!!!....Electronics world....!!!

I know I shouldn't be so surprised. That's a drop in the bucket compared with the $20,000 price tag for  Vertu 's  Year of the Dragon phone . Even the  Vertu  wall charger costs $85. For $190, the  Vertu USB cable  should be capable of transferring data at warp speeds, giving excellent stock tips, and washing your dog. Alas, it's just a USB 2.0 cable and doesn't appear to have any superpowers. There must be some explanation for the price. Maybe the Vertu USB cable was raised in a humane manufacturing plant where it was massaged and fed caviar. Maybe it was harvested from the feces of the Asian Palm Civet and then lightly roasted to provide data transfer with a smooth flavor profile. We've seen plenty of insanely expensive tech items recently. The  $8 million iPad  and a  $9.4 million iPhone 4S  come to mind. At least those have some crazy bling to help justify the nuttiness. Looking at the Vertu cable, I don't see diamonds. I don't see ...

Get ready, because it's time for another weekly serving of features. This week, we got ready for CES. Not making the trip out to Vegas? Don't worry, we'll keep you covered here. In the political sphere,  social media  is playing a different role than we've seen before in the presidential campaign, and we're keeping up with the digital trends. It's still the beginning of the new year, so we have a few more tech and social media predictions for you too.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) —  Yahoo  dangled a $27 million pay package to lure its newly hired CEO  Scott Thompson  away from  PayPal . The struggling Internet company disclosed the details of Thompson's compensation in a regulatory filing late Friday. Thompson starts his new job Monday after spending the past four years running eBay Inc. 's PayPal service, where revenue more than doubled during his tenure. PayPal took in an estimated $4.4 billion last year. That kind of robust growth is a fuzzy memory for Yahoo Inc., a one-time Internet star whose revenue has sagged as online advertising flowed increasingly to rivals  Google Inc.  and Facebook. Yahoo  has promised better times under three new CEOs in less than five years, only to frustrate investors each time. They've been especially disenchanted since the company squandered an opportunity to sell itself to  Microsoft Corp.  for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, in May 2008. The stock hasn't tr...

Indeed, not so long ago, one lady  sued Google  because the directions its map offered led her (she believed) to be struck by a  car . Now Microsoft has been  granted a patent  that is designed to make its maps more pedestrian-friendly. Somehow, this patent has immediately been dubbed the  "avoid ghetto" feature . Someone seems to have already attempted a ghetto-related mapping exercise, in Ohio. (Credit:  CC JimBobThe Boss/Flickr ) The gist of it seems to be that Microsoft's GPS--which will  reportedly be inserted  into Windows Phones in the future--will use input from more varied and up-to-date sources in order to create suggested routes. Among these sources are crime statistics. Which has led  some to the thought  that this will somehow be an insult to poor neighborhoods. What is unclear, at least from my reading of the patent--which isn't written by anything resembling a human hand or mind--is what kind of crime statistics the...