Category: News

I’m trying to get a grip on the full spectacle of the police state theater we have all just witnessed in Boston. Where to begin? Do we begin with the “lockdown” order that forced 400,000+ Bostonites to stay off the streets and hide in their homes while nobody admits…

My search for a healthy snack chip has led me to a phenomenally great-testing product from a company called “Way Better Snacks,” makers of Sweet Chili Tortilla Chips. Let’s get the basics out of the way first: These chips are Non-GMO Project verified, certified gluten…

After a daylong manhunt that saw police searching door-to-door through Boston, law enforcement officials captured the remaining suspect believed to be responsible for Monday's bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. He was ultimately found in Watertown, Massachusetts.

In a statement from the James Brady Briefing Room after the arrest, President Obama commended the response from the state and local police and federal investigators.

"We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to all our outstanding law enforcement professionals," he said. "These men and women get up every day, they put on that uniform; they risk their lives to keep us safe — and as this week showed, they don't always know what to expect. So our thoughts are with those who were wounded in pursuit of the suspects and we pray for their full recovery."

While tonight's arrest closes one chapter in this tragedy, we're still left with many questions about these young men. President Obama pledged to put the full weight of the federal government behind finding answers.

"I've instructed the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and our intelligence community to continue to deploy all the necessary resources to support the investigation, to collect intelligence, and to protect our citizens," he said. "We will determine what happened. We will investigate any associations that these terrorists may have had. And we'll continue to do whatever we have to do to keep our people safe."

It's been a long week, and the events in Boston have in some ways overshadowed another tragedy — the explosion that took the lives of at least 14 people in West, Texas and wounded more than 200. Before the President closed, he made sure to remind the people of that community that they hadn't been forgotten.

"Our thoughts, our prayers are with the people of West, Texas, where so many good people lost their lives; some lost their homes; many are injured; many are still missing," he said. "I've talked to Governor Perry and Mayor Muska and I've pledged that the people of West will have the resources that they need to recover and rebuild. And I want everybody in Texas to know that we will follow through with those commitments."

Read the full remarks here. Watch the video here.

Learn more

• President Obama's statement following the Boston bombings (4/15)
• President Obama updates the American people on developments in Boston (4/16)
• President Obama speaks at an interfaith prayer service in Boston (4/18)

Nintendo’s new Wii U has been labeled a flop with estimated sales of only 55,000 units domestically in the month of March. Nintendo of America’s chief executive Reggie Fils-Aime isn’t worried, however. The executive told GamesIndustry.biz that digital downloads are soaring and fast becoming a “notable contributor” to the company’s bottom line, a trend he believes will continue.

Continue reading…

If you’re on the fence about picking up a OUYA console when they become available in the next few months, you should know that OUYA has reached 10,000 developers officially on board for their console. That’s an extraordinarily large number of developers working to bring their games to the little Android-powered box. If game selection has been one of your worries for the console, I think you can safely put that fear to rest.

The OUYA box has received quite a bit of interest from partners, developers, and consumers alike, and the anticipation for that June 4th release just keeps growing with news like this. Are any of you picking up one of these? Let us know in the comments.

source: Games Industry

via: Phandroid

Come comment on this article: 10,000 game developers now on board with OUYA

Blackstone Group has withdrawn its bid for Dell less than a month after proposing a last-minute offer for the struggling computer company. The private equity firm withdrew its bid after “discovering that Dell’s business was deteriorating faster than previously understood,” Bloomberg reported. Blackstone previously offered the company $14.25 per share to counter a previous bid from founder Michael Dell and Silver Lake Management’s amounting to $13.65 per share. Investor Carl Icahn is also interested in the company and offered to purchase an additional $2 billion worth of Dell’s stock at $15 per share, and to provide $2 billion of cash equity financing.

Good news for Daily Show fans: You’ll still be able to watch clips of Jon Stewart on YouTube. The Los Angeles Times reports that Viacom has lost a major copyright suit against YouTube after “a federal judge in New York on Thursday ruled that YouTube had not violated Viacom’s copyright even though users of the popular online site are allowed to post unauthorized video clips from some of Viacom’s most popular shows.” U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton dismissed Viacom’s lawsuit and said that a safe-harbor provision within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects YouTube from copyright infringement charges. In response to the ruling, Google’s general counsel Kent Walker said that “this is a win not just for YouTube, but for people everywhere who depend on the Internet to exchange ideas and information.”

The tragedy that befell Boston earlier this week and its ensuing fallout has resulted in a lot of debate. I mean, everyone is talking about last night’s events. Here are two comments I overheard while having coffee at two different locations in San Francisco today.

