Author: Josh Wolford

As we told you on Wednesday, Apple’s App Store just hit a huge milestone – 50 billion total app downloads (excluding re-downloads and updates, of course). Today, they made it official with a release that mentions a couple other interesting facts.

Count one second. Good. In that time, 800 apps were downloaded from Apple’s App Store. That pace means that every month, Apple now sees more that 2 billion app downloads.

“Apple would like to thank our incredible customers and developers for topping 50 billion apps downloaded,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over nine billion dollars to developers. We’re absolutely floored to cross this milestone in less than five years.”

In honor of this milestone, Apple gave away a prize for the lucky person who just happened to download number 50,000,000,000. His name is Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio, and the lucky app was Say the Same Thing, a word game that lets you and a friend bridge word gaps to find common ground. Today, he’s the proud owner of a $10,000 App Store gift card.

This isn’t the first time Apple has done this sort of promotion for a big milestone. Back in March of 2012, when Apple hit 25 billion app downloads, they gave away another $10,000 gift card to a Chinese man who downloaded the popular puzzle game Where’s My Water.

Apple says that the App Store currently boasts over 850,000 apps. They’ve come a long way from the 500 that they started out with way back in 2008.

If you were wondering, the most popular apps of all time out of those 50 billion downloaded are Angry Birds (paid) and Facebook (free).

One of the funniest minutes on late night is back for its 9th installment, and we couldn’t be happier. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreations reading tweets from young female celebrities.

In this episode, TV’s Ron Swanson reads tweets from such starlets as Katy Perry, Miranda Cosgrove, and Jennette McCurdy.

If you’re interested, there’s a lot more where that came from.

[TeamCoco]

Google says they want to help you tackle your digital to-do’s as quickly as possible, and to this end they’ve added some new quick action buttons to Gmail that let you interact with important emails right from the inbox, without ever opening the email.

Starting today, Google will begin to roll out a few new quick actions inside Gmail, including event invite responses that link to Google Calendar, places reviews that let you rate a restaurant, for instance, right inside Gmail, and one-click actions like confirming a product or site registration via email.

“These buttons appear next to certain types of messages in your inbox and let you take action on an email without ever having to open it. For example, you can RSVP to your friend’s party invitation or rate that restaurant you went to last night all right from the inbox. You’ll be checking things off that to-do list in no time,” says Google.

Another quick action involves check-ins for flights. Although the quick action button in this scenario takes you outside of Gmail for confirmation, flight emails now feature a useful card with all the pertinent info – time of departure, terminal and gate, estimated arrival time, and whether of not the flight is on time.

Google is also asking developers to add custom actions to their emails, and they say that they hope to add many more action in the near future. Developers can go here for more info. These new actions should hit your Gmail inbox in the coming weeks.

If you’re curious about more new stuff from Google (and there’s a lot of it), check out all the news from Wednesday’s I/O conference keynote.

Nearly two weeks ago, Apple announced that they were just about to hit the 50 billion milestone in terms of apps downloaded in the App Store. Today, the company finally hit the mark.

Apple hit 40 billion app downloads back in January, so that means that they tacked on 10 billion downloads in around four months. If that rate hold with a bit of acceleration (which it currently is), Apple will hit 100 billion app downloads by the end of next year or sooner. It’s a truly impressive figure.

But it’s not that far out ahead of Google’s Android. Today, at the Google I/O conference, Google announced that Google Play has seen 48 billion app installs, with 2.5 billion installs in the last month alone.

That part about the “grand prize winner” mentioned above? Well, that references the fact that Apple is giving out a big prize in celebration of hitting 50 billion. The person who was lucky enough to download the 50 billionth app will receive a $10,000 App Store gift card.

This isn’t the first time that Apple has offered such a prize. In March of 2012, when Apple hit 25 million downloaded apps, they gave away another $10,000 App Store gift card. The winner was a man from China who downloaded the puzzle game Where’s My Water.

