. Today, it unveiled the first tangible benefit of the acquisition, CNN Trends, a snapshot of the current ten most talked-about topics.

Trends is "fueled" by Zite -- a service that provides personalized news for iPad, iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 users across thousands of categories -- meaning that its algorithms are determining, in near-real time, those ten topics, and in each case, matching CNN.com's article on the subject with a balanced group of … Read more

Trend Micro shuffles features for your safety

Trend Micro wants to redefine the expectations of people buying security suites by changing what level of protection they get. The Trend Micro Titanium 2013 updates move feature sets around, lowering the price on features previously available only for more money, as well as debuting new ones.

Available exclusively from Download.com today, Titanium Antivirus Plus (30-day trial download, $39.95), Titanium Internet Security (30-day trial download, $79.95), Titanium Maximum Security (30-day trial download, $89.95), Titanium Premium Security (30-day trial download, $99.95), and Titanium Mac (30-day trial download, $69.95) push a number of formerly premium options … Read more

Security firm: Android malware pandemic by year's end

Android malware levels are rising at an alarming rate, according to antivirus maker Trend Micro.

The security firm said at the start of the year, it had found more than 5,000 malicious applications designed to target Google's Android mobile operating system, but the figure has since risen to about 20,000 in recent months.

By the coming third-quarter, the firm estimates there will be around 38,000 malware samples, and close to 130,000 in the fourth-quarter.

If Trend Micro is forecasting the numbers correctly, it won't be a flu epidemic you'll be worried about come … Read more

iPhone stays No. 1 in Flickr popularity

Apple's iPhone 4 is still at the top of the list for Flickr users, according to Flickr's 2012 summer trends.

The phone, which was No. 1 last year as well, has beaten out several actual cameras -- the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EOS Rebel T2I, and Nikon D90 -- as well as its brethren, the iPhone 4S, which made the list at No. 3.

Flickr also complied the top photo trends from April to June among the 7.2 billion photos uploaded to the photo-sharing site. The trends includes -- surprise! -- outdoor activities:

Eclipse -- … Read more

Twitter plans to expand ads to 50 countries

Twitter will start its ad services in 50 countries this year as the company continues to grow overseas, the Guardian reported.

CEO Dick Costolo made outlined the expansion of Twitter's mobile business strategy at an advertising conference in Cannes, France. The first markets to have access will be Latin America, including Brazil, and west European countries such as Spain and Germany.

Twitter's advertising products include promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.

While other social media and Internet companies are finding it challenging to make money on mobile platforms -- -- Facebook has been dinged particularly soundly on … Read more

New site looks at Wikipedia trends by tracking article edits

DataSift, the company that gathers stats on social media trends and that took Twitter by storm, is now tracking trends on Wikipedia.

The company launched Wikistats today, a site that shows real-time data on which articles have been edited the most in the last 24 hours. The site identifies when changes were made and by how many different users. The data also shows how many lines were removed from articles and how many were added.

Most people forget that Wikipedia -- one of the largest crowd-sourced data repositories in the world and the sixth most popular Web site overall -- … Read more

Fleetwood Macintosh: #FailedTechBand names on Twitter

The top Twitter trend yesterday, #FailedTechBands, is a hilarious play on words that includes some clever imaginary band names.

According to trend-tracking site Topsy, the trend started with a tweet from Mashable features writer Christine Erickson that read "Fleetwood Macintosh #FailedTechBands."

Click through this CBSNews gallery to see more of these creative musical monikers. … Read more

Google reveals what's hot in user searches

If you go to Google's "Hot Searches" list, you'll find that the top three searches today were Apple, Robin Roberts, and the LA Kings. You'll also see how many times each has been Googled; for example, Apple had more than half a million searches in the past few hours.

All of these features are new with Google's revamp of its U.S. Hot Searches, which it rolled out today.

"With Hot Searches in Google Trends, you can see a list of the fastest rising search terms in the U.S. for a snapshot … Read more

Twitter rolls out tailored trends based on location, your peeps

Twitter is gradually rolling out tailored trends, a feature that chooses your trending list topics based on where you are located and who you follow, Twitter Product Manager Sara Masuskopf wrote in the company's blog today.

The tailored lists will be the default for the site and mobile apps, giving users a choice of more than 150 locations, including 34 countries and nearly 60 major U.S. cities. To change the setting back to worldwide trending, change the location by clicking on the link at the top of your trends list.

What's trending in the U.S. right … Read more