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No ticket to the NBA All

Samsung’s Gear VR will play host to the NBA All-Star Game. Sarah Tew Basketball fans will soon have the opportunity to sit courtside at the NBA All-Star Game without having to travel to New York this weekend. The National Basketball Association said Friday it has partnered with BigLook360, a company that makes virtual-reality cameras, to …

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Mattel’s View

Want to play with a new View-Master? Ask mommy and daddy for a smartphone. Mattel is working with Google to reboot the classic View-Master toy as a child’s first portal into virtual reality. In this CNET Update, learn how it works and how Mattel is putting a new twist on collectable reels. It’s not the first time Mattel has incorporated …

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Google to shut down Helpouts on April 20

Google says its video tutorial service wasn’t growing fast enough. Screenshot by Donna Tam/CNET Google announced Friday it is shuttering Helpouts because the 1-year old video tutorial service isn’t growing as fast as the company wants. “The Helpouts community includes some engaged and loyal contributors, but unfortunately, it hasn’t grown at the pace we had expected,” reads a blog post …

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Virgin Media plots £3B broadband upgrade, but rural areas could be left out

Virgin Media says its upgrade will bring an £8 billion boost to the UK economy. Andew Cowie/AFP/Getty Images Virgin Media is giving its network a boost, pumping £3 billion into upgrading its existing hardware — a plan that the network says will bring broadband speeds of 152Mbps to 4 million more UK homes. The provider’s strategy, called “Project Lightning”, will …

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Firefox tiptoes toward a world without Adobe Flash

Flash logo Through a Firefox project called Shumway, Mozilla on Thursday took an important early step toward building a Web that works without Adobe Systems’ Flash Player. Flash spread widely more than a decade ago so website developers could embrace games, streaming video, animation, graphics and other features that were hard or impossible with a regular browser. Such browser plugins …

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Mattel’s View

The new View-Master enables viewers to explore detailed images of the moon, Alcatraz, or even a land of dinosaurs. Ben Fox Rubin/CNET NEW YORK CITY — It’s been decades since Mattel’s View-Master was a must-have item for every kids’ toy box. But Mattel is hoping to reintroduce the toy stereoscope — first unveiled 75 years ago at the New York …

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Samsung to nix bloatware in Galaxy S6 OS, report says

Samsung’s new software platform, TouchWiz, will be unveiled at Unpacked in March. Samsung Samsung will remove many of its own programs in the upcoming version of its TouchWiz user interface, a new report claims. The new version of Samsung’s TouchWiz will be stripped down to not include any Samsung-built applications, Sammobile is reporting, citing people who claim to have knowledge …

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