Consumer content

Google is aiming to harness people's motivation to carry out their New Year's resolutions and then use that to help others achieve their goals. Be it lose weight, make more money, learn a new language, or travel more, users can see what people around the world are striving for on Google's new interactive resolution map.

"Research shows that you're more likely to achieve your resolutions if you write them down and have support," Google's Associate Product Marketing Manager Liz Wessel wrote in a blog post yesterday. "Try sharing your goals with communities … Read more

Six states have officially made it illegal for employers to ask their workers for passwords to their social media accounts. As of 2013, California and Illinois have joined the ranks of Michigan, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware in passing state laws against the practice, according to Wired.

With Congress not being able to come to agreement on the Password Protection Act of 2012, individual states have taken the law into their own hands. Both California and Illinois agreed on password protection laws in 2012, but the laws didn't go into effect until yesterday.

The laws are designed to prohibit … Read more

Avis Budget Group, best known for its car rental services has moved to acquire car-sharing company Zipcar for $500 million.

The companies announced the deal today, saying that Avis paid $12.25 per share for Zipcar, representing a 49 percent premium on its $8.24 closing price on December 31. Zipcar's board of directors unanimously approved the deal, and shareholders owning about 32 percent of Zipcar have already signed off.

Zipcar offers a unique service in the car business. Rather than rent out cars in the traditional way, like Avis, Zipcar offers a "sharing" service that places … Read more

It's been six months since Google unveiled its Google Glass project, and it appears the tech giant is still hard at work ironing out the kinks to get the product ready for consumption.

In an interview with IEEE Spectrum published today, the head of the Google Glass project, Babak Parviz, said his team is continuing to try out new ideas and that both the software and hardware development is coming along.

"We constantly try out new ideas of how this platform can be used," Parviz told IEEE Spectrum. "We're also trying to make the platform … Read more

Whether readers want to learn the complexities of how the Mars Curiosity rover was able to enter the Red Planet's atmosphere or just see photos of cats being weird, they can go to Reddit. The social news site announced today its end-of-year stats and it appears that users are frequenting the site at an ever-increasing rate.

Reddit revealed that in 2012 it received 37 billion page views, 400 million unique visitors, and 30 million posts -- not bad for one of the most simple Web sites on the Internet.

The site's user population has skyrocketed since its inception. … Read more

Millions of Instagram users are documenting their night as confetti is thrown, party horns are blown, and revelers count down to 2013. The photo-sharing social network has decided to put all of these photos in one place -- a desktop-optimized New Year's Eve photo stream.

"We love seeing photos shared from all different parts of the world," Instagram wrote in a blog post today. "At instagram.com/nye, you can see photos from every part of the world as the clock strikes midnight in a given time zone."

2012 was another year that kept me glued to my iPhone and iPad, checking out the latest batch of iOS games and other apps. So which ones proved to be among my favorites? In alphabetical order...

Angry Birds Star Wars My wife and I love to play Angry Birds, and the Star Wars edition is a great take on the familiar franchise. This app could've easily taken a turn to the dark side. But Rovio knew just how to pair its birds and piggies with the classic Star Wars characters and settings that fans know and love. The challenging … Read more

This is how you sell tech gear:

Yesterday I walked into B&H Photo in New York, which claims to be the country's largest non-chain camera store, and asked one of the many sales representatives if he was an expert on tripods. He smiled and responded: "It's a ball and three legs so you really don't need to be an expert."

I told him I needed to upgrade my tripod and he showed me how to get more life out of my old one. A few weeks ago, a B&H sales person … Read more

Xbox Live members affected by a recent outage of the Cloud Saved Games feature will be treated to an additional month of membership on the house.

Xbox Live's Cloud Saved Games lets members store their saved games online so they can play them on a different console and pick up where they left off. An outage that hit Xbox Live on Friday also took the Saved Game feature offline, according to gaming blog site Joystiq.

Microsoft apparently spent most of the weekend trying to resolve the problem. And as of early Monday, all issues had been fixed, Microsoft spokesman … Read more