Author: Serkadis

An injection-molding method that can reduce costs and increase the use of titanium and other durable, lightweight and corrosion-resistant metals has earned a 2013 TechConnect National Innovation Award.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory developed an organic binder to reduce the impurities in reactive metals, allowing them to be utilized in a powder injection molding process. Standard binders used to hold metal powders together in high volume molding processes can introduce oxygen, nitrogen or carbon into the metal as impurities, which can result in impacts to their mechanical properties (i.e. potentially making machine parts less structurally sound). But the PNNL-developed method uses a novel binder system that leaves very few impurities when it is completely burned up during a later stage of fabrication.

The innovation also reduces or eliminates the swelling, cracking or other distortions to the component that can result from traditional binders used in powder injection molding processes. The result is faster production time and lower costs.

The TechConnect Innovation awards are given annually to top early-stage innovations from around the world by TechConnect, a global outreach and development organization based in Austin, Texas. TechConnect honors technologies based on the potential impact they will have on specific industrial sectors.

“Titanium is strong and corrosion resistant, making it ideally suited to the automotive, aerospace, chemical production, and biomedical implant or equipment industries,” said PNNL commercialization manager Eric Lund. “However, until now, use of injection molding to produce titanium components has been severely limited by the introduction of impurities with the binders, which then degrade the component properties.”

Lund noted the PNNL-developed method overcomes this problem by using an organic binder that is cleanly removed during sintering and leaves few or no impurities that can cause degradation in material properties.

PNNL will be recognized at the TechConnect National Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C. later this month. The PNNL research team includes Eric Nyberg, Kevin Simmons and former staff member Scott Weil.

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For information on commercializing the binder for use in injection molding processes, contact Eric Lund at (509) 375-3764.

Samsung has reportedly made a major investment in rival South Korea-based smartphone maker Pantech. Yonhap News was first to report the news and it says Samsung spent roughly $50 million for 10% of the company. Samsung’s motives are unclear, though the deal will reportedly “help further solidify bilateral cooperation in smartphone and other business areas.” Pantech is currently the No.3 phone maker in South Korea behind Samsung and LG, and the new investment makes Samsung the company’s third-largest shareholder behind Qualcomm and Korea Development Bank.

I am in the room with Superintendent Matt Grose from Deer River Schools and he just told us about something very fun that’s happening online tonight when the Deer River high school students will be performing a joint concert online with students in Chicago, California and professional singers. You can sign up to see them online through the Cisco website.

Bridging the Gap Concert
(Live Webcast May 22, 2013 at 6:00 pm Pacific Time / 8:00 pm Central Time)

Join students from across the nation, as they perform, sing, read poetry, dance, and celebrate the arts with their peers during this cross-country telepresence event.

– Deer River High School | Deer River, Minnesota
– Martin Luther King College Prep | Chicago, Illinois
– Emerson Middle School | Los Angeles, California

Hosted annually, Bridging the Gaps concert is sponsored by Urban Entertainment Institute (UEI) and Cisco. Founded by Fred Martin in 2002, the UEI is an after-school program that is dedicated to training inner-city youths in the performing arts at no charge to their families.

Google has launched a redesigned version of the Google Publisher Bar, the Chrome extension it launched last year for AdSense earnings and performance updates.

“The Google Publisher Toolbar will continue to include the same popular functionality as before in addition to a new feedback mechanism and blocking capabilities,” says AdSense product manager Fiona Herring.

The new toolbar features pop-up account overview, ad details and a feedback box.

The overview shows you your estimated account earnings summary for today, yesterday, this month and last month, in addition to data on your top 5 channels or sites by revenue over a variety of date ranges.

The bar also gives you detailed info about specific impressions including buyer and advertiser details, the creative, and the ability to block the ad buyer.

Google says 234,000 people have installed the Google Publisher Bar since it launched.

As people continue to look for ways to “cut the cord” and move away from traditional cable services, right now they largely have no choice but to continue subscribing to ISPs’ Internet services even if they cancel pay-TV. Over the next few years, however, that need might fade in many regions. According to new research from ABI, LTE-FDD (frequency-division duplex) will expand to cover 57% of the global population by 2018 while LTE-TDD (time-division duplex) will cover 52% of the population by that point in time.

