Category: News

Roku’s new Roku 3 is out, complete with a revamped UI and a remote control that sports a headphone jack. Check out our video review:

Previously on Cord Cutters:
A first look at the WD TV Play
A first look at Netflix’s House Of Cards
Testing the Android-based Cloud TV Box
The 2012 Cord Cutters gift guide for cable-free holidays
WD TV Live gets over-the-air tuner and DVR support
Browse the show archive for a complete list of episodes, and subscribe to the Cord Cutters podcast RSS feed so you don’t miss any future episode.

Show notes for this episode:

• The Roku 3 is available for $100 online, and will come to retail stores some time in April. More information about the device can be found on Roku’s website.
• Roku 3 comes with apps for most major content providers, but still doesn’t have its own YouTube app. Check here to learn how to play YouTube videos on Roku.
• Check out our e-book Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable to learn more about various devices that help you to get rid of cable. The book is available for $5 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes.

What’s your take on the new Roku, and especially the headphone jack? Worth a buy, or just a gimmick? Sound off in the comments below, get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or email us at cordcutters @ gigaom.com. Also, please check out our new Google+ Cord Cutters community!

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• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012
• Over the top in 2012: trends and technologies to watch
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

The CEO of ASUS (2357) has set an ambitious goal for his company: To become the largest vendor for touchscreen notebooks, and the second-largest for all notebooks and tablets in 2013. Digitimes reports that CEO Jerry Shen set the goal at a recent meeting with investors, adding that the company also plans to launch new smartphones in August. In the most recent quarter, ASUS generated a majority of its profit from sales of its notebook computers, which totaled 59% of revenue, followed by the success of its Transformer line of tablets. The company recently announced two new hybrid devices, the PadFone and FonePad, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and look to increase its smartphone market share around the world.

As the process to roll out hundreds of new top-level domain names, which will join familiar ones like “.org” and “.com,” grinds forward, the head of the largest domain registrar predicted the public will be able to buy them by June.

GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, attending a large scale meeting of current and future domain registries this week, said by phone that no one knows exactly when the first batch of new names will be available but that the “over/under” consensus among the sellers is three months from now.

Under the process, the new names — which include suffixes like “.party,” “.dog” and “.mormon” — are expected to be rolled out in batches of 20 at a time. The impending sales will deliver millions of dollars to the domain name industry which makes major money off registration fees and in the secondary market for internet names.

The industry has been touting the addition of the approximately 2000 new suffixes as a “land rush” and a “gold rush.” Critics, however, have warned the process will mean a surge in cyber-squatting and trademark infringement. Companies, which have likened it to a shakedown, are already exasperated at having to pay for new names like “.xxx” they don’t need or want but feel obliged to obtain lest someone abuse them. This could occur, for example, if someone who is not Disney bought the name “www.disney.dog”.

The domain name sales have also been characterized as a brazen act of self-dealing by ICANN, an unaccountable agency that overseas the naming process for the internet.

GoDaddy’s Irvine defends the process, saying “free market economics allow people to buy the names they want.” He added that the potential for abuse is lower since so-called domain parking (sitting on a name but using it just for ads) is not as big of a business as it once was.

The first of the new names to go on sale are likely to be non-Roman scripts like Chinese or Russian. These were given high priority by ICANN and the order of others was determined by lottery; other names tapped to go early are “.wedding” and “.buy.” (You can see the priority list here).

GoDaddy, anticipating a sizable amount of new business, said it is making its website easier to navigate in response. The company this week also dropped its own application to manage “.casa” and “.home” in order not to be perceived as competing with the names it sells on behalf of others.

(Image by  d3images via Shutterstock)

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• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

With computer programs and mobile applications, people seek out physical devices on which to use them. When designing a service for the internet of things, however, the trick is to build something that’s almost invisible — but not so invisible that people won’t interact with it. At our GigaOM internet of things meetup held last week in San Francisco, Jawbone’s Roberto Tagliabue explained why that’s a design challenge that’s tough to deal with.

In his talk, the designer, who helped build the Nike+, discussed the challenges of making those devices social as a means to get more people to buy them and then use them. When someone tweets about their run it might make you want to check your own fitness scores, for example. Watch the video below and start thinking about how you might rethink design in a world of connected devices — from storytelling to observations about where you sneak a connected product or service in.