Back in April of 2011, YouTube launched YouTube Live, which offered live streaming capabilities to a select number of partners. Today, they’re announcing a massive expansion of the program which will allow tons of new channels to live stream content as they wish.

Starting today, all YouTube channels in good standing (you know, following the YouTube Community Guidelines) with over 1,000 subscribers are eligible for live streaming. If you want to know if you are eligible, simply check your account features page. If you’re eligible, you’ll see an “enable” button and there you’ll be able to sign up. YouTube says that live streaming capabilities will officially come to these channels in the following weeks.

Here’s what YouTube has to say about what content creators will get with the YouTube Live expansion:

YouTube Live allows you to offer your audience a great viewing experience, with great streaming quality and instant scalability and reliability. Here are some key features:

• You get real-time transcoding in the cloud, so you only need to send us your highest quality stream and we make it instantly available in all resolutions and device formats
• You can show multiple camera angles, add closed captions, and insert ads and slates
• Viewers can watch the live stream from any device, get the best quality constantly adjusting to their Internet connection, and can skip back and forth in the live stream

Last month, YouTube for iOS finally got live streaming. And last week, YouTube pulled the curtain back on their long-rumored paid channels. Only a few select partners currently have access to those paid channels at launch, but in the future you can see how expanded live streaming and paid channel subscriptions could prove an interesting match.

If you’re still looking to add a streaming music service to your collection of services (which, admittedly, could be pretty massive by now), Google wants to throw their hat in the ring. Today, Google launched Google Play Music All Access, which is their new subscription music service that puts millions of tracks at your fingertips, and cozies them up to all of your existing music to produce recommendations. Google says that All Access is all about music discovery.

They’re not lying – it’s very heavy on the discovery. But more on that later.

It’s now live, available at music.google.com. The first thing you’ll be prompted to do upon arrival is sign up for the free trial. Google is offering a 30-day free trial, after that the service will be $9.99 a month (the same as Spotify’s premium service). But if you sign up for a free trial before June 30th, Google will knock two bucks off that price. Not bad. When you sign up for the trial (via Google Wallet, but you won’t be charged anything right now), you then be prompted to upload your music to Google Play using Music Manager. Google tells you that All Access is “even better when you combine your collection with ours.”

The first thing you’ll see is the “Listen Now” section. Google wasn’t kidding when they said at the I/O conference that it would be a true mix of your own music and all of the other music available via All Access. At first, it looks a bit confusing, but you quickly realize that it’s simply made up of a bunch of tiles – each tile representing something different. One tile may suggest an album or track or even a playlist because you recently played it. Right next to that tile, another may suggest a new release based on what you’ve been listening to. Another tile will suggest that you start a radio station based on a song you’ve played.

Google says that the Listen Now section will improve the more you listen, as it will learn to surface better stuff based on your tastes.

The “Explore” section is another tool for discovering music, albeit it slightly less-focused on your own personal library and interest. Sure, there’s a “recommendation” section, but it’s not as intensive as the “listen now” section. Two other tabs that help you discover new music inside Explore are “featured” and “new releases.”

The featured section shows you featured playlists, top albums, and top songs from across the Google Play network.

And the new releases section is pretty self-explanatory. The Explore tab is also where you can browse music by genre. Google currently suggests 22 different genres, which when clicked on open up options for sub-genres. For instance, if I click on Alternative/Indie, I can then click on ’80s Alternative, Emo/Hardcore, or Neo-Folk. Within each genre you’re given featured playlists, top albums, key albums (the classics in that genre for instance Radiohead’s Kid A), and top new albums.

From anywhere in the service, just click on an album to open up it’s album page. From there, you can begin playing tracks, and get information on it.

Also, you can always just play any song that you see by clicking the play button. If it’s on an album, it’ll just start playing the first track on the album.

As you can see above, there are buttons to “add to my library,” which puts the album alongside all of your owned music in your library, and “play radio.”