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Back in 2007, Google announced that it would be putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a “strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal.”

This included eSolar and Makani Power. News is out today that Google has now acquired the latter. Brad Stone at BusinessWeek writes:

Last February, Astro Teller, the director of Google’s (GOOG) secretive research lab, Google X, went to seek approval from Chief Executive Officer Larry Page for an unlikely acquisition. Teller was proposing that Google buy Makani Power, a startup that develops wind turbines mounted on unmanned, fixed-wing aircraft tethered to the ground like a kite. The startup, Teller told Page, was seeing promising results, and, he added proudly, its prototypes had survived all recent tests intact.

Page approved Google X’s acquisition of Makani, which was being completed for an undisclosed amount at press time. He also had a demand. “He said we could have the budget and the people to go do this,” Teller says, “but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”

According to TechCrunch, Google invested $10 million in Makani Power in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. Frederic Lardinois shares a statement from Teller:

Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem. Makani Power’s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. They’ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. We’re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x].

Makani Power has the following statement up on its site:

We are happy to announce that Makani Power is being acquired by Google. This formalizes a long and productive relationship between our two companies, and will provide Makani with the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels. The timing couldn’t be better, as we completed the first ever autonomous all-modes flight with our Wing 7 prototype last week. Makani could not have reached this point without the support of the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program and the hard work of our talented team, past and present. We look forward to working with our new colleagues at Google[x] to make airborne wind a cost-effective reality.

Earlier this year, Google put $200 million into a wind farm in Texas.

New details continue to trickle out following Microsoft’s Xbox One unveiling. Some new tidbits answer burning questions and some simply raise new questions, but there are also a few key features being discovered that Microsoft was oddly quiet about during its presentation but happily confirmed after the show. For one example, Forbes’ Matt Hickey was able to learn after the presentation that the new Xbox One will indeed support “Ultra HD” gaming at 4K resolution. “The video and interface portions, absolutely,” Microsoft marketing boss Yusuf Mehdi responded when asked whether or not the new Xbox would offer 4K gaming. It looks like games will be 1080p at launch, though 4K games will certainly be available down the road once Ultra HD TV sales pick up.

On Wednesday, Google announced that Sabrina Brady of Sparta, Wisconsin has been named the national winner of its 2013 U.S. Doodle 4 Google contest. The doodle, titled, “Coming Home” will be featured on Google’s U.S. homepage on Thursday.

Brady is a 12th grade student at Sparta High School. She will receive a $30,000 college scholarship in addition to having her doodle featured. She also gets a Chromebook, and her school gets a $50,000 technology grant.

Google Doodle Team Lead Ryan Germick writes:

Students across all 50 states amazed us with their creative interpretations of this year’s theme, “My Best Day Ever…” From scuba diving to dinosaurs to exploring outer space, we were wowed by the ways young artists brought their best days to life in their doodles.

Sabrina’s doodle stood out in the crowd; it tells the story of her reunion with her father as he returned from an 18 month deployment in Iraq. Her creative use of the Google letters to illustrate this heartfelt moment clearly resonated with voters across the country and all of us at Google.

There were 130,000 submissions to the contest. Google lists the national finalists (who will each win a $5,000 scholarship) here.

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ll see the signs of a significant disruption in computing. No, I’m not talking about mobile: That disruption already happened and we’re in the midst of it playing out now as PC sales have become stagnant at best. Instead, it’s within the browser: Google Chrome is the harbinger of change and through it, Google has huge potential to change computing once again.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say, within a year, many of you will be using a Chromebook. Before you roll your eyes, let me add one caveat: That Chromebook won’t be Google designed hardware; instead it will be on the Mac, Windows or Linux machine you have at that time. So it won’t be a Google build device like my Chromebook Pixel is.

Let’s step back and I’ll explain.

