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Amazon announced a new Login with Amazon service for websites, apps and games, which lets users login using their Amazon accounts. The company says it reduces sign-in friction and can drive higher customer engagement and conversions.

Obviously the feature would compete directly with offerings from companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

“Login with Amazon enables app developers and website owners to leverage Amazon’s trusted sign-in solution, allowing them to focus on providing a great experience for their customers,” said Michael Carr, Amazon Vice President, eCommerce Services. “Amazon customers now have a hassle-free way to quickly and securely sign-in to apps, games and websites, without having to remember yet another password.”

Amazon subsidiaries Zappos and Woot have been using the Amazon login feature, and the company says it has seen “significant” customer adoption. Zappos in particular saw 40% of its new customers choose to sign-in with an Amazon account. On Woot, new customers picked Login with Amazon two times more often than any other social login on the site. Those customers, Amazon says, had the highest conversion rate.

Amazon appears to be looking to capture users while they’re on properties across the web more than ever before. They also recently launched a “Send to Kindle” button for content, enabling users to send articles for later reading on their Kindle devices/apps.

You can find all the necessary documentation for Login with Amazon for web, Android and iOS here.

Kelly Rowland recently broke down during a live performance of her song “Dirty Laundry”, which talks about an abusive relationship and her feelings about former stage-sister Beyonce’s success.

Rowland wrote the song after her ex-boyfriend tried to turn her against Beyonce, whose solo career went off the charts after Destiny’s Child split up.

“Doing this song for me was so therapeutic,” Rowland said. “Honesty, like my mama always says, is always the best policy.”

The lyrics touch upon Rowland’s jealousy and subsequent guilt after Beyonce went on to become the Queen Bey, leaving her Destiny’s Child mates behind in the dust.

“Bird in a cafe/ You’d never know what I was dealing with…Went our separate ways but I was happy she was killin’ it/ Bittersweet, she was up, I was down/ No lie, I feel good for her but what do I do now?”

After the group went their own ways, Rowland tried out an acting career and appeared in films like “Freddy Vs. Jason”. Michelle Williams went on to have a successful gospel career. Both joined Beyonce onstage for the Super Bowl halftime show this year.

Hollander Home Fashions, a portfolio company of HGGC, has acquired Louisville Bedding’s basic bedding retail business. No financial terms were disclosed. Louisville Bedding’s basic bedding retail business has been renamed Hollander Sleep Products. Based in Boca Raton, Florida, Hollander Sleep Products is a provider of bed pillows, mattress pads, down comforters and related products.

