Category: News

Genetically modified crops were designed to be more resistant to drought and pests, but many scientists say it’s too early to know their side effects. Even as 90 percent of soybeans, corn, and canola in the U.S. are grown with transgenic seeds, 93 percent of consumers…

Collectivists have a favorite target. Big bad corporations. This is a complete scam. Why did Goldman Sachs turn out to be the biggest funder of Obama’s 2008 election bid? Why weren’t the corporate banksters who demanded and received those enormous bailouts, under both…

Beverage giant PepsiCo has once again partnered with Senomyx, the San Diego, Cal.-based chemical company that gained nationwide attention back in 2011 for using aborted human fetal cells to develop flavor chemicals, to create even more flavor chemicals for its products…

Sometimes, it can be difficult to find apps specifically for your Android tablet on the Play Store, especially if you’re browsing from the Play Store website. The Play Store app has had a featured tablet apps section for quite some time now, but Google is finally putting some clout behind it on the website, too.

There’s a relatively short list of apps that shows off a little over 100 apps that do a great job of adhering to Android UI guidelines. The apps aren’t necessarily written for just tablets, but they are written in a way that larger screens can take advantage of the extra space without looking just like blown up phone apps, and Google is trying to give them a nudge and a thumbs up with some extra advertising, probably to convince other developers to do the same with their applications.

Anyway, if you’ve been looking for some new apps to use on your tablet, you may want to check out the featured tablet apps. You never know, there may be a nice little gem you’ve been missing hidden somewhere in that list.

source:  Google Play

Come comment on this article: Google Play shows off “Featured Android Apps for Tablets” page on website

Yesterday, we saw the teaser for Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 mobile game. Today, we’ve got an official announcement and teaser trailer.

The game is essentially a Temple Run-style endless running game, but with some pretty crazy, comic book twists. There’s way more destruction and bad guy blasting than you’re even going to see in Temple Run, and who doesn’t want to fly around in an Iron Man suit? The release date is set for April 25th, so we’ll be sure to keep you updated as that date gets closer and closer. Hit the source below to watch the trailer and see for yourself.

source: Twitter

Come comment on this article: Gameloft announces Iron Man 3 for Android on April 25th

Final Book Now Available

We live in a changing world with multiple and evolving threats to national security, including terrorism, asymmetrical warfare (conflicts between agents with different military powers or tactics), and social unrest. Visually depicting and assessing these threats using imagery and other geographically-referenced information is the mission of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). As the nature of the threat evolves, so do the tools, knowledge, and skills needed to respond. The challenge for NGA is to maintain a workforce that can deal with evolving threats to national security, ongoing scientific and technological advances, and changing skills and expectations of workers.

Future U.S. Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence assesses the supply of expertise in 10 geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) fields, including 5 traditional areas (geodesy and geophysics, photogrammetry, remote sensing, cartographic science, and geographic information systems and geospatial analysis) and 5 emerging areas that could improve geospatial intelligence (GEOINT fusion, crowdsourcing, human geography, visual analytics, and forecasting). The report also identifies gaps in expertise relative to NGA’s needs and suggests ways to ensure an adequate supply of geospatial intelligence expertise over the next 20 years.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Conflict and Security Issues | Earth Sciences

Google made plenty of nerds happy earlier today when it began reaching out to the 8,000 people that would have the privilege of spending $1,500 on the company’s head-mounted Glass display, but that thrill wound up being short-lived for some.

About seven hours after announcing that the outreach to would-be Glass Explorers began, the Glass team once again took to the project’s Google Plus page to admit they needed to rescind some of those invitations.

After noting that the #ifihadglass program yielded applicants from all walks of life, a representative noted that “it’s become clear that a few applications that don’t comply with our terms have slipped through the cracks” and that those applications would have to be disqualified.