Chrome is widely installed and growing

When Google launched the Chrome browser in late 2008 for Windows, the idea behind it was to speed up your web experience. It took until May of 2010 for all three major operating systems to have a stable version of the browser. Since then, usage has grown tremendously. Looking at market share summaries from five sources (consolidated at Wikipedia), four of them show Chrome as the biggest market share in March, 2013. (Note: April’s numbers are missing one source, which is why I’ve pointed to March figures.)

If you follow browser share statistics — hey, we all need a hobby — this won’t surprise you. Chrome has continued to slowly grow its worldwide user base with rather steady progress. And there’s little reason to assume that trend will change any time soon. So what does that mean?

For many Chrome is just a browser. For others who use a Chromebox or Chromebook, like myself, it’s my full-time operating system. The general consensus is that Chrome OS, the platform used on these devices, can only browse the web and run either extensions and web apps; something any browser can do. Simply put, the general consensus is wrong and the signs are everywhere.

Let’s talk about Chrome apps

First, much time was spent at Google I/O on two key topics we featured on last week’s GigaOM Chrome Show podcast: Packaged Apps and Native Client apps. You can listen to the show for a full description by Google’s own Joe Marini, but I’ll summarize the concept here.

Packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, just like a traditional website or web app. There’s one subtle difference though. These apps are “packaged” in a way that allows them to run outside of the Chrome browser on any device that has Chrome installed. And they can run when the user is offline. Google Keep is a perfect example of this. I use it as a to-do list outside of my browser, both online and offline. When I don’t have a connection, my data is saved locally and when I later connect to the web, Google Keep automatically syncs my data to the cloud.

Here’s an image from my Chromebook showing Google Keep outside of the browser. Note too, the notification message at the bottom right; Google has added these in the developer channel of Chrome, bringing even more desktop features to the environment.

Native client apps are similar in that they’re also packaged and they support offline access. There’s a key difference however: These apps are coded in their native programming languages — C or C++ for example — compiled and then embedded in HTML where they behave like standalone native apps. Google says there’s about a 5 percent overhead performance hit, so they’re not quite as fast as their native app counterparts.

A good example of a native client app is a game I played on my Chromebook Pixel recently called Cracking Sands Racing The app, a port of a game for iOS and Android, was a 533 MB download to my Pixel and I played it outside of the browser. Even better, the support for a gamepad worked just fine as I used an Xbox 360 controller to play the game. Controls and graphics were responsive; no different overall that if I was playing a version of the game on a Mac or PC.

I know what you’re thinking. “That’s good for you since you have a Chromebook. What do I care?”

Chrome is a back door to the new app economy

Here’s the thing: Both Packaged Apps and Native Client apps work on any computer that has the Chrome browser installed. You remember: the browser that has the biggest market share. Even better, Google is working on Portable Native Client, which extends the native client app support to mobiles. Meanwhile, at Google I/O, the company said these apps can work on mobiles through Apache Cordova, a set of cross-platform APIs that support iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and more.

You can see where I’m going with this but lets take it a step further. Have you noticed that Google recently added the Chrome App Launcher to Microsoft Windows? It’s the same app launcher that’s native to Chrome OS. And Google is working on it for the Mac platform; it’s already in the developer channel for Chromium. And it’s sure to follow for Linux.

Essentially, once you can run web, Packaged and Native Client apps on any device with the Chrome framework, you need an easy way to manage and launch them. Think of Chrome as a platform environment atop a platform. On my Pixel, Chrome runs over Linux. For you, Chrome may run on top of Windows or OS X. Both of those have their own program launchers but as developers expand the number of Chrome apps, you’ll use the Chrome App Launcher to access them.

By the way, in the launcher picture above, did you notice that CIRC doesn’t have the same little arrow as the other icons? That means it’s an app, not a web shortcut.

Wait, won’t the big platform players block this?

Along with the disruption of mobile devices, the physical media market has undergone changes too. We typically don’t buy apps on a disk to install them any longer. Instead, platforms are providing centralized applications stores that they maintain control over. The Mac App Store is a perfect example. Note that you can install apps from outside of the App Store, provided you allow for such actions in your security settings. Since these stores are controlled by the platform makers, won’t Apple, Microsoft and others try to keep Chrome apps from spreading to the desktop?