PRESS RELEASE

PALO ALTO, Calif.—May 29, 2013—HGGC (formerly Huntsman Gay Global Capital), a leading middle market private equity firm, today announced that its portfolio company, Hollander Home Fashions, has completed the strategic addition of Louisville Bedding’s basic bedding retail business, and will now operate under the name Hollander Sleep Products. The combination creates, according to Home Textiles Today, the largest utility bedding pure play supplier in North America and the third largest supplier in the industry, with revenues in excess of $500 million. Louisville Bedding will retain its contract bedding business. Terms of the private transaction were not disclosed.
Hollander Sleep Products has acquired all of the operations in North America related to Louisville’s retail business, and many of the associates at Louisville Bedding will be joining Hollander. The acquisition will provide Hollander with a larger presence in key product categories and access to new distribution channels, as well as add consequential partners to its brand portfolio, including Simmons, Beautyrest, and Nautica.
“This is a transformative transaction for not just Hollander Sleep Products, but for the overall bedding industry, as it solidifies our leadership position as the largest utility bedding manufacturer in North America” said Chris Baker, CEO of Hollander. “We are delighted to complete the purchase and look forward to combining the strengths of both companies to create a dynamic organization ideally positioned to maximize basic bedding sales for our customers. The acquisition provides additional manufacturing facilities in North America, expanding our capabilities and enhancing our distribution network.”
Hollander, based in Boca Raton, Florida, manufactures bed pillows, mattress pads, down comforters and other bedding products sold under designer brands including Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley, as well as North American retailer private labels and its own Hollander brand. Hollander owns and operates six manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and Canada, and has offices in China and India focused on sourcing, product development and quality control.
“Chris Baker and the Hollander management team have done a tremendous job guiding the company through a challenging economy and retail environment over the past few years, and we were very pleased to support them in this transaction,” said Jake Hodgman, Principal of HGGC. “The strategic addition of Louisville Bedding’s retail business is a tremendous accomplishment that immediately launches Hollander to a new level, and it highlights the HGGC investment approach of partnering with outstanding management teams to drive transformative change in companies and their industries.”
About HGGC
HGGC is a $1.1 billion private equity fund focusing on leveraged buyout, recapitalizations and growth equity transactions in the middle market. With years of collective deal and operational experience, HGGC brings best practices from bulge-bracket private equity and global corporations to the middle market. For more information, please visit www.hgggc.com.
About Hollander Sleep Products
Hollander Sleep Products is based in Boca Raton, Florida with significant market share in bed pillows, mattress pads, down comforters and related products. Hollander operates its main showroom in New York City, has nine manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and Canada and offices in China and India focused on sourcing, product development and quality control. Hollander’s products appear under a number of well-known brand names including Ralph Lauren, Chaps, Charisma, Laura Ashley, Simmons, Beautyrest, Nautica, Court of Versailles, Waverly, Homedics, Croscill and Live Comfortably.

The post Hollander Home Fashions Acquires Louisville Bedding’s Retail Business appeared first on peHUB.

A few years ago, if you wanted to join a website you had to create a brand new account, enter your email address and come up with yet another password to try and remember. That’s all changed of course and now you can log into a vast amount of sites using existing credentials for services like Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Today, Amazon adds itself to the list of services you can use to gain access to other sites with the introduction of Login with Amazon.

The official press release reads like the feature is something brand new and never been done anywhere before, which is quite amusing considering how late Amazon is to the single sign-on party. Still, another login option will always be welcome and provides a good alternative for anyone worried about how many sites they already access through Google and/or Facebook.

“Login with Amazon enables app developers and website owners to leverage Amazon’s trusted sign-in solution, allowing them to focus on providing a great experience for their customers,” Michael Carr, Amazon Vice President, eCommerce Services said. “Amazon customers now have a hassle-free way to quickly and securely sign-in to apps, games and websites, without having to remember yet another password”.

Amazon’s single sign-on feature can be used on websites and iOS and Android apps.

With its Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) tool, eBay revealed just how truly efficient its infrastructure is across a variety of metrics. The company has now hit its first full quarter of public data that measures how the company performed against its own goals.

In March, eBay launched its Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) methodology – a “miles per gallon” equivalent that displayed infrastructure effectiveness in real-time across 4 key business priorities: performance, cost, environmental impact and revenue.

Among Q1 highlights, the company raised the number of transactions per kilowatt-hour and it exceeded its cost per transaction goal. Despite increasing its number of servers powering eBay.com, there was an increase of only 16 percent (2.69 MW) in power consumption, which the company contributes to the efficiency of new servers.

There were also improvements across performance, cost, and environmental impact. In terms of environmental impact, a big boost came from the company’s Salt Lake City data center’s solar array, increasing the company’s clean energy use. While the solar array is small, it increased owned clean energy powering eBay.com by 0.17 percent, and there’s a fuel cell installation expected to come online this summer.

The company’s goals were:

•   Increase transactions per kWh by 10 percent transactions per kWh increased 18 percent year over year)

•   Reduce cost per transaction by 10 percent cost per transaction decreased 23 percent in Q1 alone, exceeding the initial goal

•  Reduce carbon per transaction by 10 percent carbon per transaction showed a net decrease of 7 percent; this was the only metric the company didn’t blow past. There’s its Utah Bloom fuel cell installation that will go live this summer, which will decrease and contribute significantly to the 10% carbon reduction goal set for the year. The company is confident it will remain on track to hitting this goal, recognizing that infrastructure is dynamic and changes.

