Category: Software

The good news for Microsoft: It seems to realize that Gap-style dance routines are no longer the best way to sell computers. The bad news: Its new marketing direction involves watermelon kung-fu. Neowin reports that Microsoft’s official YouTube page this week posted and then quickly removed three new advertisements for something called “Windows 8 Training Camp” that all failed to actually show Windows 8 at any point during the ads.

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A few weeks ago, Nokia launched a WhatsApp phone that featured a special button that gives direct access to the messaging app. Now Path has cut a deal with Sprint to become a preloaded app in selected Samsung and HTC phones. The messaging app rivalry between half a dozen of major contenders is heating up as WhatsApp, Path, LINE, Tango, KakaoTalk, Viber and Kik vie for attention. Until now, major carriers have resisted supporting messaging apps too much, afraid of undermining their SMS volumes.

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With the Windows Blue update on the way, analysts have already started writing obituaries for Windows 8, the operating system that proved to be immensely polarizing among PC users. While history will likely look upon Windows 8 more kindly than the widely despised Vista, Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty tells The Financial Times that it will be remembered as the biggest marketing fiasco since Coca Cola decided to rework the formula for its famous soft drink back in the ’80s.

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Windows Blue is hardly a secret at this point, but Microsoft finally confirmed that it is prepping an update to its Windows 8 operating system that will be released this year. Windows 8 has done nothing to boost sales for struggling PC vendors. In fact, some believe it is having the opposite effect. “Blue” will be Microsoft’s attempt to reverse course and tweak Windows 8 so that it better suits users’ needs.

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If you thought Google Glass was a major potential distraction before, just wait until Glass users start spending hours getting cute cat pictures projected onto their eyeballs. Developer Malcolm Nguyen has created his own homemade Reddit app for Google Glass that includes the top 25 posts from your own Reddit front page and refreshes every hour. It also gives users the ability to vote posts and comments up or down, and the ability to both share links and to leave your own comments.

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Perhaps the most fascinating trend in App Annie’s new March statistics is the transformation of the Google Play Android app store into a messaging app distributor. No fewer than three out of four biggest revenue generators in the non-game app chart are now messaging apps; LINE at No.1, WhatsApp at No.3 and KakaoTalk at No.4. The iPhone’s non-game revenue chart is a bit lighter on messaging app but still features LINE at No.1 and WhatsApp at No.8.

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Swype, the popular Android typing application owned by Nuance, may be making its way to the iPhone in some form. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Swype vice president Aaron Sheedy said that his company has “chatted with” Apple about bringing Swype to iOS, although no deal is imminent at this point. 9to5Mac notes that Swype owner Nuance is already licensing out its voice recognition technology to Apple to use for its Siri personal assistant software, so the two companies do have a good relationship. At the very least, 9to5Mac says, the talks with Nuance over Swype mean that Apple is likely “looking to make some big improvements to its built-in iOS keyboard,” which could involve adopting Swype or licensing some of the technologies it uses.

Facebook Home may have been downloaded more than 500,000 times in its first week but new research from BTIG suggests that it could take significantly longer to get its next 500,000 downloads. Using data from AppAnnie, BTIG found that Facebook Home’s ranking in the Google Play charts peaked at No. 50 on April 19th before quickly declining to No. 130 less than a week later. While Facebook debuted its Home application to great fanfare earlier this month, the app has been poorly received by many Android users who have been bombarding it with one-star reviews that account for more than half of all its total reviews on Google Play. BTIG says that because Facebook plans monthly updates to Home, it stands a chance to rebound if it can improve the user experience.

When hedge fund ValueAct announced it had taken a $2 billion stake in Microsoft earlier this week, questions arose about what changes the activist investor would try to make to improve the company’s value for shareholders. ZDNet reports that ValueAct’s first declared goal for Microsoft is to get it to release its Office suite of enterprise software for rival mobile platforms iOS and Android. This is particularly important because a report from earlier this month indicated that Microsoft wouldn’t have Office for iOS and Android ready until 2014 at the earliest. If ValueAct is using its newfound clout within the company to get Microsoft to focus its efforts more on developing Office for other platforms, then we could see Office release on iOS and Android sooner than we’d expected.

Amazon apparently isn’t willing to let Apple and Google hog the market for voice-enabled personal assistants. Unnamed sources have told TechCrunch that Amazon has purchased Evi, a Siri-like voice assistant application that had been developed by True Knowledge, “a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs.” Although TechCrunch has been unable to get official confirmation from Amazon, the publication’s sources say that Amazon paid around $26 million to acquire the app. Given Amazon’s investment in both Evi and voice recognition software company Ivona, TechCrunch speculates that the company may be inching close to developing its own smartphone to compliment its Kindle Fire line of tablets.

3D printers are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. Soon enough, we’ll start seeing more than just hobbyists and industrial designers working with the technology. Unfortunately, the CAD software designers use to make 3D models is still expensive and/or complicated. One new product hopes to solve that particular problem.

Doodle3D, not to be confused with 3Doodler, is a tool that transforms any simple sketch into an object that can be created on a 3D printer. It removes the learning barrier by taking care of all the complicated steps in the software and focusing solely on creativity.

Doodle3D is obviously not a replacement for traditional 3D printing software, but it’s a great tool that lets anybody just start creating with a 3D printer instead of learning how to use design software. The software then sends the file to the Doodle3D Wi-Fi box that connects to a 3D printer.

The Doodle3D Wi-Fi box was available for $88, but the initial allotment of 100 boxes have already sold out. The box is now available for $99. The project has just started, and it has already raised over $16,000 of the $50,000 requested.