If you liked this talk, check out the others here, here or here, or come to our next Internet of Things meetup in Boulder, Colo., next week.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Server vendor Boston is releasing a platform of servers that use cell phone chips that developers can use to test their software for future ARM-based enterprise applications. Boston built the platform using Calxeda’s ARM-based servers, and has dubbed it ARM as a Service, or AaaS. the idea behind the product is to help developers move software from servers with brawny x86 cores to microservers with plenty of low-power wimpy cores.

With its AaaS, United Kingdom-based Boston will use software from Ellexus to essentially provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to customers. Once enrolled, developers will be able to spin up or down multiple nodes on Boston’s Viridis microservers, which use the low-power Calxeda systems.

The impact of the Boston AaaS could trickle down the supply chain to Calxeda and AMD as well as other companies making or planning microservers and, naturally, ARM itself.

As I reported last month, the microserver market is expected to keep growing, and the new ARM cloud could bump up the growth rate. One might say it could help kick some AaaS.

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• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look
• Cleantech and investment in 2013

Former Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen has joined the Obvious Corporation to work on editorial content, providing interesting insight into the direction of Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s company.

Williams and Stone re-launched Obvious Corp. in June 2012 after they both left Twitter, the company they co-founded with Jack Dorsey. Expectations for both Obvious Corp. and Medium, a collaborative publishing tool and the first product it launched in August, have been high, although the product appears to be growing slowly.

Hansen wrote in his email to friends and family (reported by Mike Isaac of AllThingsD, formerly of Wired) that he would be working specifically on editorial content at Medium, which hired noted literary agent Kate Lee to direct content back in November.

At the moment, Medium is publishing blog posts from a wide variety of writers, technologists, and artists, clearly focusing on quality over quantity and slowly rolling out the ability to contribute. Published stories are divided into “collections” around certain themes, and aims to re-think how writers to publish to the web.

Last year at our Roadmap conference, Williams told attendees “I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates ‘Desperate Housewives,’” perhaps hinting at the type of content strategy that Medium intends to pursue.

This post and its headline were corrected at 4:28pm to after Hansen clarified on Twitter that he wasn’t leading all of editorial at Medium, just science and technology.

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The Pivotal Initiative is now selling software and support subscriptions for the Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) and is opening up governance of that effort to bring outside voices into the process.

The addition of “external committers” to the project could ease tensions brewing among some Cloud Foundry backers — companies that built their own PaaSes atop the Cloud Foundry framework.

But then again, the fact that Pivotal is now selling software/support could open new areas of contention with partners that may want to do the same thing. Such is the life of an open source project where coopetition is the rule of engagement.

As set forth in a new blog post, Cloud Foundry is going to add “full-time external committers” to the process. Governance and openness had been an ongoing issue with the PaaS project according to an exec with one Cloud Foundry vendor. “We just didn’t have any visibility into what was going on [inside the project],” he said.

He would like to see the whole effort turned over to a vendor-neutral foundation for management, as Rackspace did with OpenStack and IBM did with Eclipse. That didn’t happen here but the addition of outside committers is a step in the right direction and, to be fair, some folks in the OpenStack community complained that Rackspace took its sweet time to make its move.

Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, another Cloud Foundry backer, said he’s seen other good signs from Cloud Foundry. He is thrilled, for example, that the code is back on a public Github repository. It had been removed some time ago. “We see it as a sign of a more open approach from the Cloud Foundry team,” he said.

Collaborators or competitors: a fine line

Some history: The worry initially was that Cloud Foundry, despite all the talk of open-source goodness and just plain openness, was too closely associated with one vendor:  VMware. Then, when VMware spun it off to a VMware-and-EMC-backed entity (Pivotal) there was more uncertainty about its future.

There was also concern that some of the Cloud Foundry players were going to take the work they’d done and fork the project altogether because of the lack of visibility into Cloud Foundry plans. Under this definition a “fork” — and yes, I’ll get hate mail on this — that could lead to the creation of several not-always-compatible versions of a project. For some in the open source community, there is no such thing as a bad fork.

