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Apple has just released a new ad for the iPhone 5, and it’s good. Much better than their previous efforts, in fact. It’s a one-minute ad called “Photos Every Day,” and uses a simple fact to make a point about the device’s massive popularity.

“Every day, more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera.”

And with that, the only words in the ad, Apple builds a nice commercial around the act of snapping pictures with the iPhone. Gone is the barrage of words that they’ve been throwing at you with their previous ads, and it’s been replaced by a subtle piano. Apple is at its best when making ads like this. Let’s hope it continues.

Amazon has released a new update for its Kindle for Android app, which has tens of millions of users, according to the company.

The update includes a new design and interface, and easy access to samples.

“Customers have told us they love the UI of Kindle Fire and how easy it is to access and navigate their digital content,” a spokesperson for Amazon tells WebProNews “We’re extending this design to Kindle for Android by optimizing the Kindle Store for tablets, improving the library interface, redesigning the home screen, and simplifying navigation through the app.”

“For customers who are new to Kindle or Kindle apps, we’re making samples of many of the best sellers even easier to find, to help them get started,” the spokesperson adds. “Customers will find the samples on the home screen of their Kindle app.”

The app gives users acccess to over 1.5 million books in the Kindle Store, including 300,000 exclusive titles.

The update can be downloaded from the Amazon Appstore for Android or from Google Play.

Foursquare has a lot of imitators, making the check-in ubiquitous — and even a little passe these days — across social networking apps. At first glance, Chicago startup Evzdrop looks like one of those clones. Instead of checking in at places, users “drop” their locations on the map and, just like Foursquare, you can take the temperature of all of bars, restaurants, clubs and other venues in your area.

But then you start noticing some differences. There’s no option to find your friends, and certainly no mechanism for following them. You can interact with anyone who “drops” into your location, but you’re most likely dealing with a complete stranger. If you ask a question or make a postive or critical comment, you’re just as likely to get a response from the venue’s owner as you are from one of its patrons. And once you’ve left a location, you’ll still be able to see all of the activity going on there, but you’ll find your ability to interact with the locale much more limited.

Evzdrop CEO David Rush said he and fellow co-founder Eric Brown were inspired to start Evzdrop in 2012 because of the difficulty of sorting useful information about a bar, restaurant or event from social networks.

“There’s a fire hose of information coming out of Facebook and Twitter,” Rush said. “Check-ins are more about showing where you are to friends, which is what Foursquare has become today. … We wanted to create an app that allows you to share a common interest in place — one that lets you get the perspective of people who, along with you, are actually at an event.”

To that end, Evzdrop has created a kind of geofenced social network, allowing only people who are actually at a location to engage with one another and the business itself. Everyone else is just a voyeur. They can follow all of the drop posts going at location, but they can’t participate themselves except to comment on other people’s drops.

From my experiences fiddling with the app, many of the drops aren’t terribly useful — “Dude, this band rocks!” — but as more people use the app, more useful information rises to the top through a “props” system that allows other people at vote up the most entertaining or informative posts.

The idea, Rush said, is to create not just a repository of immediate information — older drops disappear form the site — but a real-time dialogue between all of the people sharing the same space. That differentiates it from Yelp and other reviews sites, Rush said.

If Evzdrop can reach critical mass it should be able to tell if the Hamachi at the local sushi bar is particularly fresh or foul on any particular hour. Sports bar owners will be able to alert you to which games they’re showing in playoffs, or respond to requests from customers on the premise to switch to a different game. Concert attendees can demand a band play a particular song.

Do we really need another check-in app?

Of course, to get this kind of depth out of the service, Evzdrop really needs to scale. Right now it’s still a tiny operation. It has six employees and $500,000 in angel funding, and its Android and iPhone app only has a miniscule 11,000 downloads. Growing that base is going to be difficult to say the least. Not only are there numerous competing apps promoting their own take on the check-in, every major social network, review app and location-based service — from Facebook to Yelp to Google Latitude — have added check-in capabilities. The last thing most consumers want to do is download and register an account with another check-in app.

