Category: News

Breast augmentation is not a typical medical procedure covered under the U.K.’s socialist system of medicine, known officially as the National Health System (NHS). But it suddenly became one recently after 22-year-old Josie Cunningham convinced her doctor that being…

During the 14th and 15th century pandemic, the black death killed nearly half the world’s population, according to, Bubonic Plague: Yesterday’s Scourge–and Tomorrow’s? As present-day cases of bubonic plague reappear in parts of North America and Europe, people are seeking…

The embattled city of Chicago is experiencing record firearms deaths, with more victims being shot and killed nightly. So far this year, in fact, month-to-month gun deaths are up from the record highs experienced in 2012, when 506 people were killed in the city. And…

The American people are barely putting up a fight as they relinquish what little health freedoms they have left in exchange for Obamacare, the multi-billion dollar sick care travesty that will eliminate freedom of choice in health care. But the existing insurance-based…

The idea of a national internet tax mandate has been voted on in the United States Senate. Dubbed the “Marketplace Fairness Act,” this piece of legislation, if implemented, would stifle entrepreneurs from the online marketplace, enrich large companies, and bloat state…

The things you think about and dwell on throughout your day have a direct effect on your stress levels, which regulate how much cortisol, or stress hormone, is produced in your body. And new research published in the journal Health Psychology has found that meditation…

The so-called “service industry” – which includes restaurants, entertainment outlets, retail stores and hotels, among other businesses – has traditionally been one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the country, even in a struggling U.S. economy. But its workforce…

Millions of Americans are being forced to buy conventional health insurance that directly benefits the pharmaceutical industry, which in turn fuels the biotech food “modification” industry, and that is the simple but evil math calculation being done by the big three…

A bulging belly is a common body issue and it affects everyone. However, it is also one of the most difficult to battle with. Cereals for breakfast are advertised for health but it also matters what kind of cereal an individual consumes. To get favorable results with…

Thirty years ago, Nancy Reagan launched her version of the war on drugs: “just say no.” She campaigned on that slogan all over America. She was lampooned as an idiot. Now, some researchers estimate that 60% of the Mexican economy would crash if the drug business…

My colleague, Chiara Marripodi, recently provided me some very interesting data on the effectiveness of hypnosis, as follows. It’s fascinating to consider the healing properties of what so many consider hocus pocus! The validity of therapeutic hypnosis as a complementary…

Rovio’s Angry Birds games have been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times, and are played by more than 263 million active users per month. The company is now targeting those hundreds of millions of players with a weekly animated show called Angry Birds Toons, which launched in mid-March.

Rovio has been calling these efforts “one of the world’s biggest video networks,” and Brightcove’s Executive Chairman Jeremy Allaire, whose company is powering Rovio’s video streaming, told me Tuesday that he sees this as an inflection point for video franchises. But what do the famous birds and their disdain for pigs really mean for the future of television?

These birds are up to something

First of all, Rovio’s move into the world of original video programming is pretty ingenious. The company established an audience with its games, and now offers its ad-supported video series through the very same apps — no additional installs needed. “They clearly are in a really powerful position,” said Allaire.

Essentially, the company is using its games as very effective trojan horses, in turn demonstrating how iPads, Android tablets and mobile phones have become an important piece of of the puzzle when you’re in the entertainment business. It also shows how much they’re starting to change the game for the TV industry.

Netflix started its streaming efforts on PCs, but most of its streaming is nowadays happening on connected devices. Game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are seeing the lion’s share of use, but devices like Apple TV are growing quickly as well. Netflix owes these devices its success. Without ways to get its content on the TV screen, the company would have never been in a position where it could spend $100 million on a show like House of Cards.

Rovio, on the other hand, is primarily a mobile company. Mobile devices are where people are playing Angry Birds, and it will be where they’re going to watch their weekly episodes of Angry Birds Toons. If the show turns out to be a success (and that’s still a big if) it could turn out to be the first big original programming success story for mobile devices.

And that could have an impact on the industry beyond birds and pigs, by signaling the industry that it doesn’t have to rely on traditional distribution mechanisms anymore. “You can establish a new programming franchise over the internet” thanks to mobile and connected devices, argued Allaire in our conversation.

When pigs fly

However, the flip side of this is that Angry Birds Toons also raises the bar for content companies to stand out and actually reach the consumer. It’s hard to compete with 263 million monthly active users. Heck, it’s hard to compete at all in a sea of millions of apps if all you have to offer is yet another show.

