Apple fans are abuzz after the company made its long-awaited announcement of the next incarnation of the iPad product line on Wednesday. With higher processing power, the device is seemingly built for online video.

Simply called “iPad,” the new tablet — which weighs 1.4 lbs. — sports higher resolution “retina display,” a faster processor and 4G LTE connectivity — meaning higher download speeds for users.

A high percentage of viewed and shared content online is bandwidth intensive online video. A recent report by Cisco Systems revealed that mobile video traffic “exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2011.”

“Mobile video traffic was 52 percent by the end of 2011,” Cisco reported.

The higher speed connection, processing power and visual display all speak to this increasing Internet trend.

The iPad, available for order now, is expected to hit stores worldwide March 16. In the U.S., the 16GB Wi-Fi-only version is available for $ 499, and the Wi-Fi + 4G version for either AT&T or Verizon begins at $ 629 for 16GB.

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In Italy, little can trump a home field soccer goal by Milan.

In a February championship league match between English team Arsenal and Associazione Calcio Milan, Milan midfielder Kevin-Prince Boateng scored a defining goal in the first 15 minutes of the game.

While the sea of Milan fans erupted across the arena, the exhilarating reaction made it’s way into the newsroom.

TheDC translated the soccer analyst’s crazed emotional release: “Goal, goal, goal… boa-! boa-! -teng! -teng!… a stone’s throw under the goal post!”

On  Tuesday, ABC News aired an exclusive look inside electronics manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwanese company embroiled in controversy over the low wages and stressful working conditions of its employees. As many as 14 Foxconn employees committed suicide in 2010 by jumping from buildings, and at least four more employees followed suit in 2011.

Foxconn, headquartered in Techung, New Taipei, manufactures products for the world’s largest electronics companies, producing household gadgets such as the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Playstation 2, Wii and Xbox 360.

Apple recently hired the Fair Labor Association to audit Foxconn, along with its other suppliers, and asked that the results of the audit be made public. ABC correspondent Bill Weir toured a Foxconn facility in Shenzen, China and interviewed workers and management.

Watch:

Weir’s report included an interview with one employee who saw her first finished iPad when he showed her his own device. Her request to people who use the product was to “please use it with care.”

Although the company has stressful working conditions, thousands of people wait outside of the factory in the hopes that they will be hired. Many travel for miles, often leaving their families for weeks at time in order to work at the facility. But conditions inside are so demoralizing for some workers that the company has hung giant nets outside the buildings to solve what it called a “suicide problem” among its employees.

Weir’s report also showed that workers were less disgruntled by the working conditions than about their low pay. Foxconn employees work on average 60 hours a week for $ 2 a day. A raise for workers at Foxconn took effect on Feb. 1. PC World reported that the workers’ wages will be increased again by as much as 25 percent.

Apple Insider reported Wednesday that Foxconn employees alleged the company hid underage workers before the Fair Labor Association inspection.

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Read More:

• Tablet sales expected to reach 248.6 million units by 2015, smartphones sales to hit 1 billion
• Tech conference reveals new TV tech

A new exploit has been discovered that allows unauthorized access to a user’s Google Wallet account with a simple hack that can be performed by anyone in a matter of minutes. A security firm recently exposed a Google Wallet vulnerability that allowed hackers to bypass PIN protection, but the vulnerability is only present on rooted Galaxy Nexus handsets. This new exploit, however, does not require a handset to be rooted, which leaves all Google Wallet users exposed. Read on for more.

As mobile blog The Smartphone Champ explains, the newly exposed security hole allows someone to simply reset a user’s Google Wallet password by clearing the Google Wallet application data from within the phone’s settings menu. A user’s Google Wallet PIN is not required to wipe this data and once the information has been cleared, the handset will prompt the user for a new PIN without first requiring that the old PIN be entered. Anyone who performs this simple procedure will be able to access funds on the original user’s Google prepaid card.

A Google spokesperson acknowledged the vulnerability and gave the following statement to Android and Me: “We strongly encourage anyone who loses or wants to sell their phone to call Google Wallet support toll-free at 855-492-5538 to disable the prepaid card. We are currently working on an automated fix as well that will be available soon. We also advise all Wallet users to set up a screen lock as an additional layer of protection for their phone.”

A video demonstration of the simple hack follows below.

Read

The Super Bowl won’t air until Sunday, but advertisers have been rolling out their commercials in the weeks leading up to the big game.

Volkswagen AG stuck with the Star Wars theme it used last year, but this time they upped the cuteness factor by bringing in the dogs.

Whoever did the ad for Teleflora is a very smart person because it features Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima in lingerie.