Building a business around social-location is also proving to be a difficult even if you 3.5 billion check-ins like Foursquare. New York’s check-in pioneer just raised another $41 million in financing, but it’s under intense pressure to prove it has viable business model.

Rush said that Evzdrop hopes to gain traction by targeting business owners and event planners, getting them to promote the app to their customers. Rush thinks the app would be particularly appealing for helping track customer sentiment and complaints at big events like concerts or benefits, where organizers can communicate with a lot of people en masse.

To that end Evzdrop is making venue owners a key part of the network, rather than just peripheral participants. They don’t get control their local social networks like, say, moderators on a discussion board. But they can communicate privately with their patrons, Evzdrop provides them with real-time data about the sentiment of their clientele. Rush said it Evzdrop considers itself just as much a customer relations management (CRM) platform as it does a social networking app.

That business focus is also key to its business model. While any business owner can register their place with Evzdrop, gaining access to its customer communications tools, Evzdrop hopes to build a premium platform that would allow businesses to market promotions to their most frequent customers as well as give them more control over the interaction within the walls of their social networks.

Rush said one tool Evzdrop plans to implement is a means to flag negative sentiment, allowing a proprietor to intercept a critical drop before it goes live giving them a chance to address the complaint immediately. Rush said Evzdrop would never allow businesses to censor posts — every drop would still go live – just create a kind of early warning system for negative feedback.

It seem Evzdrop is trying to walk a fine line. It’s admirable that Evzdrop is trying to develop its business model at the get go, as opposed to Twitter and Foursquare, which built their social networks and then tried to figure out how to make money. But if patrons start perceiving Evzdrop as just a promotional pulpit for businesses, they won’t use it as a social network. And if Evzdrop can’t build up a social network, it doesn’t have a business.

Concert image courtesy of Flickr user humbert15.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Analyzing the wearable computing market
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Just like the HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 features an IR blaster along with a companion app to see what’s on TV and get recommendations. Samsung’s version is called WatchON and doesn’t appear to be as robust as HTC TV, but it gets the job done. WatchON lets you control your TV as well as a cable or satellite box through the IR blaster at the top of Galaxy S 4. You will need to go through an initial setup, but soon after, you will be able see your TV guide on your GS4 and get recommendations based on your interests. Just tap on a show or sporting event to get more information and once more to change the channel to that particular program. We put together this hands on video showing you how to set it up as well as some of the features from the WatchON app. Skip on past the break to see how it works, and don’t forget to check out our other Galaxy S 4 guides.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come comment on this article: How to set up and use WatchON along with the IR blaster on the Samsung Galaxy S 4

If you’ve been using AirDroid, which I deemed an app every Android owner should try in 2013, you already know the software is great. With it, you can manage your phone, move files to or from it, change ringtones and more right from the browser of a computer on the same Wi-Fi network. AirDroid 2 is now available in Google Play and it gets even better with more features such as the ability to access your Android smartphone over a mobile broadband network.

To enable the features over 3G and 4G networks, the AirDroid folks are running servers to act as an intermediary. That means you’ll need an AirDroid account. Although the app is free, remote access to your phone through AirDroid on mobile broadband is limited to 1 GB for file transfers and such. Take a peek at how the app works:

The biggest feature is surely the access via non-local networks, but there’s plenty of other new features including: find my phone, remove device wipe, and a way to remotely enable the front-facing camera on your phone. This is handy if your phone is stolen or lost because there’s no indicator on the phone to tell someone that the camera is on.

Why Google hasn’t outright bought this app is beyond me, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from grabbing a download; especially now that it’s usable on any data connection.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
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Ah, the age old question that has divided men and women and turned plenty of friendly debates into screaming matches. Which hurts more: childbirth or getting kicked right in the balls?