But for mere mortals there is worry about an actual ecosystem divergence when many members of the same community start getting their updates from different places instead of relying on a central source, in this case Pivotal. To be fair, there is analogous concern that several versions of OpenStack backed by many vendors — some contributing back more than others — will lead to the same problem. At any rate, that’s the kind of angst Pivotal is trying to lay to rest.

In Thursday’s blog post, James Watters, head of product for Cloud Foundry, reiterated that the project will support multiple clouds, promising “open interfaces, support and continued development on AWS, OpenStack, vCloud and vSphere environments.”

And, he maintained, that the addition of outside committers was always a goal:

” … we are engaged with several organizations about putting dedicated resources on the extended engineering team –we believe this to be a very important step forward. The scale of these external investments is significant and a major milestone in our growth. The heart of Cloud Foundry, however, really comes from individual community contributions and users, so of course, we invite you to join us. All you need to do is send a pull-request.”

Going  orward it will be interesting to see what engineers from which companies will be added as committers. For now, the naysayers appear to be relieved at what Cloud Foundry has done.

Watters endorsed Cloud Foundry’s existing “corporate sponsored, Apache 2 licensed, pull request driven approach” as the right way to go. The outside committers will open up the process going forward, but he also left the door open to further changes. He wrote: “The massive growth of the community and ecosystem requires mediating a diverse set of needs and we will always be open to other governance models for the project in the future.”

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• Platform as a Service in 2012
• Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

Ask the very best investors and entrepreneurs about the secrets to their success and many of them will say it’s all about the passion. Falling in love with an idea, or a product, to the point of obsession can be a powerful catalyst that makes a venture work. But what happens when passion for an idea actually blinds us to deep problems with that idea? That’s one of the key things I think went wrong with the first wave of cleantech venture capital investing.

This week Reuters published a report, citing anonymous sources, saying that Kleiner Perkins held a meeting with its limited partners (the funds and endowments that put money into Kleiner’s fund) where Kleiner leader John Doerr apologized for a weak fund performance and promised to do better in the future. Kleiner closed on a new $525 million fund a little less than a year ago, and at the time made a bunch of changes.

Kleiner was one of the most aggressive and high-profile venture capital firms to put money into cleantech startups, and at one point had been hoping to invest a third of its funds into green companies. Part of Kleiner’s poor fund performance no doubt has to do with its greentech investments that haven’t made the firm money. And actually a bunch of its investments struggled mightily, like Miasole, Fisker Automotive, and Amonix.

I’ve written a lot on why cleantech and VC is a difficult match. Check out these pieces from over the years:

• “Greentech investing: not working for most”
• “The perils of cleantech investing”
• “We can thank Moore’s Law for the cleantech VC bust”

But one of the more nuanced reasons that I haven’t spent much time on is passion: what I think was investor passion for doing good, for helping fight global warming and for saving the planet. It’s hard to paint that type of enthusiasm as a bad thing. But I think the drive to be known as an investor that makes the world a better place was something that could have distorted the lens used to find investments that will make money.

A lot of the venture investors in Silicon Valley are cut from the same cloth. Many are environmentally-leaning Californians who have kids and who are in their mid-50s and 60s. Many made their fortunes — either through startups or investing — off of the IT sector. The general mindset several years ago was to look for what came next after IT, and greentech provided them with something they could feel good about doing and providing the right legacy for their kids.

That feeling of righteousness is a powerful drug that can cloud rational thinking sometimes. A startup with a potentially game changing innovation that can save the world should succeed — we all want it to succeed — but how much of these investments were hopeful money, blinded by do-gooder passion, as opposed to rational money?

That Doerr put his own personal money into some of these companies as they struggled highlights just how strong the do-gooder pull is and how personal these investments were sometimes. Reuters reported last month that Doerr dipped into his own pocket for the about $2.5 million that struggling solar company Miasole needed to make payroll before it was sold. I’ve heard rumors that Miasole isn’t the only company that Doerr, and Kleiner Partner Ray Lane, put personal funds into. When those companies fail, it’s a slap to the identity of the investor as the savior.

More money going into greentech innovations is the right thing to do from the perspective of the world. The planet needs this technology. But it will likely have to come from non-VC pockets of money, like government funds or project finance.