Jerry Seinfeld brought back the “Soup Nazi,” while Matthew Broderick resurrected “Ferris Bueller”.

The Daily Caller picked the 10 best commercials you’ll see on Super Bowl Sunday:

WATCH:

10. Cars.com

9. Doritos

8.  Coca Cola

7. Chevrolet Sonic

6. E-Trade

The top 5 Super Bowl ads

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich joked Thursday that a proposal to allow a moon colony U.S. statehood was actually inspired by former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

Gingrich said during Thursday evening’s CNN-sponsored GOP primary debate that he was merely reacting to Santorum’s jab that “grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich.”

Debate moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Gingrich to explain his idea that U.S. moon colonists could apply for statehood.

Gingrich informed supporters on Florida’s “space coast” earlier in the week of his desire for Americans to return to space out of “a romantic belief that it really is part of our destiny.”

“Speaker Gingrich, I want you to clarify what you said yesterday in that speech you delivered on space,” said Blitzer. “You said that you would support a lunar colony or lunar base and that if 13,000 Americans were living there, they would be able to apply for U.S. statehood from the moon.”

The former speaker, before linking the idea to President John F. Kennedy’s call for Americans to “choose to go to the moon,” first clarified that his comments were in response to Santorum.

“I was meeting Rick’s desire for grandiose ideas,” Gingrich joked Thursday evening.

“It is really important to go back and look at what John F. Kennedy said in May of 1961 when he said, “we will go to the moon in this decade,” continued Gingrich. “No American had orbited the earth. The technology didn’t exist. And a generation of young people went into science and engineering and technology and they were tremendously excited. And they had a future.”

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Five days after the Justice Department’s takedown of popular Hong Kong-based file-sharing network MegaUpload, Hollywood astroturf group Creative America posted an anti-piracy video claiming that U.S. law currently prevents the DOJ from taking down foreign-based sites that facilitate copyright infringement.

The video, meant to sell constituents on the need for Hollywood-backed legislation like the recently stalled bills SOPA and PIPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate — spoke of MegaUpload, owned by hacker Kim Schmitz, in the present tense.

“Currently, U.S. law enforcement is only permitted to shut down U.S. based IP addresses,” said the video. “Overseas sites like Schmitz’s MegaUpload and MegaVideo, and the Swedish-based Pirate Bay, are out of reach.”

Not everyone was impressed by Hollywood’s latest public relations move.

“Seriously, the video shows the level of lies that CreativeAmerica and the MPAA will spread to try to pass new, even broader laws,” wrote Mike Masnick at the tech blog TechDirt. “What’s stunning is how blatant they are about it, releasing this video even after events from a week ago already proved it wrong.”

“The individuals and two corporations — Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited — were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

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This screen shot shows the homepage of Kuma games. A small video game company linked to the American sentenced to death in Iran specializes in war games recreating real-life conflicts in the Middle East _ including one called “Assault on Iran.” (AP Photo/Kuma Games)

This screen shot shows the homepage of Kuma Games. A small video game company linked to the American sentenced to death in Iran specializes in war games recreating real-life conflicts in the Middle East _ including one called “Assault on Iran.” (AP Photo/Kuma Games)

NEW YORK (AP) — Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the American sentenced to death by the Iranian government, is linked to a small New York company specializing in video games that recreate real-life conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.

The company, Kuma Games, makes a series of “Kuma(backslash)War” games that come in short, 10- to 15-minute episodes. The scenarios are usually nabbed from the news, and like documentary films, they seek to be as accurate as possible in chronicling real-life situations. Players can simulate events such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Afghan air strikes or the death of Moammar Gadhafi. There’s also “Assault on Iran,” about the country’s nuclear ambitions.

“They are best known across academia, war hounds, people interested in war. Maybe soldiers or ex-soldiers,” said Lindsay Grace, a professor who studies video games at Miami University in Ohio.

They are not “living-room games” like “Call of Duty”, the popular shooter series by Activision Blizzard Inc., he said.

It’s not the first time that video games have stirred up international barbs. Cuba denounced the 2010 version of “Call of Duty,” in which U.S. special operations soldiers try to kill a young Fidel Castro. The country’s state-run media said the game will turn American children into sociopaths. THQ Inc.’s “Homefront,” meanwhile, had its cinematic opening scene changed in Japan, with references to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il and the country itself removed and replaced with “Northern Leader” and “A country to the North,” respectively.

Iranian authorities accuse Hekmati of spying, but the U.S. —and Hekmati’s family— said the charges are false. This week, he became the first American sentenced to death in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

The 28-year-old Hekmati was linked to the gaming company in December, when the former U.S. Marine interpreter was shown giving a purported confession in a video that was broadcast nationally in Iran.