To debate that here would be futile, so we’ll let AsapSCIENCE take over. They explain how both things can hurt like hell, citing nociceptors, nerve attachments, and more.

But in the end, pain is subjective. As a man, I’ll never experience the pain of childbirth. And as a woman, you’ll never know the agony of a swift kick in the balls. See what I did there? Because I have felt one of those pains, I’m biased. I said “agony” instead of simply saying “pain.”

I fear this question will never receive a proper answer. Both hurt. A lot. And even as a man, I can say that I’d rather get kicked in the balls 10 times, by a horse, than have to go through childbirth. Lord almighty.

Either way, it’s a fun watch.

[AsapSCIENCE]

The weapon of choice for many hacktivists is the distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. In essence, multiple users flood a server with so much traffic that it collapses under the load taking the Web site with it. It’s easy enough to understand, but a visual representation would really sell the awesome might of this particular form of online attack.

We now have that visual representation courtesy of Ludovic Fauvet. He says that his Web site, VideoLAN, experienced a massive DDoS attack on April 23. He was able to capture what the attack looked like in real time:

What’s great about this video is that it shows the number of requests hitting the other parts of the site at the same time. As thousands of requests are hitting the ‘Misc” section of the site, you see maybe 20 hit the “Images” section.

Thankfully, DDoS attacks rarely cause lasting damage. The Web site is usually back up and operational after that attack subsides. Still, it’s awe inspiring to see this much power being conveyed over the Internet.

Recent reports indicated that Google bought Wavii, a mobile startup, which has received some comparisons to Summly, which Yahoo recently acquired and integrated into its iPhone app.

Now, Wavii has confirmed the acquisition. CEO Adrian Aoun says in a note posted to Wavii’s homepage (via TechCrunch):

You probably know us best for our app that takes the deluge of information streaming across the web and condenses it into fast, fun updates. While we won’t continue to offer this particular service, we’ll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world.

To all of our loyal Wavii users, we owe you a big thanks for all of your feedback and involvement throughout this journey. We look forward to taking our technology to the next level and delighting you with what we come up with next!

Natural language has long been a big interest of Google’s, and we’ve already seen the company do a great deal with it. The better its technology gets, the better the overall experience should be for Google and Android users,perhaps with Google Now and Glass (though we don’t know exactly how Google intends to use Wavii’s technology specifically).

Here, you can watch an interview we did with Aoun last year for a better idea of Wavii’s background.

David Pogue outlines 10 computer/smartphone tricks everyone should know, but many don’t, at TED U during TED2013. Photo: Ryan Lash

David Pogue is a member of a very select club. As of today, he’s one of the few people with four talks featured on TED.com.David Pogue: 10 top time-saving tech tips (Two others who’ve reached this mark: Julian Treasure and Juan Enriquez.) Yes, we’ve shown you his talks on simplicity in tech design, cool phone tricks and the downloading wars. But we just couldn’t help but add this charming talk that The New York Times technology critic gave at TED University during TED2013. Genuinely useful technology hacks for the whole family? Sign us up.

Watch the talk – it’s Pogue’s delivery that’s half the brilliance. But below, find a condensed version of the 10 tech basics everyone should know:

1. Use the space bar to scroll down a page. Hold the shift key and the space bar at the same time to scroll back up again.
2. Tab between boxes on online forms. When there’s a pop-up menu to input details of your state, type the first letter of the state to scroll through options.
3. To make web text larger, press control +. Mac users, make that “Command +.”
4. Don’t bother with punctuation on your smartphone. Hit the space bar twice for a period and the next letter will be automatically capitalized.
5. Hit the call button of your phone to redial the last person you spoke to. No need to go into your contacts.
6. Speaking of phones, carriers have keystrokes that let you bypass the “15 seconds of fricking instructions, like we haven’t had answer machines for 45 years.” Sadly, each shortcut is different. “I didn’t say these were going to be perfect,” Pogue allows.
7. Use Google as a dictionary by typing “define” followed with the word you want to understand. You can also use it as an FAA database for flight details.
8. To highlight a word, don’t drag across it with the mouse. Double click it. And don’t bother deleting text; just type.
9. Avoid shutter lag by half pressing down the button of your camera before you take a picture. For folks who still use cameras.
10. Press “b” to black out a slide (or “w” to white it out). And make sure people are paying attention to your wonderful presentation.

