Category: News

Popular social media network Pinterest updated their Android app today adding some new features to help improve interactions between users. Mirroring a change made to their web based site, Pinterest will now alert you via a push notification whenever someone likes, comments, or repins your stuff. The app will also let you “mention” friends in comments, a feature that is popular with other social media networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. The app will also start to provide users with suggestions for search terms as they type in the search box. Hit the break for some screenshots of the new features and download links.

If you are interested in giving Pinterest a try, use the link below to grab it for your Android device.

Google Play Download Link

Come comment on this article: Pinterest app for Android receives update

Iron Man 3 kicked off the summer movie blockbuster season with a huge opening weekend. One theater in Missouri decided, as many theaters do, to provide a little extra entertainment to die-hard moviegoers who showed up for opening night. Unfortunately, the theater’s management failed to realize that patrons might be a bit worried about fake guns in a movie theater given the Aurora, Colorado shooting that took place during the opening weekend of last year’s big super hero blockbuster, The Dark Knight Rises.

According to an Associated Press report, the Goodrich Capital 8 Theatres in Jefferson City, Missouri hired cosplayers to dress up as Marvel characters, including some dressed as members of S.H.I.E.L.D., the paramilitary organization tasked with combating superhuman threats in the Marvel universe. One of the costume-wearers was reported to have carried a prop assault rifle. Complaints were made, and the Jefferson City police were called.

The theater has now made a formal apology through its Facebook page. Capital 8 claims that the incident was not a publicity stunt, and that in the future it will “take the necessary steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” The statement, in full:

(Image courtesy Capital 8 Theatres Facebook page)

When it comes to winning enterprise workloads, delivering the right services is obviously table stakes, but providing credible support and metrics is also critical. That’s one reason Amazon is staffing up Trusted Advisor, a service which guides customers on how to best deploy the Amazon Web Services they use — to choose the right instance type for a given task; to plug security gaps etc.

For example, the company is looking to hire a  software development manager for its “Kumo team” who will manage:

” .. software development engineers who are developing algorithms and building systems to automatically solve a variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the AWS Trusted Advisor — one of the company’s biggest assets.”

The Kumo team is also looking for a software development engineer and a senior product manager.

For enterprise support, more is more

That AWS should seek to add richer functionality to Trusted Advisor should come as zero surprise. The boilerplate describing the service says AWS will continually add to the number of checks it performs.

Reached for comment, a spokeswoman said AWS is investing heavily in support “not just with Trusted Advisor but also with the Service Health Dashboard, Forums, Social Media Monitoring, Service Health Checks Support APIs” and other tools that allow its engineers and associates to deliver a good user experience.

As for “Kumo,” it means cloud in Japanese and is the name of the AWS Support software development team.

But what about third-party partners?

It’s clear that as AWS wants to make itself as enterprise-friendly as possible, providing services like these is a no brainer. But, for a half dozen or so small companies that were founded to provide cloud implementation guidance, particularly on AWS, this has to be a concern. Companies including Cloudyn, Cloudability, CloudVertical, and Newvem all harvest — with customer permission — usage data from Amazon’s APIs and use that to make their recommendations. Some of them monitor multiple clouds. Others are for AWS only, a strategy they want to reconsider going forward.

Earlier this month, AWS made a support API available that, among other things, gives customers API access to their Trusted Advisor recommendations. That was seen as a huge deal by some in the AWS partner community.

Some of these partners flipped out when Amazon made Trusted Advisor available for free for a short period. They really don’t like that it’s now making all that key data programmatically available.

Said the CEO of one of these companies: “This is another step, in a roundabout way, of AWS giving their customers a Cloud Economics toolset. I’m not sure they haven’t just head-on launched a Cloud Economics tool — users need quite a lot of expertise to hack together the various data sets you can get exported to S3 – and now this. I suppose that’s the short-term opportunity for companies like ourselves.”

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There’s always money in the banana stand.

As you may have heard, some Bluth banana stands have been popping up ahead of the return of Arrested Development. Ron Howard, the show’s narrator, tweeted this out a minute ago:

I stopped by the #bananastand off Columbus Circle twitter.com/RealRonHoward/…

— Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) May 14, 2013

Just thought I’d share.

Here’s the trailer for season 4, which will be available on Netflix on May 26th. And don’t forget to check out George Bluth’s reddit AMA highlights.