It’s not clear exactly how many people ultimately got the boot from the Explorer program, but a quick Twitter search yields two viewable tweets breaking the bad news directly from the Glass account. In both of those cases the applicants (hopefully jokingly) said they would engage in some ill-advised behavior while wearing Glass — the more extreme of the two applicants said “#ifihadglass I’d cut a bitch!” which definitely flies in the face of the Explorer program’s terms and conditions. The other was mild in comparison, but still pretty pointless:

#IfIHadGlass, I'd throw it at your face. ._.

—
Le Queen. (@wutabril) February 20, 2013

Of course, there’s still the question of how those people got selected in the first place — it doesn’t seem like whoever was at the helm was being very selective in the first place. According to the terms of the Explorer program, entries were “evaluated and scored by a panel of independent content moderators” who aren’t employed by either Google or its promotional partner, a New York-based marketing firm called Anomaly. Either someone on that jury found those, erm, colorful entries funny and gave them a pass, or the jury just wasn’t paying attention at all. Either way, Google was left to deal with the aftermath publicly.

It’s also unclear how many more applications (if any) will wind up getting the boot as well. Entries like this were earnest and potentially very cool, while others who were chosen seemed to have their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks when tweeting their original applications.

[via The Next Web]

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

Aces Gin Rummy [Cards & Casino]

Apps

Verizon Announces Playphone Games Portal, Coming Q2 2013

The original Sonic the Hedgehog coming to Android in April according to SEGA

Google Translate gets offline language packs

Google adds info cards to Play Movies app

Live Transit Information Added for Washington D.C. and Salt Lake City in Google Maps

Action Launcher Makes Widgets Cool Again With Shutter Feature

Carriers

UK carrier Three to launch 4G LTE, just not before the end of the year

Google Glass

The first batches of Google Glass could be made inside the U.S.

Google TV

Amazon Prime Content Comes to Google TV’s PrimeTime

Phones

Amazon Kindle smartphone to go into production in Q2 with a 4.7-inch display

T-Mobile’s 4G LTE can be accessed with Nexus 4 under right circumstances

Free Tablet From Carphone Warehouse When You Pre-Order The Galaxy S 4 Starting March 28

Samsung Galaxy S 4 goes through extensive battery testing, shows it can stay on for possibly 3 days

Sony Xperia A ‘Dogo’ and Xperia UL ‘Gaga’ heading to Japan this summer

Updates

Android 4.1 scheduled for Motorola Droid Bionic during 2nd quarter of 2013

Miscellenous

Samsung to break smartphone sales record with 70 million units for Q1

Apple Claims Reduction Of Samsung Damages Was An $85 Million Mistake

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for March 27, 2013

With T-Mobile officially launching their 4G LTE network in seven cities throughout the U.S., their customers may be wondering exactly how to access the new bandwidth. Owners of Samsung Galaxy Note II devices can do so thanks to an update that T-Mobile just pushed out to the devices. Another group that may be able to do so are owners of the LG Nexus 4 if they have done some work. Achieving this feat with a T-Mobile Nexus 4 requires rooting and installing a custom ROM, then flashing the radio back to the previous .33 version.

According to users over on the XDA Developers forums, those who have installed the CM or AOKP ROMs seem to be having the most success, though other ROM should work. Users also have to revert their radio to the older .33 version that was present on the devices before the Android 4.2.2 update was pushed out. The 4.2.2 version of Jelly Bean included an update to the radio to .48, which removed the ability to connect to the LTE network. In addition to the custom ROM and flashed radio, users also have to update their APN settings.

If you are a T-Mobile Nexus 4 owner running a custom ROM in one of the new markets, you may want to hit the source link to start reading through the posts on how to make this happen.

source: XDA Developers
via: Droid Life

Come comment on this article: T-Mobile’s 4G LTE can be accessed with Nexus 4 under right circumstances

Electric car startup Fisker Automotive has put its U.S. workers on furlough, or temporary unpaid leave, this week according to Reuters. The news follows reports last week in the Wall Street Journal that the Chinese auto tech companies that were bidding on an investment or acquisition of Fisker have now stalled.

