Category: News

One of the more common complaints I hear from Chromebook owners is that Google doesn’t offer any accessories such as cases or sleeves. Honestly, when I spent $449 last year on the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook, which is solid but mostly plastic, I didn’t give that much thought to protecting the device. I feel a bit differently with the Chromebook Pixel with LTE, however, since it cost me $1,449. So what’s a Chromebook Pixel owner to do?

Turns out that the Apple Store is a great source for cases and sleeves to fit a Pixel. That’s ironic as my purchase decision came down to a Mac Book Pro with Retina Display or a Chromebook Pixel. I bought Google’s laptop, but I shopped in Apple’s store for a sleeve. Check before you buy, but most sleeves and cases made for the 13-inch MacBook Pro should work nicely with the Pixel, even though the latter machine has a 3:2 aspect ratio screen.

This works out well because the two devices are similar enough in size. Apple’s device is 12.35 inches x 8.62 inches x 0.75 inches, for example, while Google’s Chromebook Pixel measures in at 11.72 inches x 8.84 inches x 0.64 inches. I suppose you could order a custom case for the Pixel, but that’s likely going to be costly.

I ended up settling on the neoprense and faux fur Incase Sleeve for $39.99. My Chromebook Pixel fits it well and I like how the sleeve has three zippers: Two work together to close the sleeve up while a third opens up one corner of the sleeve to expose the laptop’s power port. This way, I can slip the Pixel in the case for protection and charge the device’s battery at the same time. I opted for a sleeve because I recently bought a new messenger bag that doesn’t have padding.

Got any more Chromebook case suggestions? Drop a comment, and we might just share them on our weekly GigaOM Chrome Show podcast.

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At Sony’s PS4 event in February, Blizzard Entertainment announced that it was returning to console development after a long hiatus. It announced a Diablo III port for the PS3 and PS4 as its first project.

Blizzard Entertainment announced today the PS3 version of Diablo III is now available for preorder. There’s no launch date available just yet, but the developer confirmed once again that the title will be available later this year.

“We’ve poured blood, sweat, and hellfire into creating an epic Diablo III experience for PlayStation gamers,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “In addition to including all the improvements from the PC version over the past year, we’ve made several updates to Diablo III for play on the PS3. We got a ton of positive feedback from players who tried the game at PAX East, and we can’t wait to get it into everyone’s hands later this year.”

Those who preorder Diablo III will gain instant access to the Infernal Helm. It provides an experience boost to any player character who’s equipped with it.

The console version of Diablo III comes with another bonus in the form of ditching the PC version’s always online requirement. Players are free to play online, or offline, with up to four friends in online and local co-op modes.

There’s no word on whether or not the PS4 version of Diablo III will be available this year, but I would expect an announcement near the launch of the PS3 version. It would be pretty advantageous for Sony if its new machine were to launch with a game like Diablo III, especially if the PS4 version was cross-compatible with the PS3 version.

Gangnam Style, as impressive as it was (in terms of sheer global reach), it pretty much over as a thing, a fad, and craze – whatever. As a culture, we’ve run it into the ground. Plus, Psy already has another song out. We’re not hating on Gangnam Style, we’re just mercifully pronouncing it dead, having lived a good life.

But Samsung has decided to kill it again. At a Galaxy S4 launch event in India, the smartphone makers tapped Bollywood star Ranveer Singh to lead a Gangnam Style reimagining that replaces most of the lyrics with Galaxy S4 spec praise. Why, oh why?

[FIlms of India]

“Windows strength appears to be the ability to attract first time smartphone buyers, upgrading from a feature phone”, Mary-Ann Parlato, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech analyst, says about the U.S. handset market for the three months ended in February. “Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Windows smartphone, 52 percent had previously owned a feature phone”.

End of story, or could be, if not for something else. Fifty-five percent of iOS buyers, and 51 percent for Android, are repeat smartphone purchasers. The two more popular platforms, while growing because of their larger bases, sell more to existing customers, which make up a more finite market. “With over half of the U.S. market still owning a feature phone, it’s likely that many will upgrade over the coming year, which will ultimately contribute to more growth for the Windows brand”, Parlato emphasizes.