So, sure. These tricks help you get the most out of your technology. And what with our recent TED@250 salon on spring cleaning your life, we here at TED Towers have been thinking about neat tricks to streamline other parts of life. So below, I’ve collected some favorite tips from the TED staff for a better, easier existence. It’s true, you might not have even realized some of the things being solved were actually issues, and it’s possible you might be right in suspecting that these are the very essence of “first world problems.” But there it is and, well, here you are: 15 more life hacks you likely had no idea you needed.

1. “My father hangs a tennis ball from the garage ceiling so he knows exactly where to park the car so there’s ample walking room on all sides. We later saw this on TV but my father definitely invented it.” —Thu-Huong Ha
   .
2. “You can use a piece of dry spaghetti to light candles that have burned down inside their holder.” —Nick Weinberg
   .
3. “If you have kids, you know two things: 1) they fill reams of paper with “artwork;” and 2) you will be going to a lot of birthday parties. Use their “masterpieces” to wrap presents; it saves money and it’s more personalized.” —Michael McWatters
   .
4. “Empty the dishwasher bottom rack first, so that the puddles of washwater on the top of all your mugs, in the top rack, don’t drip all over your plates on the bottom rack. Don’t even MOVE the top rack until you’ve emptied the bottom rack.” —Emily McManus
   .
5. “A trick I learned from a co-worker just yesterday: Facial cleansing wipes do an amazing job of getting mud off of nice shoes.” —Kate Torgovnick
   .
6. “Lay out all your credit / bank cards from your wallet on the copy machine and email yourself scans of the front and back. That way you have all the card numbers and the 800 numbers for customer service. If your wallet gets stolen (especially when on the road) you have quick access and a way to remember which cards to cancel.” —Gwen Schroeder
   .
7. “Here’s a great one for removing oil stains from anything (including the leather seats of your parents’ car…): generously cover the stained area with flour or cornstarch.  Let it sit for a while and it will miraculously soak up your oil stains.” —Roxanne Hai Lash
   .
8. “Stop using spoons for your coffee. Simply add your stuff (sugar, milk, rum, what-have-you) to your empty coffee mug, then pour your coffee in. It mixes just as well, and you don’t have a dirty spoon left over.” —Michael McWatters
   .
9. “Pour coffee into an ice tray, so you make coffee-flavored cubes that don’t water down your iced coffee.” —Nick Weinberg
   .
10. “Crack an egg on a flat surface, not on the side of a bowl. This minimizes the likelihood of pieces of shell getting into your egg.” —Becky Chung
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11. “Use an empty plastic bottle to separate egg yolk from white. My mom does this. It’s pretty awesome.” —Thu-Huong Ha
    .
12. “To call your voicemail from another phone, dial your own number, and when your message picks up, hit # and your password.” —Morton Bast
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13. “Change your contact lenses on the first of every month! That way you don’t wear them for eons, which is bad for your vision and for your eyes in the longrun.” —Kate Torgovnick
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14. “Every time you use up a household necessity (box of spaghetti, carton of milk, bag of chocolate chips), take a photo of the empty package with your mobile phone. When you’re in the store, just review your photos to see what you need. Delete the photos as you add things to your shopping cart.” —Michael McWatters
    .
15. “Honey and olive oil make a cheap face mask. The acid in the honey removes dead skin cells and brightens. Olive oil moisturizes.” —Becky Chung
    .