“Twitter and (other) social networks are really good at this news thing for first 30 minutes and then everything goes crazy – speculation, rumors and the worse part is the role television plays in it all.” (#1)

“If you watch television and Twitter at the same time, you know how woefully behind television is, and that is when start to wonder, what the role of media is in this future where Twitter is the primary medium.” (#2)

Admittedly, San Francisco is a city that teeters on the naked end of the social media, and so its obsession with it is quite extreme. Nevertheless, it still reminded me of something I wrote last year about amplification and the role media has to play in this increasingly social and hyper-connected world in which random bits of information flow to-and-from nearly infinite nodes.

The point I made in my earlier post was “the media person’s role is no longer just reporting news. Reporting through sharing and curation are going to be vital roles for us to play in the future.” I should add one more thing to the list — being careful and analytical in the near real-time world we live in today. The nodes are now part of the process and as such the process — but not its true objective of accurately informing — has to evolve.

Because otherwise it is just creating a bigger mess than one has to report on. The media’s role is changing and evolving as our behavior on the internet is changing. And the sooner we realize it, the better it will be; not just for media but also for the society it is supposed to serve.

It’s been a hard week for many Americans, as the Boston bombings continue to raise more and more questions. Here is some weekend reading as you await answers.

A poignant ode to the city of Boston, its annual marathon and the victims of the April 15 bombings. [NY Review of Books Blog]

Far, far away in another American city, income inequality varies from block to block. The New Yorker has released an insightful data visualization of city income by subway stop. [New Yorker] Find out more »

Andres Lozano: Parkinson's, depression and the switch that might turn them off
Scientists find a new approach to reversing memory loss, with potential benefits for brain disorders like Alzheimer’s. [Sci Tech Daily] Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Andres Lozano and his team are working on very precise deep brain stimulation to correct dysfunction from similar brain disorders.

Galileo’s public condemnation is often invoked to defend new or unverified science. But as Adam Gopnik writes for the BBC, Galileo taught us a more important lesson: the value of the experimental method, the essence of what science is. [BBC.co.uk]

A plan has been approved to build the world’s largest optical telescope in Hawaii. [NY Times] But will it be any match for the awesomely named European Extremely Large Telescope?

JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out
JR and his team bring the project “Wrinkles of the City” to Berlin, with photographs of the elderly pasted on 15 walls throughout the city. [JR-Art] Watch JR make his 2011 Prize wish »

Would you like to go to Mars? Would you like to go to Mars to be filmed for a reality TV show? Would you like to go to Mars to be filmed for a reality TV show, knowing you probably won’t come back? Your dream has come true »

A deeper look at the feats of Felix Baumgartner, everyone’s favorite record-breaking skydiver. [Vanity Fair]

Ron Mueck’s exhibition opened this week at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Watch a fascinating video of him constructing his work »

Earlier this week word hit the web that Bing search results display more malware than Google. Naturally, Microsoft disagrees. “AV-TEST’s study doesn’t represent the true experience or risk to customers. In other words, the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong”, David Felstead, Bing senior program manager, says. Okay, why?

Felstead elaborates: “By using the API instead of the user interface, AV-TEST bypassed our warning system designed to keep customers from being harmed by malware. Bing actually does prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the…message to stop people from going to the site”.

He goes on to explain that Bing displays links from infected sites because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked. It is a plausible, but not fully satisfactory, answer. “We warn our customers rather than suppressing the result for both completeness and educational reasons”, Felstead states.

Then, in true Scroogled fashion, he points out a search term that can be entered into Google that results in malicious results.

In fairness, Felstead also points out that Microsoft is “still waiting on answers to many of our questions” on the methodology of these tests. In other words, this is a “he said, she said” matter that we will likely never have real answers on. In the end it boils down to which engine you prefer and the good sense to not click on results that claim to provide the moon to you.

During yesterday’s earnings conference call, departing CFO Peter Klein says that Microsoft is “working closely with OEMs on a new suite of small touch devices powered by Windows. These devices will have competitive price points, partly enabled by our latest OEM offerings designed specifically for these smaller devices, and will be available in the coming months”.

The rumors are true, and, presumably, because of the context Klein makes the statement, these devices will run Windows 8 — rather than RT or Embedded. For example, he refers to support for new Intel processors, Haswell and Bay Trail Atom. The former is expected to ship with back-to-school ultrabooks and convertibles. The latter is designed for smaller touch devices, including tablets. During Intel’s earnings call this week, CEO Paul Otellini predicted that for touch-screen notebooks running the new Atom processor, “prices are going to be down to as low as $200”. Merry Christmas!

