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While it’s too soon to tell whether Foxconn will try to become the next Samsung, the company is certainly looking to diversify its product portfolio in order to lessen its dependence on Apple. Unnamed sources tell The Wall Street Journal that Foxconn “is moving aggressively to add new clients and is looking at ways to diversify beyond contract manufacturing,” including “reviewing plans to sell its own brand of electronics accessories to improve profit margins.” It’s unclear from the Journal’s report whether these Foxconn-branded devices would compete directly with Apple’s devices, although an earlier report indicated that Foxconn was mostly interested in producing its own television sets rather than smartphones or tablets.

A short while ago the good folks at The Woody sent me an all-wood bamboo BlackBerry Z10 case. I’ve always though of wood products for high tech to be a bit of a novelty but the truth is nothing beats the feeling or the look of real wood.

The case is light, sturdy and easy to put on and take off the BlackBerry Z10. The case fits tight and has a bit of felt on the inside so that it doesn’t scuff the back of your device while being protected from impacts.

The only drawback is that some of the larger-plugged micro USB chargers won’t fit through the wooden port holes. The problem is easily remedied by cutting some of the excess plastic and rubber from the plug itself, or using the official BlackBerry BlackBerry Charger Bundle that comes with a slimmer micro USB cable.

The Woody is a Canadian company based in Ottawa Ontario that can also give your wooden BlackBerry Z10 case a custom laser engraving of your own design for an extra ten dollars. They also make wooden iPhone cases so send your jealous iFriends their way too.

Click here to buy the Woody for $34.95 for the BlackBerry Z10.

Click here to buy Woody with a custom laser engraving of your design for $44.95 for the BlackBerry Z10.

So how much will it take for Yahoo to buy itself a stake in Hulu? According to a new report from AllThingsD, at least $600 million. Citing “numerous sources close to the situation,” AllThingsD reports that Yahoo is bidding between $600 million and $800 million for Hulu, a range that reflects the fact that Yahoo “has proposed several different prices based on a variety of circumstances” including “the length of the licensing rights for content and how much control the programming companies selling Hulu have over their media.”

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With the fighting in Syria showing no signs of slowing, those covering the civil war are now finding themselves in more danger than ever. According to a report from the Associated Press, a Syrian TV correspondent was gunned down on Monday during fighting near the border of Lebanon and Syria.

The Syrian government has reported that Yara Abbas, a correspondent for the Syrian government-owned Al-Ikhbariyah TV station, was killed by rebels near an air base in the Homs province. Two other station employees were also injured, a cameraman and an assistant.

The incident reportedly took place near the town of Qusair, where heavy fighting between Syria’s government and rebels has taken place this month.

The Syrian civil war grew out of protests that begain in 2011 during the so-called “Arab Spring.” Protesters in the country demanded the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad, and the Syrian military was soon called in to end protests. After the military fired on protesters, opposition groups formed into armed militias, igniting a sporadic war with flash points occurring throughout the country. The United Nations has estimated that around 80,000 Syrians have died during the conflict.

Companies and gamers in the Ottawa and surrounding regions should really check out an amazing event coming up called Ottawa’s Got Game. The event is a full day of game tournaments and casual play with prizes. Proceeds of the event are going to the charity Child’s Play which is a really great charity that puts video games in hospitals and children’s wards to provide some fun in an otherwise depressing environment.

So check out Ottawa’s Got Game and register your company or go as an individual. There’s also a huge Star Wars exhibit going on at the same time so there are plenty of reasons to attend.

Go to this Eventbrite link and register. Individual passes are only $10.

For the first time, researchers have found a particular kind of molecular switch in the food poisoning bacteria Salmonella Typhimurium under infection-like conditions. This switch, using a process called S-thiolation, appears to be used by the bacteria to respond to changes in the environment during infection and might protect it from harm, researchers report this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

S-thiolation protects proteins from irreversible chemical changes when a cell is stressed. The newly discovered switch might regulate when or how proteins work while offering protection, providing researchers insight into Salmonella infection.