Right now, Android and iOS own the U.S. smartphone market, with 93 percent combined share. Windows Phone: 5.6 percent. There’s small room for a third platform and potentially bigger space given the untapped feature phone segment. In a rapid-growth market, anything can happen — as repeatedly mistaken analyst forecasts prove. Consider Windows Phone maker Nokia, which share in Q1 reached 4 percent. While seemingly small, that’s up from 1 percent a year earlier. Small gains, big percentage growth.

Like Gartner, but using other metrics, Kantar Worldpanel data is for actual phone sales, which offer better view into the market than analyst firms counting shipments. The difference is handsets going to carriers and dealers that may or may not be sold versus those going to end-user buyers. The latter measure is more reliable. Kantar Worldpanel puts Android sales share ahead of iOS — 49.3 percent to 43.7 percent.

Carrier share reveals a disturbing trend: T-Mobile smartphone sales share declined 3.2 points to 9.5 percent, the only one of the big four to suffer losses. The real measure of Pink’s success will be the period ending in March, following first iPhone 5 sales and introduction of new unlimited talk, text and web plans. Additionally, T-Mobile’s MetroPCS merger is official May 1, amid major LTE network expansion.

As for the others, their respective smartphone sales share: Verizon, 37.2 percent; AT&T, 27.9 percent; Sprint, 12.3 percent. By the way, three of the four largest carriers sell Windows Phone. But AT&T has exclusive U.S. distribution for Nokia flagship Lumia 920.

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox

Skype has just landed on BlackBerry 10 for the first time. Making it’s debut on the Q10, Skype will support the Z10 as soon as OS 10.1 is launched in the coming weeks.

Skype is the ubiquitous IM, voice and video calling app that put VOIP on the map a few years ago. With traditionally terrible BlackBerry support, Skype has finally launched a fully functional app that rivals the desktop client.

Here are Skype’s main features:

• Skype to Skype IMs, video and voice calls are free* over 3G or WiFi.
• Make low-cost calls and send SMS messages to mobiles or landlines from your BlackBerry® smartphone.
• Send pictures, videos and files to any of your contacts.
• Enjoy high-quality sound when you call anyone else who is on Skype.
• Talk face to face or show what you’re seeing with front and rear-facing cameras.
• Talk to your Windows Live Messenger friends on Skype. Sign in to Skype with your Microsoft account and have your Messenger, Hotmail and Outlook contacts in one place.
• Unlike rival VOIP, teleconference and chat solutions, nearly everyone you know has a Skype account

Click here to download Skype for BlackBerry 10.1 for free from BlackBerry World.

“Jersey Shore” star Ronnie Ortiz-Magro has been admitted to an Orlando hospital with a painful kidney stone, his rep says.

Ronnie was in Florida to promote his new alcoholic beverage line, Smush Cocktails, and started feeling pain during a convention. He later tweeted out that he was in the hospital and in a lot of pain, which was followed up by a statement from his reps.

“Ronnie was admitted to an Orlando area hospital late Saturday night,” the statement said. “He’s in a lot of pain and is expected to remain there for several days.”

Kidney stones are usually broken up by laser once they reach a certain size and then passed through the urine stream, but sometimes the patient just has to wait it out and let them pass on their own. No word yet on whether or not Ronnie has undergone any procedures while in the hospital.

Wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone! #KidneysFML

— Ronnie Magro (@MTVRonnie) April 28, 2013

“Jersey Shore actor goes to hospital” Hm, didn’t know jersey shore had an actor. You learn something new everyday!

— Moso Sematlane (@MosoDarko) April 29, 2013

#JerseyShore actor Ronny in the hospital for kidney stones is the #1 searched item on #Yahoo.Cause, that’s what’s important y’all.

— Shawn Rowan (@shawn_rowan) April 29, 2013

In the latest Webmaster Help video from Google, Matt Cutts discusses the biggest mistakes that a lot of webmasters are making when it comes to SEO.

The top mistake, he says, is not making your site crawlable, which includes not having a domain.