Some of these positive trends were driven by newer, smarter features on the site including feed technology rolled out last fall. The feed technology attempts to personalize the shopping experience by showing auctions that might be of interest based on a user’s history.

Also important to note is that the company fine-tuned the methodology. It now only looks at server pools that receive external web traffic so it can measure “buy and “sell” traffic, calling all other server pools not receiving external web traffic “shared”.

The company said it was making $337 million per megawatt last time around, but this metric has been fine tuned to measure Revenue per megawatt hour now to represent total consumption per quarter and year rather than quarterly averages.

The auction giant had 52,075 servers then, which is up to 54,011 servers now. It was consuming 18 megawatts of power to support 112.3 million active users; now it consumes 19.08MW for 116.2m active users. Next quarter will paint a clearer picture of revenue per user, as on a Q/Q basis it seems to have dropped $1 from $15 to $14. For last year, the company showed revenue of $54 per user, and $117,000 per server.

DSE provides a vivid example of the productivity of data center infrastructure, which typically has construction costs of $5 million to $10 million per megawatt for large users like eBay. All the information is publicly available at dse.ebay.com

Insight Venture Partners said on Wednesday that it has closed its most recent fund at $2.57 billion. Names of investors were not disclosed. Insight Venture Partners VIII will invest in global software, e- commerce, internet and data-services businesses. Insight Venture Partners, a global private equity and venture capital firm, is based in New York.

PRESS RELEASE

NEW YORK, May 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Insight Venture Partners announced the closing of Insight Venture Partners VIII, a $2.57 billion private equity fund. Like its predecessor funds, Insight Venture Partners will invest Fund VIII in global software, e-Commerce, internet and data-services businesses. The firm will deploy capital in growth stage and more mature companies, as minority or control transactions. The new fund will continue to execute on Insight’s strategy of helping portfolio companies achieve their long-term operational and financial goals.
“We appreciate the commitment of our investors who continue to support our strategy of focusing on software and technology companies that are scaling and maturing,” said Jeff Horing , co-founder and managing director at Insight Venture Partners. “By combining financial flexibility with our deep industry knowledge and growth-stage operations expertise, Insight plays a unique role in helping unlock value for management teams, employees, customers and investors.”
Commitments from existing investors contributed a majority of the capital in the new fund. The total capital committed to Insight since inception in 1995 is now over $7.6 billion. Insight will continue to seek transaction opportunities worldwide; Fund VIII has the flexibility to invest any amount up to approximately $300 million of equity per transaction.
Insight’s predecessor fund, which closed in 2010, has invested in more than 35 companies, including Airwatch and New Relic (infrastructure software); Kinnser Software and Mimecast Services (SaaS businesses); Despegar and Fanatics (eCommerce); Indiegogo, and Udemy (consumer internet) and Drillinginfo (SaaS data services). Prior fund portfolio investments include ExactTarget and Shutterstock which had their initial public offerings in 2012, Trivago, which earlier this year was acquired by Expedia Inc., Flipboard, Kony Solutions, OverDrive and Twitter. More recently, Yahoo! announced a deal to acquire another portfolio company, Tumblr.
About Insight Venture Partners
Insight Venture Partners is a leading global private equity and venture capital firm investing in software, eCommerce, internet and data-services companies. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $7.6 billion and made more than 190 investments worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund and work successfully with visionary executives who are driving change in their industries. We provide them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. For more information on Insight and all of its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com.

The post Insight Venture Partners Closes $2.57 Bln Fund appeared first on peHUB.

The Samsung Galaxy S 4 mini will be unveiled officially on June 20 in London, but we will probably know just everything there is to know by then. Take for instance, the leaked screenshot above that gives us the complete spec rundown. There really isn’t anything that is surprising since we already knew it’s a budget-version of the flagship S4.

