Consumer content

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter has released his monthly estimates on console sales, and not surprisingly, given recent months, April didn't look too swell for Nintendo and its Wii U.

According to Pachter, who estimates console sales in the U.S. based on retail checks, Nintendo sold just 55,000 Wii U units in April, down 19 percent compared to March. The company's Wii, which has been on store shelves for years, sold 75,000 units in April, according to Pachter.

Microsoft was once again the leader in the console market in April, selling 205,000 Xbox 360 units … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Aiming to help Square Register merchants who have had no standard hardware, Square today unveiled a stand meant to hold an iPad and make for an easy and common point-of-sale experience.

At a press event across the street from Square's office, the mobile payment company's CEO, Jack Dorsey, and Jesse Dorogusker, who leads the Square Register team, showed off Stand, its new hardware intended to give merchants a streamlined way, and a single aesthetic, to accept payments.

The problem, said Dorsey, is that merchants have had no single method to take payments using Square Register. Around the … Read more

Aereo is on a roll, with plans now to bring its streaming TV service to Atlanta.

The Atlanta launch is scheduled for June 17, the company announced Tuesday. The capital of Georgia will be the third city to get the Aereo service, following New York and, from Wednesday of this week, Boston.

The news of the launch comes a day after Aereo reset its pricing structure. Starting Wednesday, consumers can pay $8 per month to get a base membership plan to use Aereo's cloud-based antenna/DVR technology, receiving 20 hours of DVR storage in the bargain. For $12 a … Read more

With a 1976 release, Atari's Breakout was right at the frontier of video game history -- and, it would seem, Apple's. The task of designing a prototype board with as few chips as possible fell to Steve Jobs, with an extra $100 for every chip less, and Jobs delegated it to his pal Steve Wozniak, who completed the board with just 42 chips in only four days.

Jobs, the sneaky cur, kept the bonus to himself, paying Wozniak a pittance. Atari couldn't even use the board, and ended up going with a different design that had about 100 chips.

Anyway, as interesting as all that is, you want to play Breakout on Google Image search, right? Head on over to Google and do an image search for "Atari Breakout" (or just click the hyperlink). … Read more

If you like sports highlights but spend more time on social networks than watching TV, Twitter and ESPN are going to do their best to meet your needs.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter and ESPN plan to announce tomorrow a deepening of their existing relationship, agreeing on a pact under which the leading sports channel will unveil a wide variety of highlight clips in its tweets. The videos would be available on Twitter "shortly after" they take place live.

Naturally, the new arrangement -- which expands on a pact signed in December under which ESPN began … Read more

Over the last several weeks, Marissa Mayer has talked about "sprinting." She is referring to Yahoo's run for daylight, after years of stumbling and being viewed as yesterday's Internet company.

Mayer's formula for a Yahoo resurgence starts with a sprint to get the "right people in place, and culture and energy where we want it to be so we can really run," she said during an interview last week at the Wired Business conference.

In her nine months as CEO, she has been adding and subtracting to Yahoo's talent pool, and rounding … Read more

Twitter's shopping spree shows no signs of letting up. Today, the social-networking giant said that it has acquired big data startup Lucky Sort.

Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said in a blog post that his company's "goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize, and visualize by building elegant and user-friendly tools for text analysis."

Neither Twitter nor Lucky Sort said precisely how the startup will be integrated into Twitter's larger plans, but Pepper said in his post that several members of his team would be moving to San Francisco to become … Read more

Sony is launching a new Xperia smartphone designed to be dunkable.

Announced on Monday, the Xperia ZR phone can stay under as much as five feet of water for up to 30 minutes. Using the phone's 13-megapixel camera, you can shoot underwater photos and videos in full HD. The dedicated camera key also allows you to quickly take a shot even if the phone is locked.

The camera takes advantage of Sony's Exmor RS for mobile image sensor with HDR (High Dynamic Range) for both photographs and videos. The company promises that photos and videos are automatically captured … Read more

Apple and other mobile phone vendors are being asked to amp up the fight against cell phone theft.

In a series of letters sent today to the heads of Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola, and Microsoft, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman requested information on what they're doing to make their phones more safe and secure from thieves. Schneiderman also urged the companies to work with his office to devise ways to cut down on the lure of cell phones to criminals.

The attorney general pointed to a rise in the theft of phones and other mobile devices in … Read more