After that, it’s not including the right words on the page. Think about what the user is going to type, and include those words, he says. Going further, also have the things that people would be likely to look for on the page. For example, include your business hours. If you’re a restaurant, inlclude a menu in plain text – not just a PDF.

The third thing is that people are thinking too much about “link building” when they should really just be thinking about creating compelling content and maketing (including things like talking to newspaper reporters).

The fourth thing is the lack of good titles and descriptions. Make sure you include something that makes people actually want to click on the search result, and something that will be helpful, should users bookmark the site. “Something that lets them know you’re going to have the answer they’re looking for – something that makes them understand this is a good resource,” says Cutts.

Finally, the other big mistake is not taking advantage of webmaster resources, including (but not limited to) Google’s own Webmaster Tools. Cutts also suggests following Google’s blogs and webmaster videos, attending search conferences, talking to people online (including in Google’s forums), and even mentions Blekko’s link tool. Basically, just follow the SEO industry.

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that the Herschel space observatory has run out of liquid helium coolant. The coolant is necessary to cool the telescope’s instruments to near absolute zero.

Herschel’s ground station in Western Australia this afternoon found that the temperature in all of the telescope’s instruments is rising, confirming that the helium has run out. The depletion of the coolant was expected, as the 2300 litres of liquid helium inside the observatory had been evaporating since Herschel’s launch in 2009.

“Herschel has offered us a new view of the hitherto hidden Universe, pointing us to a previously unseen process of star birth and galaxy formation, and allowing us to trace water through the Universe from molecular clouds to newborn stars and their planet-forming discs and belts of comets,” said Göran Pilbratt, a Herschel Project Scientist at the ESA.

The telescope has been gazing into space for over three years. In just the past few months data from Herschel has been used to find starburst galaxies, examine a near-earth asteroid, discover massive comet belts, and link the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact to water on Jupiter.

“Herschel has exceeded all expectations, providing us with an incredible treasure trove of data that that will keep astronomers busy for many years to come,” said Alvaro Giménez Cañete, Director of Science and Robotic Exploration at the ESA.

(Image courtesy ESA)

The first public beta of WinRAR 5.0 is now available. And it’s an interesting release with quite a few new features, although most are based around the addition of a new archiving format — RAR 5.0.

This first aims to improve compression performance by increasing the maximum and default dictionary sizes. Some older and less efficient compression algorithms have been ditched, while RAR 5.0 decompression can make use of multiple CPU cores.

A new Reed-Solomon-based recovery record improves your chances of reconstructing a corrupted archive.

Security enhancements see AES-256 encryption now used in CBC mode. A new file checksum scheme makes it harder for attackers to find file contents. And smart password verification means the program can usually detect a wrong password without first having to unpack the full archive.

RAR 5.0 also sees several smaller enhancements in various areas. File times are now always stored in UTC, for instance, simplifying archive exchange between different timezones. And NTFS symbolic and hard links can now be saved simply as links, without having to archive their contents.

More general improvements include a maximum path length of 2048 characters for regular RAR and ZIP archives, while there’s now extraction-only support for the XZ archive format.

And one or two features have been dropped, including support for file comments, although archive comments remain as before.

If you need the full details then they’re available on the WinRAR What’s new page. Otherwise, WinRAR 5.0 Beta 1 for Windows, OS X and Linux is available now.

Photo Credit: Arkady/Shutterstock

Facebook has removed an option on pages that allowed users to filter recent posts to show only the ones made by friends. As of now, the “Posts by friends” filtering option located on the clickdown menu at the top of pages’ Timelines is gone.

Now users can only filter by “Highlights,” “Posts by Page,” or “Posts by Others.” The latter will naturally include posts by friends.

Facebook confirmed to Inside Facebook that the option was indeed removed:

We continue to improve pages to make them a place for people to learn and interact with different businesses. News Feed is where people can engage we posts and content from their friends and connections. Given that, we removed ‘posts by friends’ on pages. Those posts can still be seen in ‘posts by others.’

Of course, with their updated “new” news feed, Facebook added an option to filter by “All Friends,” removing page posts.

