12 tips to become a better smartphone photographer

Wondering how to get the most of your smartphone camera? Is there more to mobile photography than filters to make your pictures look better than they really are?

Multimedia journalist and iPhone street photographer Richard Koci Hernandez recently joined the CNN iReport community on Facebook for a chat about how to become a better smartphone photographer.

"People do not understand the unbelievable opportunity that

Rock on! The compact disc turns 30

On October 1, 1982, the first commercial compact disc, Billy Joel's "52nd Street," was released in Japan. In the 30 years since, hundreds of billions of CDs have been sold, Joel has stopped recording pop music and the music industry has moved on to the next hot medium.

When the first CD player was released that same day, it was described as a "new digital record player, using laser beams" by United Press International. Spun out of the far less successful Philips' laser disc technology (remember those?), the CD was a result of Philips and Sony combining forces.

The compact disc was actually invented several years earlier. The first test

IPhone 5 journal: Finding the best, cheapest carrier

You may think you're buying an iPhone from Apple for $199 and up, but in most cases you're really signing up for 24 months of payments to one wireless carrier or another. Choose wisely.

If what you care about most is widespread coverage, it's easy: AsCNNMoney's graphic shows, Verizon's 4G LTE coverage overwhelms AT&T's, which in turn dwarfs Sprint's. But if your region has or will soon have LTE from all three -- or if you're fine with 3G -- your choice remains wide open.

Choosing on cost isn't so simple. Sprint has the cheapest plan for a data-hungry user: $80 for unlimited data and texting, plus 450 peak minutes. If you're positive you won't use much data and won't text at all, however, you can

Last-minute giving made easier with Facebook Gifts

Bad about forgetting peoples' birthdays until you see them pop up on Facebook?

A new feature on the site will make you look like you were on top of it all along.

Facebook Gifts began rolling out late Thursday in some areas. The feature lets users click a link to send a gift from a list of approved vendors. Starbucks, Gund teddy bears and Magnolia Bakery are among the retailers included at launch.

"Every day, millions of people share special moments with their friends on Facebook by saying 'Happy Birthday,' 'Congratulations,' or simply, 'I'm thinking of you,' " Facebook said in a blog post. "Now there is another way to celebrate those moments."

Facebook is touting Gifts as a way to choose, buy and ship real-world

Apple CEO Tim Cook's letter: "We fell short"

Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) issued a rare apology on Friday in response to customer complaints over its new and buggy Apple Maps app, which replaced Google (GOOG, Fortune 500)Maps in Apple's recent iOS 6 update. Below is the text of Apple CEO Tim Cook's letter.

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better

Major banks hit with biggest cyberattacks in history

Since Sept. 19, the websites of Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500),JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), U.S. Bank (USB, Fortune 500) and PNC Bank have all suffered day-long slowdowns and been sporadically unreachable for many customers. The attackers, who took aim at Bank of America first, went after their targets in sequence. Thursday's victim, PNC's website, was inaccessible at the time this article was published.

Security experts say the outages stem from one of the biggest cyberattacks they've ever seen. These "denial of service" attacks -- huge amounts of traffic directed at a website to make it crash -- were the largest ever

RIM stock rises 17% after not-so-bad quarter

Research in Motion's sales slumped 31% from a year ago, and the BlackBerry maker also swung to a loss. But the results weren't as bad as feared, so investors sent the stock 17% higher in Friday premarket trading.

RIM (RIMM) booked a net loss of $235 million, or 45 cents per share, on sales of $2.9 billion for its fiscal second quarter. RIM turned a profit of $329 million in the same period last year.

Still, the results released Thursday beat the consensus estimate from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Wall Street expected a loss of 46 cents per share on sales of $2.5 billion.

The question on everyone's minds is the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which had been slated for release later this year. In June, RIM revealed

Computer game lets you run a presidential campaign

The campaign to become president of the United States is drawn-out and contentious, with key battles and strategies that can turn the outcome.

In other words, sort of like playing a game.

In both worlds there are good guys and bad guys, actions and reactions, and a prize at the end for the winners. Like a multiplayer game, a political campaign requires many people acting together to achieve an ultimate goal. Like a role-playing video game, it poses a series challenges that need to be completed before moving on to the next.