Bungie popularized the ‘online community tied to a specific shooter’ concept with Halo Waypoint, and EA and Activision took it to its logical conclusion with subscription services like Call of Duty: Elite and Battlefield 3 Premium. Now publishers have begun to create online communities for games that aren’t even shooters. Capcom’s ResidentEvil.net, which tracks player stats and issues challenges for Resident Evil 6, is a good example.

This week, Ubisoft has announced it has created a new “VIP program” for the Assassin’s Creed series.

The community is called “The Watch,” and fans of the series can join the program now, if they’ve pre-ordered Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and have a Uplay account. It’s available online through the Assassin’s Creed website and Ubisoft claims it has been “optimized” for mobile devices.

People who join “The Watch” will have access to “exclusive tailored content” and early Assassin’s Creed announcements. Ubisoft will also be publishing “in-depth features” about the world of the games and their creation. Of course, members will also get special missions and rewards, as well as a chance to rate themselves against other players on leaderboards.

In general, “The Watch” appears to be another online gaming community for gamers who are really into one game. The new trailer for the service shows that separate feeds will be used in a column format to deliver content to users.

A year ago I decided to become an active content creator and social media contributor.

I wanted to show our teams at Xerox how a social program could help change perceptions of our brand. Many still think of Xerox as a copier company, but the majority of our revenue now comes from business process outsourcing.

I’ll be honest; playing guinea pig required time that is scarce these days. Maintaining a lively, close-to-real-time presence on any media outlet is not for the faint of heart. How many followers and tweets make a Twitter feed look respectable? How many views make a blog post high-impact? Is my Klout score high enough? And ROI? Let’s not even go there.

Another issue: Our executive team is proud of the Xerox brand presence in the social space, but we have a team-oriented, humble culture. I didn’t want to be seen as a chest-thumping “celebrity” executive who uses social media as a megaphone and whose personal brand can outshine their professional one.

I set out to connect with communications professionals and marketing thought leaders, the most relevant audience for me as a marketing executive. Before taking the plunge, I carefully considered what value I could bring to the social conversation in a very crowded field. I thought about how Xerox helps customers so they can focus on their real businesses — and my purpose as its CMO. My answer was clear: giving a real, clear-eyed take on the business of marketing and communications. Marketers have a reputation for being full of hype; I wanted to share information about and examples of smart, yet simple, marketing and communications.

Where to start? Not Facebook, that was a given. While I’m on Facebook, it’s reserved for life outside of work when my heart and mind kick full-time into mom mode. It’s a social place where, for me, the lines don’t blur between work and family.

Twitter felt like a more natural place to kick start dialogue — my target audience was fluent in 140 characters. I didn’t have a huge Twitter following then and I still don’t. Quantity is never the point. Quality engagement always is. I tweet a few times a day — much of it is sharing what I’m reading, watching, and inspired by in marketing, branding, communications, leadership, and the occasional a-ha moment I have as a runner and/or as a parent. These are topics I live and breathe every day.

My social participation has generated more speaking invitations, which led to one of my favorite moments of the year. Following a speech I delivered at an event in Philadelphia, a woman approached me and said, “I never thought I’d see the old brand Xerox represented by a woman in an orange dress who tweets and talks like she’s my next door neighbor. I thought Xerox was stodgy; now I can tell you’re not.” I wasn’t sure at first but I decided to take it as a compliment. We can’t all have “geniuses” representing our brand like Apple does, but never underestimate how brands can be personified by the simplest virtual and face-to-face social communication.

What I enjoy most about being active in social is the way it has helped me build connections with others in the marketing industry and with my colleagues. I’ve been surprised by the number of people, fellow employees included, who introduce themselves at large events to say they read and share my tweets and blog posts. It’s nice to know someone hears you when you’re talking in a forest.

There’s a rich debate in marketing circles about how important it is for executives to be on social. To me, it’s personal. And, it only works if it’s authentic. That means it won’t work for any professional who sees it as a burden instead of an opportunity.