“We continue to recognize just how clever this bug is in adapting to its environment,” said systems biologist Josh Adkins of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “During infection it lives in hostile environments, and so it can use multiple approaches to adjust its functions.”

Whole Ensemble

Salmonella Typhimurium causes food poisoning in people and can be fatal in the elderly or very young. Recent technological advances in the field known as proteomics are allowing researchers to explore how proteins, the workhorses of the cell, allow the bacteria to infect and cause illness. Most technologies that examine a cell’s ensemble of proteins do so by chopping the proteins up. Adkins, lead author Charles Ansong and other colleagues wanted to look at whole proteins, which provides more information such as how proteins are regulated.

Cells regulate how proteins work in several ways. One of the most common adds molecular pieces that serve as gas pedals on proteins, turning them up or down in a grand orchestrated way. Proteomics methods that chop up proteins allow a researcher to determine that a particular protein was present, but not if it was actually functioning. Those methods also destroy evidence about how hard the gas pedal was pressed.

To identify which proteins were likely turned on or off during Salmonella infection, the team grew the bacteria either with rich food that satisfied all their nutritional needs or with nutrient-poor food that mimicked the kind of stressful environment the microbes find themselves in while infecting someone.

Then the researchers took samples of the bacteria and identified the proteins inside. They used a method called top-down proteomics, a technological advancement that allows researchers to look at wide swaths of whole proteins instead of just a few at a time. The team identified 563 unique proteins. This number is comparable to fungus and human studies but almost three times as many as in other bacterial studies using top-down proteomics.

They also determined if the proteins had molecular modifications on them. These can cap an end of a protein or dot the protein’s length. Because different modifications can be mixed and matched on one protein, they ended up with a total of 1,665 different forms of the 563 unique proteins.

“This study shows how well top-down proteomics works, especially to get at regulatory information,” said co-author Ljiljana Pasa-Tolic, who led top-down proteomics development with mass spectroscopist Si Wu at EMSL, DOE’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus.

Gluts Versus Cysts

Of particular interest to the team were S-thiolation modifications. These modifications cover and protect a protein’s sulfur atoms, which tend to snag each other like velcro and cause misshapen proteins. The modifications come in two flavors: a bulky glutathione and a compact cysteine. While glutathione modifications are pretty well studied, only four studies reveal cysteine modifications, and only two of those are in bacteria.

A total of 25 proteins sported glutathiones and another 18 wore cysteines. But nine of these stood out: The glutathiones and the cysteines attached to the same exact spot on the nine proteins. Not at the same time — the team found that Salmonella used glutathiones at these sites when they were fat and happy, growing with rich food. When grown under stressful conditions with nutritionally poor food, the Salmonella swapped their glutathiones for cysteines.

In addition, switching S-thiolation modifications appeared to be a talent unique to Salmonella. The team checked other bacteria such as Escherichia coli, a common gut bacteria, and Yersinia pestis, which causes plague, to see if other species used this S-thiolation switch on their proteins. They didn’t, suggesting that Salmonella had come up with this tactic during its own evolution.

The researchers speculate that Salmonella might use the smaller cysteine under stressed conditions as an energy saving device. Additional research will reveal what control functions the modifications are actually performing on the proteins, as well as explore how global this method of control is within the microbe.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease through interagency agreement Y1-AI-8494-01 and the National Institute for General Medical Sciences.

---

Reference: Charles Ansong, Si Wu, Da Meng, Xiaowen Liu, Heather Brewer, Brooke L. Deatherage Kaiser, Ernesto S. Nakayasu, John R. Cort, Pavel A. Pevzner, Richard D. Smith, Fred Heffron, Joshua N. Adkins and Ljiljana Paša-Tolic. Top-down proteomics reveals a unique protein S-thiolation switch in Salmonella Typhimurium in response to infection-like conditions, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, Early Edition online the week of May 27, 2013, DOI 10.1073/pnas.1221210110.

