Author: Zach Walton

Google Fiber may be coming to more cities around the country, but the company is still solely focused on building out its current Fiber network in Kansas City. It probably won’t be done there for a while either as more neighboring cities are welcoming Google Fiber with open arms.

Google announced this week that the town of Grandview, Missouri has recently voted in favor of bringing Google Fiber to the city. Grandview is directly South of Kansas City and borders the current Google Fiber buildout plans. It ensures that Google will be able to just keep building down into Grandview from Kansas City.

Just like every other bordering town, however, Grandview will have to wait its turn. Google is still building out Fiber in Kansas City proper, and the company notes that it must plan and engineer the network in Grandview first before bringing Fiber over.

Regardless, it’s an encouraging sign to see more and more cities signing up for Fiber, even if those cities directly border Kansas City. It shows that interest in gigabit Internet is high despite claims to the contrary from incumbent ISPs.

Aside from the buildout around Kansas City, Google Fiber will also be coming to Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah in the future. The latter already has an established Fiber network that Google just bought from the city so it may come there sooner than the planned rollout in Austin.

In an encouraging sign, Google Fiber and other Fiber initiatives around the country have seemingly inspired smaller ISPs to start offering gigabit Internet to their customers. The most recent being a small rural ISP in Vermont offering gigabit speeds to customers for only $35 a month.

Adobe is making headlines this week with its controversial decision to discontinue development of Creative Suite in favor of Creative Cloud, but that’s not all we’re seeing from its annual MAX Conference. ColdFusion, Adobe’s Web development software, is the subject of a recent whitepaper that details where the software is at and where it’s headed in the future.

Adobe sponsored a whitepaper from IDC called “Turning Up the Heat with ColdFusion,” and it’s mostly what you would expect from a company-sponsored analysis of its own software. There’s heaps of praise thrown upon ColdFusion for its ease of use while offering all the tools professionals need to build and scale enterprise grade Web sites.

That’s all fine and dandy, but the whitepaper gets really interesting once it gets into future developments. It provides some early details on where Adobe is heading with future versions of ColdFusion. For ColdFusion Server, Adobe has two new releases on the horizon that will add a number of features and enhancements:

Adobe has discussed the broad outline of the next two releases of ColdFusion server — Splendor and Dazzle. In between releases, the team has continued to work on other aspects. For example, support for the popular Amazon cloud in the form of a Splendor AMI was released in early 2013, providing users with a quick and simplified approach to deploying ColdFusion applications in the Amazon cloud. The key thematic areas of improvements for Splendor include bringing ColdFusion into the era of mobile
application development and support for social applications. Special emphasis is planned for additional security features, building on the significant security work done for release 10 and taking its priorities from the OWASP Top Ten Project. Improved manageability and deployment as well as revamped and new PDF integration functionality are also planned.

For the Dazzle release, expansion of the mobile platform support capabilities and support for multiscreen content are planned. Dazzle is also expected to carry the water for Adobe’s aggressive push into the digital marketing space by introducing deeper Web, mobile, and social analytics functionality. A customizable enterprise video portal is also planned, and capabilities that will enable ColdFusion to run in cloud environments in major cloud platforms are expected in the Dazzle release. Finally, the improvements are expected to be accompanied by a strong focus on security, extending the work done with Splendor and prioritizing mobile security according to the OWASP Mobile Security Project.

As for ColdFusion Builder, Adobe plans to also release two new versions to coincide with the Server releases:

Adobe has also identified key work areas for two future releases of ColdFusion Builder. The Thunder release is expected to play a key role in the end-to-end development workflow for mobile application development as well as provide a professional JavaScript authoring experience. Focus on new developers will be delivered with new workflows around a “getting started” scenario. The following release, code-named Blizzard, is expected to coincide with the Dazzle server release and to feature one-click multiscreen support, deployment support in line with Dev/Ops integration trends, and improved test and debug workflows.

The rest of the whitepaper catalogs the various challenges facing ColdFusion, and how Adobe can turn those challenges into opportunities. It also contains a variety of case studies from various software development houses. You can read up on all of that here.

105-year-old bacon woman sounds like a post-modern art piece, but it actually refers to a sweet grandmother who has found the secret to life – delicious bacon.

Pearl Cantrell is 105-years-old and she really loves bacon. In fact, she eats bacon for every meal. She is also a bacon ambassador among her family and friends encouraging them all to enjoy pork-based meat.