Yesterday, only a couple days before Google I/O is scheduled to open, a new photo of a white Google Nexus 4 device surfaced. Today, things ratchet up a bit with the discovery of a white Nexus 4 at a Qualcomm booth at The Mobile Show in Dubai. The folks at TechView even took the time to video the device which was presented to them as a demo unit. One thing that is apparent now is that only the back is white with the face still sporting black panels surrounding the screen. Since there is no information on a timeframe for a retail release, or if that will even happen, there is always the possibility the whole thing could end up being white, not just the back. Hit the break to check out the video. Be sure to check back for TalkAndroid’s coverage of Google I/O to see if any formal announcements are made about the white Nexus 4.

Click here to view the embedded video.

source: TechView

Come comment on this article: Video of white Google Nexus 4 surfaces

Smell-O-Vision was a short lived idea in the 1960s that never really took off. Even so, people have tried to communicate smells through electronic transmission for quite some time now. One new smartphone accessory may have finally perfected it.

Say hello to Scentee, a new accessory from Japanese company ChatPerf. It’s a small attachment for mobile devices that disperses scents from small liquid capsules loaded into it. Check it out in action below:

So, how would you actually use this? The developers at ChatPerf suggest that somebody could send a scent to a friend, or they could use it to augment a media experience. One example in particular is that the Scentee could disperse a gunpowder odor during a first-person shooter.

Using odors as a form of communication seems like a strane idea that might not catch on, but you just never know anymore. If it works as advertised, the smartphones of 2020 may have odor dispersals integrated within them.

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.

In October 2012, the armed robbery and kidnapping case for which O.J. Simpson was convicted in 2008 was reopened. Simpson is currently serving 33 years in prison for the charges, but the former football star is hoping to get a new trial. He is claiming that he is entitled to a new trial due to his lawyers’ ineptness during the first trial. This week, Simpson got his first hearings on the possibility of a retrial.

According to an Associated Press report on today’s hearing, Simpson was allowed to have his right hand free during the hearing, to take notes and drink water.

Witnesses were called to testify about the legal advice given by Simpson’s former trial lawyer, Yale Galanter. Simpson’s co-counsel during the trial, Gabriel Grasso, today testified against Galanter’s trial strategy of focusing on Simpson’s claimed ignorance of the guns that were used in the robbery. Galanter is expected to testify on Friday.

Simpson was convicted in 2008 for leading a 2007 armed robbery at the Palace Station hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Simpson and his associates stole memorabilia at gunpoint from a sports memorabilia dealer, claiming that the items had been previously stolen from him. Following the conviction, Simpson appealed, but the conviction was upheld by the Nevada Supreme Court in 2010. Without a new trial, Simpson may only have to serve nine years of his sentence, as he is up for parole in 2017.

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Henry Alex Rubin, who directed films like Murderball and Disconnect, recently participated in an At Google talk, discussing Disconnect at Google NYC. The talk took place on April 26th.

Disconnect is Rubin’s first non-documentary. It’s described as “a drama centered on a group of people searching for human connections in today’s wired world.” It stars Jason Bateman, Hope Davis and Jonah Bobo.

More recent At Google talks here.

GigaOM will host its Sixth Annual Structure conference, June 19-20 in San Francisco. As computing becomes more cost effective, the ability to capture data expands, and disruption is everywhere, there is a greater need to hear from industry experts who are getting their hands dirty with deployments.

Cloud practitioners representing a variety of sectors – including retail, consumer goods and energy – will examine how real-time business needs are shaping IT architectures and what tomorrow’s cloud will look like.

Speakers at Structure include:
• Pat Gelsinger, VMware
• Werner Vogels, Amazon
• Satya Nadella, Microsoft
• Jay Parikh, Facebook
• Bob Muglia, Juniper
• Jeff Dean, Google
• Lew Moorman, Rackspace
• Kevin Scott, LinkedIn
• Raj Patel, Cisco Systems
• Dean Nelson, eBay
• Gary Grider, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Ben Haines, Pabst Brewing Company
• Bobby Murphy, Snapchat
• Ralph Loura, The Clorox Company
• Stefan Apitz, Box
• Peter Gross, Bloom Energy
• Lew Cirne, New Relic
• Aneel Bhusri, Workday

More details on speakers and sessions are available on GigaOM Structure website.

Venue
Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF
1675 Owens Street
San Francisco, CA 94158
(+1) 866-431-UCSF

For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar.

The PC market isn’t the only tech sector in trouble. According to Gartner’s new numbers, Asia-Pacific is the only region in the world where mobile phone volumes are still growing. Phone sales in the United States are now dropping at 9% annualized pace. Globally, phone volumes were practically flat in Q1 2013, inching up a mere 0.7% year-over-year. Smartphone growth came in at a torrid 43% during the quarter, several points above what was expected a few months ago. This contrast means that feature phone sales are in a real free fall. This is particularly clear in Latin America, where even the hot smartphone growth is not enough to prevent overall phone sales from declining by nearly 4%.