Earlier this month, Osaka, Japan Mayor and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, Toru Hashimoto caused controversy by referring Japan’s policy of providing “comfort women” to soldiers in World War II as “necessary.” The women he referred to were taken from surrounding countries, such as China and Korea, and forced into sex slavery during the war. He had last year claimed that there is no evidence that the Japanese military was involved in the enslavement of these women.

This morning, Hashimoto called a press conference to explain his remarks and offer an apology. According to an AFP report, Hashimoto spoke for nearly three hours to the foreign press, defending his comments and accusing other countries of sex slavery as well.

Hashimoto spent much of his address defending his comments, repeating that it is “unclear” that Japan or the Japanese military officially provided comfort women. He also accused other countries, such as the U.S., Britain, France, the U.S.S.R, and Germany of doing the same during World War II, though through less official means, such as private businessmen who operated wartime brothels. Hashimoto also stated that, no matter how it was provided, World War II sex slavery was wrong.

Hashimoto also took the opportunity to walk back his comments to the U.S. military stationed in Okinawa. According to the AFP report, he had previously encouraged U.S. commanders to allow soldiers to partake in Japan’s licensed sex shops, in order to lessen crimes committed by those soldiers. Back in March, two U.S. Navy sailors were convicted of raping and robbing a woman in Okinawa.

Google is once again said to be at the center of an antitrust investigation over its business practices. According to a report from Bloomberg, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether Google is using its dominance in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition. The agency had previously investigated the company over its search practices and use of Motorola’s patents. The latest probe will seek to determine if Google is violating antitrust laws by using its position in the $17.7 billion U.S. display-advertising market to force companies to use more of its other services.

Last Thursday, former child actress Amanda Bynes was arrested at her Manhattan apartment after allegedly throwing a bong out of her window. The police had been called after the Nickelodeon star had allegedly been smoking marijuana in the lobby of her building. She was taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and then taken to jail. On Friday, Bynes was released without bail and is now scheduled to appear in court again in July.

Now, Bynes is using her Twitter account to lash out at everyone – the NYPD, the press, and even her own parents. Though Bynes has become infamous for her Twitter rants over the past few months, her latest claims are easily some of her most grandiose and serious.

Bynes began her rants this weekend by denying the NYPD’s version of her arrest. She denies throwing anything out of her apartment window and claims that she doesn’t drink or do drugs:

“This is all false! Nothing was thrown out the widow! They asked if a vase was a bong to which I replied, no, that’s a vase. I’m very close friends with Nikki Blonsky, we chat all the time! Stop writing pathetic articles about me! E isn’t run by beauty queens like me! I’ve met you all! You’re a bunch of drug users and alcoholics! I don’t drink or do drugs! Get your story straight!”

She followed up her denial by accusing the NYPD of illegally entering her apartment and sexually assaulting her. She then shifts to accusing her parents of money laundering and “unethical manager work,” and states that she is suing them:

“To say I wasn’t offended being treated like a mental insane person/criminal on the night the cops illegally entered my apartment, found nothing, sexually assaulted me, then arrested me taking me to a mental hospital, then locking me up all night for no wrong doing us criminal on THEIR part. My lawyer and I are taking this mistake extremely seriously! You cannot illegally enter my apartment then take me to mental hospital without any grounds. I have never been so offended in my life. They found nothing criminal on me or around me, one cop then sexually assaulted me, so I’m suing for all of the above! I’ll be happy when I get money compensation from the cop who assaulted me and NYPD for wrongfully arresting me and having me put into a mental hospital and jail overnight! I don’t want to keep talking about it. My lawyer is taking care of it for me. My real friends don’t talk about me on twitter. Also, never trust or listen to a word any person from my family says to the press. I am suing them for money laundering/unethical manager work, I never signed a contract with them, and they had been stealing my money without me knowing, claiming they were managing me somehow when they have no right to act as if they did anything to help or enhance my career and I want $ back that I earned on my own. I’m 27 and don’t like when press talks to my parents. My parents are almost 70 years old. We are no longer on speaking terms. I would rather them be homeless than live off of my money.”