While Kleiner is the highest profile of the venture firms to make an aggressive bet on cleantech and then (seemingly) retrench, it by no means is the only one. VantagePoint Venture Partners admitted recently that it had to curb its cleantech fund due to lack of interest from investors. Private equity firm Hudson Clean Energy Partners also halted its clean energy fundraising process and the managing director resigned.

Other firms, like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mohr Davidow, have shifted strategies to focus on cleantech lite, or cleanweb startups. There’s a few VC firms left that are still trying to do investments in new energy tech and sustainability-focused startups like Khosla Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures, and Lux Capital, but these are few and far between. The silver lining for those guys is that there’s a lot less competition out there now.

Clearly over-exuberant save-the-world optimism wasn’t the only problem with cleantech. The sector is vast, complex, science-heavy, partly regulated, partly government dependent, and many areas haven’t seen innovation in decades.

We’ll be watching closely to see if some of the cleantech 2.0 strategies are actually working and if those include that same do-gooder passion.

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• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy
• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking with thousands of cybersecurity practitioners and stakeholders at the 2013 RSA Conference USA in San Francisco, CA.  

The conference was an ideal venue for discussing the President’s new Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (E.O. 13636) that was announced in this year’s State of the Union address. The E.O. will be the catalyst for a variety of new initiatives to develop cybersecurity standards, improve public-private information sharing, and ensure privacy and civil liberties protections.  With so many cybersecurity professionals in one place, I and several senior leaders from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Commerce were able to provide in-depth explanations of the E.O., answer questions on its implementation, and engage with industry partners on how they can help. 

read more

There are probably days when Michael Dell regrets ever taking his company public. AllThingsD reports that famed activist investor Carl Icahn says that there will be “years of litigation” ahead for Dell (DELL) if it goes through with its current buyout plan without making substantial changes. In particular, Icahn wants Dell to “pay a special dividend of $9 per share” to investors if they decide to vote down Dell’s proposed plan to go private later this year. Icahn says that this “proposed $9.00 special dividend gives Dell shareholders a total value of $22.81 per share, representing a 67% premium to the $13.65 per share price proposed” in the original plan. Of course, increasing the potential cost of the buyout by 67% would greatly complicate things for Dell, which has inked a delicate agreement with Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft (MSFT) and several banks who are financing debt for the transaction.

It’s hard to find a compelling use case for the Philips Hue. But Jim Rutherford and his son hacked the wireless LED lightbulbs to be in sync with the day/night cycle in Minecraft. It creates an immersive setup and is actually useful as creepers start appearing at nighttime.

In Minecraft, 24 hours go by in 10 minutes. It’s therefore fairly easy to program the Hue to progressively change color. But Rutherford had to find a clever implementation to sync time between the game and the light.

He developed an iPad app to adjust the position of the sun or the moon in the sky according to the game. You just have to pan your finger across the screen. Then, the app handles the interface to the lightbulb. You can see how it pans out at the end of the video.

At $199 for the Philips Hue starter pack, it sure is an expensive accessory. Only the existing Hue owners or hardcore Minecraft players should consider replicating this setup.

Rutherford said that he will release the app in the App Store so that everyone will be able to enjoy Minecraft’s virtual sunset. For now, you can have a look at the source code.

An interview with Bruce Nussbaum, professor at Parsons The New School of Design and author of Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire.

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A written transcript will be available by March 15.

Apple (AAPL) didn’t get to be the world’s most valuable tech company by paying other companies premiums for their products and services. The New York Post reports that Apple has once again taken its hard-bargaining approach to the recording industry, as unnamed sources claim that the company wants to pay record labels just $0.06 per every 100 songs users stream over its yet-to-be-announced music-streaming service. To get some perspective on just how cheap this is, consider that Pandora pays double this rate at $0.12 per 100 songs and that Spotify pays around $0.35 per 100 songs. Of course, neither of those companies has the enormous clout of Apple, which the Post’s sources acknowledge “could tap a whole new revenue stream for them” with its own music service. All the same, it would be surprising if the record companies in the end agreed to accept half of what the current lowest payer on the market is offering.

Pandora Chairman, CEO and President Joe Kennedy is stepping down from his posts, the company announced today shortly after the release of its Q4 results. Kennedy, who has led the company since 2004, will remain in charge until Pandora has named a successor.