They can try but I don’t think they’ll succeed, expect maybe on mobiles. If people find the apps compelling enough, they’ll be in an uproar for starters. But there’s another possible reason and I think it’s brilliant on Google’s part.

I noticed that when I downloaded Cracking Sands Racing, the video game I was able to play offline on my Pixel, the file had a .crx file extension. That may not look familiar to you, but I recognize it. It’s the same file extension Chrome uses for browser extensions. If that naming convention holds true, any company blocking Chrome app installations would also block Chrome extensions. How would the Chrome using community react to that? Not well.

What does your desktop look like a year from now?

As I alluded to at the beginning of this post, if you’re a Chrome user today, you’ll be more immersed in the Chrome ecosystem a year from now, even if you don’t have an “official” Chromebook. This all depends on how well Google pulls off its strategy to upend the desktop computing world, but so far, it seems to be on track.

Bear in mind the apps in this vision will be truly cross-platform as they’ll run on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer with Chrome installed. If it can get developers on board — and those I spoke with at Google I/O are ready to embrace the effort — Google will have a thriving desktop platform built on top of the platforms created by others. But it will be a desktop that’s far more agile, with new features added within days or weeks, not months or years.

Welcome to Chrome, my desktop today and your desktop of the future.

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Google X, Google’s lab where the company hatches big ideas like driverless cars and Google Glasses, is acquiring the high altitude wind startup Makani Power, according to an article in Bloomberg Business Week. This is the first time we’ve heard that Google’s secretive moonshot lab has bought an outside company and is bringing it in house — usually the lab works on crazy ideas in house, and if these ideas become less risky, then Google turns those into actual Google products or pushes the products into other Google divisions.

Makani Power has been building and testing a new type of wind turbine that is attached to a long tether (that could be 600 meters long) and which rotates high off the ground, capturing wind that is stronger and more consistent than typically found on the ground. The idea behind the innovation is that capturing high altitude wind could be cheaper, more efficient, and more suitable for certain environments like offshore than traditional wind turbines.

Makani Power has said its kite-style system could deliver twice as much capacity factor (a measure of energy generation productivity) with 20 percent less mass than conventional wind turbines. A computerized system launches the turbines and monitors and tracks the data on how much energy is generated.

Makani Power was founded in 2006 by Saul Griffith and former World Cup windsurfer Don Montague and a lot of the early employees were kite surfers. Griffith has since gone on to run Other Labs, his incubator workshop in San Francisco that is building things like a new natural gas engine and tiny solar thermal devices.

Makani Power previously raised $15 million from Google.org, back when Google.org and Google were more actively funding next-gen energy devices. According to the Business Week article Google X’s captain of moonshots, Astro Teller, proposed the idea of buying Makani Power to Larry Page and Page’s response was that Teller had to make sure to crash at least five of the high-altitude wind devices in the near future (basically put it to a rigorous enough test).

While Makani Power has been working on this innovation for seven years, it’s been slow going commercializing a product. The company has survived on the funding from Google.org, and grants from the Department of Energy’s early stage ARPA-E program. Late last year Makani’s charismatic, kitesurfing CEO, Corwin Hardham, tragically passed away unexpectedly. Earlier this year former energy policy maker and energy exec Cathy Zoi joined Makani’s board of directors.

Google is interested in clean energy generation partly because its data centers suck up a ton of energy and cost it a lot of money. Google has invested over a billion dollars into various clean energy projects, but in recent years moved away from making equity investments into clean energy startups. Perhaps Google X is a better place for this high-risk clean energy ideas.

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If you know Java, R or SAS, doing machine learning on Hadoop data just got a lot easier. Concurrent (see disclosure), the company behind the popular Cascading framework for writing big data jobs, has developed a new open source tool called Pattern that lets users export their models from statistical analysis applications and run THEM? at scale on Hadoop data with little to no code change.

The reason for creating Pattern is pretty simple, according to Concurrent Founder and CEO Chris Wensel: “Hadoop is never used alone.” It’s always part of a data environment that also includes databases, visualization tools, analytics software and/or statistical analysis tools that arguably do the really valuable work. Hadoop’s real value is an integration platform that can feed data into these other systems and, ideally, put their outputs to work across much larger datasets.

