point

When it comes to taking photos and videos, an increasing number of consumers are reaching into their pocket instead of a camera bag, a new study suggests.

According to new research by the NPD group, smartphones hit a major milestone this year, accounting for 27 percent of photos taken in its Imaging Confluence Study. That's up from the 17 percent that gadget class garnered at the same time last year.

What made room for that growth was a decrease in the number of photos taken by standalone cameras, the firm said. This year, those devices came in at 44 … Read more

Fishing Joy is the iOS port of a popular Asian arcade game, ostensibly about catching fish with nets but really about quickly calculating probabilities, taking risks, and earning coins.

Fishing Joy is a pretty game, with a top-down view of colorful fish swimming around a tropical undersea environment. You want to catch the fish by firing a net at them, and you only have two controls: you can tap on where you want the net to go, and you can tap on your net cannon to determine your net's size rating, from 1 to 7. You're very likely … Read more

If I were president, I would propose legislation making misuse of Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software a Class C misdemeanor. Read a slide; go to jail.

I would empower audience members to confiscate the presenter's hardware if they're shown any slide with more text than the average tweet, with dark-on-dark or light-on-light text, or with more elements than the Periodic Table. They would also be allowed to pull the plug whenever anything on the screen is illegible to anyone in the back row.

Microsoft's ubiquitous presentation program has been used and abused by everyone from elementary school … Read more

Several free Microsoft apps will be hopping aboard Nokia's Symbian phones by the end of the year.

As described in a blog yesterday, Microsoft and Nokia will deliver the apps in the form of free updates sometime during the fourth quarter. The updates will only be available to owners of phones running Symbian Belle, the latest update to the Symbian OS, or to those who upgrade from Symbian Anna to Belle.

The mobile apps and updates scheduled to roll out this year include:

Several of Microsoft's online services suffered an outage last night but are reportedly all back up at this point.

The company's Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and various Windows Live services were down throughout the world for a period of around three hours. Microsoft acknowledged the outage late yesterday in its Inside Windows Live blog and on its Office 365 Twitter feed and said that it was working to resolve the issue.

After a couple of hours of investigation, the company pinned the cause on a DNS (Domain Name System) issue and said that it was starting to see … Read more

A good point-of-sale system can be the difference between happy employees and frustrated ones, and between speedy transactions and those that drag on forever, often requiring manager intervention. Intuitiveness is the name of the game when it comes to POS software. Based on that criterion, we can't say that we're particularly impressed by Easy POS-Gold Point of Sale. Its interface is neither attractive nor easy to navigate, and it doesn't have much to recommend it over other POS programs.

When we first launched Easy POS we were a bit taken aback by the interface; its garish colors, … Read more

The sun's energy will replace natural gas as the fuel for drawing more oil from the ground in Oman.

GlassPoint Solar yesterday announced that it has signed a deal to install a 7-megawatt solar power system for Petroleum Development Oman to aid oil extraction. The solar system, which is essentially a glass house with solar concentrators, will generate the steam needed to pump oil from existing fields.

In many existing oil wells, there is a substantial amount of oil underground, but it has become more expensive to pull out. In an enhanced oil recovery field, steam is pumped into … Read more

Let's face it: PowerPoint presentations can be pretty boring, especially if the presenter reads directly from the slides, one by one. But with iSpring Free, you can take your PowerPoint presentations up a few notches by inserting Flash files directly into your slides and even publishing the presentations themselves as Flash videos.

If you're familiar with PowerPoint's user interface, then you'll have no trouble navigating iSpring Free as it integrates itself into the Ribbon as an extra tab. The menu options are few, but they get to the point: Publish and Insert. As its name suggests, … Read more

Paving the way for the wave of electric vehicles poised to enter the market, Coulomb Technologies announced that it will be installing 150 ChargePoint stations in the Boston metropolitan area.

The planned installations are part of Coulomb's $37 million ChargePoint America project funded by the Department of Energy. The 150 networked EV charging stations will be installed primarily within the Route 495 Beltway, and available for use by any ChargePoint member. After they are built and go online, drivers can find the stations using the ChargePoint iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android apps. TomTom GPS users will also be able to … Read more