Continue reading…

Nvidia debuted its Project Shield gaming console in January and now the full details are available. On Tuesday, the company announced that Nvidia Shield — it’s no longer a “project” — is available for early pre-orders at $349. People who registered for product updates can reserve their device, while the general public can place orders on May 20. Nvidia plans to ship the first Shield devices in June.

If you missed the original announcement, Shield is literally Nvidia’s play to get directly into the mobile gaming hardware business. The handheld device is shaped like a Microsoft Xbox 360 controller with two important additions: A 5-inch 720p touchscreen display and bass reflex stereo speakers. Inside Shield is Nvidia’s Tegra 4 chip with 72 custom GPU cores and four Cortex-A15 CPU cores. Essentially, this is a mobile gaming console with hardware controls.

I was impressed by the device demo I saw in January: Not only does Shield play Google Android games it supports game streaming from a PC, provided that computer has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPU inside. Nvidia has also worked with Steam — an online computer gaming distribution company — to get PC quality games on Shield. I’m leery about the price, however.

Sony’s PS Vita is at least $100 below the $349 Nvidia Shield price, and Sony’s game machine isn’t the hottest seller right now. Instead, mobile gaming has increasingly moved towards tablets and smartphones instead of dedicated mobile game consoles.

I know that Shield has all of the whiz-bang features essential to mobile gaming — solid controls, a fast processor and multiple graphics cores, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and a 720p display — but I have doubts about the market supporting the $349 price tag. Perhaps I’ll feel differently when I have the chance to spend more time with the device. For now, my enthusiasm for Nvidia Shield is somewhat diminished.

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CNN anchor Zoraida Sambolin said today that she is electing to have a double mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis, and it’s thanks in part to Angelina Jolie’s announcement about her own surgery that she had the courage to speak up about it.

Jolie, who wrote a piece for the New York Times this week about her brave decision to go under the knife as a preemptive strike against breast cancer, says she did it partly because she watched her mom go through a battle with the disease and doesn’t want to leave her own children without their mom. Sambolin says the same thing inspired her to elect for the invasive surgery.

“I struggled for weeks trying to figure out how tell you that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was leaving to have surgery then Angelina Jolie shares her story of a double mastectomy and gives me strength and an opening,” Sambolin wrote on Facebook.

Sambolin says her prognosis is a good one due to early detection, and says she wants to warn women of the dangers of being neglectful with their breast care. She is scheduled to undergo surgery on May 28.

Verizon is offering their HTC Droid DNA absolutely free (with a 2 year contract, of course) thanks to a coupon code promotion they just began which will run through May 21. To take advantage of the deal, all you need to do is head to Verizon’s website via the source link below, and type in your email address. Verizon will then email you a promo code which you can use to purchase the Droid DNA at no cost from a Verizon store or through their online shop.

In addition, as part of the new Verizon Referral Rewards Program, if you refer a friend to switch to Verizon from another provider, you and your friend will each get a $25 Verizon Wireless Visa Debit card for free.

Source: Verizon Wireless

Come comment on this article: Verizon offering HTC Droid DNA for free through new coupon code promotion

Every new trailer for Rayman Legends makes it harder to wait for the game’s September release. The latest featuring some undersea adventures mark the return of underwater levels – a level theme largely missing from contemporary platformers.

Some platformers have unintentionally sullied the good name of underwater levels, but Rayman Legends looks to put them back on their pedestal of greatness. The addition of lite stealth elements are also welcome.

Rayman Legends will be out on on September 3 for the Wii U, Xbox 360 and PS3.

Whenever McDonald’s un-retires its McRib sandwich, it’s an event. People react quite favorably to the boneless pork slab that gets lathered in barbecue sauce. So much so, in fact, McDonald’s has done a good job capitalizing on the sandwich’s popularity and they play it up a great deal with their associated marketing pushes, as you can clearly see:

Apparently, after years of letting McDonald’s bask in the glow that is the American population’s desire for pork sandwich bliss, a contender has decided to step up and grab some of that spotlight for themselves. At least, that’s plan according Burger King, and the reports of the upcoming release of what’s being called the “McRib buster,” aka, the BK Rib Sandwich. While the official release has yet to be broadcast, information about Burger King’s upcoming summer menu, which will feature the McRib contender, have been hitting the `tubes:

Burger King on Thursday will unveil its 2013 summer menu plans, highlighted by a new, limited-time BK Rib Sandwich, which is boneless like McRib — has a tangy sauce and comes with sweet bread and butter pickles. It will be sold nationally beginning May 21.