Developers can use the Pattern Java API to create machine learning jobs, but they can also simply export a Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) file from software like R, SAS and MicroStrategy that Pattern will read and run them as a Cascading workflow. Models are useless unless you can run them in production, Wensel said, and Pattern lets them run across more data, stored in Hadoop, than you can use to build them with those other tools.

However, Wensel noted, “The real takeaway isn’t Pattern itself.”

From his perspective, the real story is Pattern plus Cascading plus Lingual, the open source SQL-to-Hadoop tool that Concurrent recently developed and released. Lingual is the tie that binds everything together, creating a sort of assembly line for data as it works its way from generation to delivering some value. For example, someone might create a Cascading job that adds structure to incoming data, and then pull some of the data into R using Lingual. Once a model is created in R and exported to the Hadoop cluster using Pattern, Lingual can feed the MapReduce output file back to R so a data scientist can test the model’s accuracy.

And actually, Wensel said, Lingual could have a positive effect on companies’ bottom lines. Airbnb recently replaced a departed engineer with Lingual for monthly migrations of data from Hadoop and into SQL environments. Climate Corporation, a massive Hadoop and Cascading user, could use Lingual to let its crop-and-weather insurance customers access their data from the company’s Hadoop store.

Lingual and Pattern should help Concurrent finally make some money, too. Both of them, as well as the Cascading framework that underpins them, will always be open source, Wensel said, but it plans to create “a suite of products that will make your life much better if … you standardize on Cascading.”

For example, the company has the ability to monitor jobs at the application level rather than the cluster level, meaning it can tell you the details of that job that’s locking up all the resources and whether you really want to kill it (it might be an important report for the CFO …). “We can do some really interesting things,” Wensel said.

Disclosure: Concurrent is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user PENGYOU91.

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Windows users never get tired of finding new ways to improve the appearance of the operating system or of tweaking for increased usability.

Among the most popular tuning jobs is changing the log on screen, which is the same with the log off one and the system lock wallpaper. There are dozens of applications fit for the job, most of them fre… (read more)

Google announced some new features for Goals in Google Analytics, including a new set-up flow, new templates, and new verification capabilities.

For setting up Goals, you now find a profile in your account, click the admin tab, and navigate to the account, property, and and profile of choice. From there, click Goals, and Create a Goal. From there, you will be guided further:

New templates have been added to the set-up flow.

“When you use a template, the Goal setup flow is prefilled with suggested values (based on your industry) that you can either keep or change as you walk through the process,” explains product manager Stefan F. Schnabl. “The templates are organized into four business objectives (Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, Engagement) to help you think about the purpose of each Goal, plus you can still create custom goals. Note that ‘revenue’ goals don’t necessarily imply a direct sale — these goals are user activities which have a strong impact on your desired business outcomes. Depending on your business model, a Revenue Goal could be a purchase, such as a completed checkout; or it could also be a successful lead submission, such as a scheduled appointment. Some Revenue Goals might lend themselves to Ecommerce tracking as well.”

Templates are based on Industry Categories selected in your property settings. There are also twenty new categories.

“In addition to the templates, we’ve added a way for you to check your setup before you save,” says Schnabi. “You’ll find a verify option at the end of the setup flow that lets you see what the conversion rate would have been for the past seven days had this Goal been setup. Using the verify option gives you immediate feedback, so you can decide to save or modify the Goal configuration you’re working on.”

You can use the Goals Overview report under Conversions to see how goal completions happen over time. From there, you can also choose relevant metrics with the metric selector.

The updates are now live in Google Analytics.

When you’re a tween or teen who just has to repost that great porn GIF you just found, Facebook really isn’t the place to do it. It’s not that porn GIFs are any less appreciated by Facebook users, of course, but rather that young users are often tracked by their parents on the world’s top social network. As a result, a recent Pew Research study found that teenagers are moving away from Facebook and finding a new home on Tumblr.

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Google has launched an update to Google Drive for Android with a few new features.

For one, files are now displayed in a new card-style, and you can swipe between them to see large previews. You can also now download copies to your Android device from within the actions menu in settings.