Radio is one of the features that Google seemed really excited by at the I/O conference. With Google Music Radio, all you have to do is base it off of one song, and Google will generate a never-ending playlist of related tracks – not exactly a breakthrough technology within the streaming music service world. But one cool thing about the playlists are that they fully customizable, as you can click and drag to reorder them however you please. Plus, you can play any track in the station whenever you want.

Clicking on the “Radio” tab on the left-hand side accesses all of your created radio stations, plus gives you some suggested stations.

Artist pages looks nice, an feature bios, top songs, albums, and related artists:

Very early, probably misguided and subject to change thoughts:

Look, there are other streaming music services that offer millions of songs ready to play at the click of a button. Google Music All Access looks to be at least a competent service by this criteria, if not better than that. Time will tell as you search through artists to see what’s available and what isn’t. Google has major labels as partners in the venture, so I think we’ll be good in that department.

The “Listen Now” section is probably the most notable feature of the service so far. The way that Google interweaves your personal music library with all of the other music available through All Access is nice, and could lead to some good discoveries. Mainly, Google says that it will help remove the paralyzing “what the hell to listen to now” problem.

One of the major strikes that it has is the lack of a free, ad-supported option. You’re either all-in or all-out with that $9.99 per month fee. And even the free trial requires a credit card signup. I feel that many users will be wary of that.

But it’s worth a try, and with the free trial why not? Plus, if you sign up before June 30th, you can get All Access for $7.99 a month. Give it a try now.

Today at the Google I/O conference, the company announced their long-rumored new steaming music service called Google Play Music All Access.

It’s built on the concept of music discovery, with an “explore” section with personalized suggestions, featured content, and new releases. You can also search music based on 22 genres, each with curated playlists. There’s also a “Listen Now” section with even more recommendations.

You can turn anything you’re listening to into it’s own radio station, filled with related tracks. You can reorder tracks in the curated radio station, look ahead to what’s coming up, and more.

“It’s Radio without rules,” said Google’s Chris Yerga.

With one tap, you can add any song or album to personal library, so that your owned music mixes with the music available on All Access.

It’ll run you $9.99 a month in the U.S., and there’s a 30-day free trial – but if you start a trial by June 30th, it’s only $7.99 a month. Launching today in U.S., it will roll out in additional countries later.

Google didn’t mention its label partners at the conference, but reports indicate that Universal and Sony are now both on board. Of course, the streaming music service will compete with the likes of Spotify, Rdio, and even Pandora with the curated radio features. But unlike a service like Spotify, for instance, Google Music All Access doesn’t offer a free, ad-supported tier.

More to come…

If the internet seems a bit quieter today, it’s probably because the initial rush has died down from Daft Punk’s early release of their new album Random Access Memories. Boy, that was a hell of a Monday.

While you’ve been listening to the new album two, three, four, maybe a dozen times since then, redditor fkobbe has been doing something magical. What happens when you sync Random Access Memories with Daft Punk’s 2066 film Electroma (which didn’t originally feature any Daft Punk music)? ELECTR.A.M., that’s what.

[F Kobbe via reddit]

How do you get people talking about your new brand of bug spray? For Orphea and their ad agency, all it took was a little creative thinking, a large billboard, and a sticky surface.

All they had to do was apply transparent glue to a designated section of the billboard, so that any bugs caught on it would appear to be trapped in the bug spray’s path. After a few days, nearly 230,000 insects gave their lives for the sake of advertising. Or, as Publicis Italy calls it, preventing 230,000 insects from bothering anyone else.

Cool? Imaginative? Disgusting? Yes, yes, and yes.

[h/t PSFK]

WLIIA fans, rejoice! The CW has just unveiled the first promo clip for the new season of the classic improv show, which is slated to kick off this summer.

The CW revival of the series, which started in the late 90′s and ran for 8 seasons on ABC, brings back Ryan Stiles, Wayne Brady, and Colin Mochrie – but has replaced the host. In the new version comedian Aisha Tyler is filling in for Drew Carey. The new series will feature a “special guest” for each episode, and will consist of ten 30-minute shows.