There’s conflicting reports about why talks with the Chinese auto companies have grown cold. The WSJ says it’s because Fisker wants to try to get the remaining amount of the loan from the Department of Energy that was frozen, and restarting such a loan would mean Fisker’s next car would have to be built in the U.S. The Chinese companies would probably want to build the car in China where it would be lower cost. PluginCars says that the Chinese giants are less interested after looking under the hood of Fisker and realizing the company doesn’t own a lot of the technology in its vehicles.

Fisker hasn’t made one of its hybrid electric sports cars, the Karma, since the Summer of 2012. The company was plagued by problems in 2012, including the bankruptcy of its battery maker A123 Systems, hundreds of cars lost to superstorm Sandy, software glitches and recalls in the Karma cars that were made, and the loss of part of its loan from the Department of Energy for not meeting milestones with its Karma. The broker that was helping raising money for Fisker, Advanced Equities, also shut down after getting in trouble with the SEC.

Fisker founder and former CEO Henrik Fisker resigned earlier this month. The company has a loan repayment of part of the $192 million that it was able to secure from the DOE next month. Fisker raised over a billion dollars from private investors. It’s Karma car is owned by some well known customers including actor Leonardo DiCaprio, hip hop artist The Game, pop artist Justin Bieber, former Vice President Al Gore, and actor Matt Damon.

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Look out, Splunk. Chronon, a startup that just picked up $30,000 in seed funding through the second class of the Alchemist Accelerator, wants to take a different approach to keeping and reviewing log files — it wants to ditch them in favor of something that takes much less time to deploy, allowing for quicker data review.

Like a Tivo or other digital video recorder, Chronon records live data on the use of Java programs and lets developers and business people check out the resulting databases and performance charts later.

Companies can use Chronon on top of log-monitoring software such as Splunk, Sumo Logic and Loggly, but founder and CEO Prashant Deva expects customers of both products to look at logs less and less. Gradually, Deva believes his sort of push-to-use code for recording and replaying will replace logging altogether.

Chronon, based in San Mateo, Calif., has already signed up Disney, HSBC, Nokia, Sony, Pearson and other companies as customers. It wants to take on more funding and further build out its product. But Splunk has gone public and gotten lots of attention. Persuading many enterprises to try another, different model won’t be easy.

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At first glance, the idea of playing Bioshock Infinite on your web browser sounds like a pipe dream. But according to Ars Technica, it’s a pipe dream that Mozilla is working very hard to make real by porting Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 onto its open-source Firefox web browser. To achieve this daunting task, Ars says Mozilla “has been working on WebGL, in order to bring 3D graphics to the browser; Emscripten, a tool for compiling C++ applications into JavaScript; and asm.js, a high performance subset of JavaScript.”

Continue reading…

I’m very particular when it comes to the launchers that I use. I’ve been perfectly content in my Nova Launcher set up for over a year now. It looks like this is going to change however, as Chris Lacy released an update for Action Launcher today with a killer new feature.  In this update, the Covers feature is taken a step further. Covers brought you your most accessed destinations quickly with the swipe of a finger and Action Launcher’s new Shutter feature looks to do the same with widgets.  For example you can slide your finger up on the Gmail icon and it displays the Gmail widget, giving you quick access to your email. Chrome gives you quick access to your bookmarks (see below). Most apps with widgets have this ability and I particularly liked being able to skip tracks in the Play Music App right from the icon.