“The updated Drive for Android app also gives you to a way to keep track of important paper documents like receipts, letters, and billing statements,” says Google software engineer Denis Teplyashin. “Simply click ‘Scan’ from the Add New menu, snap a photo of your document, and Drive will turn the document into a PDF that’s stored for safekeeping.”

“And because Drive can recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, a simple search will retrieve the scanned document later,” adds Teplyashin. “No more frantic scrambling through drawers looking for a receipt or digging through your pockets to find that business card — just scan, upload and search in Drive.”

The Google Sheets editor now lets you adjust font types and sizes for spreadsheets, and change the cell text colors and cell alignment from the app.

The app also comes with Cloud Print support.

A few days ago when hanging out with a friend, I got a chance to play around with HTC One, the newest and shiniest Android phone on the market (of course until it wasn’t when Sony launched its Experia Z.) I was quite impressed by the build quality, the industrial design and the beauty of the device. Despite its supersize — I have normal people’s hands — it did feel like something I would want to buy, especially if I was picking amongst the ever increasing array of Android smartphones.

Maybe, I thought to myself, HTC was going to make a comeback. I mean, these were the guys who jumpstarted the Android smartphone ecosystem in partnership with Google and T-Mobile USA. These were the guys who innovated fast and even came up with their own skin for Android. They pushed the design and speed envelope. They had edgy marketing. They were the first movers and their early sales were red-hot.

And yet, when they spent $300 million on headphones maker Beats by Dre, it became obvious that this company was going to run into a some stormy weather. Of course, it was an idea that didn’t go down well with many of its fans and its investors — HTC eventually sold back half its stake.

This (relatively) tiny Taiwanese company was going to get squeezed by cheaper Android phones on one end and Samsung on the other. In fact, as far back as 2010 we have argued that the real smartphone battle was going to be between Apple and Samsung. And when it comes to hardware, nothing really has changed. It is Apple vs Samsung.

According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung now accounts for about 95 percent of the total operating profits of the global Android business. During the first quarter of 2013, Samsung had an operating profit of $5.1 billion, while LG made $100 million and all other vendors (HTC, ZTE, Huawei, Sony and no-name brands) collectively made $100 million in operating (not net) profit.

It is hardly surprising to see that HTC is in trouble. A report in The Verge suggested that HTC’s chief product officer, Kouji Kodera, has left the company. The report also implied that other senior executives are leaving the company. The most recent high-profile bet — the HTC First, which was launched in partnership with Facebook — has been a flop and one wonders if the company really has the wherewithal, both intellectual and financial, to undertake such experiments.

I am not sure if people remember, but Motorola was another company that found itself on a Sysephian quest and eventually found a $12 billion bailout from Google. The trouble with the smaller Android players is that despite all the talk about a PC-like ecosystem of sourcing components and using others to assemble their products, it is fundamentally not true.

Apple has used all the billions in the bank to lock up supplies for processors, memory chips, radios, displays and other such components at favorable prices. It has worked out long term manufacturing arrangements with the likes of Foxconn. It has its own retail outlets. While most of us try and focus on Apple’s hardware and software integration, we forget that it is software, hardware and supply chain integration that allows the company to sell 37.5 million phones in the most recent quarter. It allows the company to make phones that meet the needs of different carriers.

Samsung too is an integration beast. It owns memory chip plants. It makes its own processors. It makes displays and it owns the factories. It has the unique ability to churn out new products faster than anyone else in the consumer electronics business and thus overwhelm the market with dozens of models. Just look at the many flavors on its latest Samsung S4 device and you start to see that this is a game only for big boys.

The only other company with Apple and Samsung-like manufacturing oomph was Nokia. I say was, because they are losing a grip on the phone business. However, their supply chain and manufacturing was legendary. It still is. I have yet to see a badly made Nokia smartphone — I just see smartphones with an OS that makes no sense. I bet if they entered the market with their own flavor of Android — something we suggested in 2010 — they would instantly become number three in the smartphone market, behind Samsung and Apple.