The 4.3-inch display will be Super AMOLED and have a qHD (960 x 540) resolution. Remember, this resolution debuted with the DROID Bionic!! Other major specs include a 1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 CPU, Adreno 305 GPU, 1.5GB of RAM, 8MP rear camera, 2.1MP camera, and Android 4.2.2. Put this one in Easy Mode folks, and you will have the perfect phone for Grandma!!

source: AllAboutSamsung

Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy S 4 mini specs confirmed, Snapdragon 400 and qHD display

James Lipton has dropped quite a bombshell on us with the new Parade interview; apparently, the “Inside the Actors Studio” host was a pimp in 1950′s Paris.

“It was only a few years after the war,” Lipton said. “Paris was different then, still poor. Men couldn’t get jobs and, in the male chauvinist Paris of that time, the women couldn’t get work at all. It was perfectly respectable for them to go into le milieu [prostitution].”

The 86-year old–who has recently shown up on the new “Arrested Development” episodes on Netflix– says everything had to be done a certain way for him to stay safe. After befriending a young prostitute, she arranged for him to take a job as pimp in order to stay in Paris.

“We became great friends. When I ran out of money, I said, ‘I have to go home.’ She said, ‘No, you don’t. I’ll arrange for you.’ So she arranged for me to do it. I had to be okayed by the underworld; otherwise they would’ve found me floating in the Seine,” he said. “I represented them all, but her especially. I did a roaring business, and I was able to live for a year. The French mecs didn’t exploit women. They represented them, like agents. And they took a cut. That’s how I lived. I was going through my rites of passage, no question about it. It was a great year of my life.”

Lipton, who began acting after he spent time in the Air Force, said he originally had other career aspirations in mind.

“I was going to be a lawyer because that was as far away from my father’s lunacy that I could imagine. He was nuts. He abandoned us. I was afraid of being like that.”

Android users with aspirations of learning another language have a new app to check out. About six months after rolling out an iOS app, Duolingo on Wednesday launched its Android app.

Created by Recaptcha founder and Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn, Duolingo helps people learn languages while translating real-world content from the web.

Built from the bottom up for the new platform, von Ahn said, the Android app could help the company as much as double its user numbers. At the moment, the app has 3 million registered users, half of which are on mobile and 1 million of which are active. Already, it has broad appeal among non-U.S. users – about 70 percent are not from the U.S. – but considering the number of non-U.S. Android fans, von Ahn said that number could rise quickly.

Like the website, the Android app offers skill-based, game-like lessons, but they’re optimized for a smaller screen and shorter chunks of available time. They’re easier to complete while you’re waiting for the bus or in line at the store, and they require less typing.

In the last month and a half, the iOS app added the ability to download lessons for offline use (great for subway commutes) and a feature for recording yourself speaking the language (so the app can assess your pronunciation). The Android app doesn’t yet include those features, but von Ahn said they should be added later this summer.

First revenue-generating deal with publisher

Until now, the service has offered web and mobile users theme-based, mastery-level-appropriate lessons, as well as opportunities to translate real-world web content. But von Ahn said the company just signed its first partnership with a U.S. publisher, meaning that users will begin to translate actual news articles from English to Spanish.

He declined to share the name of the publisher, but said the deal marks the startup’s first revenue-generating partnership and points the way to how the company intends to make money. At any given time on the service, he said, about 80 percent of the users are completing lessons, while 20 percent are translating content. But even though a smaller percentage is translating, he added, users can translate a 500- to 600-word article in about an hour.

Now that the company is beginning to make money from the translations, von Ahn said it may experiment with new ways of incorporating translation opportunities into the lessons and other parts of the experience.

“We haven’t had a huge incentive to push the translations because they haven’t been generating revenue,” von Ahn said. But “we’ll never force you. What I hope is that users like them – and they actually do.”

In the past few months, interest in language-learning startups seems to have picked up. Last month, Rosetta Stone, a giant in the space, acquired language-learning community LiveMocha. And in April, Berlin-based language learning service Babbel acquired PlaySay, a small Silicon Valley language-learning app, and raised $10 million.

