Stephen Hawking

2014. The year of Virtual Reality, Selfies, Snowden, Microsoft CEOs and Sony Hacks. Defining moments in technology in how we podcast, build devices, and release movies. I have gone through the news stories of 2014 and put together a good representation of Technology stories.

This is a list that will continue to grow for the next couple weeks – adding stories and making any corrections needed. If you find an issue, please let me know and I’ll get it corrected. All information is found at Wikazine.com/2014

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Jan-March | April-June | July-Sept | Oct-Dec

January

January 3 – Yahoo accidentally served malicious advertisements through ads.yahoo.com. Yahoo quickly fixed the issue.

January 6 – Google teamed up with GM, Audi, Honda, Hyundai, and Nvidia to for mthe Open Automotive Alliance (OAA). This group will work on innovations to future driving needs.

January 7 – Apple opens an official store on Tmall, a marketplace run by Alibaba.

January 9 – IBM invested $1 billion for Watson and the Watson Developers Cloud project. This will be offered in new enterprise apps to businesses and consumers.

Overstock.com becomes the first major online retailer to accept Bitcoin.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Stanford University created the world’s fastest organic transistor. Previous versions have been tested, but this organic transistor can run 5x faster and is the size of a stamp.

January 13 – The US Court of Appeals ruled the FCC cannot impose Net Neutrality rules on companies, although they can regulate how web traffic is managed.

YouTube adds comment management tools to help creators reply to comments on videos.

January 14 – Google adds Image usage rights to search terms

Kim Dotcom enters the New Zealand election with a new organization called “Megaparty”

January 15 – NSA reported they implanted malware on 100,000 computers outside the US to conduct surveillance maneuvers and spy to prevent cyber-attacks by other countries.

Google buys home automation company Nest for $3.2 billion

January 16 – The Guardian reports that the National Security Agency collects data from hundreds of millions of text messages each day.

January 21 – Instagram becomes the fastest growing social site on a global scale, increasing by 23% in the last 6 months alone. On March 27 Instagram surpassed Twitter on Smartphones

500 million Internet users in China were unable to load websites. China’s Firewall was to blame, keeping things down for the next 8 hours.
Google Glass App “Sex with Glass” debuts

Beats Music arrives on Android and iOS devices.

January 22 – AMD introduced 12-core and 16-core processors for Opteron 6300 series. These are enterprise-class servers known as Piledriver. Price: $377 (12-core) $598 (16-core)

January 23 – Lenovo Acquires the Server side of IBM for $2.3 billion. Any device in the x86 portfolio including BladeCenter and Flex System will be acquired by Lenovo. IBM will retain the System Z mainframes, Power-based Flex servers and other appliances.

January 24 – Adobe released Photoshop Express 2.0 for Android
Neiman Marcus revealed 1.1 million credit cards have been compromised by hackers.

January 26 – Google and Samsung announce a cross-licensing deal to cover most patents held by each company and any patent created in the next 10 years.

January 27 – Microsoft acquires the Gears of War Franchise for an undisclosed sum
Microsoft rebrands SkyDrive to OneDrive after losing to British Sky Broadcasting Group for the name.

January 28 – AMD Unveils the first 64-bit ARM server chip. codename Seattle, the Opteron A1100 series uses an ARM8-A instruction set. The device has 4 MB on L2 and 8 MB L3 cache, 8 lane PCI-Express gen-3 I/O, 2-10 GB Ethernet ports, ARM TrustZone technology and more.

January 29 – Google announced it would sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.

gTLD .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles and .ventures went online.

January 30 – Hackers hit Yahoo mail. Yahoo’s defense system kicked in and reset passwords

January 31 – DARPA awards IBM a $3.4 million dollar contract to develop VAPR – Vanishing Programmable Resources.

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February

February 3 – Google releases the Chromecast SDK

February 4 – Microsoft names Satya Nadella as CEO in the board of directors meeting.
FCC announced they would invest another $2 billion in broadband networks for schools over the next two years.
February 5 – Susan Wojcicki was named Head of Youtube. Wojcicji was the senior VP of ads and commerce at Google.
Google was ordered to remove their mystery barge from San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The barge did not have the necessary permits.

February 6 – Sony sells off the VAIO PC business and split off the TV unit into a separate subsidary. 5,000 jobs cut and Sony would focus on imaging, gaming and mobile.

Amazon acquired gaming studio Double Helix for an undisclosed sum

February 7 – GoPro cameras has announced plans to file for IPO.

Google closed a $3.2 billion dollar deal to acquire Nest home products.

