Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures, an investor in Siri Inc., prior to Apple acquiring the company, recently sat down on Bloomberg to discuss the technology. Apart from talking about the initial demo that attracted him to the investment and meeting Norman Winarsky of Nuance, Bloomberg host Cory Johnson pressed him on exactly how Siri is able to take voice-recognition data and determine intent. Read...

Yesterday’s eagerly awaited iPhone 4S launch in China quickly turned into chaos as an ugly brawl between gangs of professional scalpers grew out of control. Beijing SWAT teams intervened to calm down hundreds of angry customers and tame the rowdy lines. The New York Times explained that scalpers hired migrant workers to stand in the line and buy the phone. As Apple said it would not open the store, those individuals, identifiable by...

The United States Patent & Trademark Office published an Apple patent application today (via PatentlyApple) detailing new 3D GUI concepts and touch-free, motion sensing gestures that would allow you to simply wave your hand over a device equipped with proximity sensors. This follows a patent application published in July that explores similar 3D gestures and user-interfaces, and another in September detailing 3D display and imaging...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expanding its antitrust probe of Google to include the inspection of social network service Google+, according to Bloomberg. The publication sourced two people “familiar with the situation,” and cited ”competition issues raised by Google+” as the primary aspect of the FTC’s investigation into whether the globally popular search engine gives preference to its own services. The FTC is also...

Chipmaker Texas Instruments placed its OMAP 4 application processors in many smartphone, tablet and e-reader devices last year, but the company debuted the first reference design demo running its latest OMAP 5 chip and Android 4.0 at CES 2012, and Texas Instruments’ Vice President said it is “way ahead of Apple.” The device is a chunky reference design, but its responsiveness while swiping through the Ice Cream Sandwich operating...

HTC have announced the Titan 2 over in CES running on AT&T’s LTE network. Specs of the new HTC Titan II include a 4.7″ WVGA super LCD capacitive screen, a Qualcomm 1.5GHz Snapdragon S2 CPU, a 16 megapixel camera (yes, 16 megapixel!) with dedicated hardware button, autofocus, dual LED flash and a second 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera. Ah… now, wait. Didn’t the HTC Titan 1 just get announced four months ago? Yes indeed it...

Apple just released a third beta version of the upcoming iOS 5.1 firmware (Build 9B5141a). The software is available as an over-the-air update for existing iOS 5.1 beta users, but is not yet available (update: now available) as a standalone download through Apple’s developer portal. As you might imagine, it contains the obligatory bug fixes and improvements. According to the tips we’ve received, it also restores the Enable 3G toggle in...