Despite increasing competition, Duolingo’s traction seems to be growing at a healthy clip. Since the startup raised a $15 million Series B round in September, its number of active users has quadrupled. A study earlier this year found that it takes a Duolingo user 34 hours to learn the equivalent of one semester of college-level Spanish, while it takes a Rosetta Stone user 60 hours to learn the same amount of content.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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I’ve been researching what allows companies to be successful even when their competitive advantages are short-lived — a phenomenon I call transient advantage. The Regus Group, Ltd., a company that provides many services but is best-known for its offices-for-rent business, is one of many I’ve been studying whose leaders seem comfortable that their current competitive advantages won’t last, and don’t waste too much time clinging on to them once competitors have caught up or the moment has passed.Their success is a great example of how companies can quickly get out of an uncompetitive business, and decisively spot, capture and exploit new opportunities, even as the next one unfolds. What’s their secret? How do they manage from one wave of transient advantage to another?

Regus was founded in 1989, one of a string of businesses started by Mark Dixon, a colorful serial entrepreneur from the UK. His entrepreneurial beginnings weren’t auspicious — a food delivery operation called “Dial-a-Snack” he started upon leaving school failed (as he later said to a reporter, “customers loved it but nobody told me that you had to make a margin”) — leading him to undertake a nomadic life supporting himself with odd jobs such as bartending and selling encyclopedias. He eventually scraped together enough money to buy a “burger van” and spent some years selling hot dogs. Spotting an opportunity in the difficulty he had getting a supply of good buns, he started The Bread Roll Company with £10,000 in savings, eventually selling the business in 1988 for £800,000. He next started what he would call a “flat rental” firm in Brussels. While he was there, inspiration struck at a small cafe. All around him were businesspeople awkwardly taking notes and trying to work amidst shoppers, students and housewives, because they were not near their offices. At that time, if you were working and on the road, the local coffee shop was about your only option for a meeting. The idea for a business centre (as they say) that could be rented on an as-needed basis was born.

The people at Regus, like their founder, recognize that any given competitive advantage is temporary. This wisdom was painfully gained — with the dot.com crash, the US part of the business went into Chapter 11 as the entrepreneurs who rented their facilities themselves went under. Coming out of that experience, Dixon led the company through a reinvention of its business model through new kinds of partnerships with building owners, new product offers such as a members’ club, “Businessworld,” and international expansion to new geographic markets. Today, Regus is present in 95 countries with facilities in 550 cities. It’s listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250. It offers a vast number of services, from disaster recovery to “virtual” offices. It moves into and out of geographies and businesses with rhythmic regularity.

One way Regus has addressed the phenomenon of transient advantage is that when scoping out new business opportunities, they assume — even before entering — that any competitive advantage gained there will eventually end. As Rudy Lobo, their Chief Operating Officer explains, at the very moment the company goes after an opportunity, it simultaneously considers what it will take to exit it. Facing short-lived advantages is a way of life. Before they even commit to a property, according to Lobo, they ask “what happens if this doesn’t work?” They then work on that “religiously” (as he says) to take as much risk as possible out of any projects before making a commitment to them. It’s a principle I’ve been teaching for years — if you can de-risk a project, you can move much more aggressively, even if there is some chance of failure.

Regus’ has also exploited the phenomenon of transient advantage in another, even more clever, way — they’ve linked their own success to the increasing prevalence of transient advantages of their customers. By using Regus’ services, companies can keep their costs variable. This frees them up from being saddled with assets that may become obsolete. In addition, Regus can help its clients ramp up quickly should an opportunity prove more attractive than initially thought. It can help small companies seem like big ones; and can help big ones explore new territories and operate as a “virtual” back office for companies on the move. Companies like Regus have much to teach us about how to operate with the logic of transient advantage underpinning a strategy.

Wearable computers are somewhat of a fad these days. It’s hard to say if it will be a fad a year from now, but Apple is researching ways to capitalize on the trend it if happens to grow.