It seems that her love for bacon caught the attention of Oscar Mayer. The company decided to take Cantrell’s love of meat to the next level by giving her what every bacon-loving child has ever wanted – a ride in the fabled Wienermobile. She was driven around town in the vehicle while waving to everybody.

A ride in the Wienermobile wasn’t the only thing Cantrell received though. Oscar Mayer also gave her plenty of bacon so she could continue spreading the bacon gospel throughout her hometown of Richland Springs, Texas.

After the events of the day, Cantrell says that she “will never, ever forget it, as long as I live.” Here’s hoping she lives for many more years so she can continue preaching the joys of bacon.

[h/t: kxan]

The most persistent rumor concerning Windows 8 is that Microsoft would be releasing an update for it later this year called Windows Blue. Those rumors were pretty much confirmed as fact when a Windows Blue preview build was leaked in March. Now Microsoft has finally come out and confirmed that Windows Blue is indeed a thing.

Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President for Windows, announced today at the Wired Business Conference that Windows Blue is the codename for the next major update hitting Windows 8 later this year. In an interview with Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc, Larson-Green gives us an idea of what to expect from Windows Blue:

Windows Blue is a codename for an update that will be available later this year, building on the bold vision set forward with Windows 8 to deliver the next generation of tablets and PCs. It will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem. It will provide more options for businesses, and give consumers more options for work and play. The Windows Blue update is also an opportunity for us to respond to the customer feedback that we’ve been closely listening to since the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT. From a company-wide perspective, Windows Blue is part of a broader effort to advance our devices and services for Microsoft.

Larson-Green’s response is incredibly vague. The preview build that was leaked in March gave us far more information, including some improvements to multitasking and the existence of Internet Explorer 11. Most importantly, the preview builds also point to the return of the Start button and the inclusion of a boot to desktop option.

There are bound to be other improvements coming to Windows Blue that have yet to be revealed. Leaked copies of Windows Blue are incredibly early builds, and are undoubtedly missing features that will be present in the public preview.

By now, you’re well aware that three women were found safe after being held captive in a man’s basement for 10 years in Cleveland, OH. The story (and the unlikely hero) have captured the attention of the nation, but now people are beginning to ask questions. Why couldn’t police find these women after they went missing?

Well, the house in question may help answer that question. The house belonging to the suspect, Ariel Castro, is pretty normal from the outside. Here’s what it looks like in a Google Street view image from 2009:

The house would look pretty normal to any bystander last week, but it takes on a creepier atmosphere now that the truth has come out. It’s actually a little unsettling to think that three young women were being held hostage in the house’s basement as Google’s Street View car drove by in 2009.

Here’s an interactive Street View version for those who want to tour the neighborhood in which the women were thankfully found alive and well:

View Larger Map

Sen. Rob Portman has smoked marijuana. That was the big reveal during the senator’s interview with BuzzFeed Brews on Monday evening. Since then, the video blew up as people are somehow drawn to stories of drug use and politicians.

Of course, Portman doesn’t smoke anymore. That was only during his younger days in the 70s and 80s when BuzzFeed’s John Stanton said the senator looked “a bit like a dirty hippie with long hair.” He didn’t elaborate on if he used the drug more than once. He did, however, talk about his efforts as a senator to stop drug use in Ohio and around the nation.

Marijuana use among politicians is a popular question to ask during interviews as it always draws a humorous or awkward response. One of the more famous was when former President Bill Clinton was asked if he smoked pot during a 1992 interview. He admitted that he did, but claimed that he didn’t inhale.

[h/t: ABC News]

For years, Adobe has sold its professional design software under the Creative Suite banner. There were hints that was going to change when Adobe stopped selling CS6 at retail, but the company has moved to kill Creative Suite faster than anybody expected.

Adobe announced at its annual MAX conference that it will no longer be releasing new versions of its software under the Creative Suite banner. Instead, all future updates and features will be delivered via Creative Cloud. In other words, those who buy Creative Suite 6 will only get just that while all new features to Photoshop and the like will only be available via Creative Cloud.

The move to Creative Cloud, which is a subscription service, has upset some members of the Adobe user community. The complaints were excellently captured in a new video released by our favorite Taiwanese animators at NMA:

Adobe says that it’s moving to a subscription-only model because it will allow them to deliver updates to users at a faster rate:

“We launched Creative Cloud a year ago and it has been a runaway success,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “By focusing our energy — and our talented engineers — on Creative Cloud, we’re able to put innovation in our members’ hands at a much faster pace.”