Plan A Underway

The point: Don’t count out Microsoft or its PC partners just yet. Windows 8 is a work in progress, and that’s by design, while OEMs have yet to step up with the right devices. There is no Plan B, because A is still underway and will be until new hardware reaches the market for the two key selling seasons of the year, back to school and Christmas. I want to restate: There is no Plan B, contrary to what writers Adrian Kingsley-Hughes and Jay Greene, among others, say is necessary.

Many Plan B advocates presume Windows 8 is a failure because PC shipments reached record lows during Q1, following a disappointing fourth quarter. But this trend, spending on smartphones and tablets displacing PCs, started long before Windows 8 shipped, and Microsoft prepared.

“Consumers and businesses are increasingly shifting their focus to touch and mobility, and as a result, they want touch-enabled computing devices that are ultrathin, lightweight, and have long battery life”, Klein says. But the duh statement is obvious but oft overlooked. “While Windows revenue has been impacted by the transition from the traditional PC to a new era of computing devices, the overall addressable markets are growing, and we are excited by the opportunities ahead of us”.

The market for PCs, tablets and ultramobiles will grow 79 percent from 2012 to 2017 — 467.2 million to 836 million units — according to Gartner. Android and iOS are largely confined to tablets, while Windows dominates personal computers and the fledgling ultramobiles. Gartner’s data, which puts Android way ahead of Windows, and Apple platforms just slightly behind, misleads by including smartphones. When doing actual apples to apples comparisons, the PC market (including ultramobiles) rises from 351.1 million last year to 368 million in 2017. Tablets go from 197.2 million to 468 million during the same time frame.

The point: The addressable market for Microsoft grows, as Windows gains tablet share. Certainly Apple won’t snag share going the other way, certainly not with OS X, based on recent market share trends. Microsoft’s Plan A objectives are the same: Get a touch-oriented OS out the door and enable OEM partners to bring different size and form-factor designs to market.

Downsizing Windows

Right now, there are two dramatic shifts underway: Falling tablet prices and consumer shift to 7-7.9-inch models; both are intertwined. NPD DisplaySearch predicts that tablets in that size category will account for 45 percent of shipments this year. That’s where Microsoft sees partners headed, but running a desktop operating system.

The process is arduous. “We built Windows 8 with touch and mobility at the center of the experience, which positions us well in this new era”, Klein says. “However, the transition is complicated, given the size of our hardware and software ecosystem. We still have an immense amount of work to do, yet we feel good about the foundation we have laid and are optimistic about the long term success of Windows”.

Windows 8’s focus on touch is a hot topic of debate. Today, colleague Wayne Williams asks “Do you users really want touchscreen PCs (Because I don’t)“, while in December developer Robert Johnson asserts “Touchscreens on laptops make complete sense“.

I love Surface Pro. Touch and Windows 8 deliver great user experience. But there aren’t yet enough touchscreen choices available at prices that woo buyers from tablets. Wayne’s problem isn’t the touchscreen but how little he can do with tablets. Give him an affordable touch convertible or slate running Windows 8, and his opinion might change. Even yours.

This discussion would be moot, if not for a fundamental shift in Microsoft product development that I explained last month.

“With Windows 8, we are setting a new, accelerated pace for updates and innovations, as we focus on making the Windows experience richer and better”, Klein says. “Since launch we have delivered several important updates to improve our mail, storage, search, music, and video services”.

Photo Credit: Federico Rostagno/Shutterstock

Silicon Valley’s Tandem Entrepreneurs has always been a small operation, focusing attention on a dozen or so mobile technology startups each year, but it’s showing signs of getting bigger. On Friday Tandem announced it has brought on two new partners: former BlackRock Asia-Pac Chairman Rohit Bhagat and Doug Ellis, co-founder of online advertising tech company Turn.

Considering that before these new additions Tadem had a roster of only three partners, that’s significant growth. Tandem typically accepts into its accelerator program three or four early-stage startups each quarter, making a $200,000 investment in each, as well as providing office space and mentoring.

With its newly bulked up team, though, Tandem plans to host and invest in a larger number of companies each year and expand its scope to more countries – while still maintaining its focus on mobile. Last year, Tandem closed its second fund, raising $32 million.

Tandem on Friday also revealed the three companies that make up its latest accelerator class:

• Tile: Tandem’s first mobile hardware investment, Tile has developed a small mobile tracking device that can be attached to any personal or important item, even pets.
• Swoopt: Currently in beta, Swoopt has developed fantasy sports gaming and tournament software for the mobile phone.
• HomeTapper: This startup is developing a rich-media experience for real-estate listings on the tablet.

Tandem is accepting applications for its summer class until May 1.

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Fitbit activity trackers are popping up in pockets across the country but, apparently, U.K.-based Fitbug believes it deserves some credit for its rival’s adoption.