Sadly, smaller players like HTC can’t compete with the manufacturing and marketing capabilities of Samsung. The HTC One, which is an awesome looking device, was hit by manufacturing issues earlier this year. So it needs to rethink its strategies. HTC needs to become comfortable with the idea of being a one or two product company, and hope that it can keep comping up with winning products every single time. Even that is a long shot. The marketing budgets of Samsung and Apple are enough to finance some small nations.

HTC’s story is all too familiar to those who have studied the first mover phenomenon. A story in Economist points out that innovators captured seven percent of their market over time. THey point to various examples like White Castle who invented the idea of fast food burger joint but McDonalds is the big daddy now. Apple and Samsung are going through some of that as well. The lesson here for everyone — even tiny startups — is as Scott Anthony once perfectly said (and I paraphrase him): no one remembers who was leading the race midway through, and everyone remembers who finished first. And in order to finish first, a lot has to go right.

So where do companies like HTC go? And sad as it might be, perhaps nowhere. I am going to do my bit to give them some support — I will buy that HTC One, just because it is actually a great little device. It truly is.

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Arrested Development’s return via Netflix is only days away (it will be available on Sunday, May 26th), and fans who have been waiting for years are ready to dive in.

Netflix’s exclusive shows have brought about a new trend of “binge watching” (watching the entire season immediately, as opposed to the traditional one episode per week format), but should we really be doing this to ourselves?

While Arrested Development’s new season will indeed be released all at once, the show’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz, warns that viewers who choose to watch it this way may miss out on some of the fun. In an interview with Wired, he said:

“I think of it more like writing a mini-series than something [for] binge watching… I think that people do sit down and watch it all at once. Personally, I think [that] will be very fatiguing and will lose some of the fun of being able to mull on it. But I think that with the majority of binge watchers, it’s a modified binge watching, just like the majority of novel readers. You know, you don’t read it all at once. But you are in control of when you feel like going back to it… I personally hope people don’t sit and watch it for, you know, 500 minutes or longer.”

Don’t underestimate the years of anticipation leading up to this season. Die hard fans who were outraged by the show’s original cancellation have had to wade through rumor after rumor about the show’s return and a possible movie for a long time. The fact that the show is actually back is still shocking to many. While some may choose to take their time and savor it (leaving some time between episodes), my guess is that many of these fans will want to consume it all as quickly as possible, then of course, consume it over and over again.

That is, if Arrested’s return lives up to expectations and the greatness that made fans fall in love with it oh so long ago. We’ll find out soon enough.

Read Wired’s full interview with Hurwitz here.

Apple has updated an earlier lawsuit filed against Samsung with claims that the Galaxy S4 and its Google Now feature violate two Apple patents covering functions of its own virtual personal assistant, Siri. Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents relayed news of the updated complaint on Wednesday, and he noted that two of the patents — U.S. Patent 8,086,604, and U.S. Patent 6,846,959 — cover technologies related to Siri. Both filings describe a “universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system.” Apple also added three more patents to its earlier complaint that are not related to Siri, according to the report.

Google has launched a new Google Trends feature called “Top Charts,” which show you the top searches by region by month for various categories. It’s similar to the year-end Zeitgeist lists Google provides annually.

So far, you can look at charts for: Actors, Animals, Athletes, Authors, Baseball Players, Baseball Teams, Basketball Players, Basketball Teams, Books, Business People, Car Companies, Cars, Chemical Elements, Cities, Cocktails, Colleges/Universities, Countries/Regions, DJs, Dog Breeds, Drinks, Energy Companies, Fashion Brands, Financial Companies, Foods, Games, Government Bodies, Kids’ TV, Medications, Movies, Musical Artists, People, Politicians, Quick Service Restaurants, Reality Shows, Retail Companies, Scientists, Soccer Players, Soccer Teams, Software Technologies, Songs, Space Objects, Sports Cars, Sports Teams, TV Shows, Teen Pop Artists, US Governors, and Whiskeys.

Each category lets you dive into a top ten list, with information about each subject, including how long they’ve been in the chart, the change by month, and when they peaked. You can also explore interest over time, regional interest and related terms for each subject.

Right now, the feature is only available in the U.S., but Google says more countries are coming soon.