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The humble business of tutoring is getting an upgrade for the digital age. In the last year, much attention has been given to startups bringing instruction to mass audiences — and for good reason: massive open online courses (MOOCs) have the potential to remake what it means to get a college education. But several startups are starting to find success with the opposite approach — using the web to teach one student at a time.

And it’s not an insignificant market. Market research firm Global Industry Analysts, Inc. projects that the global private tutoring market will surpass $102.8 billion by 2018. No wonder online tutoring sites, which use video chats, web-based messaging, online whiteboards and other services, are attracting the interest of investors like Sequoia Capital and SV Angel and Internet companies like IAC.

As more educational instruction and content moves online, and the lifelong learning movement picks up, it’s only natural that the web will increasingly become a vehicle for finding and/or receiving one-on-one instruction. And the rise of mass online classes that provide little individual support could help drive the need for individual instruction. While most tutoring startups serve students at traditional high schools and universities, Alison Johnston, co-founder of InstaEDU, an on-demand tutoring service backed by the Social+Capital Partnership, said 10 to 15 percent of their online lessons are for “non-traditional” students.

“There’s a great opportunity for online tutoring to step in and provide virtual [teaching assistants] for the web,” she said.

Some startups offer tutoring sessions exclusively offline, while others provide on-demand services online only and still others take hybrid and non-traditional approaches to one-on-one instruction.  Here are 5 companies worth following:

InstaEDU

With almost 2,000 screened tutors from the country’s top colleges, InstaEDU provides 24/7 on-demand tutoring sessions that can last as little as 10 minutes or as long as 4 hours. This week, the startup launched a searchable marketplace for its tutors, so students can find tutors by interest, location or gender. While most other online tutoring services automatically match tutors with students, Johnston said InstaEDU wanted to give users the opportunity to select their tutor because they believe students learn better from teachers they like. Pricing is subscription-based, with the cost is determined by how much time students want to spend on the site. The startup, which has raised $1.1 million from The Social+Capital Partnership, said it’s talking with MOOC providers about partnering to provide teaching assistants for online classes.

StudyEdge

StudyEdge may provide extra study help, but they don’t use the T-word around their students. “Every student we’ve spoken to thinks there’s a stigma attached to the word ‘tutor’ – [that] it’s only for the rich or the dumb,” said cofounder Ethan Fieldman. “We think of them as personal trainers.” The Y Combinator graduate, based in Gainesville, Fla., takes a very different approach to tutoring. Instead of matching tutors anywhere with students anywhere, it targets students at specific schools with supplemental online videos, as well as online and live support, tailored to courses at that school. Students at the University of Florida, for example, can purchase a membership (which starts at $25/month) to access offline review sessions, exam review and concept explanation videos on Facebook and mobile apps, online and offline individual help and online peer support.  All of the content, Fieldman said, is created specifically to match the courses delivered at that school. Before StudyEdge, Fieldman said, he built a successful offline tutoring business based on tutoring strategies used to help star athletes at the University of Florida.

Tutorspree

Another Y Combinator-backed startup, Tutorspree doesn’t conduct tutoring online but lets students pair up with one of its 7,000 nationwide tutors on the web. Launched in 2011, the company provides a marketplace of pre-screened tutors searchable by location and subject area expertise and then lets students book appointments and pay online. Prices depend on location, subject and the length of the session but the company says its top tutors make $1,000 to $2,000 a month. The company has raised $2.8 million from investors including SV Angel, Sequoia Capital and Lerer Ventures.

Course Hero

Since launching in 2008, Course Hero has focused on building a hub of digital study guides, lecture notes and practice problems for college students. Last month, the company expanded into an online tutoring with a Q&A platform that lets students pay for on-demand answers to homework and study questions. In an almost TaskRabbit-like way, students submit their questions, as well as a suggested price, and then tutors can choose to answer them. Unlike other tutoring platforms, Course Hero supports less direct interaction between tutors and students and could make it a little easier for students to cheat – they could just pay for answers to homework questions without really learning the underlying concept. But for students stuck with a last-minute question, it provides a lightweight option for help.