Those quarterly results were mixed: for the company’s fiscal Q4 2013, which ended in January, Pandora clocked $125 million in revenue during that quarter, compared to $81.3 million during its fiscal Q4 2012. However, losses also grew substantially to $14.4 million, compared to $8.1 million a year ago. For its fiscal FY 2013, Pandora incurred losses of $37.7 million, which is up significantly from the $19.9 million it incurred in its fiscal FY 2012.

Pandora has long struggled with finding a business model that matches its high licensing costs. The company spent 61 percent of its revenue last year on music licensing, and it has repeatedly pushed to lower the rates it has to pay rights holders.

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• How consumer media will change in 2013
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg paused before unveiling a fresh design for its News Feed on Thursday at company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Before moving to the slide everyone was waiting for, he took us back in time for a few seconds, first showing how Facebook’s homepage used to look.

It was a good reminder. Back in 2007, the News Feed was a lot boxier. It had a lot fewer photos. There was more text, and everything seemed smaller.

In those early days, Facebook pioneered a different look that distinguished it from competitors like MySpace, offering a cleaner design and fewer options and customization for users. It was a new approach, and it worked. But the amount of content shared to the site has grown by an astounding amount since those days, as you’d expect from a site with now over a billion active users, and the News Feed hadn’t exactly kept pace. It had started to look cluttered and dated, and navigation (not to mention surfacing interesting content) was a challenge.

So from a visual perspective, Thursday’s update clears out most of the clutter from the homepage, taking Facebook back to its original design proposition of simplicity and filtering. And it emphasizes the idea of Facebook as the “local newspaper,” bringing you a small slice of the most interesting and informative posts on the homepage — and giving you sections where can dive deeper into the material where you want. It’s unclear how advertising will play into the changes, since the company gave virtually no attention to ads on Thursday, but if ads change to look anything like the enhanced photos, this could be a boon for advertisers as well.

I wrote on Wednesday about the three advantages Facebook still has that I didn’t think it should break with the new design: content discovery (showing you interesting things you hadn’t previously discovered), visual media (photos and videos still look the best on Facebook’s page), and the content directory (taking advantage of all your friends and their information on the site.) In many ways, the re-design announced Thursday played perfectly into these three strengths, primarily the first two.

“We believe that the best personalized newspaper should have a wide variety of content,” Zuckerberg explained during the hour-long presentation.

With content discovery, the new News Feed — structured after the metaphorical newspaper — is all about giving you more content to read and discover (in fact, it seems more like a consumption page now than one for sharing — interesting to consider that users are probably sharing more from mobile devices than desktops now). The re-design introduces tabs on the top right of the page that let you toggle your view: “All Friends” (who you haven’t hidden from the newsfeed), “Close Friends” (an older feature where you can designate certain people), “Following” (pages and people you subscribe to), “Groups,” “Photos,” “Games,” “Music,” and “Other.”

In each of these categories, users will be able to select specific set of content to dive into. “All Friends” gives users a chronological series of updates from friends, providing a feature that Facebook employees said was highly requested from users (especially considering the criticism the News Feed algorithms and perceived lack of transparency have faced in the past.)

The “Following” page serves as almost like a page for news, assuming you like any celebrities, journalists, news outlets, or organizations on the site who post updates. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton recently criticized the company for not sharing his posts with subscribers as much as he would expect, and while the company refuted his claims, the Following page certainly addresses this need for asynchronous relationships and sharing.

And the company emphasized music — the music page will show songs your friends are listening to through apps like Spotify that use the company’s Open Graph. Each of these tabs give you a new set of information to dig into and greater control over the information you see.

From a design perspective, the emphasis on photos is a huge part of what’s new. Photos are far more dominant in the main news feed, appearing larger in previews and playing on two obvious influences: the Instagram experience of a continuous photo scroll, and design for mobile that inherently incorporates a simpler, stripped-down look. Michael Reckhow, a product manager for mobile newsfeed, said they had worked so hard to build a cleaner mobile feed, that in looking at the desktop, they realized they’d already devised many of the solutions they needed:

“Mobile is inherently simpler,” he said. So it’s fair to say that in some ways, you’ve already seen the new Facebook — on your phone.

