The Xbox One was just unveiled at Microsoft's Redmond campus and, true to multiple reports that circulated before the official reveal, the new console will indeed come with a Kinect. And what a Kinect it is! The rumors of a vastly improved Kinect sensor array were right on the money -- this next-generation model is capable of tracking motions as minute as wrist rotations, and Microsoft's Marc Whitten said the new Kinect would even be able to read users' heartbeats when they're exercising or when players shift their weight.

While we don't have all of the details on the new Xbox Live features announced at today's XBox One launch, it's clear that Microsoft is going all-in when it comes to social and multiplayer gaming. First, they are upping the number of dedicated servers for online play from 15,000 to 300,000 and that nearly all of your content and game data will be store in the cloud.

Now leading the pack in gaming consoles, Microsoft's future growth lies outside the gaming sphere. We'll surely see tons of games at E3 in a few weeks, but at the big reveal of the Xbox One, the company chose to focus on non-gaming features, such as media streaming and Skype conversations. But what makes streaming and entertainment a true upgrade on the Xbox One, which already has access to almost all streaming platforms? Instant Switching. It allows you to switch between inputs, games, menus, internet explorer, and almost anything else almost instantly. And what's more, it lets you layer the the power of Microsoft partnerships and information across live TV.

Microsoft’s Don Mattrick pulled back the curtain on the Xbox One at a live event at the company’s Redmond campus, and it wasn’t long at all before the talk turned to software. One application in particular has been the subject of speculation for months, and SVP Yusuf Mehdi confirmed that Skype (which, if you recall, Microsoft acquired for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago) is part of the Xbox One experience. As you might imagine, the Xbox One Skype application allows users to participate in group video chats with their fellow users using the Kinect camera — so there are opportunities for a natural type of ongoing conversation, one that won’t require you to chat for thirty minutes and then disconnect. This could be an “always on” situation. You can answer a call by saying “Xbox, answer call” and then the video screen slides in from the right. Since the Xbox One aims to be your all-in-one “Home Entertainment System,” Skype is going to play a huge role in the overall experience. The demonstration showed a group Skype conversation happening while watching a video, with video quieting down a bit once the call is connected. Microsoft has always talked about being the hub of the living room, and it seems like the newly announced Xbox One is the device which brings its vision to reality. The game-changer with this Skype integration is that you can watch a television show or play a game while carrying on a conversation. This has been attempted, mostly as a “second screen experience,” but to make this a seamless reality is a huge step forward for Microsoft. Up until now, you were constrained to the functionality of a particular game supporting voice chat, but this gives you a more personal experience no matter what you’re doing on your Xbox.

Microsoft has revealed its new Xbox, the successor to the Xbox 360. It's a next-generation console, with plenty of power under the hood, but it's also clearly about consolidating your digital entertainment and operate as much more of a lifestyle device.

Microsoft is about to unveil the next Xbox home gaming console, and they're broadcasting the entire event live for all to watch. There will be thrills! Spills! Chills! Maybe some actual hardware, unlike at Sony's PlayStation 4 reveal. Check it out above, or if you're in an environment where you can't listen in, or just prefer glorious words written by Greg Kumparak to these newfangled moving pictures, check out our live blog.

Virtual private networking is a great way to accomplish a number of things, including making sure that your secrets stay your own, protecting against malware attacks, and getting around the geoblocking of audio and video content from networks, labels and basically anyone who wants to restrict your sweet, sweet access. It's understandable, then, that as computing increasingly goes mobile, VPN would get more popular on mobile, too.

It's Xbox day! Almost exactly 8 years after the announcement of the Xbox 360, Microsoft is back with another one. We're live on the ground at Microsoft's Xbox campus in Redmond, where the company is about to show its next-generation console for the very first time. We'll be bringing you the news as it breaks with our up-to-the-second liveblog. Join us, won't you?

Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing -- or possibly because of its own behavior -- is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful's maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be compromised in the process.

We are updating this blog during the live congressional testimony of Apple CEO Tim Cook. More details will be added soon. Apple's CEO Tim Cook came out firing during his Congressional grilling, declaring, "we pay all of the taxes we owe, every single dollar." A blistering Senate investigation accused Apple of shady tax dodging, helping it avoid $13.8 billion in taxes.

Last year, Twitter announced something it called the Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA), which would keep patents in the hands of the designers and engineers that came up with the technology behind them. What this agreement serves as is a promise to only act on a patent for "defensive purposes." Anything outside of that scope would need to be signed off on the creator of the patent itself.

The Meta1 is a pair of virtual reality goggles that perform some very unique and useful tricks. While they are still in beta stage, the glasses are coupled with a Kinect-like camera to sense objects in real space and allow users to interact with virtual worlds with the swipe of their hand.

Postmaster, an Austin-based startup that aims to simplify shipping and parcel tracking through an easy to use REST API, launched earlier this year and today, the company announced that it has raised a seed investment round of $600,000 led by Capital Factory, Cloud Power and Zelkova Ventures, as well as a consortium of angel investors. The Postmaster team plans to use this additional funding - it launched as a member of the last TechStars Cloud class - to expand its development team and build additional carrier integrations.