Impressions? Well, Colin and Ryan look a bit older, but other than that the performers don’t seem to have lost a step – even when they’re being forced to use 90210 as source material. And Laura Hall is back!

Check it out:

As you may know, Arizona Senator John McCain has sponsored a bill that would take on cable and satellite TV providers by forcing a new “a la carte” system for consumers to pick and choose which channels they want to pay for. Of course, consumers now pay over a hundred dollars a month for hundreds of channels – many of which they never watch. McCain argues that it’s simply becoming too expensive, and that forcing people to pay for channels they don’t want is wrong and must be curtailed.

McCain recently spoke to Bloomberg TV about his new bill, the TV Consumer Freedom Act, which aims to “allow multichannel video programming distributors to provide video programming to subscribers on an a la carte basis, and for other purposes.”

In the interview, McCain likens the current system of subscription-based television to a restaurant with a menu full of pricey packages:

“When I go into a restaurant…I’m given a menu and I can select from it. And the waiter doesn’t come up and say ‘which package do you want, of different courses?’ Now there may be a menu there that you can select, that has entree, appetizers, etc., but you don’t have to pay for things you don’t order. Now, because these people have monopolies…and why don’t restaurants do this? Because other restaurants don’t so therefore they can’t force you to.”

McCain goes on to discuss the efforts against his legislation.

“Are we gonna win? I dunno. I’ll tell you, their lobbyists, when I testified this morning, they were there in their $500 dollar suits…It’s gonna be awful hard to beat them, but they look nice though,” said McCain.

Check out the interview below:

Rapper Eminem left nearly DEAD after being stabbed 4 times in NYC!

That’s the message circulating around Facebook right now. The post claims that the whole thing was caught on surveillance video, and offers a link to said video.

Luckily for Eminem, the whole thing is just another Facebook hoax. One that if followed, will simply lead you down a path of survey scams, info phishing, and perpetuation of the scam via blanket Facebook shares.

Here’s what the hoax post looks like. It features what appears to be a white male, with multiple knife wounds on his back. I guess it could be Eminem, right?

Clicking on the link takes you to a site called amazingvid.biz, which features a video embed and what appears to be a Facebook comments plugin. But when you click to play the video, it asks you to share it with your Facebook friends before clicking play again. And those Facebook comments? Fake and unclickable. They’re simply there in an attempt to give legitimacy to the scam.

This Facebook scam is simply a rehash of a scam from 2011 that used the exact same image of a white male with his back sliced up to convince Facebook users that Justin Bieber had been stabbed “by a crazed fan outside an NYC nightclub.”

Kentucky Kicks Ass. Seriously. It’s full of history, horses, mountains, rolling hills, great food, better bourbon, beautiful women, and we gave you George Clooney.

But here in Kentucky, we also produced Trevor Runyon, whose overnight grocery party for one would make Barney Stinson rethink his criteria for legen…wait for it…

A Mount Washington ValuMarket manager found an odd scene when he opened up the store on Monday morning. Little did he know, but he was gazing upon one of the most epic parties one could ever throw for himself.

Here’s a brief list of everything Trevor Runyon reportedly did on Sunday night, according to WAVE 3 News:

• Used (note, used, not necessarily consumed) 57 cans of Reddi-Wip whipped cream.
• Cooked and consumed 6 steaks
• Smoked an untold amount of cigarettes
• Ate an untold amount of shrimp
• Ate at least part of a birthday cake
• Peed himself and found replacement clothes
• Fell asleep in the rafters of the store

Apparently, Runyon was able to sneak into the grocery store at closing time on Sunday. He’s been taken into custody, after the fire department was called to get him out of the rafters. That’s one nitrous party for the books.

…DARY.