“In some sense, the business model hasn’t changed at all,” admitted Allaire. You still need to have highly compelling content, you still need to market that content effectively — and doing both  effectively is likely going to cost you a lot of money. And if you’re in mobile, you’re going to also need a really good app.

Birghtcove learned that lesson the hard way over the last couple of months when it failed to establish its app cloud offering, which was meant to provide publishers with an easy way to deploy HTML5-based apps with a native wrapper across a variety of platforms.

Turns out that publishers actually prefer to have true native apps that take advantage of each platform’s strengths and features, which is why Brightcove discontinued app cloud in February. “If you want a premium video experience, you got to put your best foot forward,” acknowledged Allaire when I quizzed him about its app cloud.

The bottom line is that Rovio may demonstrate new ways to enter the game — but that doesn’t mean that the rules have changed. To find large audiences, you still need to be big yourself or partner with a bigger platform.

That’s good news for Rovio and companies like Netflix and YouTube – but not necessarily for a startup looking to change the future of television.

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In its mission to become the “Linux of online learning,” edX just got a powerful new partner. On Wednesday, the Harvard and MIT-backed non-profit is set to announce that it’s teaming up with Stanford to collaboratively develop the open-source edX platform.

Last fall, Stanford launched its own open-source online learning platform Class2Go, which it released to the public in January. Developed by a team of Stanford engineers, the platform was designed to support the university’s online classes and research. In addition to being open, the platform was intended to be inter-operable with other services and portable (meaning that the course content isn’t tied to one platform). But as part of the new collaboration, Stanford will cease development on that platform and focus its efforts on edX.

“[We’ll] fold in the key features of the Class2Go platform in the open-source edX and, together, we’ll be working on a single platform going ahead,” Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said on a call with reporters. “By putting all the wood behind one arrow, so to speak, we thought we could have a bigger impact.”

Since its launch, other schools around the world have started using Class2Go. While the platform will continue to be available to other users, John Mitchell, Stanford’s vice provost for online learning, said they’ll work with those schools to migrate to edX while it transitions its own courses.

The two organizations gave few details on how the collaboration would actually work. But they said that Class2Go’s analytics tools, which can track how long students watch a given video, which sections they repeat and other kinds of student activity on the site, are an example of the kinds of features that will be integrated with edX.

Despite Stanford’s collaboration on the edX platform, Mitchell said the university was not joining the “X University Consortium” of institutions that offer courses on the edX site — which is not entirely surprising given its affiliation with for-profit rival Coursera. The startup was launched by two Stanford professors and the university was one of its launch partners.

But even as Stanford and other top universities partner with for-profit online course providers, like Coursera and Udacity, the growing support for an open source platform shows that schools want to experiment with multiple approaches and be able to control and customize online educational courses and learning tools. The open-source approach means developers anywhere can add new tools to the platform, that professors can create online experiences that best suit their needs and that schools can learn from the innovation of others.

In addition to the Stanford partnership, edX also announced that on June 1, it will release the entire source code for the online learning platform. That development follows its announcement last month that it would release its XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting edX course content.

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The Galaxy S 4 is one of the most high end phones money can buy in terms of sheer processing power, but it’s hard for any one device to hold that title for long in the quickly evolving mobile industry. This time, it looks like Lenovo and Intel are the ones looking to outdo Samsung. Lenovo’s latest 5.5 inch phablet, the IdeaPhone K900, packs a zippy dual-core Intel Atom Clover Trail+ CPU clocked at 2 GHz. And, according some AnTuTu benchmarks, it actually edges out Samsung’s Exynos 5 (octa-core) processor. Of course, at that point, you wouldn’t really notice much difference in real world usage of either device, but it goes to show that more cores don’t necessarily mean a better processor.

The K900 features a full HD 5.5 inch screen, Intel’s Atom Clover Trail+ processor, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, 2500 mAh  battery, but no micro SD card slot. Are any of you surprised that Intel’s processor did so well in benchmarks?

source: Phone Arena

Come comment on this article: Lenovo IdeaPhone K900 barely beats out the Galaxy S 4 in benchmarks thanks to Intel CPU

Prices of virtual currency Bitcoin have been absolutely surging lately but one analyst thinks such a rapid rise is more indicative of a bubble than a genuine boom. ConvergEx Group Chief Market Strategist Nick Colas tells Business Insider that the reaction from his clients “has been pretty uniform: it must be a bubble.” Colas goes on to say that the price increase in Bitcoins has been “too far, too fast, too new” and exhibits all the signs of a classic speculative bubble. Colas also notes that “it’s very hard to short Bitcoins, so there’s no real way to express that pessimistic point of view,” which means that the price of the virtual currency may continue to rise until it experiences a hard landing. The price of Bitcoins, which remained at under $20 for all of 2012, has recently spiked to more than $110 over the span of just a few weeks.