If you’re looking for a new launcher to try, I can’t recommend Action Launcher enough. Not only is it fast, clean, and polished it will make using widgets cool again. Even if HTC’s Director of User Experience, Drew Bamford thinks otherwise. This Shutter feature alone makes it well worth the $3.99 you’ll pay for the pro version. If you’re skeptical though, you can check out Chris Lacy’s video run through of it below.  Otherwise you can scroll past that to get your QR code and download link. I don’t know about you guys, but it looks like Nova’s getting put up on the shelf for a while as I have a new launcher to play with.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Play Store Link

source: Chris Lacy – Google+

Come comment on this article: Action Launcher Makes Widgets Cool Again With Shutter Feature

In one of his first public appearances since joining Khosla Ventures back in February, longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Keith Rabois talked about a wide range of topics, including Stanford football, the so-called Series A crunch and working with the press.

Rabois recently resigned from Square, where he was serving as COO in January after an employee accused him of sexual harassment. Square accepted his resignation but has so far backed Rabois and he joined Khosla Ventures in February. Vinod Khosla said in an interview at the time that he was consistently impressed with Rabois’ business expertise, and said he heard from entrepreneurs that Rabois was one of the most sought-after advisers in Silicon Valley.

During the Founder’s Showcase event on the future of investing on Wednesday, Rabois didn’t break a lot of new ground, but here were five things he told us:

His “Spidey Sense” tells him the Series A Crunch is probably real

Various people have written about the Series A crunch, and Rabois said he thinks it’s probably not just hyperbole. It is actually getting harder for companies to move from raising a seed round to raising a Series A round, especially with crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter making it easier to get in the game.

“My spidey sense is that there is a real change,” he said.

Half the battle for startups lies with people

“Capital is one of the resources you need to build a real business, but people are the other. And people are incredibly scarce,” he said.

Party rounds are not that effective

“When you do that, no one really cares. They won’t wake up in the morning and think about your company. Most of the people will return your call and try to be helpful, but it’s very different having a partner and having an investor,” Rabois said of party rounds, which are investment rounds involving a large number of people where no one has a substantially larger stake.

When dealing with the press, be honest

Having worked on communications teams for a variety of startups, Rabois said honesty is the best policy and it’s not worth taking short-term gains if you think you’ll be around for a while. This gets harder if a reporter hears that you raised funding that you’re not ready to announce, but he said he’s always tried to give more than a “no comment.”

Being a good VC is an art, not a science

In response to questions about metrics he looks for or benchmarks he wants to see in companies he invests in, Rabois said metrics are important to an extent, but anyone can look at numbers and make a call. Being a successful venture capitalist is about the art of recognizing unique founders or market opportunities.

“It’s pretty much a commodity skill to look at numbers. It’s not a real skill,” he joked. “Investment bankers can look at metrics.”

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Insulting the honor of alleged Dutch spammers may not be the smartest idea. The New York Times reports that a fight between Dutch anti-spam group Spamhaus and Dutch hosting company Cyberbunker has resulted in the world’s largest recorded distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which peaked at speeds of 300Gbps this week. The spat between the firms started when Spamhaus added Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is designed to help email providers block alleged spammers. Shortly after Spamhaus blacklisted Cyberbunker, which says it on its website that it will host any data not related to child pornography or terrorism, the anti-spam group was hit by an enormous DDoS attack that is described by Akamai Networks chief architect Patrick Gilmore as “the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.”

A little over a year and a half ago, Mascoma, which is a startup with aims to make next-generation cellulosic ethanol, filed to go public in a potentially $100 million IPO. In an article entitled “Some red flags and numbers in Mascoma’s IPO filing,” back then I detailed why that seemed like a strange choice given its weak financials, such as the fact that at the time government grants made up 86 percent of Mascoma’s total revenue.

So whatever happened to that IPO? Last week, Mascoma quietly withdrew its IPO plans. The company cited “market conditions,” for the move, though the macro IPO market conditions seem a little better in 2013 than 2012. Already this year smart grid company Silver Spring Networks went public, and late last year solar installer SolarCity made it out.