Bynes’ latest Twitter rant again accuses the NYPD of lying about her arrest, and states that she will be suing the police. She also took the opportunity to talk about what she hopes will be in her future: another nose job, appearances in music videos, and “a long and wonderful career as a singer/rapper.”

“For once and for all, this is the last thing I’ll say about the mistaken arrest. I’m suing NYPD for illegally entering my apartment, lying about drugs on me and lying about me tampering with non existent drug paraphernalia, then I’m suing for being put into a mental hospital against my will, then locked up overnight for coming home after a facial and working out with my trainer like the good girl that I am. I’m allergic to alcohol and drugs and don’t partake in any of the above. I’m so offended by all of this but so proud to not be a drug or alcohol user. I don’t need to talk about this anymore. My lawyer and I are taking this offense so seriously! Everything they did was against the law and The judge saw that there was no drugs on me or proof of any type of bong or mental illness (I was so offended to even be taken to a mental hospital and they would not let me call my lawyer until the next day after being in jail all night, then I went to court and was immediately released because the judge saw that I was wrongly arrested. The cops found no proof of any type of drug use or evidence of drug paraphernalia such as a bong in or around my apartment) I’m also suing my apartment complex for lying about me smoking in my building. I’m free forever! You can’t lock up an innocent person! Thanks for caring! Look forward to seeing me in music videos! I’m getting in shape and getting a nose job! I’m looking forward to a long and wonderful career as a singer/rapper!”

A lot of the gadgets that help people monitor and track their physical health focus on providing feedback related to physical activity for use with tracking workout data and energy expenditure during the day. Now, a new Kickstarter projected called the W/Me band wants to leverage similar data sources, but with the goal of providing a more holistic picture of wellness.

The W/Me wristband is based around a sensor that monitors your body’s automatic nervous system, providing feedback on body activity that you may not be at all aware of, including breathing patterns and heart rate, to let you know about automatic reactions you may be having that are detrimental to your state of health or physical wellbeing. Then, with rhythmic breathing exercises, the idea is that you’ll be able to correct these negative patterns and improve your general health and mood for the better.

The W/Me project is different from most activity tracking in that it takes a very specific goal of managing breathing and describing a user’s mental state. It provides readings for agility score and ANS (autonomic nervous system) age in addition to a general description of your mental state, which provides information that tells you both how good you might be at dealing with stress, and how old your nervous system is, independent of your actual biological age.

The wristband will have Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, as well as an LED readout that can provide information independent from an attached smartphone. It advertises a full week’s worth of use on a full battery charge, and also has a built-in USB connector for charging. It uses a built-in heart rate variability sensor, combined with the company’s own algorithms to arrive at its various readings, which can be displayed either on the band itself or on a companion app.

Whether or not you believe in the science behind this, this is a clear growth market for quantified-self devices. There’s plenty of opportunity to explore the intersection of these devices and alternative theories of medicine and wellness, so it’ll be interesting to see if these kinds of gadgets can help bring health- and self-monitoring tech into the mainstream.

Samsung is still trying to expand its patent portfolio as a way to combat intellectual property lawsuits filed by Apple, and the company has now gone so far as to start its own patent trading and development firm in the United States. Korea Times reports that Samsung last week plunked down $25 million to launch Intellectual Keystone Technology, a firm based in Washington, DC that will focus entirely on acquiring and developing patents. Unnamed sources tell Korea Times that Samsung is most interested in acquiring patents related to LCD and OLED displays that the company uses in smartphones, tablets and televisions. One Korea Times source says that Samsung is “eager” to buy display-related patents to maximize its “indisputable leverage” in the display manufacturing business.

We all expected the new 2014 Corvette Stingray to be a beast of a car, but I’ve got to admit that the boys over at GM have really outdone themselves. The new 6.2L V8 engine for instance produces 455 hp and 460 lb-ft of torque. It costs a mere $51,995.00 (a bargain), comes with a set of real seats, a new seven-speed manual with Active Rev Match technology, composite and carbon-fiber body panels, hydroformed aluminum frame with aluminum and magnesium structural and chassis components AND a perfect 50/50 weight distribution. What this all means is that for under 55k you will now be able to have a car that will (most likely) be able to go head-to-head (in stock form mind you) with some of the baddest automobiles the planet Earth has to offer.

