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Facebook users ready to move from a personal profile to a business page can now make the switch through a new process offered by the company.

Sparing people from the chore of building a business page from scratch, Facebook's Profile To Business Page Migration tool can provide a head start by just converting an existing personal profile. The process is geared for a variety of business types and categories, including local companies, larger organizations, public figures, causes, and even individual products.

The migration works by converting all of a user's friends into fans and moving over his or … Read more

Zachery Bir, on his Urbanape blog, explains how he used an iPhone 4 with the new Personal Hotspot feature in iOS 4.3 to add GPS to his Wi-Fi-only iPad. A tweet from Bir earlier in the day caused some skepticism when he posted:

From a technological standpoint, I must admit I was a bit skeptical as well. When deciding on which iPad 2 to get, I debated many of the same pros and cons as other customers wondering if the $130 upgrade to enable 3G on an iPad was worth the money.

Ultimately, I decided to put the extra money toward more storage and I settled on a black, 32Gb, Wi-Fi-only iPad 2. Upon seeing a post from Daring Fireball's John Gruber about Bir's findings, I feel as though my decision may well be completely justified. … Read more

Expanding its efforts to help restore contact among people separated by the Japanese disasters, Google said today it's creating computerized versions of lists of people at emergency shelters.

"To help the many people in shelters get word of their whereabouts to loved ones, we're...asking people in shelters to take photos of the handwritten lists of names of current residents and e-mail them to us," Google said in a blog post. Google scans the data to add to its Japan person-finder site, "but it's a big job that can't be done automatically by … Read more

Sure, the iPad's fun. It's thin, it's addictive, it can handle a wide variety of apps and media files. There's only one problem: it still needs to sync to a PC.

If "magical" was the catchphrase most repeated at last year's iPad unveiling, "post-PC" was this year's equivalent for the iPad 2. I had hoped that, along with the iPad 2, Apple would find a way access media libraries wirelessly. They have, in a way, with iOS 4.3's new Home Sharing capability--but it needs a Mac or PC … Read more

opinion For years now, Infinity Ward and Treyarch's Call of Duty franchise has been the big bully on the playground, commanding millions of day-one sales with each new installment. Even piracy can't slow down the speed at which Call of Duty is swallowing the market, pushing every other worthwhile competitor in the most popular video game genre down to steerage class.

After knocking the Halo franchise to its knees in 2007 with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, 2011 may be the year COD needs to shape up. Will gamers choose the eye-catching Battlefield 3 over their current FPS fare of choice? The heart-stopping Battlefield 3 trailer that debuted at last week's Game Developers Conference suggests that could well be, but will its prioritization of the PC version kill its chances?

Gamers can expect an intensified version of the current Iraq conflict with this game, which is set in 2014 in the parched cities and barren wastelands of the Middle East. Focused on the chaos caused by the PLR terrorist group, it's your mission to stabilize the region from a recent rise in terrorist attacks.

The waiting game is a dangerous one in game development, particularly when catering to the hard-core class that chews through first-person shooter games like they were candy. Tantamount to a first-person shooter's bankroll is the quality of the graphics engine, and developer DICE has wisely bided its time in fine-tuning its Frostbite 2.0 engine for the past three years. When the preview for Battlefield 3 faded to black at GDC and on millions of computer monitors worldwide, the impression was virtually unanimous: expectations for this game went through the roof. … Read more

I've been hearing "post-PC era" so much now that I wince when I hear the term. Clearly it must be time for me to get something off my chest.

There is no post-PC era.

Not as I see the landscape, at least. To me, tablets are a big break with the past when it comes to user interface, but deep down, more stays the same than changes. And the better tablets get, the more they'll simply absorb what we do with PCs.

In short, tablets will become PCs. Different PCs from today's PCs, but PCs. … Read more

With the latest changes to its search algorithm, Google is aiming to reward Web sites that offer original, in-depth content at the same time that it penalizes those that simply borrow content from others.

Rolled out this week, the changes will help ensure that sites considered to be of "high quality" will rank higher in Google's search results, while those deemed of "low quality" will get dumped lower in the ranks, according to a blog posted yesterday by Google fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts.

Google is clearly looking to crack down on &… Read more

Google has launched one of its first experiments aimed at fighting back against content farms, asking the public to help identify the worst offenders.

Chrome users can now download an extension from Google called Personal Blocklist that will allow users to block certain domains from appearing in a personalized list of search results. Google will also track the domains that users flag "and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results," wrote Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google and a prominent anti-spam spokesman for the company, in a blog post.

For several weeks Cutts and Google have been acknowledging frustration … Read more

As your e-mail inbox fills up, it can be difficult to distinguish the important messages from the ones you can read later--if at all. One way to help identify personal e-mails from impersonal ones is by the number of recipients. By highlighting messages sent only to you, you're less likely to miss mail requiring your immediate attention.

Last November I described how to merge multiple e-mail accounts and organize them by using filters and labels. This can help shuttle less-important messages out of your inbox and into folders you can peruse at your leisure.

But not all the non-filtered … Read more