Mascoma currently makes a next-generation yeast that it sells to corn ethanol makers to help them cut the costs of making corn ethanol. That’s what made up the other 14 percent of its revenues (the part that wasn’t grants) at the time of its IPO-filing. But Mascoma’s real aim is to use its technology to make cellulosic ethanol — a next-gen type of ethanol that uses plant waste (not corn) — and the company wanted to do that using wood waste in a factory in Michigan. Many companies have tried to make cellulosic ethanol at scale in recent years and failed.

Before pulling its IPO, Mascoma raised two rounds of a few millions of dollars in debt over the past six months. That’s not the typical behavior of a company on the upswing getting ready to go public.

And over the past year and a half, as Mascoma amended its S-1 every once in awhile, its finances didn’t improve. The latest revenue numbers from March 2012 — a year ago — said that government grants and awards then constituted 93 percent of its revenue while sales of its equipment and services made up 6 percent of revenue. So the percentage of grants disturbingly actually rose over the 6 months from its first filing, rather than dropped, and its percentage of sales from real products fell.

Mascoma over the years has raised a lot of money from both venture capitalists, strategic corporations and public funds. At least over $100 million in private capital from companies like Khosla Ventures, SunOpta, GM, Marathon Oil, Khosla Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Atlas Venture, General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vantage Point Venture Partners, and Pinnacle Ventures. The company was founded in 2005 from research from a Dartmouth Professor, Lee Rybeck Lynd.

Public funds have also been awarded and sometimes allocated for its projects. The Department of Energy awarded it $80 million to help it build Kinross, though its unclear if Mascoma actually drew down on those funds. The state of Michigan also offered Mascoma a $20 million grant to build the factory in Michigan.

At some point in 2012, Mascoma had been hoping to start construction on its factory in Kinross, Michigan that could eventually produce 20 million gallons per year of cellulosic ethanol. The company had wanted that to happen before the end of 2012, with operations starting in 2014.

An article in Michigan Capital Confidential from the summer of 2012 quotes a financing partner of Mascoma’s, Frontier’s VP of Operations, Ken Nielsen, who said that the company expects to ”start construction by the end of the year [2012].” Mascoma managed to secure (in December 2011) an agreement with Valero to help it build that factory, but it’s unclear how much Valero was willing to put up to finance this project.

According to the Michigan Capital Confidential the Kinross project had as of the summer of 2012 only created three jobs (it was originally supposed to create 70) and “received strong criticism from environmental and fiscal groups across the political spectrum.”

As of March 2013, it’s unclear if Mascoma ever broke ground on that facility, or if it hasn’t when it will. I’ve reached out to the company and am waiting to hear back. You can bet if they did start construction, they’d have sent out a press release on it across the internets. Instead, vaguely, Mascoma’s website still says the Kinross facility is “planned” and anticipated to go under construction in 3 to 6 months (the same time line it used a year ago).

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Google has been working hard at bringing public transportation information to its Google Maps app over the past year. They’ve expanded coverage for New York’s Subway (MTA) system while adding information for Salt Lake City and Washington D.C. Those in New York will now see departure times for seven of the subway lines.  If you’re in Salt Lake City you’ll be able to see the bus and tram (UTA) schedule updated in real time. People who use D.C.’s Metrorail will be able to see live service alerts. These alerts include scheduled track work as well as unplanned delays straight from Metrorail’s Control Center. So if you live or travel in these areas make sure you download Google Maps as you’ll be able to take advantage of this real time updating travel information.

source: Google Lat Long Blog

 

Come comment on this article: Live Transit Information Added for Washington D.C. and Salt Lake City in Google Maps

In an age of Hadoop and a general analytics revolution, it’s easy to poke fun at legacy data warehouse vendors such as Teradata. Some people might even call it fun. After all, they sell expensive appliances and weren’t built from the ground up to handle the unstructured data that most people think of when they think of “big data.”