Well done GM!!

Source: GM.com

Sure, genealogy nerds might have fun poking through U.S. Census records, birth certificates and other documents in pursuit of information about their relatives on Ancestry.com. When it comes to showing off individual records to friends and relatives, though, the presentation can lack punch, and telling the whole story of an ancestor’s life isn’t straightforward.

The people behind the Ancestry.com service have realized this. Now they’re making the most of their 4PB storehouse of official personal records, user-submitted information and other data with a new feature delivering sleek computer-generated but customizable summaries of information available on users’ ancestors.

Ancestry started rolling out the feature, known as Story View, earlier this quarter to a tiny share of its customers, and now it’s active for 10 percent of them. The plan is to analyze the use of Ancestry with and without Story View and round out the feature before making it generally available, probably later this year, said Eric Shoup, the company’s executive vice president of product, in a recent interview. Already Ancestry has made the feature more interactive by letting users move around a single page the images of documents and edit the associated bodies of text derived from the documents.

How it works

Story View builds on top of Ancestry’s already highly evolved tools for mining data about relatives, including some handwritten records. But sometimes only critical fields, such as name and place of residence, have been processed for inclusion in Story View. A customer can access a handwritten record, scroll down to the row in which a relative is described and toggle across columns to see data that hasn’t been processed, such as that person’s occupation.

Ancestry is working on getting more out of its handwritten records by gradually directing armies of “keyers” to decrypt handwriting and turn it into searchable text. Street addresses have been added in this way, and other fields will come later. And since Ancestry continues to add records to its repository, life stories will gain more sources to draw from as well.

To generate one-paragraph summaries drawing on information from multiple documents (check out the top paragraph in the picture above), Ancestry looked to Narrative Science, a company founded in 2010 to make machines turn out readable copy. Early use cases came in the production of coverage of sports events and public companies’ earnings reports, but now Narrative Science technology is handling much more personal information.

When Ancestry first got involved with Narrative Science, it was only possible to produce data in big batches, said Reed McGrew, lead developer on Ancestry’s narrative and context services team. “They’ll produce huge numbers of financial reports, and that’s not really the experience we’re trying to deliver,” McGrew said. “Because it was meant for batches, it was pretty slow.”

Within a few months, Narrative Science came out with a new API that could work on a more granular level. “On kind of a user-by-user basis, they generate our life stories,” McGrew said.

Ancestry knows a thing or two about serving up genealogy information. The company’s editors provided editorial standards, or “rules,” for how the data should inform the narratives and how the narratives should sound, McGrew said. One Ancestry standard? “We don’t talk about births that happen to mothers less than 10 years old,” he said. “They’re more likely keystroke errors. They do happen in reality sometimes, for sure, but more often than not, when we find them, they’re errors.”

Underneath a picture and life summary of an ancestor in Story View are zoomed-out pictures of documents, instead of discrete fields of structured text. Next to the images, Ancestry can plug in blurbs generated from information in the document. Those draw from a system that engineers drew up in house. Once Ancestry has found all the records associated with a person, it selects specific facts to pull out of them based on Ancestry editors’ rules, and assembles them into full sentences. Once the document-based blurbs are displayed in the browser, customers can edit and save them before sharing.

Sharing ain’t easy

The challenge is not the creation and storage of new data and websites that users create, said Scott Sorenson, Ancestry’s chief information officer. Storage has gotten cheaper and cheaper, and that trend should continue. Accurate processing of handwritten records generally is not an issue, either. Often the keyers are in China, Sorenson said. “The Chinese character set is much larger than our alphabet,” he said. “They’re actually very skilled at keying these records.”

The real hard part is to make sure the service is highly available, to serve up all the right document and text for millions of users and keep the site from crashing when traffic peaks. But since one goal of Story View is to get more people checking out content on the site and eventually signing up, that would be a good problem to have.