In a lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for Northern California, Fitbug accuses San Francisco-based Fitbit (see disclosure) of trademark infringement that is causing “irreparable harm and damage” to the company.

Aside from the name similarity, Fitbug alleges that Fitbit’s logo, imagery and packaging bear a “striking resemblance” to early Fitbug marketing material and have caused “consumer confusion.”

Fitbug was founded in 2005 and Fitbit came along in 2007. Both digital health companies make wearable devices that track users’ activity and sync with web and mobile services to help users increase their fitness. And as evidence of customer confusion, the complaint says that, in the last year, it’s received more than 200 customer service inquiries from Fitbit customers and that several news reports and blog posts have mixed up the two services.

In response to the allegations, James Park, Fitbit’s CEO and co-founder said in a statement:

“Fitbit is very proud of our fantastic products and reputation, which we have earned solely through the tremendous efforts of the Fitbit team. We are surprised by the allegations contained in Fitbug’s complaint. We are confident of our legal position in the case and look forward to addressing the allegations in court.”

This is hardly the first time that companies have to come to blows over similar names. A few years ago, Facebook sued parody site Lamebook (and ultimately settled). Although the dispute never reached legal proportions, Chicago-based programming bootcamp Code Academy last year changed its name to Starter League partly because of confusion with online coding startup Codecademy.

Fitbug, which says it has two U.S. Trademark Registrations, is asking the court to require Fitbit to cease the use of its logo and refrain from conduct that causes confusion with Fitbug’s brand and services.

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

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This has certainly been a pretty quiet spring for Apple so far, as the company has made more headlines for reported product delays than actual product releases. While Apple has remained silent, its share price has continued to plummet, plummeting from a high of over $700 in September all the way down to below $400 this week. Barron’s points us to a new note from Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, who makes a fairly bullish case for Apple that assumes that the company “does SOMETHING by September and lifts itself from an almost ‘frozen state’ during the March quarter.”

Continue reading…

In 2011, LulzSec was a name that everybody knew. They were the hacking group behind the PlayStation Network hack of 2011 that brought the service down for more than a month. They were also responsible for a number of other attacks on companies over the course of a few months.

Since then, the members of LulzSec have been rounded up and taken to trial. The latest trial saw Cody Kretsinger, known as “Recursion” in online circles, sentenced to a year in prison. He was convicted on one count of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. After his year in prison, he will remain under home detention.

You may be thinking that Kretsinger’s sentence is a little light. He was able to get his sentence down to a year thanks to a plea bargain he made last year with federal prosecutors. As part of that plea bargain, he admitted to hacking into a Sony Pictures’ database and sharing the information with other members of LulzSec.

Home detention won’t be the only thing that Kretsigner has to look forward to after his stint in prison either. The U.S. district judge ordered him to complete 1,000 hours of community service. Maybe he can help clean up Sony Pictures’ studios in Los Angeles to help make up the $600,000 in damages that federal prosecutors say he caused the studio.

Kretsinger is one of the last original LulzSec members to be sentenced for their hacking spree in 2011. The hacker collective fell apart last year when its leader, known as Sabu, went rogue and started working with the FBI as an informant. There have been attempts to resurrect the group since then, but nothing has come of it.

[h/t: Reuters]

Yahoo announced today that it is shutting down a number of its products as part of its efforts to make sure its products “are still central to your daily habits”.

The company is killing Upcoming, Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo Mail and Messenger for feature phone (J2ME) apps and older versions of Yahoo Mail. Upcoming, Deals, SMS Alerts, Kids, and the feature phone apps will be closed on April 30.

Yahoo is offering a way to download any events you may have upoladed.

Yahoo provides details for saving coupons from Yahoo Deals here.

“If you’ve been receiving SMS alerts, we encourage you to stay-up-date on all the latest with our mobile apps including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Sports, or Yahoo! Finance,” says Yahoo’s Jay Rossiter. “If you’ve been receiving horoscope alerts, you can check your horoscope on yahoo.com. Alternatively, you can go to alerts.yahoo.com and select to receive your alerts via email or Yahoo! Messenger.”

Regarding Yahoo Kids (formerly Yahooligans), he says, “Our youngest users still have plenty of opportunities to engage with Yahoo! content and products. For example, users who are under 13 can register for a Yahoo! ID through our Family Accounts program, connect with family and friends through Yahoo! Mail and Messenger, and check out upcoming family friendly films on Yahoo! Movies.”

Yahoo will continue to support Mail and Messenger on feature phones via the mobile web. Obviously those using old versions of Yahoo Mail are encouraged to upgrade to the new one. The old versions will stop working the week of June 3.