But whatever you think about Teradata’s approach to handling big data workloads, make no mistake about the company’s clout: It has been around for decades, and it’s still analyzing boatloads of data for some of the biggest names in business. I spent a day in February touring the Teradata Labs facility in San Diego, and although I heard all about the technology and the company’s vision for a Teradata-Hadoop-Aster analytics super-environment, the thing that stuck out most were the users. Walmart, eBay, Continental … Apple.

Here’s how they’re all using Teradata and at what scale (try not to faint when you think of the bill):

• Apple: Apple is operating a multiple-petabyte Teradata system (that became apparent during its iCloud launch in 2011) and, I learned, was Teradata’s “fastest ever customer to a petabyte.” Apple uses the data warehouse to get a better understanding of its customers across product groups. Now every piece of identifiable information — and those iTunes interactiona generate a lot of data — goes into the system so the company knows who’s who and what they’re up to.

• Walmart: The retail giant deployed Teradata’s first-ever terabyte-scale database in 1992, and it has grown, uh, a bit since then. Its operational system was at 2.5 petabytes as of 2008, and is certainly leaps and bounds bigger by now — likely well into the double digits when you consider it operates separate ones for Walmart and Sam’s Club as well as a backup system. The analytics efforts have essentially helped Walmart become a massive consignment shop. It tells suppliers, “You have three feet of shelf space. Optimize it.” And then it gives them any data they could possibly need to determine what’s selling, how fast and even whether they should redesign their packaging to fit more on the shelves.
• eBay: eBay (e ebay) has two systems in place, and they’re both big. Its primary data warehouse is 9.2 petabyes; its “singularity system” that stores web clicks and other “big” data is more than 40 petabytes. It has a single table that’s 1 trillion rows. Yes, this is smaller than the 50 petabytes worth of Hadoop capacity eBay added last year, but Teradata is quick to point out that all of its systems support data into and out of Hadoop, so it’s not as if eBay is operating two entirely distinct data environments.

Of course, Teradata has lots of other petabyte-scale customers, with Verizon, AT&T and Bank of America among them. Here are a few more interesting use cases:

• Harrah’s (now part of the Caesar’s Entertainment casino empire) understands how much money particular gamblers can afford to lose in a day before they won’t come back the next day.
• Disney is rolling out new bracelet tickets equipped with GPS and NFC that track everything visitors do while inside Disney’s amusement parks. The New York Times detailed the privacy implications of this move in a January article.
• A manufacturing customer generates 20 terabytes of data per hour while testing products, although that volume is ultimately reduced to about 1 terabyte after the valuable data is filtered out.
• At some point, Continental Airlines decided it wanted to keep its customers happy and began assessing them by lifetime value (which, it turns out, is often inversely related to frequent-flyer status) and began making alternative arrangements for them as soon as the airline realized flights would be delayed.
• A luxury car company used Aster Data to analyze the pattern of failures for various components inside its cars. It found out that lighting, seats and infotainment often failed together (they’re on the same circuit) and began inspecting all three when a customer comes in for service on any of them.

None of this means Teradata is destined to continue being a huge name in analytics (Scott Yara, co-founder of rival EMC Greenplum, recently called data warehouses this generation’s mainframe), but it’s still interesting to learn how big companies are analyzing their data, regardless what they’re running on. And with exabytes worth of data no doubt residing in customer systems across the world, Teradata isn’t going anywhere soon.

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If you’re a user of Amazon Prime and own a Google TV then you’ll be excited for this next tidbit. Amazon Prime content is now viewable on Google TV’s PrimeTime TV guide. This new feature comes on top of other bug fixes. The other feature that it has now is a subscription selector that makes it easier to customize your subscriptions. Netflix, HBOGO and Amazon Prime will show up as “free” if you’re subscribe to those services. So if you have a Google TV, Amazon Prime and use PrimeTime you’ll be able to access your content easier. Happy viewing!

 

source: Google Play Store

Come comment on this article: Amazon Prime Content Comes to Google TV’s PrimeTime