In the video, Hekmati said he worked for New York-based Kuma Games, “a computer games company which received money from CIA to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable,” according to an account of his statements in the English-language Tehran Times.

Kuma did not respond to repeated email messages for comment on Monday and Tuesday, and a listed phone number for the New York-based company did not connect to anyone.

The website of the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research program lists an “Amir Hekmati” as the principal investigator for Kuma LLC with a Kuma email address, indicating that he worked for the company. The website says Kuma was awarded $ 95,920 for developing a second-language training program. The CIA was not listed among the agencies participating in the program, and it’s unclear whether it has any connections to Kuma. The CIA declined to comment.

It is not unusual for a video game company to do side projects for the military, said Stephen Totilo, editor-in-chief of video game blog Kotaku, who visited the company’s office in 2006 when he worked for MTV. Totilo said Kuma’s CEO told him at the time that Kuma has done some work developing training software for the U.S. Army as a side project.

The office, he added, looked much like any other small game studio, with “a bunch of young guys, some just out of college,” working with the same tools as creators of other shooter games.

Though many of Kuma’s games are based on recent events in the Middle East, the company also makes games such as “DinoHunters,” which lets players fight dinosaurs and “I, Predator,” based on the Animal Planet series.

But the war games are getting much of the attention.

Are they propaganda?

“Obviously, they are biased, like anything,” said Ian Bogost, a game designer and Georgia Tech professor who wrote about Kuma in his book, “Newsgames.” ”But I think it would be pretty bad Western propaganda if you took Kuma’s existing products and dropped them in Iran.”

Propaganda, he says, would be less subtle than Kuma’s games, which are “really quite modest. Let’s take this thing in the news and recreate it.”

That said, it’s hard to say how players in the Middle East would respond to games created in the West, he added — just as it’s hard to say how American players would react to games created from Iran’s perspective.

Kuma’s “Assault on Iran” episode seeks to offer players “the most plausible scenario to delaying or destroying Iran’s nuclear arms capabilities,” according to the company’s website. It was released in 2005. Two years later, Kuma’s CEO Keith Halper told video game blog Gamasutra that the game was downloaded “hundreds of thousands of times” in Iran.

“We put Iranian and American gamers face to face, playing and talking together in a virtual space in a way that still eludes our real-world politicians,” Gamasutra quoted him as saying in May 2007.

On its website, Kuma describes its war games as an “interactive chronicle of the war on terror” and says the company is “very sensitive and respectful of American and coalition soldiers and the sacrifices they are making every day.” It says it donates money to two veterans groups — the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund and the Vietnam Unit Memorial Monument fund.

“They want to sell you on the experience that you get to do the battle,” Kotaku’s Totilo said. “You get to be the soldier.”

He added that it would be easy to say that what Kuma is doing is “pro-U.S. military,” in the sense that anyone who is recreating conflicts and letting people play from the American perspective is taking America’s side.

“We have a whole host of movie directors and TV producers who, like Kuma, recreate real battles from an American perspective,” he said. “And I haven’t seen them as quickly accused of being a front for the CIA.”

A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology by three Florida State University psychologists suggests that playing video games won’t make people smarter.

The study also argues that violent games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 don’t damage gamers’ brains or compel them to commit violent acts, the Associated Press said Friday.

Full Story: Violent games don’t compel gamers to commit violent acts, researchers say

If you didn’t think that Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow had arrived before, you may need to think again now that he and his teammates were the subject of a sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”

The sketch aired over the weekend and depicted Tebow (played by Taran Killam) and his teammates getting a post-game visit from Jesus (played by Jason Sudeikis). After taking credit for the Broncos recent winning streak, Sudeikis — clad in sandals and white socks — urged the team to work harder earlier in games so they wouldn’t fall so far behind and have to rely on divine intervention in order to win.

The best joke of the sketch came after Sudeikis asked the players who they were playing next. When informed that it was the New England Patriots, he replied, “If I’m the son of God, Tom Brady’s gotta be the guy’s nephew.”

On Sunday in Denver, Brady and the Patriots beat Tebow’s Broncos, 41-23, snapping Denver’s winning streak.

As for what the writers at SNL think of Tebow’s public displays of faith, why not just watch the video?

Eric McErlain blogs at Off Wing Opinion, a Forbes “Best of the Web” winner. In 2006 he wrote a “bloggers bill of rights” to help integrate bloggers into the Washington Capitals’ press box. Eric has also written for Deadspin, NBC Sports and the Sporting News, and covers sports television for The TV News. Follow Eric on Twitter.