California state Senator Mark Leno introduced legislation requiring all phones and tablets have a kill switch which would render the device inoperable. On August 25 the bill became law, requiring all devices in California to have the switch by July 1, 2015.

February 8 – Google loses an appeal to French courts and was forced to pay 150,000 euros for violating data collection laws.

February 10 – Web Security company CloudFlare battled a record-breaking DDoS attack of 400 gigabits per second. A standard DDoS is around 50 GBps.

February 13 – Facebook added different gender options to profiles, including androgynous, bi-gender, intersex, transsexual or gender fluid.
AMD introduced additions to the R7 Radeon series in the 250X and 265

February 14 – Comcast buys Time Warner cable for $45.2 billion. Comcast would acquire 11 million subscribers in the deal. Although they underbid Charter, Comcast will have to sell some assets to them before getting approval of the FCC.

February 18 – NVidia introduced the GeForece GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750 with Maxwell architecture. The GPU uses 28-nanometer chips and sports 640 Cuda cores (750 Ti). Prices $149 (750 Ti) and $119 (750)

February 19 – Facebook buys WhatsApp Messanger for $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in shares. Whatsapp would continue as a separate offering.

February 23 – Comcast and Netflix sign a multi-year deal to improve movie quality by accessing Comcast’s broadband network. Details were not disclosed.
AOL closes Moviephone – a voice dial-in number to find out about movie information.

February 24 – Intel unveiled the XMM 7260 LTE modem, which adds flexible carrier aggregation capabilities up to 40 MHz along with over 30 3GPP bands. Previous models could support 22 RF bands.

February 25 – Gmail adds ‘Unsubscribe’ link option for mailing lists
Facebook announced they will be discontinuing their email service by next month. Facebook.com email has been available since 2010 and was forced on users in 2012.

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March

March 2 – Ellen DeGeneres took her Samsung Galaxy Note 3 into the crowd, Bradley Cooper snapped the picture and made the most re-tweeted selfie to date with 3.3 million.

March 3 – After refusing to pay a $300 stop ransom, a hacker created a cyberattack against Meetup.com which lasted on and off for the next two days.

March 4 – Roku announced the Roku Stick – a Roku box within an HDMI stick to fit right into the HDMI port. Roku stick cames with 802.11 a/b/g/n Wifi and a single core processor with 512 MB memory. Price $49.99

March 5 – RadioShack announced they will be closing 1,100 stores in the US to counter financial issues in the previous quarter

FreedomPop launched the “Snowden Phone” – a fully encrypted device to allow for private communication. Price $189 without contract

Yahoo removes Facebook and Google login options from their website login.

March 7 – Vine officially bans all porn videos while artistic nudity is still acceptable.

March 12 – Neil Young’s PonoPlayer Kickstarter begins. This is a media player with high resolution audio for audiophiles. The Kickstarter exceeded the goal with $6 million in pledges. Price $399 ($300 Kickstarter price)

March 13 – Mark Zuckerberg called President Barack Obama to express his frustration over NSA spying.

March 15 – Just days before its release, Mozilla scraps the “Metro” version of Firefox for Windows 8.

March 16 – Christopher Viatafa decided to Google his name to see what came up. The result: a listing of him as one of northern California’s most wanted. The report said he fired shots at a private party on August 8, 2013.

March 17 – Cubestormer 3, a Rubik cube solving device made of LEGO and an ARM powered Samsung Galaxy S4, solved the puzzle in 3.253 seconds.

March 20 – Facebook engineers released an open-source version of ‘hack’, a programming language used at Facebook.

Google announced all email will now have a level of encryption. The service was turned on in 2010 but didn’t require people to use it until now.

Alex Kibkalo was arrested for theft of Microsoft trade secrets. He leaked early copies of Windows 8 to a French Blogger in 2012.

March 21 – Lenovo acquires patents from Unwired Planet for $100 million dealing with 3G and LTE mobile technology

March 24 – Brendan Eich was named CEO of Mozilla. The co-founder took the spot after Gary Kovacs announced he was stepping down.
Box filed for IPO [1]

March 26 – The Burger King Baby is reunited with her mother. Katheryn Deprill was abandoned at a Allentown , PA Burger King. Using Facebook, Deprill posted a photo looking for her mother, which was shared on Facebook over 32,000 times.

March 27 – Photo app Instagram surpassed Twitter use on smartphones. 35 million use Instagram at least once a month.
Microsoft launches Office for iPad and will be available via subscription.

March 28 – over 34,000 Lenovo ThinkPad batteries were recalled due to fire hazzard. T410, T420, T510 and W510 series, and the X100e, X120e, X200, X201 and X201s series were part of the recall.

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Jan-March | April-June | July-Sept | Oct-Dec