A new computer game tests this theory by letting players become campaign managers for a presidential candidate in the 2012 race. "The Political Machine 2012" tries to gamify the electoral process by assigning scores to candidates' stances on such issues as gay rights, the national debt and the war in Afghanistan, then

RIM's fate hangs on BlackBerry 10

Research in Motion will reveal its second-quarter financial results late Thursday, but here's what most BlackBerry investors really care about: What the heck is going on with BlackBerry 10?

RIM shocked the industry in June when it said that the BlackBerry 10operating system, meant to be the crown jewel of the company's turnaround, won't hit the market until the first quarter of 2013. The software had previously been slated for release later this year.

The news was so damning that critics wondered aloud if RIM (RIMM) will even

Stunning undersea panoramas now on Google Street View

Google Street View, the interactive panorama feature within Google Maps, has shared eye-level images of Antarctica, gone inside NASA's Kennedy Space Center, floated down rivers in the Amazon and strolled the halls of famous museums.

Now the company is going underwater. The company on Wednesday added panoramic undersea images of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the waters off the Apo Islands in the Philippines and underwater life around the Hawaiian islands.

The stunning photos capture fish, plants, turtles and other marine critters going about their business in faraway oceans. Now anyone

Have smartphones killed boredom (and is that good)?

Take a look around today at people in line at Starbucks, on the train platform or waiting for their bags at the airport.

Odds are, a huge chunk of them are staring down into a glowing mobile device -- passing time by checking on friends, catching up on texts or e-mail or playing a video game that would have required a PC or home console just a few years ago.

"That's me," said Jeromie Williams, a 36-year-old social media manager and blogger from Montreal. "If I'm on the bus. If I'm waiting in line somewhere ... .

"The other day I was at a restaurant with a friend. He got up two times -- once

Self-driving cars now legal in California

California is the latest state to allow testing of Google's self-driving cars on the roads, though only with a human passenger along as a safety measure.

Gov. Edmund "Jerry" Brown signed the autonomous-vehicles bill into law Tuesday afternoon alongside Google co-founder Sergey Brin and State Sen. Alex Padilla, who authored the bill, at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. The bill, SB 1298, will set up procedures and requirements for determining when the cars are road-ready.

Brin hopes that self-driving cars will be able to drive on public streets in five years or less.

"Anybody who first gets in the car and finds the car is driving will be a little skittish. But they'll get over it." said Brown

BlackBerry's wipeout creates major mobile security gaps

For years, BlackBerrys were the only mobile devices corporate IT departments allowed past their gates. Now those heavily guarded doors are swinging wide open to all kinds of personal gizmos, including iPhones, iPads, Android gadgets and more.

The trend has obvious advantages: Businesses get to cut expenses by having their employees use their own phones and tablets, and employees get to carry around high-powered devices of their choosing. It also comes with a cost: The "bring your own device" phenomenon introduced a whole slew of vulnerabilities to corporate networks.

Big corporations are "offering up a way into their networks on a silver platter," says Georgia Weidman, CEO of Bulb Security, an information security consulting firm. "Every app you install on your

Barnes & Noble unveils $199 Nook HD

The tablet field is one of tech's hottest battlegrounds, with new players and new devices popping up every week. The latest is Barnes & Noble's new Nook HD line, which offers beefed-up hardware and a new 9-inch tablet size.

The 7-inch Nook HD starts at $199 for a 8 GB model, and the 9-inch Nook HD+ starts at $269 for 16 GB. Both tablets begin shipping in late October and are slated to hit store shelves in early November. (Nook's older 7-inch Nook Tablet recently had its price tag cut to $179. The company's black-and-white Nook e-readers sell for $99 to $139.)

New features include a Nook Video streaming service, a "scrapbook" feature that lets users save content like magazine pages, and the option to create device profiles for different family members. The Nook HD line runs on Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android operating system, and its homescreen design is much more

Are private Facebook messages becoming public?

 Rumors of a Facebook bug has users from all over the world worried about private messages showing up very publicly on Timeline pages. But the social network is debunking those claims, saying these messages are actually just older wall posts.

A series of reports coming out of France — including ones fromMetro France and Le Nouvel Observateur — claim that Facebook members who sent private messages over the past few years have been popping up on public posts.