Reuters reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted that wearable computers were on the tech giant’s shortlist of new products this week during an All Things Digital conference. He didn’t come right out and say that Apple was working on a smartwatch, but he did say that his company is working on “several more game changers.”

So, what would an Apple-made wearable computer look like? It won’t be anything like Google Glass or other wearable computers. He said “there’s nothing that’s going to convince a kid who has never worn glasses or a band or a watch to wear one.” In other words, slapping a computer onto a watch isn’t suddenly going to make somebody want to wear a watch. Cook said that “there’s lots of things to solve in this space,” so Apple is obviously researching how to make wearable computers cool.

That’s always what Apple has done best – making nerdy things cool. You could argue that Google Glass is really cool, but then a bunch of pasty white nerds make it not so cool anymore. An Apple iWatch or whatever it’s called would have to convince people that it’s cool to wear something that’s inherently nerdy on their person at all times.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that Apple may just give up on its plans to release a wearable computer. It was impossible to make a calculator watch cool in the 80s, and it may be just as impossible to make smartwatches cool today.

Former Grand Valley State University quarterback Cullen Finnerty went missing this weekend while fishing at his family’s cabin on the Baldwin River in Michigan. Now, the former quarterback’s body has been found.

According to an Associated Press report, on Tuesday Finnerty was found dead in the woods over one mile from his fishing boat. The cause of his death has not yet been determined, pending the results of an autopsy. Authorities have stated that they do not suspect foul play.

Finnerty had gone missing on Sunday, and police and volunteers, including some Grand Valley coaches and players, searched for 30-year-old athlete for days before finding him. Based on Finnerty’s last phone call, his family has stated that he may have had some kind of “mental episode.”

After completing his college career with a 51-4 starting record, Finnerty was not drafted in the 2007 NFL Draft, but was later signed by the Baltimore Ravens as an undrafted free agent. After one NFL season on the Ravens’ practice squad, he was signed by the Denver Broncos, but not used. He went on to play American football in Europe and in the Continental Indoor Football League.

Grand Valley State University has issued a statement on Finnerty’s death, stating that the university’s community is “saddened” by his passing.

Kate Upton is reportedly pretty irate over a photo of her that showed up in a recent Victoria’s Secret catalog, not only because she never gave her consent, but because the brand talked so much smack about her before she became one of the biggest models in the world.

One of the people in charge of booking VS models, Sophia Neophitou, said last year, ”We would never use Kate . . . She’s like a footballer’s wife, with the too-blond hair and that kind of face that anyone with enough money can go out and buy.”

Of course, Kate went on to be the most popular Sports Illustrated cover girl in quite a while and practically broke the internet with her YouTube video. All that fame must have been too much for VS to pass up, because they included her in the new catalog despite the fact that the photo is from two years ago.

Despite the photos and a swell of rumors, Kate isn’t contracted with the company to become an Angel.

A 24-year old man from Afghanistan recently went to doctors for help in explaining why he suffered from constant headaches, colds, and vision loss in one eye. What they found was astonishing.

The man had a 4-inch long pencil lodged in his sinuses that he never knew was there. Over the years, it damaged his eye socket and caused vision loss. He claims to have no clue how it might have gotten stuck in there, but says he took a bad fall as a child and thinks it might have happened then.

Doctors removed the pencil and the man is now recovering.

We all know the human body is capable of some crazy things–like functioning around a foreign object–but sometimes it does things that almost defy explanation. There have been documented cases of tumors growing fingernails and hair, and a similar case to the man with the pencil in 2007 when a woman underwent surgery for nosebleeds. Doctors found a 3-inch long pencil lodged in her head after a childhood accident more than 50 years prior.

“This was something unique because the trauma was so old,” said Dr. Hans Behrbohm, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Berlin’s Park-Klinik Weissensee. “She shouldn’t suffer any longer,” he said.