About.me, the online identity platform that spun out from Aol* at the beginning of the year before acquiring the one-time Digg spinout Wefollow, is now lifting the curtains on its plans to generate revenue, with today’s debut of About.me Premium. Via this new, paid tier to the service, the company is adding some of the more advanced features users have requested, including domain mapping, Google Analytics integration, the ability to remove the About.me branding, and more, for a $4 per month fee. And that’s just to start. This is the first time About.me has charged users for any aspect of its service, co-founder Ryan Freitas tells us. With today’s release, the site will begin to offer features aimed at professional users, like the ability to display their About.me page on their own custom domain name – the most in-demand user request to date, he says. The site will walk users through the process of adjusting their DNS settings to map the new domain to their page. To accompany this change, Premium users can also remove the branding on their page, which includes the “about.me” logo and the top navigation bar entirely. However, branding won’t entirely disappear. A small button at the bottom will still say “me,” pointing those who are interested to more details about the About.me service. Users will also be able to check site statistics using Google Analytics, and jump to the front of support queues with priority email support. The company isn’t yet committing to a guaranteed turn-around time, however, because they’re currently unsure what user support volume will be. But Freitas says the company has always taken support seriously, and is now staffing up on the customer service side of the business. The company also announced its future plans with Premium, which speaks to how it will integrate the technology acquired by the purchase of Wefollow, which today still serves as a discovery tool that helps Twitter users find others to follow by interest. “There will be a secondary tier that allows for people who want to be discovered,” explains Freitas. “We’re going to be able to create a paid tier using the algorithms from Wefollow to promote [users] into a variety of different mechanisms that we’ll be unveiling over the next few months,” he says. This will include a search directory, similar to the one Wefollow offers today, as well as tools that will allow premium users to pay for

Smart watches are all the rage, and judging by the turnout and level of enthusiasm at the recently year one meetup for Pebble Kickstarter backers in San Francisco which I attended last week, there's at least a passionate niche audience for the things. So it isn't surprising to see them continue to pop up on Kickstarter. A new one called Agent has a few unique tricks, however, which its creators believe set it above the competition.

Airbrite, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce startup, is debuting its first product today called Celery (its name a play on the world “sell”). Celery is designed to be a “pre-commerce” store builder – or, in other words, it allows anyone to start selling ahead of having a product to ship. That means sellers can start taking credit cards now, then charge when their product is ready to launch. And in case you couldn’t figure it out by that description, Airbrite is hoping the product will be a hit with those raising funds using crowdfunding. In fact, says Airbrite co-founder Chris Tsai, the company has already seen some traction with crowdfunders during its private beta, which rolled out to hundreds of users this March. But, he clarifies, Celery isn’t just designed for those merchants – it’s for anyone in any business who needs to enable pre-commerce on any platform. Some of its early customers include Kickstarter crowdfunder the3doodler.com, e-commerce site dagnedover.com, connected hardware maker breathometer.com, and onesmall.biz. Tsai says the product itself was inspired by the shift the team saw happening in commerce – that sellers want to establish more personal connections with buyers, and vice versa. But to do so, they need tools that give them more flexibility. ”E-commerce is kind of like  blogging was five years ago. It was really challenging to get a good CMS up without a serious backend developer, then came things like Tumblr and Blogger which made it really easy for anybody to get a blog up and running,” Tsai explains. “It’s really hard today to get an e-commerce storefront that flexible and available anywhere,” he continues. “We want to make it easy to embed an e-commerce touchpoint wherever you are – whether it’s your website, your mobile app, on Facebook, or even on Google Glass.” In addition to Tsai, who previously led mobile commerce initiatives for Groupon overseas, Celery’s founding team includes Brian Nguyen, whose background is in social commerce, and Peter Shih, a key developer on LinkedIn’s iPhone development team, who also worked at Foursquare. Their diversity of experience with social, commerce, and multiple platforms helps to inform their decisions as to how to proceed with Celery. During their time in Y Combinator, the company was building its API and e-commerce platform, though originally with more emphasis on their support for mobile. Celery is actually built on top of Stripe, which makes it similar to newly launched MoonClerk, another e-commerce startup whose

Brow.si, a new product from MySiteApp, is launching in open beta today as an add-on for mobile websites that promises to bring a number of features to rival the engagement of native apps. These include social sharing, a read it later button, subscriptions, and push notifications (sort of). Developers can also create additional extensions for the Brow.si platform to add further desktop web/app-like functionality and monetization options.

TeamSnap, a company that provides tools for managing sports teams, has today announced that it is acquiring Weplay, a social networking site for athletes, parents and coaches to help facilitate coordination for events, games, practices, etc. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Change.org got its start in 2007 as a social network for non-profits. For years, growth was slow for the fledgling social action platform, but, over the last year, that changed dramatically. Change.org has grown from six million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today, and, as a result, has become one of the largest and fastest growing of its kind.

Burstly's grand vision coming out of its TestFlight acquisition is getting full reveal today with the announcement of the company's new corporate structure, which rebrands Burstly's monetization tools as SkyRocket, and opens them up to all mobile developers and publishers with a new self-serve option, whereas previously they'd been accessible only to the biggest fish in the app ecosystem pond.