The Surface, Microsoft's tablet to answer the iPad that has been hinted at for months, finally has a price and a release date.]]> It's the death of a video game era. Again.]]> Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery, which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in the deal are titles like Mission: Impossible 3, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, Nacho Libre and Clueless, to name a few, and Amazon says more will be added “soon.”]]> A surprise bid from Dish, the second-largest satellite television provider, to purchase wireless company Sprint has emerged. The offer has thrown a wrench into a Japanese bank's plan to buy Sprint.]]> Internal memos from the Internal Revenue Service indicate that the agency would try to read personal emails without a warrant.]]> Google has taken the wrapper off of its redesign of Google , which the search giant reckons makes the social network easier to use.]]> Develop a cheap way to kill bacteria in water, and you can provide clean drinking water to millions, maybe billions, of people in the developing world.]]> Microsoft, just like Apple, usually runs a major back-to-school promotion every summer that is meant to give students (and their parents) some extra incentives to buy a new computer. The company’s just-announced back-to-school deal for the U.S. and Canada is pretty much the same as last year’s. A year ago, Microsoft gave students who bought a new PC and Xbox 360 and this year it’s doing exactly the same.]]> Spotify is bringing Android users into its Pandora-like free streaming service.]]> Notorious hacker group Anonymous has previously stated its intentions to shutdown the Internet on Saturday, March 31st, as a form of protest.]]> Google unveiled its own Nexus tablet, the Nexus 7, at the Google I/O conference Wednesday in San Francisco. The 7-inch tablet running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will have a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor as well as a 1280x800 IPS display with a 178-degree viewing angle.]]> AntiSec, a hacking group spun off from Internet ne'er-do-wells Anonymous, has announced that it stole 1 million or more Apple user IDs from an FBI database.]]> It's no secret that Nate Silver and the FiveThirtyEight blog are popular.]]> Sony Computer Entertainment announced today that it has acquired the prominent interactive cloud-based gaming company, Gaikai, for approximately $380 million.]]> 0 inShare Despite a few public missteps last year, Netflix doesn't appear to be slowing down — the internet video giant just announced that it streamed more than one billion hours of video this past June. This milestone was actually released by CEO Reed Hastings over his Facebook; in a post, Hastings congratulated Netflix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos "and his amazing content licensing team" for helping the company reach this milestone. Hastings also thinks that the upcoming Netflix orignal series House of Cards as well as the Netflix-exclusive fourth season of Arrested Development will help the company "blow these records away." It's hard to argue with Hastings — the company reportedly was the leader in online video revenue in 2011, and with traffic continuing to surge it may end up being the leader this year as well.]]>