To convince current CS6 users to move to Creative Cloud, Adobe is offering discounts on the subscription service for a limited time. You can check out all the different Creative Cloud plans here.

In its current state, Google Glass is incredibly expensive. Those who signed up for the Google Glass Explorers program last year had to fork over $1,500 to get a crack at the device. The price will come down when it’s made available to consumers next year, but a new survey suggests that the price will have to come down a lot before consumers bite.

Last week, TrendBlog posed a question to its audience – “How much are you willing to pay for Google Glass?” The respondents were given a wide variety of price options ranging from below $100 to more than $2,000. The end result found that most were willing to pay near the bottom of the price spectrum.

Overall, 48 percent of respondents would pay between $200 to $300 for Google Glass when it launches next year. Going lower or higher than that causes interest to drop dramatically with only 13 percent willing to pay less than $100 with only one percent willing to pay between $1,200 and $2,000. Unsurprisingly, nobody would pay more than $2,000.

How Much Are People Willing To Pay For Google Glass by trendblog.net

Pricing is incredibly important, especially when it comes to consumer electronics. Microsoft has learned this lesson the hard way as Windows 8 PCs have failed to take off partly due to the high cost. Apple was able to sell high priced electronics because it was able to convince consumers that its products contained exceptional software value. Google will have to do the same if Google Glass is priced above $300.

YouTube popularity is an incredibly fickle thing. A video can be incredibly popular for a day, and then be buried into obscurity the next. To further help chart this ebb and flow, YouTube has launched a new trend measurement tool.

YouTube announced today that it has completed work on a Trends Map. As the name suggests, the map tracks video popularity by gender, age, geographic location and by the number of views or shares. Such a tool sounds incredibly interesting, but looking into it makes you realize that almost everybody is watching the same videos.

Looking at both genders among all ages, the video with the most amount of shares is the True Blood season 6 trailer:

The above trailer dominates shares among pretty much every demographic except for the 13-17 age range. Even then, only males are turning their gaze towards the following clip from Family Guy:

Moving over to views tells a different story altogether. By far, the most popular video across the country at the moment is the aftermath of a water polo match that went viral over the weekend:

Once again, gender has played a role in popularity as women are drawn more to the following video from a child abuse prevention group and its new ad:

The YouTube Trends Map is pretty fascinating, and it could be a useful tool for those looking to jump on board the next viral hit before it really takes off.

YouTube notes that the Trends Map is currently only available in the U.S., but it sounds like it will be adding support for other countries in the future.

Mother’s Day is quickly approaching. Do you have all the preparations ready to celebrate the most important woman in your life? If not, Google’s got your back.

Google announced today that it has launched a special Mother’s Day page to help sons and daughters everywhere plan an extra special day for their mothers. The page includes a gift guide (with the obligatory link to Google Offers), a guide to local florists, and an offer to send a tech care package to help your technologically deficient mother get on the Internet so you can chat it up in a Google+ hangout.

While it may reek of corporate shilling, Google is onto something here. You really should get your mother something nice on Sunday. That something nice can be as simple as a phone call (or a Google+ hangout) to tell her how much you really appreciate her.

If you want to get more creative than a phone call or a hug, however, Google will be hosting a number of events this week to share some ideas. The first will be an AskMen sponsored Google+ hangout with the editors of Parenting.com. They will be suggesting “creative ideas” to make this Mother’s Day “a day your mom won’t forget.” Google has also set up a Mother’s Day Guide Google+ community for people to share ideas and stories with each other.

Star Wars is a pretty big deal. The video games based on the classic franchise is an even bigger deal. Some of the best video games ever made have come from the franchise, and now Disney has signed a deal to put Star Wars in the hands of EA.

As per the terms of the deal, all of the core titles in the Star Wars universe will be made and published by EA. The publisher said that it has three of its top development houses – DICE, Bioware and Visceral – all working on Star Wars games now. There have been no specific announcements, but people are already speculating what we might see from these developers.

Gamers seem to be especially excited at the prospect of a DICE-developed Star Wars game. DICE is best known as the developers of the excellent Battlefield franchise, and some see their involvement as a sign that Star Wars: Battlefront III could soon be a reality.