For Facebook, the question is how users will respond to the updated look — and if adoption of the new features goes the opposite way of print newspaper subscriptions.

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• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Flash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest

Samsung is a fan of Sharp’s displays and has acquired three percent of the Japanese company for $111 million. The move now makes Samsung the largest shareholder outside of a financial institution, and the fifth largest shareholder overall. This three percent stake helps solidify both companies’ relationship and ensures a steady supply of LCD panels for Samsung’s products.

Sharp isn’t doing so well financially and has created similar deals with such companies as Qualcomm who owns 2.56 percent of the business. Foxconn could soon be another shareholder Sharp with a 10% stake. However, that deal was announced in March 2012 and closes at the end of this month.

Source: Unwired View

Come comment on this article: Samsung Pays $111 Million For 3% Stake In Sharp To Secure LCD Supply

We’ve all been in a situation before where we needed to either factory reset our phone, send it in for a warranty replacement, etc. Not a big deal by itself, but you’ve got 3 stars on 80% of Angry Birds levels, and who would want to lose that accomplishment? You want to be able to keep that data forever. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do, and this guide will help you get started. You’ll even be able to start transferring some app data to new phones when you upgrade.

Carbon – No Root Method

Carbon is an application by popular developer, Koushik Dutta, who has also developed ClockworkMod Recovery, ROM Manager, and a recent Superuser application. Needless to say, he’s made some extremely useful applications that are very widely used. Carbon is no exception, and it allows any device running Android 4.0 or higher to back up their applications and data without root. All you’ll need is your device, a computer, and your USB cable. (It’s worth noting that according to its Play Store page, Motorola devices are not supported due to a bug on Motorola’s part.)

First off, you’re going to need the free companion desktop application to use the backup features (for non rooted users only).  There are versions for Windows, OS X, and a Linux shell script, so regardless of what kind of computer you’re using, you’ll be able to take advantage of Carbon. If you’re using Windows, you’re also going to need specific drivers for your phone. There’s a link on the download page (above) with a list of drivers for easy access and installation, and just about every major OEM is covered. OS X and Linux users don’t have to worry about the driver issues.

Once you have that all set up and running, start the Carbon desktop app, connect your device via USB to your computer, and start Carbon on your phone or tablet. Wait just a few seconds, and Carbon will be fully enabled so you can start backing up your apps. You can now disconnect your phone/tablet from your desktop and utilize the app itself. You won’t have to reconnect your phone/tablet again, but if you reboot your device you will have to connect it again to re-enable the app. It’s an inconvenience, but a minor one when you consider this is the only option for backing up app data for non rooted devices.

There’s a few cool features and tricks you’ll probably want to take advantage of while using Carbon, though, so poke around and look at some settings before you back up your massive stockpile of apps. Let’s say you really only want to back up your Angry Birds data, but you don’t mind re-downloading the app from the Play Store first. If you swipe up the bottom tab in Carbon, you’ll see a check box that gives you the option of backing up only the app data, and it does exactly that; your bigger apk will not be saved, but the data that goes along with it will be saved. You’ll have to download the app from the Play Store before you can restore that data, but if you want to save some storage space on your phone or SD card and don’t mind the extra step, that can be a pretty helpful option. There are also quick options to select and deselect all available apps in this window.

If you don’t mind going for the paid version of Carbon ($4.99), you’ll get a really cool feature; the ability to back up your data to cloud storage. Carbon supports Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive, and it can seamlessly get your data on your favorite cloud service. That’s extremely helpful if you’re switching over to a new phone without an SD card, or just to make a backup in case you were to ever lose your phone.

So let’s fast forward a bit and say you’ve got your warranty exchange, you’ve finished your factory reset, or you just brought your shiny new phone home after upgrading. Restoring those applications is quick and easy, and all you’ll have to do is download Carbon from the Play Store. After downloading, run Carbon, connect it to your computer again, and you’ll be able to restore all of your apps and data. That precious Angry Birds is still completely intact. You’ll never have to worry about losing data again.

You can also use Carbon as a rooted user  and you don’t need to bother with the desktop companion software. Everything else works the same, but I prefer the next option, Titanium Backup because it’s more feature rich, but Carbon is still a great app.