Here’s what I’ve learned about joining the conversation:

Don’t boil the ocean. I started by writing blog posts and establishing myself on Twitter. This was more than enough at the time. If you are intimidated by all of the public-facing social options, instead of tackling Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at once, begin with a single platform. It’s better to be active on a single channel than to have a sporadic presence across several.

Be conversational. Initiate or amplify conversations with clients, prospects, media players and employees. Banter with followers or comment on your blog posts. Remember: the only legitimate social media voice is the same one you would use in a room full of peers. You’re not leading a seminar. You’re having a conversation around the virtual water cooler, or even better, at a collegial cocktail party.

Be prepared to move quickly. Remember Communications 101: Listen. One day, comments I made during a speaking engagement appeared in Click-Z, a marketing publication. The headline was misleading — and some of the comments that followed the story were off base. I jumped to the head of the comment thread to put my quotes in context. Don’t forget that conversations continue after a speech is delivered or a tweet is posted.

Don’t sell. If you want to sell, buy an ad or an advertorial or, perhaps, sponsor tweets. Otherwise, contribute insights and stimulate conversation by expressing a point of view.

Enlist a team. It’s just a reality that busy executives will sometimes be out of commission in closed-door meetings or airplanes without Wi-Fi. Chatter on digital media outlets is 24/7. So be open to asking trusted advisors to watch your blog and social media feeds while you’re “dark” and alert you when it’s important that you respond.

Like anything new, practice brings progress. Keeping up with the pace of social requires being an active practitioner. For me, it’s now a natural part of my day and has changed how I get, share, and talk about information. And, if I’m successful in getting just a handful of people to see a new face to the new Xerox, then it’s worth every tweetin’ moment.

Just how easy is it to move workloads around in the cloud? The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is testing virtual machine interoperability in the enterprise cloud. A new report looks at hypervisor interoperability – just how easy it to move a virtual machine from hypervisor to hypervisor? It identifies gaps that hypervisor and VM solutions providers need to address in order to move VMs between public and private enterprise clouds going forward.   It’s tackling the dangers of “Cloud Lock In” on the hypervisor level, and trying to establish an ODCA VM Interoperability Usage Model.

“A capability for VM interoperability is an important precondition to truly realize the oft expressed benefits of virtualized clouds, such as the ability to balance resources through fungible pools of resources, business continuity and load balancing by leveraging distributed publicly available resources, as well as demonstrable avoidance of lock in to a single Cloud Provider, platform or technology,” states the report.

The report details a test taken to check out hypervisor interoperability, with the specs and components used for the test bed solution stack and hardware components available in the report. The aim was to:

• Check interoperability
• Move or copy between two hypervisors and cloud providers
• Leverage common operation and interoperability

The results aren’t meant to determine interoperability, but rather show there’s room for maturity when it comes to hypervisors playing nice with one another. It includes matrices showing how well commonly used VMs were moved between VMWare, Citrix Xen, KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. Who was the friendliest hypervisor during the test? Who was a big, fat jerk hypervisor? You’ll have to read the report (note: the report does not actually call any hypervisor a “big fat jerk”).

Cloud interoperability remains a concern, particularly with all of this hybrid/multi-cloud talk. The ODCA continues its efforts to resolve interoperability challenges that might prevent cloud adoption.

Android users, do you feel left out by all of the fun your iPhone-wielding counterparts are having with their quirky 6-second videos? Well, you don’t have that much longer to wait until you can join in.

Vine, Twitter’s new 6-second video app, is on the way to Android “soon.”

Speaking to The Verge, Vine Co-founder Dom Hofmann confirmed the “soon” timeframe. Nothing more, nothing less. Just “soon.” We always knew that an Android version of the popular app must be in the works, but this is the first time that we’ve heard that it is indeed on the horizon. Back in February, Vine began looking for a lead Android engineer.

He also said that a new feature is coming to the iOS version – friend tagging. But it’s currently waiting for final Apple approval.

