Apple just snagged itself another 5 million potential Apple Pay customers, after the tech giant announced a new partnership with one of Australia’s largest banks, ANZ. The move firmly establishes Apple in the mature Australian market, where contactless and mobile payments already make up the majority of everyday transactions (60 percent of card transactions in …

When you think of wacky and innovative tech companies, Google is usually the first to come up. But Facebook is quickly becoming second. More people in Silicon Valley are talking about how Mark Zuckerberg is transforming Facebook from a way to share baby photos and updates about what we ate for breakfast to a company that wants to be an …

Comcast broadband customers will no longer have to worry about busting through data caps while catching up on “Game of Thrones.” Enlarge Image Comcast customers are getting a healthy boost in their data caps. Comcast On Wednesday, the cable giant said it’s raising the cap on home broadband to 1 terabyte of data per month. That should let customers stream …

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Remember 2015? When we all had bad blood and couldn’t feel our faces when we were uptown funkin’? Turns out 2015 was the most successful year the music industry has seen in 15 years, according to new figures. That’s in terms of growth, anyway: People don’t spend nearly as much on music as they did in the heady days of …

The OS X menu bar is a great spot to park lightweight apps for easy access. Here are my six favorite menu bar apps that I use each and every day. Itsycal There are more powerful calendar apps than Itsycal, but I prefer Itsycal for its simplicity. It installs an icon in the menu bar that displays the current date. …

If you want your wedding proposal to really soar, call in a drone. A new Wedding Proposal Package from UK drone retailer DronesDirect includes everything you need to get engaged in style (ring sold separately, of course). The kit includes rental of a DJI Phantom 4 and a DJI Inspire One with pilots — the Phantom 4 drone delivers the …

TiVo has a new option for people looking to ditch their cable providers once and for all. The DVR maker unveiled on Wednesday the Roamio OTA 1TB for over-the-air programming. It can record up to four shows simultaneously from local networks available via an HDTV antenna. Its 1 terabyte of storage holds up to 150 hours of high-definition programs. To …

I’ve totally lost count of how many Avalon Acoustics speakers I’ve heard since the early 1990s, but for one reason or another I haven’t reviewed one in at least 10 years. So when my friends at the Innovative Audio Video showroom in New York City suggested I check out the Avalon Idea speakers, I quickly agreed. Enlarge Image The Avalon …

Streaming-media service Spotify has acquired CrowdAlbum, a startup that collects photos and videos of performances shared on social networks. The acquisition is designed to help artists better “understand, activate, and monetize their audiences,” Spotify said Wednesday. CrowdAlbum’s staff will also assist in building new products for performers related to touring. Spotify is folding CrowdAlbum into its group responsible for Spotify …

A light switch that you can talk to and that responds to your questions. A robot that shows emotions. A home security system that tells the difference between people and animals. Sounds pretty cool, right? Too bad those smart devices aren’t hitting store shelves anytime soon. The three products are so-called reference designs that Samsung created to show what kind …

Over 110 million people use Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system. Unfortunately, the fine folks of Des Moines, Iowa’s KCCI 8 news and weather station aren’t among them — and on Wednesday they paid for it. Metinka Slater, the station’s resident meteorologist, was giving her standard weather update when the PC that was projecting the weather map prompted her to upgrade …

Samsung saw a slight dip in smartphone shipments last quarter but was still top dog thanks to demand for its Galaxy S7 lineup. For the first quarter of 2016, Samsung shipped 81.9 million phones, down slightly from 82.4 million in the same quarter last year, research firm IDC said on Wednesday. The decline would’ve been larger if not for the …

For Samsung, the phone market has been feast or famine. The launch of the Galaxy S3 in 2012 crowned Samsung the world’s smartphone king and helped fuel five consecutive quarters of record profits. But the company’s phone fortunes faded as subsequent flagship handsets failed to excite consumers, leading to seven straight quarters of declining profits. Now it appears that Samsung’s …

Apple Music continues to catch on with more people. The company’s first attempt at a music streaming service now has 13 million paid subscribers, Apple CEO Tim Cook said on Tuesday during a conference call to discuss the company’s fiscal second-quarter results. Citing the new number of subscribers, Cook said the service continues to grow in popularity. “We feel really …