Media

When you keep getting mail addressed to someone you don't know, you might feel annoyed, inquisitive, or even suspicious.

Or you might e-mail the company sending it and wonder whether it's intended for some future resident of your home.

Andrew Gardner took the latter route with quite beautiful results.

The Toronto resident e-mailed Shoppers Drug Mart and asked to be removed from its mailing list because, well, he clearly isn't "Matthew."

As the Globe and Mail reports, Gardner wondered whether "Matthew is a future resident of this address, and seemingly against the laws of … Read more

This is perhaps an even greater philosophical question than: "Why do some people consider cheerleading a sport?"

For today we must consider how to hold a baby and watch the NBA Finals at the same time.

Should we turn on our televisions and hold the baby with both arms? Or does modern man hold his large-screened cell phone in one hand, while cradling baby in the other?

Samsung has a position on this. For its new Galaxy S4 ad insists on the latter pose as the ideal for both man and baby.

This ad, a follow-up to one released on Monday … Read more

Let's role play.

You're a school bus driver at Haralson County Middle School in Georgia. A 6th-grader gets on your bus and complains he's hungry.

You ask him why he's hungry. The kid says he was 40 cents short on his lunch card, so he was denied food.

When this scenario played out for bus driver Johnny Cook, he took to his Facebook page to express his shock and offer to help any child who is short of lunch money.

However, as CBS Atlanta reports, the school wasn't too pleased with this expression of concern. … Read more

Samsung's share of the U.S. smartphone market topped Apple's last month for the first time since the iPhone 5 launched, analysts at investment bank Canaccord Genuity say, thanks to greater supply of Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphones and sales stoked by lower pricing for Galaxy S III and Note 2.

With prices on Apple's iPhone 4/4S reined in as well, overall smartphone sales improved in May compared to the prior month, according to the firm's monthly wireless store surveys.

Samsung takes the mantle a little later than Canaccord had estimated, as the S4 rolled out … 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

Media outlet Bloomberg will launch a $75 million venture capital fund to invest in early-stage companies.

The fund, called Bloomberg Beta, is expected to launch Wednesday, according to various media reports, but has already invested in nine companies, including Newsle, Nodejitsu, Codecademy, Errplane, and ProsperWorks, according to VentureBeat.

The independent venture will focus on startups that are "producing insights from data" and "making the experience of work better," according to a news release cited by VentureBeat.

Bloomberg has invested in tech companies before through Bloomberg Ventures, an incubator that helped companies that could be combined with … Read more

The high camp era of the 1960's Batman TV show, and video game-influenced "choose-your-own-adventure" stories, will come to DC Entertainment's digital comics this summer with new digital storytelling techniques to draw in readers.

At a "Future of Storytelling" event that DC Entertainment parent company Warner Brothers held on Tuesday in New York City, DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson said that the new comics will appeal to fans of the classic Batman TV show and the current series of Batman: Arkham video games.

"These are our latest steps in a methodical digital strategy," … Read more

People who stream are streaming television, they're streaming more of it, and they're probably streaming it from Netflix.

TV streaming -- which accounts for 80 percent of subscription video-on-demand, or SVOD -- was up 34 percent in the first three months of the year compared to a year earlier, according to a report from tracking-firm NPD.

Netflix commands 89 percent of that. Smaller rival Hulu Plus increased its share three points to 10 percent of TV streams. Amazon Prime doubled its share -- to 2 percent.

The figures coincided with Netflix's biggest and most successful foray yet … Read more

Rhapsody International is breaking radio silence on Napster.

Since Rhapsody bought it in 2011, not much has been heard of the once high-flying peer-to-peer service that transformed public assumptions about consuming music. Now an above-board streaming service with more than 20 million songs in its global catalog, Napster will expand into 14 European countries from its current U.K. and German markets.

The move will triple Napster's potential base of users.

But it comes as a monolith in digital music industry is casting a wide shadow over Rhapsody and competitors like Pandora. Apple is widely expected to unveil a long-awaited iRadio streaming service … Read more