Over the past year or so, Foursquare has been going through a major transformation – well, at least a major improvement. What they’ve been doing is making both small and large tweaks to turn the focus of the service toward local search and discovery. A company that started as a simple check-in app is now competing with the likes of Yelp, Google Places, and Urbanspoon.

You may recall a major app update last month with a stated goal to “reveal more of the world around you the moment you open up the app.” Then, a few weeks later, Foursquare completely redesigned their location pages to make them more photo-rich and informative. If you have increased traffic to your location pages (which Foursquare does) and want to continue to tout yourself as the go-to place for information on locations, you have to keep making those pages better.

Today, Foursquare is taking another step in that direction with an expansion of menus on restaurant pages.

“It’s a Saturday night and you’re meeting friends for dinner. You’ve narrowed the choices down to two popular Italian spots – but how to choose? Starting today, you’ll see more menus in Foursquare, so you can decide given what restaurants have to offer. In addition to SinglePlatform, we’ve also partnered with Locu (a company that shares our mission of helping restaurants and local businesses connect with customers),” says Foursquare.

Locu is a web-wide menu platform founded in 2011. Last year, it received $4 million in Series A funding, fyi. Foursquare has partnered with SinglePlatform on their menus since the launch of the “Explore” feature in January of 2012.

Right now, it’s just menus for restaurants – but Foursquare says that will eventually grow into price and service lists for a variety of businesses. That includes hair salons, gyms, dry cleaners, etc.

Of all the payments processed using Square nearly 50% take place on an iPad, and the average payment volume processed by iPad users doubles that of smartphone Square users. With that in mind, Square has just unveiled some new hardware for the iPad-using crowd.

It’s called the Square Stand, and it turns your iPad into a true point of sale system.

“Local business owners take as a given that they need an ugly, slow, expensive, and complicated point of sale system cluttering their counter,” said Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Square. “Square Stand is elegant, fast, affordable, and easy to use. Whether you’re selling cupcakes, cardigans, or cappuccinos, running your business with Square has never been easier.”

Square Stand lets you attach your iPad 2 or 3 (versions with lighting connectors coming soon) to a adjustable stand, complete with an attached card reader. This, of course, replaces the old method of attached the smaller Square Reader to your iPad. The Stand can be secured to your countertop, and when it is all said and done it becomes a more secure, permanent, and faster POS system for your business – at least according to Square. But there’s no arguing that this new piece of hardware would make processing a high volume of transactions much less of a headache.

Ready to use in minutes, Square Stand works with Square Register, the free point of sale application, and gives merchants access to real-time analytics, robust reporting, and a delightful experience for their customers. Square Stand features an integrated card reader that keeps information secure from swipe to payment, and easily connects to the hardware accessories businesses need, including a receipt printer, kitchen printer, cash drawer, and barcode scanner.

Square Stand will run you $299. You can pre-order it starting today, and it will be available to purchase in Best Buys on July 8th.

Last month, Square launched a big update to Square Register to make it much more useful to restaurants.

It appears that professional escorts have been using LinkedIn to make professional connections, and the company wants to put a stop to that. LinkedIn has just updated their terms of service and user agreement to add a good amount of new language, but one particular clause is rather interesting. Apparently, LinkedIn doesn’t want you using the service for “escort services or prostitution,” even if such activity is legal in your area.

Here’s the relevant addition to LinkedIn’s terms:

Upload, post, email, InMail, transmit or otherwise make available or initiate any content that, even if it is legal where you are located, create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution.

Making the waters murkier, you can actually endorse users for “prostitution” on LinkedIn:

Other skills and expertise “related” to prostitution that LinkedIn offers are “extortion,” “rape,” “forgery,” “robbery” and more criminal activities. It’s clear that these “skills” are not there to endorse the commission of said activities, but for fileds related to those activities like law or social work. But still, you can technically be endorsed for prostitution on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has always banned the promotion of illegal activities on their network, but it appears that they felt they needed to clarify their terms for legal activities that they find unsavory.