Some members in the U.S. have said their private messages from 2007 and 2008 are showing up on their Timeline, but Facebook told Mashable that the company hasn't found a bug and believes

Teaching an old dog new tricks: How to fix Microsoft

 There's nothing broken about being the fourth-most valuable company in the world, which is exactly what Microsoft is today. That same company, however, is valued at half what it was 10 years ago. It's not exactly thriving, either.

Regardless if the glass is actually half empty or half full, consumer confidence in Microsoft is at a low. It is ignored or considered uncool by younger generations. Older generations are often required to use the company's software at work, but turn to Apple or Google devices in their free time.

A month from now Microsoft will release Windows 8, a bold new operating system that seeks to bring touchscreen interfaces to desktop computing. It's the company's biggest product since Windows XP and yet the only thing the tech world has seemingly talked about over the last

Foxconn factory reopens after brawl

A factory operated by Foxconn Technology Group in central China is back online Tuesday, just one day after a large-scale brawl forced the facility to close.

The company described the incident, which started Sunday night and lasted into the early morning on Monday, as a "personal dispute between several employees" that escalated to include thousands of people.

Some 40 people were taken to the hospital, and "a number" of individuals were arrested.

The incident, which a worker at the scene described as a "riot," took place in Taiyuan, a city in central China. Foxconn employs 79,000 workers at the facility. Production at the plant halted Monday, but Foxconn said Tuesday that the factory reopened.

Foxconn supplies parts to Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and other

Apple sells 5 million iPhone 5 phones in first weekend

 Apple sold more than 5 million iPhone 5 phones since the highly anticipated device went on sale on Friday, setting a new sales record for the device, Apple announced Monday.

Over the weekend, the company outpaced the 4 million iPhone 4S units that it sold during last year's opening weekend, though the numbers are a bit skewed. This year's iPhone was simultaneously launched in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United Kingdom, while last year's launch did not include Hong Kong and Singapore.

Investors viewed the iPhone 5's opening weekend as somewhat of a disappointment. Wall Street analysts had

IPhone 5 journal: LTE performance and photos

Reviewer Rob Pegoraro is putting the new iPhone 5 through its paces and keeping a running journal of his impressions. Have any questions about the phone? Leave us a comment about what you'd like to see Rob tackle in future updates.

Before the iPhone 5 debuted as the iPhone 5, many people called it "the LTE iPhone." It was a tantalizing prospect -- and for some iPhone 5 users, it remains one.

Long Term Evolution mobile broadband -- what people sometimes used to call just "4G" before carriers elected to apply that shorthand to other wireless standards that were faster than 3G but not as quick as LTE -- can provide downloads faster than many residential cable or fiber-optic connections.

That's "can," not "will." AT&T's (T, Fortune 500) LTE network

Will mobile kill digital advertising?

Like all online businesses, the marketing industry is being radically changed by the creeping ubiquity of mobile devices.

This shift to the smaller screen will inevitably have profound implications on both global marketing companies like WPP and Omnicom as well as on Internet companies like Google and Facebook whose revenue is mostly derived from online advertising.

It was no surprise, therefore, that one of the major

Should you upgrade to the iPhone 5?

Deciding to when to upgrade is a funny, sometimes expensive thing. Carrier contracts that subsidize the cost of a new iPhone are usually for two years, so it's traditional to upgrade every other model or less. You also want to time it just right, during the iPhone development cycle, so you don't buy a phone months before it's outdated.

If you are an iPhone owner who is pondering an upgrade to the new iPhone 5, here are some things to consider:

Do you long for more screen space/watch a lot of movies?

Perhaps you've heard that the iPhone 5 is taller. This is true. After testing its

IPhone 5 journal: So about that Maps app ...

Reviewer Rob Pegoraro is putting the new iPhone 5 through its paces and keeping a running journal of his impressions. Have any questions about the phone? Leave us a comment about what you'd like to see Rob tackle in future updates.

Apple's new iPhone 5 may not feel that much thinner than other phones, but it's dramatically lighter--in a way that makes you wonder if somebody forgot to put the battery inside.

But it's there, and so are all of the other parts of a