With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!

Reviews

Strategy & Tactics: World War II [Arcade & Action]

Fynch for Twitter [Social]

Apps

WWE Presents: Rockpocalypse now available in Google Play Store

3DMark comes to Android platform, now available in Google Play Store

Carriers

AT&T Working on HD Voice capabilities for its customers due for arrival later this year

Are Verizon and AT&T Working on a Vodafone Buy Out Deal? Verizon Says No

Google

Androidbooks, as in Android notebooks, could show up by Q3

Hardware

ARM Teams Up With TSMC To Create First 16nm Cortex-A57 Processor

Phones

Facebook phone images leak, likely to be called the HTC First

AT&T to offer the HTC One smartphone April 19th, will start from $199.99

Add Sprint to list of carriers offering HTC One on April 19th

LG confirms Optimus G Pro sales have already topped the 500,000 unit mark

Verizon Offering Dual-Core LG Lucid 2 For Free Starting April 4

Samsung Fonblet now known as Galaxy Mega and will come in two sizes

AT&T’s Galaxy S 4 hits the FCC

Tablets

$79.99 7-inch tablet from Ematic hits the market, powered by Android 4.1

Updates

Want to know if your HTC phone will get Sense 5 with Android 4.2.2? Here’s the latest list

 

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for April 2, 2013

Looking for a way to find cool new apps? You might not have previously thought to check Twitter, but now your Twitter stream could start to look more like an avenue for app discovery.

Twitter announced updates to its Twitter Cards at a developer event in San Francisco on Tuesday, and the most interesting news is that tweets will now allow for third-party developers to include download links within those tweets, turning Twitter into more of an app discovery platform and showing users where content is coming from.

So for instance, if your friend posts a photo to the social network Path and cross-posts that photo to Twitter, and if you don’t already have Path installed, you’ll see a link where you can go download Path. And if you do have Path installed, the link can serve as a deep link that will allow you to head directly to the content in that app.

It might seem slightly counterintuitive for Twitter — why would the company want to send you elsewhere? But clearly Twitter has realized that people respond positively to visual, richer content within tweets, like the short basketball clips embedded in March Madness tweets. So if Twitter becomes a more interesting place, that’s obviously a win for the company.

Mike Isaac wrote for AllThingsD last week that the developer event would revolve around cards, and explained why the cards matter so much for the future of Twitter’s business. Facebook has built up its third-party developer community in recent years, and while Twitter struggled to work with developers last summer over API guidelines, this could be a new way for the company to build a more positive ecosystem around its product.

The updates to Cards also come with some changes to the types of content that can be tweeted out, including app descriptions, product details, and galleries, to show that more than one photo is being shared. The blog post from Twitter explained:

“We first introduced expanded Tweets with three card types: summary, photo and player/video. Since then, we’ve heard that publishers want to be able to share different types of content. With these new card types, more publishers can show more types of content on Twitter.

Finally, with this update to Cards, we’ve fundamentally re-architected the way Cards are created and delivered. The new Cards system lays a foundation that will make it easier for us to develop more types of Cards in the future and allow for greater customization by publishers and developers. Additionally, this new system is backward compatible; if you’ve already implemented Cards, your integrations will continue to work seamlessly.”

Twitter announced that its first partners for this roll-out include Delectable, Etsy, Flickr, Foursquare, Gumroad, Jawbone, Path, Rovio’s Angry Birds, SoundCloud, Storenvy, Wine Library and Vine.

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If you’ve been itching to pick up an Android tablet without breaking the bank, a new player in the Android tablet game has something that may pique your interest. Ematic has announced today that they’re releasing a 7 inch tablet running Jelly Bean, and it’ll only set you back $79.99. The specs are pretty on par for a tablet under $100, but it’s a great bang for your buck.

It packs a 1 GHz A4 processor and 512 MB of RAM under the hood, as well as 4 GB of internal memory. It also comes in six different colors, which is something pretty unique, and it features all of the core Google apps you’re used to, which is something usually missing from these cheap tablets. It weighs about 2 ounces less than the Nexus 7 as well, so if you’re looking for something light, this may be an option.