“In the old [user agreement], we had it covered by saying that one could not use a profile to promote anything ‘unlawful,’” a LinkedIn rep told Mashable. “However, in some countries, that activity actually is lawful.”

Sorry, escorts. It looks like you’ll need to find another way to make new contacts.

Google’s autocomplete results are not suggestions straight from the brains of Googlers, pecking away on their keyboards. When you type something and Google attempts to finish your thought for you, it’s simply throwing up the most popular searches for that string of word. It’s an algorithm, not manually determined – everything that appears has been previously typed by another Google user.

But that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from going after Google when they don’t like what they see appearing next to their names or businesses. And sometimes successfully, I might add. The latest case to spring from a disputed autocomplete result comes from Germany and is bad news for Google.

A German court has ruled that Google must manually remove autocomplete results if they are determined to be defamatory. This wide ruling could have an effect on not only cases in Germany, but in other countries who could use the decision as a model.

As the AP reports, the case stems from an unidentified plaintiff, only known as “R.S,” whose company sells nutritional supplements. R.S. filed a complaint when they saw that Google autocomplete results associated the name of the company with “fraud” and “Scientology” – both of which they considered defamatory.

A lower court dismissed R.S.’ claim, but the Federal Court of Justice overruled. According to the ruling, Google isn’t being directed to turn of autocomplete or even interfere preemptively, only required to eliminate defamatory autocomplete suggestions when they are brought to the company’s attention.

This isn’t the only case in Germany involving Google’s autocomplete to make headlines. Last year, former German First Lady Bettina Wulff claimed that Google destroyed her reputation with their autocomplete suggestions. Wulff, who has battled rumors that she worked as an escort prior to marrying former German president Christian Wulff, has her name associated with “escort” and “prostitute” in multiple languages in Google autocomplete.

Of course, those suggestions only exist because of the high volume of Google searches. But this new ruling could affect that case, which is still pending.

In April, Google lost a case in Japan over their autocomplete function. A man sued Google over suggestions relating to criminal activity – activity he denied. A Japanese court ruled that Google must alter their results and they also issued a 300,000 yen fine (roughly $3,100).

Google has also faced autocomplete complaints in France.

Closed captioning has been helping deaf and hearing impaired television and movie fans for decades – but the technology has mostly been limited to the home viewing experience. Going out the the theater has traditionally posed a problem for those who require captioning, since theater companies cannot accomodate their needs by putting captioning on all their films, for all to see.

But now, new technology is helping people with these special needs enjoy the theater experience. It’s starting with Regal Cinemas, who by the end of May hope to have over 6,000 of their theaters equipped with new closed-captioning glasses.

The system is called Sony Entertainment Access Glasses, and they look like bulkier 3D glasses. What they do is project captions, which to the viewer appear to float about 10 feet or so from their eyes. This way, deaf moviegoers can watch the film and read the dialogue more conveniently. Previous systems for this have not fared so well.

The system can also help both blind and hearing impaired moviegoers. Headphones can be plugged into the receiver to boost the volume of the films for the hard of hearing. And the track can be switched to give a play-by-play of what’s happening on the screen, visually, for blind patrons.

Any theater that offers the glasses should have every movie available for captioning, says Regal.

Regal first began introducing the glasses to American moviegoers in April of 2012. Earlier this month, they announced a milestone – more than 400 theaters equipped with the tech. And, as I mentioned before, they’re planning a huge expansion in the next few weeks.

Regal Cinemas CEO Randy Smith Jr, who has a deaf son, describes the meaning of the accessibility to NPR:

“I’ve attempted to enjoy a movie with my son so many times over the last 26 years, but to no avail. After watching a movie I would try to discuss it with him. The comments he would make would in no way relate to the plot of the movie and at one point he finally confessed that as he watched the screen, he simply made up the story in his head. He didn’t really know what was going on. The fact that I can take my son to a movie when he visits at the end of June is literally bringing tears to my eyes. It would seem silly to most people but I would imagine you understand what it feels like.”