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Lately, we’ve seen Google make more of a push at getting new customers connected to the internet instead of pushing any one particular product on them. It’s a sensible business strategy for a company that sells ad space on the internet, as the more people that have access to reliable internet, the more potential customers Google can serve ads to.

On the heels of beefing up their Google Fiber rollout, Google is deeply committed to building up new wireless networks in developing markets that don’t have access to a wired internet connection otherwise. Sources close to Google say that the search giant is planning to team up with local telecoms and equipment providers to get the ball rolling, but they weren’t clear on if any deals were already in place. Building up these networks is said to be able to connect almost a billion new people to the internet.

It’s a smart business move for Google, but it’s also going to help a ton of new people gain access to new technology and information, which is always great to see.

source: Wall Street Journal

Come comment on this article: Google to help fund and develop new wireless networks in emerging markets

A prominent anti-piracy commission, whose members include former Utah governor Jon Huntsman and former U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, has released a new report making the case that copyright holders should start deploying software capable of locking down the computers of alleged pirates. The new report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property says that copyright holders should be allowed to take more assertive action against intellectual property thieves, including developing software that will “allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information” and will potentially lock down any unauthorized computer that tries to access the file.

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Even as Yahoo was closing in on its ambitious $1-billion acquisition of Tumblr last week, the web giant was busy on a number of other fronts as well — including a relaunch of its classic photo-sharing service Flickr. But just as some sceptics (including us) have raised red flags about Yahoo’s ability to capitalize on the purchase of Tumblr without ruining it, the Flickr redesign has plenty of vocal critics as well. Are these the usual die-hard users who are simply resistant to change of any kind, or has Yahoo altered Flickr to the point where it has made the service worse rather than better?

As my colleague Laura Owen has described, the new Flickr includes a number of fairly dramatic changes — not the least of which is a full terabyte of storage for all users. Now, instead of a Pro level where members paid for extra storage, Flickr users can pay a monthly charge to have advertising removed from their feed, or they can pay an even larger annual fee to double the amount of space. The user interface of the service has also been completely redesigned to focus on showing large-format photos.

Changing the look also changes the focus

Not surprisingly, the relaunch caused a storm of controversy on Flickr forums and elsewhere, with many veteran users complaining that it was difficult to find things or that favorite features were missing. As many Yahoo fans have since pointed out, this kind of response occurs virtually every time a service or website launches a new design — and as a result, many supporters have argued that the backlash is just noise and will eventually subside. The redesign also has some prominent fans, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield:

A blogger by the name Newton Gimmick, however, argues in a post at Infinite Hollywood that the backlash to Flickr’s relaunch is more than just the typical knee-jerk response: in his view, the redesign has fundamentally changed some aspects of the service in important ways — ways that make it less likely Flickr will succeed or thrive, rather than more likely. In an attempt to be “cool” or compete with other services like Instagram, he says, Yahoo has ruined what made Flickr different, which was the element of shared community.

“Yahoo’s new vision of Flickr is to try and be a cool site like Tumblr and Instagram. Yahoo is furious that Instagram has so much of the market share. What Yahoo failed to realize is that Flickr doesn’t share the same market with Instagram. Flickr wasn’t ever about posting the latest photos from your iPhone.”

Gimmick argues that because the new layout is aimed at creating an Instagram or Tumblr-style stream of large-format photos, many of the other features that Flickr users relied on to connect with fellow photography enthusiasts and exchange information about their photos are either missing or almost impossibly hard to find. For example, he says, Flickr used to make the “EXIF” data about a photo — the type of camera, aperture size, frame rate, etc. — obvious, but now users have to hunt for it.

the more I use the new Flickr – the more I hate it. For people browsing pictures its an improvement – for people using it, its total crap.—
Digital Cosmonaut (@iamkosmonaut) May 26, 2013

Has Flickr lost its core value?

Yahoo’s CEO set off a minor firestorm following the Flickr relaunch when she said that “there’s no such thing as professional photographers any more,” which many took as a denigration of the industry. Mayer quickly explained that her comments were intended to refer just to the abolishing of the “Pro” tier of Flickr service. But Gimmick argues that the real impact of her comment is to make it clear that Yahoo no longer cares about even hobby photographers: instead, it simply wants to accumulate as many photos as possible.