Making a new Battlefront game wouldn’t actually be all that difficult as Free Radical was working on a new entry in the series before they went bankrupt and became Crytek UK. Disney probably still owns the assets created by Free Radical and DICE could use those assets as a jumping off point for its own Battlefront game. To get a taste of what Battlefront III may look like, here’s some leaked alpha footage courtesy of Reddit:

BF3 alphaNov from Blue_Monkey on Vimeo.

As for Bioware, its Star Wars games could go anywhere. Some are hoping that Bioware will make a new Knights of the Old Republic game, but others feel that the studio may make a Star Wars game more in line with its recent Mass Effect series. Either way, fans are pretty happy that Star Wars will be going back to the main Bioware studio after many felt that Bioware Austin botched The Old Republic MMO.

Visceral is the wild card of the bunch as the studio is most well known for the Dead Space franchise. It’s hard to imagine that the studio would make a horror-themed Star Wars game, let alone an M-rated Star Wars game. The studio does have some experience in making action games, however, so it’s possible that we could get a third person action game in the vein of the classic Jedi Knight series.

With all this speculation, fans are understandably torn over whether EA was a good choice to sign a deal with. The reactions on Twitter say just as much:

The Last of Us looks more promising every time we see it. The developers at Naughty Dog may just be onto something here, and it becomes harder to wait for its June release. In the meantime, Sony is drip feeding us new trailers to keep fans satiated.

In the latest trailer for The Last of Us, Naughty Dog discusses the inspiration for the game’s more monstrous enemies – the Infected. The name may not be unique, but the creative process that led to their creation certainly is. It’s not everyday that you see enemies based upon a real fungus that can take control of an animal’s mind.

The Last of Us will launch June 14 exclusively for the PS3.

We reported early last month that Disney shut down LucasArts and canceled all the games that the developer was working on. At the time, it was suggested that Disney would farm out future Star Wars games to outside publishers and developers. As it turns out, those Star Wars games will be going through only one publisher.

EA announced today that it has signed an exclusive deal with Disney to be the sole publisher of Star Wars games for the foreseeable future. The exclusivity deal only covers games targeting a core gamer audience with Disney’s own mobile division overseeing all casual and mobile titles.

“Every developer dreams of creating games for the Star Wars universe,” said EA Labels president Frank Gibeau in a statement. “Three of our top studios will fulfill that dream, crafting epic adventures for Star Wars fans. DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”

The three above mentioned studios should make Star Wars fans giddy with glee. All three are respected developers with a proven track record so any Star Wars games out of them should be good. DICE may even finally finish Battlefront III – a game many have been requesting for years now.

As for BioWare, a Star Wars game made by the core team could potentially be exciting as the studio also made Knights of the Old Republic – a title many consider to be the best Star Wars game ever made. Some may be hesitant of such a title, however, especially after BioWare’s The Old Republic failed to live up to the hype. The MMO was made by BioWare Austin, though, so some may be willing to give the main BioWare studio a chance, especially if its Star Wars game is similar to its recent Mass Effect trilogy.

[h/t: Kotaku]

Are YouTube subscription fees almost upon us? A recent report suggests that the oft rumored feature is soon to be announced.

The Daily Mail reports that Google will introduce a YouTube subscription fee this week. The new initiative will allow channels to monetize their content with direct contributions from fans, instead of relying upon ad revenue.

The current report suggests that Google will add 25 to 50 channels to the initial rollout of its subscription service. It will also reportedly cost as little as $2 a month per channel, and doing so will provide a few perks to the subscribers. The biggest, of course, is exclusive content only available to subscribers. The videos will also reportedly be ad-free.

The current rumors, however, don’t address what YouTube intends to offer to non-subscribers. Will subscriber content only be available to those who pay? Or will YouTube allow non-subscribers to watch some content with the support of advertising?

Alongside channel subscriptions, previous rumors also suggested that YouTube would begin monetizing live events. In other words, users could pay a small fee to watch major live events, like the Red Bull Stratos Jump from last year.

There’s still too many variables to even think about with a platform as big as YouTube. The announcement is expected to come sometime this week though. We’ll continue to keep an eye for any such announcement, and bring you all the details as soon as it happens.

A little over a week after a young boy shot and killed his younger sister, another similar tragedy has occurred after a teen shot his 6-year-old sister in the chest. The difference is that this young girl survived.