The “Post by Friends” filter was useful at times when filtering out page posts – oftentimes users want to see just what their friends had to say about a restaurant or other business. It’s likely that Facebook simply removed this option because it wasn’t being used or was deemed superfluous. Either way, it’s gone. That means that until Facebook adds posts to the content able to be found using Graph Search, there’s no real way to find out what a friend said about that new local brewery.

ReadItNow! is a handy reader app for BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook that allows you to read articles offline. Ideal for air travel or commuting with bad or no connectivity, the app makes it easy to collect content for later reading.

The latest update sees the app adopt native BlackBerry 10 code giving it a new look and feel. Along with the improved performance and better interface from going native, the app also saw a few bugs get fixed.

The article mode makes for a great reading experience on both BlackBerry 10 and the PlayBook. Save choice articles using either the Evernote or Springpad integration. Use the browser to surf the web while you have connectivity and they’ll be saved for when you want them even without a connection.

Click here to buy ReadItNow! for BlackBerry 10 and the PlayBook for $1.99 from BlackBerry World.

Do you develop games for Facebook? Were you unable to attend the Game Developers Conference in March? If you answered yes to both, Facebook has quite a treat for you today.

On its developer blog, Facebook posted a recap of all of its sessions at GDC. The social network covered everything from the basics to advanced monetization strategies. Here’s some of the more interesting talks with links to the videos in blue:

Facebook Games Product Update

It’s been a record year for games. More than 250 million people, or one out of every 5 users, play games on Facebook.com each month. George Lee, Product Manager for Facebook Games, walks through improvements that have helped drive 75% more game installs year over year. He also discusses how games are part of the overall Facebook experience through News Feed, Timeline, and Graph Search.

Building Core and Mid-Core Games on Facebook

There are 84 million 18-35 males playing games on Facebook each month, which represents 32% of all monthly active gamers. In other words, there’s a huge opportunity for core and mid-core game developers to build on Facebook. Andy Katzman, Strategic Partner Manager, Colin Creitz, Partner Engineer, and Peter Chang, Partner Engineer, walk through the products we are building to help gamers find great games and stay connected with each other. In addition, Greg Richardson, CEO of Rumble, discusses how his team is creating a more immersive game experience, and David Helgason, CEO of Unity, talks about 3D gaming and how we’re improving the Unity experience on Facebook.

Monetizing Your Game on Facebook

More than 100 developers generated more than $1 million on Facebook last year. Our payments team is committed to growing the games payments ecosystem and driving developer revenue. Deborah Liu, Monetization Product Manager, Daniel Schultz, Partner Engineer, and Sara Brooks, Strategic Partner Manager, discuss how developers can prepare for the updated Facebook Payments and price virtual goods for a global audience.

There are many more videos at Facebook’s blog post to keep you busy for a few hours. You might even learn something.

Soap opera fans can rejoice as new episodes of One Life to Live and All My Children start airing online Monday. Two years after ABC canceled them, the soaps are coming back to life — but only in digital format, via Hulu and iTunes.

Production company Prospect Park, which licensed the shows from ABC, will run new, 30-minute episodes of each show Monday through Thursday. (Previously, each episode was an hour long and a new one ran each weekday.) On Fridays, there will be a recap of the week. Episodes are available for free streaming on Hulu and Hulu Plus, or can be downloaded from iTunes for $0.99 apiece or $9.99 per month (20 episodes). The free version of Hulu will only make the most recent episodes available, while Hulu Plus will have all of them.

The New York Times calculated that, because production costs are lower (due in part to having shorter and fewer episodes) and because ads on Hulu can be targeted, Prospect Park needs 500,000 streaming viewers to break even on the soaps. By contrast, the shows attracted three million viewers on TV. In addition, Variety noted that Prospect Park has the rights to sell the the shows to U.S. cable and broadcast networks starting in September (where, in an interesting twist, they’d be available a week after they air online) and is also distributing them to international television networks.