Vine has seen quite a bit of success after its rocky start. Vine launched back in January and immediately found itself in the middle of a porn controversy. Users were shocked to find that people were using the service to post 6-second porn clips. Vine doesn’t specifically ban nudity in their terms, but they did mess up handily when they accidentally promoted an explicit video as one of their editor’s picks.

With poor user feedback and the threat of a ban in Apple’s notoriously conservative App Store, Vine made some changes to bury NSFW content deep down in the app.

But soon, we saw Vine being used in a variety of ways: for promotion and for politics. For comedy and for game teasers. Vine even played a pretty big role in raw footage from the Boston Marathon bombings.

When Vine finally comes to Android, you can expect its presence to rise significantly. It’ll probably look a lot like the moment when Instagram finally launched on Android – but this time I don’t expect iOS users to get all pissy about their favorite app opening up to the masses.

Whether you’re fighting mutant cyborg dogs in a hellish, post-apocalyptic wasteland or, more likely, dealing with potentially radioactive substances on a daily basis, the MTM ‘Rad’ watch may be the wrist droid you’re looking for.

MTM makes so-called ‘Special Ops’ watches which are bold, large, and usually made of coated steel or titanium. However, every once in a while they come out with something unique. This new timepiece costs $1,500 and includes a built-in radiation detector that can sense rate and dose of radiation as well as warn you when you’ve gone over a preset boundary.

The counters are completely self-contained and surprisingly small. The battery should last two years and, although this thing looks big, it’s actually quite light and watch writer Paul Hubbard wore it in a 5K race and on a plane where he got a reading of “3.7 micro sieverts/hour.” You can also transmit readings to a computer via an IR transfer system that is built into the watch.

Who is this for? Hubbard writes:

In short, if you’re in need of a Geiger counter (and, let’s face it, in these Mad Maxian times I think we all are) this may be just the wrist-mounted Pip-Boy for you.

Samsung shows no signs of slowing down according to Strategy Analytics. They released numbers for the 1st quarter and Samsung hit a new record in terms of smartphone market share. They sold 69.4 million smartphones, which equates to a 33.1% market share, 4.2% higher than the 1st quarter 2012. Most of that increase came at the expense of Apple, which was at 17.9%, down from 22.8%. Apple could be peaking…

Woody Oh , Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics said, “Apple grew just 7 percent annually and shipped 37.4 million iPhones worldwide in Q1 2013. Apple’s global mobile phone marketshare is approaching a peak. Apple will need to launch new models, or partner with additional major carriers like China Mobile, if it wants to expand significantly beyond its current ceiling of 10 percent global volume share.”

source: Strategy Analytics

Come comment on this article: Samsung smartphone market share hits new record for 1st quarter 2013

This week, Google held its Test Automation Conference in New York. This is an event that brought together engineers from a variety of organizations to discuss test automation. It was a two-day event, and it streamed live when it was happening (April 23-24). Now, Google has made Day one’s content available for anyone to benefit from at their leisure.

George Jones, whose music has been so important to country artists for decades, has died after an illness. He was 81.

Jones had been briefly hospitalized during his most recent tour–which was to be his last–for an undisclosed illness. His cause of death has yet to be released.

Jones was introduced to a love of music as a child and began playing guitar at the tender age of nine years old. His early life would take him to many different places–he was married, divorced, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps before he was 20–but he always came back to music. He would go on to have over 150 hit songs during the course of his career and has been called the greatest living country singer of the past 20 years.

Known as much for his love life as he was for the music that lived in him, Jones was married four times and often chronicled his relationships in the songs he wrote. He also battled alcoholism for years and gained a reputation for being unreliable when it came to showing up for gigs. But his wild ways only endeared his fans to him, and his music would be revered, imitated, and loved without bounds by millions of fans.

Sadly, the 2013 tour was to be his last, as Jones announced he wanted to retire and spend time with his family. He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and four children.