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Microsoft on Monday flipped the switch on Student Advantage, a program, announced in October, that extends the availability of Office to students of educational institutions that pay for Office 365 for their staff and faculty. According to Microsoft, 35,000 educational institutions are eligible for Student Advantage, which provides access to the ProPlus SKU of Office Continue Reading →

PayPal has announced a new section dedicated to online gift card purchases. The “Digital Gifts” store has opened with what PayPal describes as a “marquee merchant”, namely iTunes. Although buying iTunes gift cards with PayPal has been possible for a long time thanks to eBay, this is the first time PayPal is selling the cards Continue Reading →

Volvo is to introduce 100 driverless cars on to public roads as part of the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot. The cars will drive in normal, everyday road conditions, surrounded by pedestrians and other traffic, and will even be able to self-park, as the Swedish car-maker (which is now under Chinese ownership) attempts to Continue Reading →

Shelly Palmer chats with Teresa Priolo and Ben Simmoneau on Fox 5’s Good Day Wake Up about 4K TVs and buying an HDTV. Continue Reading →

Time Warner Cable (TWC) is experimenting with cheaper bundles to keep people from cancelling cable: The pay TV provider just introduced a Starter TV with HBO bundle that includes access to 20 channels, including local broadcasters in HD, as well as HBO and HBO Go, for $30 a month (hat tip to Lightreading). TWC is Continue Reading →

This is a riff about executives improving their strategic career and job search efforts based on a lecture I heard recently at Skidmore College that included a single slide about Gist Reasoning Strategies. Although I found more than a dozen academic abstracts in 8-point type, I admit that I simply went back to the bullet points and Continue Reading →

Jeff Bezos is nothing if not a showman. Amazon’s CEO loves a good reveal, and took the opportunity afforded by a 60 Minutes segment to show off his company’s latest creation: drones that can deliver packages up to 5 pounds to your house in less than half an hour. They’re technically octocopters, as part of Continue Reading →

On Tuesday – aka Giving Tuesday – Google will repurpose its video broadcasting service called Google+ Hangouts to help host an online “Hangout-a-thon” that aims to connect those interested in making charitable donations with a worthy cause of their liking. Like a modern-day telethon, the “Hangout-a-thon” will feature celebrities, including  Jennifer Garner, Chris Daughtry and Continue Reading →

When I blogged recently about Microsoft’s plans on the operating-systems front following Windows 8.1, I mentioned a couple of “spring 2015” releases. It turns out the Microsoft codename for that wave of deliverables is “Threshold.” A couple of my contacts have confirmed that Microsoft Executive Vice President Terry Myerson recently mentioned the Threshold codename in Continue Reading →

Yahoo has acquired SkyPhrase, a startup that builds natural language processing technology, the company revealed Monday in a blog post. SkyPhrase will join Yahoo’s New York office, according to that company’s site, and will work with Yahoo to help continue its goal of “making computers deeply understand people’s natural language and intentions.” Back in October, Continue Reading →