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Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. EU Privacy Regulator To Investigate Google . CNIL, a data protection agency from France will investigate Google's new privacy policy to check if the company's changes flout the laws the EU has in place to protect user privacy

Ahead of the Mobile World Congress event next week dozens of new smartphones are being revealed or teased to stir up the tech press, get potential customers excited, and, of course, drum up sales.

They're tiny, powerful, and just might inspire tech envy in everyone around you. But before you buy, check out the pros and cons. Much ado was made at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show over Intel’s so-called “ultrabooks.” Still not sure what those are?

Your notes to yourself are a precious thing. These tools let you write quick and find ideas later, wherever you are.

Long, hard stares are nothing new to computer users, particularly when their PCs have crashed or their screens are frozen. In the near future those stares will let us do more than merely convey anger to our silicon friends. Developers of eye-tracking technology already a tool to help the disabled interact with specialized computers and to let market researchers evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns have turned their attention to Windows PCs and video game consoles

At a Hewlett Packard event in late October, company suits showed off the latest HP tablet: the Slate 2. The second version of the Slate 500, HP's Slate 2 is a thick, Windows 7-based device targeting the enterprise that comes with a stylus and starts at $699. It might be hard for consumers to imagine buying this tablet over the best-selling iPad 2, which starts at just $499.

From the exhibition floor of the mega Consumer Electronics Show: compact, portable devices that will help you get your work done better and faster. This year's Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas was better than ever.

LAS VEGAS Microsoft kicked off the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Monday night here much as the company has done since its first CES keynote in 1998 extolling the virtues of Windows and promising big things from its operating system in the future.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. EU Introducing Cookie Regulations . New European Union regulations will require customers to explicitly opt-in to receive cookies from websites

Rachel Shechtman just launched her new venture, A Startup Store , in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. The store, still in "beta," currently features a rotating selection of startups and their products in a physical retail space, including: Artspace, Birchbox, Baublebar, Joor, and Quirky. But A Startup Store will be ever-changing and ever-morphing

Fix your passwords, safeguard against email break-ins, and theft-proof your devices before that cup of joe gets cold. As long as we’ve had computers and gadgets, there’s been a tension between security and ease of use. On one extreme, there are the passwords that are so complex you intentionally can’t remember them, and emails that involve sending an encryption key to your recipients

The sun is the greatest source of energy on the planet. Instead of spending money trying to fight its power in the summer (and supplement it in the winter), revolving homes maximize solar heat and electricity.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. Nokia Eyes U.S. With Lumia Windows Phone .

Check out these four second-generation touchscreen desktops, and find out which one is right for you. When all-in-one touchscreen desktops debuted a couple of years ago, they were criticized for being sluggish and not responding well to gestures. These second-generation machines, all of which run on the Windows 7 operating system, come with faster processors and more responsive screens.

At universities, educational software largely means enterprise-scale, expensive, feature-stuffed "learning management systems." Blackboard has the majority of the market, but professors and students are about as enthusiastic about its various updates, crashes, and bugs as people are with the latest version of Windows (Blackboard scores a whopping 93% "hated" rating on website Amplicate ). Last week, a new alternative was launched--built by students--that looks and works a lot more like the social platforms people actually choose to use in their spare time.