Play Store Download Link

Play Store Download Link (Premium)

Titanium Backup – Root Method

Carbon is useful, and if you can’t or don’t want to root your device, its backup capabilities are fantastic. If you are rooted, however, it’s hard to beat Titanium Backup’s extremely rich feature set. It essentially works the same as Carbon but with a bit more flexibility and automation. It also works on any device that can be rooted, regardless of manufacturer or OS version.

First off, with Titanium Backup, you must be rooted. There’s no way around it. If you need some help on that, we do have a guide to rooting to get you started and answer most of your questions. If you’re already rooted, just download and install the app and start it. It will prompt you for root permissions, which you will want to grant, of course, and you’re ready to start backing things up.

Titanium Backup has three tabs you’ll be looking at; an overview page, a backup/restore page, and a schedules page. For this guide, we want that middle tab to start backing up applications. You’ll see a long list of every single application that’s installed on your phone, including system applications and data. This is the biggest difference from Carbon, and it’s extremely important to remember. Backing up and restoring system applications and data can cause serious problems. As a general rule of thumb, it’s much safer to manually sign back into accounts and adjust settings instead of restoring a backup for those settings. In some cases, restoring system data will be fine, but more often than not it will cause problems. Restoring system data from one device to another will definitely cause problems.

Now that we’ve got that friendly disclaimer out of the way, tap the “Click to edit filters” button above your app list. For safety, we want to uncheck the boxes under “Filter by type” except for the User option. Only the User box should be checked, and the System and Uninstalled box should be blank. Tap your green checkmark at the top right of the screen to go back to your app list that’s been completely filtered to only user apps and no system apps. Here you can manually select which apps to backup and restore, so if you really only wanted to keep data for your games when moving to a new device, it’s easy to do so.

Now let’s say you want to run a full backup for your apps. That button on the top right of the screen, next to the magnifying glass, is your “batch” button in Titanium Backup, and that’s where the magic happens. Tap that and it will give you a long list of actions you can take. For this backup, we want to run the “Backup all user apps” action. This pulls up a list of your user apps where you can individually check each app you want to back up, or you can simply select all of your apps. After figuring out what you want backed up, tap the green checkmark at the top right and the batch action will run in the background.

Restoring your apps again is pretty much the same thing. When you go to your batch actions list, scroll down a bit until you find the action for “Restore all apps with data.” This list will show each app you’ve backed up so you can batch restore everything you need, data included. The free version of Titanium Backup will make you press a yes dialog box for each app you want to restore, so it’s not totally automated, but the paid, premium version does it all behind the scenes. And, like Carbon, you can set up schedules to back up at specific times and, if you opted for the paid Pro Key, sync your local backups to cloud storage. So if you’re in one of those situations we mentioned earlier, like moving to a phone without an SD card or just making backups in case your phone is lost or stolen, Titanium Backup supports the same three major cloud storage services for backing up your data.

Play Store Download Link

Play Store Download Link (Premium)

Like always, there’s plenty of Android apps available that do what Carbon and Titanium Backup can do, (although Carbon is the only app that can fully backup nonrooted devices) so if neither of these seem like your cup of tea, it’s easy to find an alternative. Both of these apps have relatively simple, easy to use designs that most users can figure out to do something that we’ve all needed to do once or twice with our phones.

Come comment on this article: How to backup apps and app data on your rooted or non-rooted Android phone or tablet

God of War: Ascension comes out next week, and you’d be forgiven if you forgot the game had a multiplayer mode. Most of the press leading up to the game’s release has been focused on the traditional single player campaign without much attention being given to this new gameplay element.

To correct that oversight, Sony has been sharing some videos over the past few days that help to show what players will be getting themselves into once God of War: Ascension launches next week on March 12. The first is a look at Poseidon and how pledging allegiance to him will help players overcome their enemies in multiplayer battles:

Up next is a look at the new Trial of the Gods mode. In previous games, this was a simple extra mode that allowed players to take on challenges against increasingly tougher enemies to unlock rewards for use in the main game. In Ascension, players can now take on these challenges with a co-op partner, or go it alone.

Finally, here’s a look at three of the multiplayer maps that will be shipping with the game: