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My colleague, Chiara Marripodi, recently provided me some very interesting data on the effectiveness of hypnosis, as follows. It’s fascinating to consider the healing properties of what so many consider hocus pocus! The validity of therapeutic hypnosis as a complementary…

Thirty years ago, Nancy Reagan launched her version of the war on drugs: “just say no.” She campaigned on that slogan all over America. She was lampooned as an idiot. Now, some researchers estimate that 60% of the Mexican economy would crash if the drug business…

A bulging belly is a common body issue and it affects everyone. However, it is also one of the most difficult to battle with. Cereals for breakfast are advertised for health but it also matters what kind of cereal an individual consumes. To get favorable results with…

Millions of Americans are being forced to buy conventional health insurance that directly benefits the pharmaceutical industry, which in turn fuels the biotech food “modification” industry, and that is the simple but evil math calculation being done by the big three…

The so-called “service industry” – which includes restaurants, entertainment outlets, retail stores and hotels, among other businesses – has traditionally been one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the country, even in a struggling U.S. economy. But its workforce…

The things you think about and dwell on throughout your day have a direct effect on your stress levels, which regulate how much cortisol, or stress hormone, is produced in your body. And new research published in the journal Health Psychology has found that meditation…

The idea of a national internet tax mandate has been voted on in the United States Senate. Dubbed the “Marketplace Fairness Act,” this piece of legislation, if implemented, would stifle entrepreneurs from the online marketplace, enrich large companies, and bloat state…

The American people are barely putting up a fight as they relinquish what little health freedoms they have left in exchange for Obamacare, the multi-billion dollar sick care travesty that will eliminate freedom of choice in health care. But the existing insurance-based…

The embattled city of Chicago is experiencing record firearms deaths, with more victims being shot and killed nightly. So far this year, in fact, month-to-month gun deaths are up from the record highs experienced in 2012, when 506 people were killed in the city. And…

During the 14th and 15th century pandemic, the black death killed nearly half the world’s population, according to, Bubonic Plague: Yesterday’s Scourge–and Tomorrow’s? As present-day cases of bubonic plague reappear in parts of North America and Europe, people are seeking…

Breast augmentation is not a typical medical procedure covered under the U.K.’s socialist system of medicine, known officially as the National Health System (NHS). But it suddenly became one recently after 22-year-old Josie Cunningham convinced her doctor that being…

In the wake of the recent announcement by Whole Foods Market that the retailer will require the labeling of all foods containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in its stores by 2018, many in the natural health community are now wondering, why the long wait? Whole…

Despite all the claims made by industry-funded hacks that genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) and other industrial agricultural methods are necessary for the future of humanity, it is the traditional growing methods that continue to shine through as the real sustainers…

Incidence of stroke in the U.S. and western cultures continues to grow at a staggering rate as it takes the lives of nearly 150,000 Americans each year, making this debilitating illness the fourth leading cause of preventable death. Closely aligned with heart disease…

Responding to a letter from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Department of Homeland Security — an agency that has no business being armed in the first place — says it’s buying billions of rounds of ammunition in order to “significantly lower costs.” It’s all about saving money…

Rovio’s Angry Birds games have been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times, and are played by more than 263 million active users per month. The company is now targeting those hundreds of millions of players with a weekly animated show called Angry Birds Toons, which launched in mid-March.

Rovio has been calling these efforts “one of the world’s biggest video networks,” and Brightcove’s Executive Chairman Jeremy Allaire, whose company is powering Rovio’s video streaming, told me Tuesday that he sees this as an inflection point for video franchises. But what do the famous birds and their disdain for pigs really mean for the future of television?

These birds are up to something

First of all, Rovio’s move into the world of original video programming is pretty ingenious. The company established an audience with its games, and now offers its ad-supported video series through the very same apps — no additional installs needed. “They clearly are in a really powerful position,” said Allaire.

Essentially, the company is using its games as very effective trojan horses, in turn demonstrating how iPads, Android tablets and mobile phones have become an important piece of of the puzzle when you’re in the entertainment business. It also shows how much they’re starting to change the game for the TV industry.

Netflix started its streaming efforts on PCs, but most of its streaming is nowadays happening on connected devices. Game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are seeing the lion’s share of use, but devices like Apple TV are growing quickly as well. Netflix owes these devices its success. Without ways to get its content on the TV screen, the company would have never been in a position where it could spend $100 million on a show like House of Cards.

Rovio, on the other hand, is primarily a mobile company. Mobile devices are where people are playing Angry Birds, and it will be where they’re going to watch their weekly episodes of Angry Birds Toons. If the show turns out to be a success (and that’s still a big if) it could turn out to be the first big original programming success story for mobile devices.

And that could have an impact on the industry beyond birds and pigs, by signaling the industry that it doesn’t have to rely on traditional distribution mechanisms anymore. “You can establish a new programming franchise over the internet” thanks to mobile and connected devices, argued Allaire in our conversation.

When pigs fly

However, the flip side of this is that Angry Birds Toons also raises the bar for content companies to stand out and actually reach the consumer. It’s hard to compete with 263 million monthly active users. Heck, it’s hard to compete at all in a sea of millions of apps if all you have to offer is yet another show.

“In some sense, the business model hasn’t changed at all,” admitted Allaire. You still need to have highly compelling content, you still need to market that content effectively — and doing both  effectively is likely going to cost you a lot of money. And if you’re in mobile, you’re going to also need a really good app.

Birghtcove learned that lesson the hard way over the last couple of months when it failed to establish its app cloud offering, which was meant to provide publishers with an easy way to deploy HTML5-based apps with a native wrapper across a variety of platforms.

Turns out that publishers actually prefer to have true native apps that take advantage of each platform’s strengths and features, which is why Brightcove discontinued app cloud in February. “If you want a premium video experience, you got to put your best foot forward,” acknowledged Allaire when I quizzed him about its app cloud.

The bottom line is that Rovio may demonstrate new ways to enter the game — but that doesn’t mean that the rules have changed. To find large audiences, you still need to be big yourself or partner with a bigger platform.

That’s good news for Rovio and companies like Netflix and YouTube – but not necessarily for a startup looking to change the future of television.

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In its mission to become the “Linux of online learning,” edX just got a powerful new partner. On Wednesday, the Harvard and MIT-backed non-profit is set to announce that it’s teaming up with Stanford to collaboratively develop the open-source edX platform.

Last fall, Stanford launched its own open-source online learning platform Class2Go, which it released to the public in January. Developed by a team of Stanford engineers, the platform was designed to support the university’s online classes and research. In addition to being open, the platform was intended to be inter-operable with other services and portable (meaning that the course content isn’t tied to one platform). But as part of the new collaboration, Stanford will cease development on that platform and focus its efforts on edX.

“[We’ll] fold in the key features of the Class2Go platform in the open-source edX and, together, we’ll be working on a single platform going ahead,” Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said on a call with reporters. “By putting all the wood behind one arrow, so to speak, we thought we could have a bigger impact.”

Since its launch, other schools around the world have started using Class2Go. While the platform will continue to be available to other users, John Mitchell, Stanford’s vice provost for online learning, said they’ll work with those schools to migrate to edX while it transitions its own courses.

The two organizations gave few details on how the collaboration would actually work. But they said that Class2Go’s analytics tools, which can track how long students watch a given video, which sections they repeat and other kinds of student activity on the site, are an example of the kinds of features that will be integrated with edX.

Despite Stanford’s collaboration on the edX platform, Mitchell said the university was not joining the “X University Consortium” of institutions that offer courses on the edX site — which is not entirely surprising given its affiliation with for-profit rival Coursera. The startup was launched by two Stanford professors and the university was one of its launch partners.

But even as Stanford and other top universities partner with for-profit online course providers, like Coursera and Udacity, the growing support for an open source platform shows that schools want to experiment with multiple approaches and be able to control and customize online educational courses and learning tools. The open-source approach means developers anywhere can add new tools to the platform, that professors can create online experiences that best suit their needs and that schools can learn from the innovation of others.

In addition to the Stanford partnership, edX also announced that on June 1, it will release the entire source code for the online learning platform. That development follows its announcement last month that it would release its XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting edX course content.

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The Galaxy S 4 is one of the most high end phones money can buy in terms of sheer processing power, but it’s hard for any one device to hold that title for long in the quickly evolving mobile industry. This time, it looks like Lenovo and Intel are the ones looking to outdo Samsung. Lenovo’s latest 5.5 inch phablet, the IdeaPhone K900, packs a zippy dual-core Intel Atom Clover Trail+ CPU clocked at 2 GHz. And, according some AnTuTu benchmarks, it actually edges out Samsung’s Exynos 5 (octa-core) processor. Of course, at that point, you wouldn’t really notice much difference in real world usage of either device, but it goes to show that more cores don’t necessarily mean a better processor.

The K900 features a full HD 5.5 inch screen, Intel’s Atom Clover Trail+ processor, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, 2500 mAh  battery, but no micro SD card slot. Are any of you surprised that Intel’s processor did so well in benchmarks?

source: Phone Arena

Come comment on this article: Lenovo IdeaPhone K900 barely beats out the Galaxy S 4 in benchmarks thanks to Intel CPU

Prices of virtual currency Bitcoin have been absolutely surging lately but one analyst thinks such a rapid rise is more indicative of a bubble than a genuine boom. ConvergEx Group Chief Market Strategist Nick Colas tells Business Insider that the reaction from his clients “has been pretty uniform: it must be a bubble.” Colas goes on to say that the price increase in Bitcoins has been “too far, too fast, too new” and exhibits all the signs of a classic speculative bubble. Colas also notes that “it’s very hard to short Bitcoins, so there’s no real way to express that pessimistic point of view,” which means that the price of the virtual currency may continue to rise until it experiences a hard landing. The price of Bitcoins, which remained at under $20 for all of 2012, has recently spiked to more than $110 over the span of just a few weeks.