[h/t: Engadget]

While Windows 8 has a lot going for it, it’s also proven to be a very polarizing operating system that many users have criticized for departing too much from earlier versions. The most common complaint lobbed at Windows 8 is that it lacks the classic Start button that Microsoft users have long relied on as a central navigation tool. But with rumors percolating that Microsoft is considering dialing back some of the changes it made to Windows with the next major update to the operating system, Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder is encouraging the company to go all-out and bring back the Start button as a nod to users’ constructive criticisms.

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Windows 8 hasn’t exactly been the huge boost PC vendors were looking for to reinvigorate the slumping PC market. In fact, a few reports suggest it’s actually having the opposite effect on sales. While some users seem to really enjoy the new tile-based user interface found on the Start screen, it’s also mentioned in nearly every complaint about Windows 8 we have seen — many people would like to bypass it and boot directly to the Desktop. The lack of a Start button is also a big problem for a number of users, but both of these issues are rumored to be addressed in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8.1 update. Of course, as we’ve discussed before here on BGR, there’s no reason to wait: You can boot directly to the Desktop and get the Start button back in Windows 8 right now with one simple, free app.

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If early reviews are any indication, Google doesn’t have to worry too much about Facebook Home winning the hearts and minds of Android users. Facebook Home’s Google Play page shows that roughly 47% of Android users have given the new software just one star so far, while another 14.5% have given it two stars. Taken together, 61.5% of Google Play users so far have given Facebook’s newest Android software a below-average rating and Facebook Home’s overall rating on Google Play stands at 2.3 stars. Among other things, negative reviewers complained that Facebook Home “hid most of my other apps,” that it had “no support for my other widgets” and that it “made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours.”

Everyone seems to following be Pandora into the music discovery business these days and Twitter has decided getting into the game by releasing its own music app on Friday. There’s just one catch, however: As AllThingsD writes, Twitter is only making the app accessible to select “influencers” such as Ryan Seacrest before making it available to the non-famous portion of the public. The music app apparently “suggests artists and tracks to users based on a number of personalized signals, including the Twitter accounts a user follows on the microblogging service” and will let users “listen to clips of music from inside the app, using third-party services like iTunes and SoundCloud.” AllThingsD says that the music app will likely be released for all users some time next week.

If you thought the Bitcoin market was crazy before, just wait until traders get the ability to make leveraged bets on the virtual currency’s future price. From the what-could-possibly-go-wrong department, TechCrunch reports that New York-based startup Coinsetter has received $500,000 in seed funding to set up a Bitcoin trading platform that will allow for high-risk margin trades and short selling of Bitcoins. Coinsetter co-founder Jaron Lukasiewicz tells TechCrunch that the ability to make leveraged trades is vital to every major financial market and that giving owners the ability to trade Bitcoins in this way will help the virtual currency establish itself as a legitimate alternative to government-issued money.

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Google’s (GOOG) Play store doesn’t exactly have a good reputation when it comes to quality control since the company allows anyone to post their Android apps on the store without going through any sort of filtering process. However, TechCrunch reports that this may be changing since a record 60,000 were purged from the Play store in February. Although TechCrunch’s sources acknowledge that Google wasn’t responsible for removing all the purged apps, they also say that there’s no way that many apps could have been removed from the store without significant involvement from the company. Google has been working on overhauling Play to give it a cleaner, brighter look so it’s likely that Google has been doing some housekeeping in removing low-quality apps in preparation for the store’s upcoming refresh.

We still have no idea whether Apple’s (AAPL) next iPhone will have fingerprint-scanning technology but it’s a good bet that the company is at least working to put fingerprint scanners on some future devices. AppleInsider has spotted a new job posting showing that the company is looking for a new software engineer for its “Melbourne Design Center” in Florida that just happens to be in the same location as AuthenTec, the mobile security firm that Apple acquired last summer. Since AuthenTec has a strong background in fingerprint scanning technology and since AppleInsider notes that the new engineer will “write low-level control firmware for ‘sensor ICs,’” it’s probably fair to assume that some sort of mobile scanning technology is in the works.

Everyone who just can’t wait to get their hands on Facebook Home can now download a pre-release version of the software that’s apparently “buggy and incomplete.” MoDaCo has got its hands on a pre-release build of Home APKs — “the main Facebook (FB) app (‘katana’), the now-integrated-with-your-SMS Messenger app (orca) and the Home / Launcher ‘shell’ app (home)” — that will run a decent simulation of what the final build will look like once it’s released on April 12th. MoDaCo says that anyone interested in downloading the APKs needs to have a device with “a maximum resolution of 1280 x 768 and the ability to completely uninstall your existing Facebook app” and notes that anyone installing the APKs does so at their own risk. With the Facebook Home release just four days away, it’s hard to imagine too many people bothering with a bug-ridden early version of the software but it’s still interesting nonetheless.

We know that Windows 8 has failed to reignite demand in the PC market so far and now one formerly bullish analyst says that the platform “lacks momentum” and is “challenging” his earlier optimism. Benzinga notes that Bank of America analyst Kash Ragan downgraded Microsoft (MSFT) from “Buy” to “Neutral” on Thursday and expressed dismay that Windows 8 has still shown few signs of catching on “despite more available touch-based devices” more than six months since the platform’s initial launch. Microsoft has been taking feedback from early Windows 8 adopters and is planning to make changes to the operating system aimed at winning over more traditional Windows users with its “Windows Blue update” rumored to be released this summer.