“They want teenage kids posting up all the stupid duck face photos that they litter Instagram and Facebook with. Because those teen kids, are ad revenue. If you’re hip, people will pay big bucks to advertise on your site. And if you offer tons of free space for kids to post duck face photos, you’ll draw in lots of users and that means lots of ad revenue.”

It’s easy to see Gimmick’s rant as just another lament for the passing of the “good old days” by someone who has been a fan of a service for a long time. But as a long-time Flickr user, I think he might be on to something with his criticisms: I have used the site mostly as a way to backup my photos — but there are plenty of places that make it easy to do that. The real killer feature of Flickr has always been the community aspects, and the redesign diminishes or hides those in many ways.

That may be the kind of tradeoff that Yahoo and Mayer see as worthwhile — perhaps even necessary. But for me and Gimmick, and potentially other users as well, downplaying those features removes the main rationale for our loyalty to the site. If Flickr looks and feels just like every other photo-stream or sharing service, why wouldn’t we just go and use one of those instead?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Getty / Chris Jackson

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The ZTE Grand S was an incredibly impressive phone we got to see at CES this year. At CES, ZTE’s head of North American operations, Lixen Cheng, said he was confident the device would arrive in the United States before the end of the year, but it looks like ZTE wasn’t able to keep that promise. The latest reports have the device slated to hit North American shores sometime in 2014 due to issues with national carriers.

ZTE has had considerable success in the prepaid markets, but that success hasn’t been mirrored on the postpaid side of things. The Grand S would have been a good step in the right direction for the company, but if the device launches next year, it will be long outdated by whatever the big OEMs have cooked up at the time. Hopefully we’ll see ZTE get something high end over here in the near future, whether or not it’s the Grand S.

source: Cnet

Come comment on this article: ZTE Grand S US launch delayed until 2014

Do you live in Switzerland, want a Samsung Galaxy S 4 and have a large attention span? If you answered yes to all of those questions, you may be able to win Samsung’s latest flagship by merely staring at it’s gorgeous screen for one hour. Swiss carrier Swisscom has teamed up with Samsung to bring a very cool challenge to various Swiss cities. Participants will be asked to stare at the S 4 for one hour straight and if their concentration is broken, they are disqualified.

Cheating is impossible, as the S 4′s Smart Stay feature (which keeps the screen on as long as the user is looking at it) will be used to monitor the competition. If that sounds too easy, the competition’s organizer have set up a number of distractions including obnoxious actors, motorcycles revving engines and burning rubber and many more.

While the May 16th date of the competition has passed (as seen in the video below) there are three more challenges coming up in Lucerne, Schwanenplatz on May 28, Berne, Waisenhausplatz on May 29, and Lausanne Place de l’Europe, on May 30. Hit the source  for information on registration.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come comment on this article: Swiss carrier Swisscom teams up with Samsung to give away Galaxy S 4s in the world’s most intense staring contest

If it runs Android, it’s going to be tinkered with. The new, yet-to-be-released OUYA console is no exception. Some devs on XDA have officially unofficially ported CWM recovery to the little gaming box. This opens the doors for flashing custom ROMs and kernels on the box, although since the device is really aimed at controlling your TV, I wouldn’t expect to see too many ROMs for the OUYA. Performance-tuned kernels are definitely possible, though.

The device will need to be rooted first, but if you’re interested, hit the links below to check out how it’s done.

source: XDA

XDA

Come comment on this article: OUYA console gets unofficial CWM recovery

The European Commission is reportedly investigating whether Apple is using “anti-competitive iPhone sales tactics and technical restrictions” to edge out rivals in the European market, according the Financial Times. The probe is said to be focused on Apple’s distribution terms, which may prevent rival smartphone vendors like Samsung from securing a better sales deal. The investigation is the result of an influx of private complaints from mobile operators, however it is still in its preliminary stages.

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