Even so, some longtime fans of the shows who are not accustomed to online viewing may be confused about how to find new episodes online. (That theory is borne out by many of the user comments on this paidContent post from January.) “We would hope that all [fans of the shows] would call their friends to make sure they watch them,” Prospect Park cofounder Rich Frank told Soap Opera Digest recently. “The way to ensure that this is going to work, because we’re really totally advertiser-supported, [is] that we’ve got to get the eyeballs to be watching this. They’ve done it before; it’s just a matter of rallying the troops and getting them to watch.”

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President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the National Academy of Sciences on its 150th anniversary, in Washington, D.C., April 29, 2013.

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In March of 1863, President Lincoln and Congress established the National Academy of Sciences as an independent and nonprofit institution charged with providing the government with the scientific advice that it needed. Today President Obama joined the current members of that body to celebrate the advances in science, engineering, infrastructure, innovation, education and environmental protection that can be attributed to the 150 years of work by the brilliant and committed scientists who have been elected and volunteered to serve their country.

While the National Academy of Sciences was created during the Civil War to help the Union understand the challenges new iron-clad battleships would create for the Navy, President Obama praised President Lincoln's wisdom in looking forward and recognizing that finding a way to harness the highest caliber scientific advice for the government would serve a whole range of long-term goals for the nation. And he highlighted the Academy's legacy of answering big questions and solving tough problems for the benefit of the nation:

read more

The Weather Company, eager to expand beyond its usual fare of snow and storms, announced three new original web series on Monday that will feature athlete amputees, virus pandemics and disaster survivors.

The company says advertisers can be exclusive sponsors of the shows, which consist of six 2 two to four-minute episodes across four screens: smartphone, tablet, web and cable. The shows are titled “I am Unstoppable,” “Virus Hunters” and “Alive,” and will be shown this fall in addition to three other already-announced web series.

For the Weather Company, the original web series are an attempt to tap digital dollars while also expanding its content offerings — which include the Weather Channel and Weather.com — beyond forecasts and national disasters. Weather’s digital editor-in-chief, Neil Katz, announced the details as part of Newfront, a series of events in New York at which video creators are trying to woo Madison Avenue.

The web series comes at a time that the Weather Company is emerging as a formidable data and advertising company. Recently, the company has been comparing itself to Google insofar as it allows marketers to sell in real time based on users’ likely intent — an ice cream company, for instance, could display its ads while the sun is out. It has also been hiring veteran data and ad tech executives.

On the social media front, the Weather Company has been creating personalized products like a custom Twitter forecasts and, as an executive described today, a “social emergency network” that can let people use Facebook to warn loved ones in a given region about an impending weather apocalypse.  It has also been expanding its original TV content.

The Weather Company’s mass audience makes it attractive to advertisers but its histrionic style — which can feel like tragedy tourism — has also attracted ridicule. After a snowfall this year in the northeast, for instance, Gawker displayed a series of screenshots to explain how “Snow panic has driven Weather.com completely Insane.” The company also gained attention for “Torturing its interns with Twitter” — a social media stunt for “tornado week” that involved high-powered fans aimed at interns.

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In early April, J.C. Penny CEO Ron Johnson stepped down following over one year of dismal financial results at the company. Johnson had attempted to turn the department store business on its head, eschewing sales and coupons in favor of consistently lower pricing, but the company’s board was forced to make changes due to a plummeting stock price and an estimated $3.5 billion debt.

It seems, however, that not everyone has written off J.C. Penney. Investment bank Goldman Sachs has issued a five-year $1.75 billion loan to the troubled department store. J.C. Penney stated that the funds will be used to fund “ongoing working capital requirements,” “general corproate purposes,” and part of its debt. The loan is secured by real estate and interest in J.C. Penney.

“This loan facility is an important component of our strategic plan to strengthen the Company’s financial position,” said Ken Hannah, CFO of J.C. Penney. “Together with our revolving credit facility, this will give us the financial strength we need to meet our current funding requirements and build toward a successful future.”

This loan is in addition to the $850 million that J.C. Penny borrowed from a revolving credit fund two weeks ago. The company stated that loan would go toward ensuring the company’s liquidity and to replenish inventory at its stores.