trends

When compared to the Centers for Disease Control's national surveillance of influenza lab tests, data from Google Flu Trends is 25 percent less accurate at estimating rates of lab-confirmed influenza infections, according to a new study out of the University of Washington.

The findings are being reported at the American Thoracic Society 2010 International Conference in New Orleans this week.

Google Flu Trends estimates national rates of flu-like activity by monitoring the popularity of certain Google search queries in real time. This method is precisely the problem, because the influenza virus does not always cause influenza-like illnesses. (The researchers … Read more

Entertaining America is our No. 1 job at CBS, so staying on top of the latest home entertainment gadgets and technological trends is central to everything we do. Times change, strategies shift, yet certain themes persist. Time and time again, platform innovations have sparked revolutions in programming, from radio to television, black-and-white TV to color, standard-definition programming to HD. With each breakthrough technology comes new potential for creative storytelling and an enhanced home entertainment experience.

Here's a list of three noteworthy trends we've got our eye on in today's digital home.

Real time search engine OneRiot, celebrated its one year anniversary on Friday by shedding its beta status. The change is notable considering OneRiot was a complete overhaul of the social site Me.dium, making this the full fledged version of the product.

With the change comes a new look for the site, along with a new back-end technology the company is calling the "trending topics engine." This new engine takes the entire public data feed from social sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and groups together what it considers to be emerging topics. These topics are then … Read more

When we first looked at geo-centric Twitter trend-tracking service Trendsmap it had one notable shortcoming: It was unable to drill down to an accurate city level. The good news is that this is about to change.

With the inclusion of geo-location as part of tweets, sites like Trendsmap will be getting a whole lot more detailed. Though even now, getting enough geo-tagged tweets has proven to be a challenge.

CNET met with Trendsmap's lead developer is John Barratt on Tuesday, who explained that while the geo feature has been live on Twitter for some time now, people just aren'… Read more

Computer security company Trend Micro has an offer for any teen or adult who cares about Internet safety and security and wants to become an award winning filmmaker. The company has launched a contest called "What's Your Story?" where the person who submits the best short video (no more than 2 minutes) can win $10,000. There are also four $500 prizes.

The deadline is April 30th and only residents of the U.S. and Canada who are 13 or older are eligible to win.

Entries must be about one of these four topics:

•Keeping a good … Read more

Seeing as I gave quite a bit of mostly positive airtime to the Toyota Prius last week, I thought it would be good to do the same for a new electric hybrid made stateside that's set to roll out later this year. And in case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm referring to the 2011 Chevrolet Volt. The Volt marks Chevy's first serious foray into the hybrid car market, and by the looks and sounds of things, this one may make a serious automotive splash.

Today's lengthy but informative video gives us a look … Read more

If you're one of Facebook's 350-million-plus members, you've probably noticed a handful of people on your friends list changing their profile photos to pictures of celebrities, cartoon characters, Muppets, and other notable figures recently.

That's because an unofficial viral craze called "Doppelganger Week" has arisen on the social network. To participate, you change your profile picture to a celebrity or otherwise notable figure whom you resemble (or like to think you resemble).

Nobody's really sure where Doppelganger Week came from or who started it. It's particularly funny considering the recent emergence of more photos … Read more

CES 2010 was full of the usual electronics wonderment, but some trends were more frequent or more prominent than others. We took a gander about the show floor and tallied up the five top trends from the show.

Take a look at the video then come back here for a chance to win the swag bag.

LAS VEGAS--TrendNet was one of the first networking vendors, together with D-Link, to start the green-networking initiative more than a year go. The company invented and implements what it calls GreenNet technology in most of its networking products.

The company announced Friday the latest addition to its green product portfolio, the eight-port Gigabit GreenNet switch, model TEG-S80Dg, which uses significantly less energy compared with traditional products of the same type.

GreenNet is a TrendNet switch-based technology that determines and supplies the appropriate amount of electrical power to each hardwired switching port as required by the connected device, the port, or … Read more