Apple head Tim Cook was interviewed yesterday at the D11 Conference and he had some interesting things to say about their main competition. The explosive growth of Android came up, and he doesn’t seem worried. He said, “Winning has never been about making the most” which if you’re reading between the lines, that means quality is more important than quantity. To further clarify, he said, “Arguably, we make the best PC, but we don’t make the most.” On the other hand, he said that they made the best music player and did make the most, but it wasn’t that way from the start.

Cook went on to explain that things aren’t always the way they seem. For example, tablet market share might be fairly close, but when it comes to the web market share there’s no contest, at least for North America. The iPad controls 80% of the web traffic and if you look at worldwide data from both smartphones and tablets, iOS controls nearly 60% of the market.

In a completely unrelated topic, the question came up on porting their own iOS apps to Android. Cook said, “We have no religious issue with porting an Apple app to Android. If it made sense for us to do that, we would do that.” No don’t go thinking that we are going to see iOS apps anytime soon on Android because the key to this statement is “if it made sense”. What he is saying is it hasn’t made sense and it doesn’t make sense now. Sure, if it makes sense in the future they will do it, but a lot will need to happen for that to take place.

Apple and Google are two completely different companies, and although I wouldn’t agree with Cook’s comment that Google isn’t concerned with quality, I think Apple’s plan of attack will continue to work for them. If you’re interested in seeing the complete interview, you can check out the 81 minute video below.

source: Engadget (1) (2)

Come comment on this article: Tim Cook on Android’s dominating market share: ‘Winning has never been about making the most’

On the surface, the thought of adult males riding around on Barbie Jeeps may seem a little odd. However, once you watch this video it will become apparent that this is truly the reason that these things exist.

Source: Youtube.com

Sprint on Wednesday confirmed that it has received the go-ahead from the U.S. government to merge with Japanese carrier SoftBank. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) had been investigating the proposed acquisition to ensure that it doesn’t pose a risk to national security. The government was worried about the use of telecom equipment from ZTE and Huawei, however SoftBank’s CEO confirmed there are no plans to use Chinese equipment. Sprint and SoftBank have entered into a National Security Agreement with the U.S. government and now only await the green light from the Federal Communications Commission. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal requires the two companies to have a four-member national security committee, which will include a security director on Sprint’s board of directors that has the power to veto equipment purchases. Sprint’s press release follows below.

Continue reading…

Alternative search engine Blekko announced the launch of a major site redesign today. The design leverages the API the company built for its mobile app izik, and breaks search results down into categories, offering curated results from “verified” sources of content. Search results pages also now include more results per page.

“Blekko’s new search results page will move away from the standard search result status-quo and introduce a remodeled homepage with an innovative new way to display results,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews. ” This new design will break down the spam-free search results into categories that will make it easier than ever for users to sift through human-curated content. The shift away from the customary 10 link search result archetype is the next big step for Blekko.”

The new site features responsive design, and has more images.

“It’s a great testament to our team that we’ve reached a usage level that almost no other search startup has managed to achieve in the past decade,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “And now we’re ready to take things to the next level by radically redefining the search results page. Now every search is going to instantly return results from the best sources on the Web and break them down into categories to provide a richer, more accurate list of real information, not just links.”

Blekko says its user base is up to 12.5 million, with 5 million searches a day.

 

And while we’re on the topic of the HTC One finally appearing on more retail outlets, it appears that we have some additional colors of the device on the way as well. Pocket-lint claims that inside sources confirmed that blue and red variants of the smartphone are on the way and will arrive in the coming months, joining the already existing silver and black variants of the smartphone. Considering that we’ve already seen the red variant of the smartphone, this new tidbit of news shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise really— though we’re hoping HTC doesn’t tease us for too long and will unleash the new colors sooner rather than later.

There’s no word yet on what storage capacity the new colors will come in, nor do we have an idea of how much each will cost– but we’ll be sure to give you all the deets as we hear them.

source: Pocket-lint

Come comment on this article: Blue and red variants of the HTC One smartphone are on the way and will arrive in the coming months