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The trend these days in pico projectors is bigger, brighter, and more affordable.

Take Acer's new $259 100 ANSI lumens C120 projector. It's slightly bigger than some of the early ultraportable pico projectors, but it's still very compact, measuring 1 inch by 4.72 inches by 3.23 inches (HWD) and weighing 6.34 ounces. It has native WVGA resolution (864x480) resolution, but Acer says you can upconvert to WXGA (1,280x800). Also, the projector has a USB power option if you want to connect it directly to your computer sans AC adapter.

It's worth noting, however, that if you do go with USB power, you can't project at full brightness; you get bumped down to 75 ANSI lumens. … Read more

Who would have thought a Java-based game about creating a world out of 3D blocks would blow up like it did? But with more than 5 million copies sold and 25 million registered users, Minecraft is still going strong and spawning new ventures. Can its creator duplicate this kind of success? Well, we may soon find out because a new game is in the works.

Minecraft maker Markus "Notch" Persson revealed his plans for a new game, temporarily called "0x10c," that has roots in hard-core science fiction. Still in early development, 0x10c is based on the idea that a group of humans were accidentally put into a deep sleep in 1988 and are now finding themselves waking up in the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD in a parallel universe that's nearing extinction. … Read more

Nokia is bringing its Lumia 800 and 610 smartphones to the booming Chinese market.

The Nokia 800C will be the first Lumia phone and the first CDMA Windows Phone to reach Chinese consumers. Carried by China Telecom, the 800C will make its debut in April at a contract-free price of 3599 RMB ($571). Buyers can pick up the phone at Nokia brand stores, China Telecom's Tianyi FlyYoung distribution chain, and other retail outlets.

"We're excited to introduce our first Lumia smartphone, the Nokia 800C, to this important market with our exclusive launch partner, China Telecom," Nokia … Read more

Facing greater expenses, the wireless industry is trying to drum up profits by relying more on such services as prepaid and mobile broadband, says a report out today from PwC.

Surveying wireless carriers in the U.S. and Canada last year, PwC found a variety of challenges to their profitability.

Rising smartphone subsidies have forced providers to pay more up front for the privilege of carrying certain smartphones. Though obviously popular, the iPhone requires carriers to pay a huge subsidy, crimping per user profit.

And though providers have been pushing smartphones to their customers, the resulting rise in data usage … Read more

Comedian and actor Aziz Ansari is selling his new hour-long stand-up special, "Dangerously Delicious" for $5 over the Internet.

Ansari's announcement over Twitter follows in the successful wake of fellow comedian Louis C.K., who similarly bypassed the studios and sold his online video with no copy protection restrictions for $5.

The last time Louis C.K. offered a sales update, he said the experiment had pulled in $1 million in sales.

In a statement published on his Web site, Ansari explained his reasons for going solo.

"I wanted to release it online because I saw … Read more

BARCELONA--It's been an action-packed two years since Jeff Jaffe took over as the World Wide Web Consortium's chief executive, but more action is the order of the day at the standards group.

The W3C oversees the standardization of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), technologies that carry tremendous importance as the Web expands from a medium to publish documents into a foundation for applications that can run on anything from mobile phones and cars to TVs and tablets. These Web standards, combined with the JavaScript programming language and other related technologies, let programmers reach a … Read more

BARCELONA--Facebook would like to build more mobile Web apps and fewer mobile native apps. Really, it would -- but browsers just aren't up to it, the company has concluded.

Web apps naturally span the multitudes of mobile devices that Facebook loves to run on, but they support Web standards so inconsistently that it's a developer's nightmare, said Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor, speaking here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. So Facebook is trying to do something about it: "We're taking on mobile web standards," Taylor said.

It's a two-pronged effort. … Read more

Microsoft, Google, and Netflix have proposed a standard for copy-protected Web video, but HTML editor Ian Hickson has dealt it a serious blow by calling it impractical and "unethical."

"I believe this proposal is unethical and that we should not pursue it," Hickson said in a mailing list message this week. "The proposal...does not provide robust content protection, so it would not address this use case even if it wasn't unethical," he added.

The Web video DRM debate--and this one isn't the first--shows the difficulties of reconciling open standards with the … Read more

If you think 802.11n Wi-Fi is the bee's knees, check out this new ultra-powerful wireless setup jointly developed by Sony and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The two chips in this advancement push a staggering data rate of 6.3Gbps, which is 14 times the transfer speed in commercially available routers (450Mbps).

According to the press release, "implementation of this technology will enable users to transmit and receive data at much higher speeds between mobile devices without the need for cable connections. This technology will also enable users to enjoy uncompressed high-quality video streaming from a mobile device to a display." … Read more