It turns out that CVS is one of about 40 merchants in a consortium that formed in 2011 to develop their own mobile-phone-based payment system. The consortium, called the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, is in large part all about eliminating, or at least reducing, the fees banks charge retailers for swiping credit cards.
Samsung has drastically altered the rule that big screens mean huge phones. Even this smaller of the new Galaxy S models has a larger screen than the biggest iPhone, but it's much narrower and easier to hold and to slip into a pocket.
Arguably Apple's least successful core hardware product in decades, the Apple Watch could have been nursed along, like a terminal patient.
People always worry that buying tech products today carries a risk of obsolescence. Most of the time, that fear is overblown.
Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it's hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes.
Has the smartphone begun to mature, plateau out?
As for the device we now call a TV or a cable box, I want it to be fast with a clean interface and seamlessly upgradeable to the latest software. I want it to be the primary source of all TV, not an ancillary device.
There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will.
Big screens helped propel Samsung to top-tier prominence and helped iPhone sales explode a few years later. But for many, including myself, the biggest-screen models just weren't practical, because their overall size made them too large, too bulky, and too heavy.
If you buy the Chromebook Plus and intend to use it mainly as a Chromebook, I expect you'll have a good experience. But if you plan to rely heavily on Android apps, you're basically buying into the start of a journey, replete with odd-looking presentations of familiar apps, bugs and crashes.
I simply believe that people who respect their customers and have faith in their own technology products should welcome competition and that consumer choice should be a paramount value in retailing.
When I first reviewed the iPad, I wrote that, to succeed, 'It will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative.'
When I walk into a Best Buy, I now see, right from the front door, a giant Apple logo. I see a giant Samsung logo. I see a giant Microsoft Windows logo. And those are stores within a store.
I was very proud to be at 'The Wall Street Journal'. I have nothing bad to say about it. I had a great run there. In what turned out to be the final years of my tenure there, 'AllThingsD' occupied me more and more and was much more fun.
I want to thank Vox Media, The Verge, Recode, the 'Wall Street Journal,' and CNBC for giving me a voice.
It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of the 'Wall Street Journal' and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970.
The textile industry became a huge deal in 19th century America, kind of like the tech industry is today. And that immigrant tradition continues, especially in tech, America's most dominant and dynamic industry today.
Amazon's 'Twitch' appears to be creating a service that operates like Twitter.
I actually think it's against the rules at Vox Media to work there if you've never dropped an iPhone.
Companies often visit my office, or invite me to theirs, to brief me on new products, Web sites, or software before they are released - usually a few weeks or days ahead of time. I don't review most of these products.