The Sun-Sentinel reports that a 13-year-old boy shot his 6-year-old sister in the chest at their Oakland Park home over the weekend. The weapon was a handgun in which the boy found. It was later revealed that there was no supervision at home at the time of the shooting.

The accident was reported by Justin Latourette, a neighbor, after he heard a gunshot a little before 7 p.m. He recounted the scene of when they were wheeling the young giri into an ambulance:

“Her shirt was bloody, and you could see through a piece of gauze that she had a hole in her chest above the heart. Her eyes were wide open in a blank stare, like she was in shock. I’ll never forget that look.”

Thankfully, the young girl who has now been identified as Angela Divin is said to be improving after she was listed as critical.

‘Sex superbug’ may sound like a cheesy teen sex comedy from the late 90s, but it’s no laughing matter. It’s in fact a drug-resistant strain of the STD gonorrhea that has people around the country worried.

It was reported last week that a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea was found in two people in Hawaii. The finding led people to assume that it was the same ‘sex superbug’ that has been found to be immune to all forms of antibiotics. Fortunately, the Hawaiian Health Department says the case of gonorrhea it found is different from the ‘sex superbug’ strain found elsewhere.

Despite it being a different strain, the emerge of a gonorrhea that’s immune to medication should have people concerned. For years, the sexually transmitted disease was on the decline thanks to antibiotics and medication. The number of infections may rise, however, as the disease has evolved immunities to the medication used to treat it.

Peter Whiticir of the State Department of Health’s STD/AIDs Prevention Control branch confirmed that the the Hawaiian ‘sex superbug’ is, in fact, not the dreaded strain that’s completely immune to all drugs, but he does say that the current news helps remind people that these diseases are evolving.

“There is no multi-drug super resistant superbug yet in Hawaii or the United States. We don’t have the superbug in Hawaii that I repeat again, but I think it does raise people’s consciousness that gonorrhea is out there, there are new strains that are developing and evolving and we need to be aware of that and protect ourselves.”

Even if its not the dreaded ‘sex superbug,’ gonorrhea can still evolve to a point where it becomes one. As such, health officials fear that such a form of gonorrhea could be worse than AIDs. The Center for Disease Control has even asked Congress for $50 million in funding to research new treatment for gonorrhea infections just in case things go South.

Even if you have no intention of catching gonorrhea, it’s always advisable to use safe sex. You should also never be afraid to discuss STDs with any potential partner.

[h/t: WTVM]
[Image: WebMD]

The season finale of The Walking Dead didn’t go over that well with some fans and critics, but there’s hope that the next season will be better. Everybody’s favorite Taiwanese animators at NMA hope so too and have put together a short live-action trailer that follows the exploits of Glenn Rhee’s unnamed sister.

Besides the hilariously animated zombies, NMA might be onto something here. A spin-off Web series that explores previously unknown characters in The Walking Dead universe could potentially be a hit. It would also be a good way to keep people interested in the franchise in between seasons since the latest game was pretty much a disaster.

Google Glass has some people spooked. They think that Glass turns everybody into a surveillance cyborg that constantly violates their privacy. Fittingly, a group called Stop the Cyborgs has been outspoken on the privacy implications of Glass, but now some are calling for a blanket ban.

In a We The People petition submitted on Friday, a man from Seattle, Washington is requesting that the government “Ban Google Glass from use in the USA until clear limitations are placed to prevent indecent public surveillance.” As the title suggets, the three people who have signed it thus far are scared of the privacy implications:

Google Glass is a new twist on technology which hasn’t had clearly stated limits on the locations in US communities where it can and cannot be used. In order to protect our communities we need limitations to prevent indecent public surveillance of our friends, children, and families.

It is hard to prevent it because the hardware gives no notification that it is recording an individual at any given time.

I think most can agree that hardware like Glass shouldn’t be allowed in certain places. It’s totally reasonable to ban its use at bars, strip clubs and other places that respect client confidentiality. That being said, the last sentence is totally false as Glass does notify people that it’s recording. The only thing is that it those notifications can be turned off if the hardware is rooted, but doing so will be beyond the capabilities of the average user when it launches sometime in the next year.

Besides, most people won’t be indiscriminately monitoring you with Google Glass. They’ll be too busy taking selfies in the shower.

[h/t: TechDirt]