You can check out the full press release after the break. Anybody planning on picking one of these up?

Ematic Unveils Genesis Prime, a 7” Google Certified Tablet with Android 4.1, Jelly Bean Giving You Full Access to the Hottest Apps, Games and More, only $79.99

 

The device packs other Google services such as Chrome, Gmail, Maps and YouTube; Offers Access to Thousands of Movies, eBooks and more

LOS ANGELES- April 2, 2013- Ematic launches the Genesis Prime, its first-ever Google-certified tablet with complete access to Google Play.  For on-the-go users, this 7” Android 4.1(Jelly Bean) tablet is your hub for entertainment with access to thousands of today’s most popular apps, games, movies and more. 

 

“With Google Play, we [Ematic] were able to bring an entirely new digital experience to our consumers,” says Roy Rayn, President of Ematic.  “Intuitive and exciting, this tablet is ideal for work or play with faster web browsing capabilities and endless possibilities for entertainment.”

Google Play is a digital content experience providing access to music, movies, television shows, books, magazines, Android apps and games.  Users can browse this online market from the web or Android device for content to stay entertained for hours.  There are more than four million titles available in the eBookstore, thousands of TV shows and movies to stream directly to your tablet, and millions of music titles to peruse.  Additionally, with music on Google Play you can upload 20,000 of your songs for free, discover new artists, browse millions of tracks and share music you buy with your friends on Google+.

 

Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them. Google Now delivers the weather, Google Calendar appointments, reminders about when a user needs to leave their home or office to catch a flight, a heads up on nearby events, dinner reservations and much more.  The Genesis Prime also includes other Google services such as Chrome, Maps, YouTube, and Google Talk.

Lightweight and portable, the Genesis Prime is designed with the active, on-the-go user in mind.  The HD video player supports up to 1080p HD videos, and the tablet features a front camera to easily capture life’s memorable moments.  The tablet is loaded with a 1.1 GHz processor with dedicated GPU lets you get the most out of your favorite games and apps.  Additionally, the Genesis Prime has 4GB of internal storage available as well as 5GB of included cloud storage to store your important content and favorite multimedia.

 

The Genesis Prime is available at amazon.com for $79.99.

Technical Specifications
1.1 GHz processor
4GB on-board storage memory
5GB of included cloud storage
7” capacitive multi-touch screen
Built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
Front VGA camera
USB 2.0 port, 3.5 mm audio jack
Rechargeable battery- up to 4.5 hours of battery life
Weight: .59lbs
Dimensions: 7.56” x 4.92” x .39”
Android 4.1, Jelly Bean operating system
Google Play
Google Now
Other Google services: Chrome, Gmail, Maps, YouTube
About Ematic

 

Ematic is the leader in portable media and value tablets; offering high quality consumer electronics at an affordable price.  Founded in 1985, the company offers a variety of technology ranging from designer headphones to MP3 players and tablets.  Ematic prides itself on offering the latest in advanced technology that has undergone rigorous testing for quality performance and design.  

Come comment on this article: $79.99 7-inch tablet from Ematic hits the market, powered by Android 4.1

There was a news story circulating the tech world today suggesting that both Verizon and AT&T were working together on an agreement that would split up Vodafone. Verizon would take back the 45% stake in US relations that Vodafone has in Big Red’s company while AT&T would take control of non-U.S. action. The deal would give AT&T a big boost in achieving a foothold in other markets. After the transaction Vodafone at $245 billion. It was confirmed by “usually reliable people” and would be complex to complete. However Verizon took to the internet to squash this rumor. They were quoted to say:

“Verizon Communications Inc. (“ Verizon ”) notes the recent press speculation regarding a potential merger with or purchase by Verizon of Vodafone. As Verizon has said many times, it would be a willing purchaser of the 45% stake that Vodafone holds in Verizon Wireless. It does not, however, currently have any intention to merge with or make an offer for Vodafone, whether alone or in conjunction with others.”

Make of it what you will, but it appears that Verizon and AT&T won’t be playing together. While it could be the standard boiler plate media response to get rid of media attention, Verizon has at least let us know where they stand on the 45% stake Vodafone has. It also looks like AT&T’s big break into other markets will have to come from somewhere else. So at this point in time it appears that nothing’s changed and that these “usually reliable people” weren’t so reliable. We’ll keep you posted if anything changes but don’t hold your breath.

 

source: Financial Times

Come comment on this article: Are Verizon and AT&T Working on a Vodafone Buy Out Deal? Verizon Says No