BK’s other summer roll-outs include a return of Memphis Pulled Pork sandwiches, a line of Carolina BBQ sandwiches and sweet potato fries. It also will introduce a new BBQ Chicken Salad and line of Oreo-infused desserts. All of the products, including the rib sandwich, will be available only though the summer.

An image of the upcoming delicacy:

As the description of the BK Rib Sandwich reveals–”has a tangy sauce and comes with sweet bread and butter pickles”–if you can’t beat the McRib, why not copy it? Whatever the case, I just hope the upcoming marketing push for BK’s summer menu/McRib contender features Darius “Hootie” Rucker:

TED Talks are available in 100 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our volunteer translators. So far, more than 10,000 volunteers have created upwards of 40,000 talk translations — and every week, the TED Blog brings you a Q&A with one of them. Today, meet Khalid Marbou.

1. Where do you live and what do you do by day?

I was born and raised in Tiznit, Morocco, and live in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, where I’m pursuing a bachelor’s degree in nanotechnology engineering. Aside from my studies, I spend most of my day online keeping in touch with friends and relatives — blogging, translating, reading and working on different projects in Malaysia and Morocco. 

2. What drew you to TED?

Many factors made me into a TED fanatic, but I would say that the most influential of them is my constant search for inspiration and intellectual stimulation. Before TED, I found small doses of inspiration reading novels and watching movies, but when I first discovered TED, it gave me a jolt. It’s never ceased to inspire me to this day.

3. What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

Charles Fleischer insists: All things are MoleedsMy first talk was Charles Fleischer’s “All things are Moleeds.” Most of the other translators avoided the talk because of its complexity and richness – it has made-up words and expressions — but I liked Charles’ sense of humor and wanted to share it with my friends, so they could understand it. I picked it up both as a challenge and as a test to see how prepared I would be for complex translation tasks. I managed to finish it within a day, and picked up another talk right away.

4. What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole: Science is for everyone, kids includedI would say Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole’s talk: “Science is for everyone, kids included.” First, because I am very passionate about science communication and involving kids in scientific activities. I’ve been working on implementing similar initiatives in Moroccan schools and raising awareness about the subject in general. And second, having attended TEDGlobal2012, I saw Beau and Amy onstage and was tremendously amazed and excited. I said to myself, “That’s a talk I want to spend hours translating.” And I did.

5. Which talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why?

The most challenging talk for me was indeed that first talk I translated, “All things are Moleeds.”

6. What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally?

I’d like to share a quote from my native language, Tamazight:

“أورا تمون أبلا إيح ترعي”

Which translates into:

“It won’t get organized unless it first gets all messy.”

We have seen mixed reports regarding BlackBerry’s performance with the BlackBerry Q10, its first QWERTY toting BlackBerry 10 smartphone. Most industry watchers seems to think early Q10 sales have been strong, though a few analysts have strayed from the pack. RBC Capital Markets’ Mark Sue is in the first camp, though he noted in a new research note on Monday Q10 sales might not blow us away. Regardless, however, the analyst says BlackBerry has already succeeded in one respect: The Q10 is buying BlackBerry some time to turn things around.

Continue reading…

It’s clear that Wal-Mart Stores wants to stay on top as a major online retailer in the United States and abroad, as it takes steps to turn stores into fulfillment centers and bolster its virtual capabilities. What hasn’t been clear is how that transition will look, or how long it will take.

@WalmartLabs gave people a glimpse at its playbook on Tuesday by disclosing in a blog post the acquisition of OneOps, a finalist in the LaunchPad competition at GigaOM’s 2012 Structure conference, as well as Tasty Labs, whose CEO, Joshua Schachter, founded Delicious.

Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

According to the @WalmartLabs blog post, OneOps has “developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that enables us to significantly accelerate our PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies.” The OneOps acquisition could strengthen Wal-Mart’s chances of rapidly building, tinkering with, testing and deploying new applications onto walmart.com and other online retail sites affiliated with the company, such as samsclub.com. The unification of the back-end components of many sites is an ongoing project for Wal-Mart.

As for the Tasty Labs buy, it could lead to additional social experiences for site visitors. Wal-Mart has been incorporating social elements into its sites, such as pins from Pinterest as well as recently reviewed and fast-moving items. But with Tasty Labs’ Jig product, customers have been able to type in their needs and get responses about products that could help meet said needs.

However Wal-Mart ends up making use of OneOps and Tasty Labs, the company could well keep acquiring companies as it strives to enhance its hardware and software arsenal. Wal-Mart might find a new acquisition target at this year’s Structure conference, coming up on June 19-20 in San Francisco, where another batch of companies will compete in the LaunchPad event, including Factor.io, Mertica and SaltStack.

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