Tutor.com

I’m cheating here a little bit because Tutor.com isn’t a startup at all — the company was launched way back in the late 1990s. But earlier this year, it was purchased by Internet giant IAC, which could make it an interesting site to watch. The company provides a network of about 2,500 online tutors through consumer subscriptions and partnerships with libraries, school districts, the military and colleges. Given its background with sites like Match.com and CollegeHumor, it will be interesting to see how IAC uses its internet chops to upgrade the product and enhance distribution.

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The House has been unusually proactive early this year in attempting to pass email privacy protections through an updated Electronic Communications Privacy Act. In fact, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this morning to gather testimonies from Google, law experts, and law enforcement on potential fixes for the ECPA. Now the Senate is finally ready to reveal its bill – authored by the lawmaker who helped write the original bill over 20 years ago.

The Hill reports that Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Mike Lee have introduced the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2013 in the Senate today. It doesn’t have quite the same ring as Rep. Zoe Logren’s bill that was introduced in the House earlier this month, but it will accomplish much the same thing.

In short, Leahy’s bill will require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing private emails or other online online communications. Under current law, law enforcement need only submit a subpoena to obtain emails that are more than 180 days old. What’s more is that the bill would require law enforcement to notify a user that their online communications were under investigation, but the notification requirement can be delayed with a court order.

“No one could have imagined just how the Internet and mobile technologies would transform how we communicate and exchange information today,” said Leahy. “Privacy laws written in an analog era are no longer suited for privacy threats we face in a digital world. Three decades later, we must update this law to reflect new privacy concerns and new technological realities, so that our Federal privacy laws keep pace with American innovation and the changing mission of our law enforcement agencies.”

All of this may sound really familiar because it is. Leahy attempted to pass an amendment to the ECPA during the last Congress, but it never went to the floor for a vote before the end of the year. This latest bill gives Leahy a head start on negotiations to hopefully get a bill passed this year.

Cloud storage providers Dropbox and Microsoft SkyDrive have both released minor maintenance updates for their desktop applications. Both Dropbox 2.0.2 and the Windows version of Microsoft SkyDrive 2013 v17.0.2006.0314 are minor maintenance releases with no new features.

Both updates are the first since major releases — Dropbox 2.0introduced a new sharing-friendly user interface, while SkyDrive 17.0 allowed users to selectively sync folders and sub-folders to specific devices.

Platform-specific fixes for Dropbox 2.0.2 on both Windows and Mac centre around the new menu. For Windows users, one bug preventing the pop-up tray appearing at all has been squashed alongside another that “broke” the menu when the user pressed [Alt] + [F4]. A third bug fix ensures the pop-up menu is positioned correctly on-screen even after the user changes display resolution.

In OS X, fixes for similar issues with the dropdown menu have been implemented, including an issue when plugging in an external monitor as well as another that meant the menu didn’t appear if Dropbox’s Login Item was set to Hide.

Another bug fixes include one that affected the Camera Uploads feature in Windows, as well as a platform-wide issue whereby a notification’s time label was incorrect. The update is rounded off by a number of unspecified performance improvements and further bug fixes.

Also released is Microsoft SkyDrive 2013 build 17.0.2006.0314 for Windows users. The update comes with no release notes, but is the first update of the 2013 release that debuted last November, so is likely a maintenance release, fixing bugs discovered since version 17.0 made its first appearance. In addition to introducing selective sync, version 17 also made it possible to share items direct from the OS X or Windows context menu.

Dropbox 2.0.2 is a freeware download for Windows, Mac and Linux. Microsoft SkyDrive 2013 v17.0.2006.0314 is available as a freeware download for Windows and Mac. Also available is a dedicated Dropbox for Windows 8 app; the SkyDrive app is built into the OS.

Photo Credit: ARENA Creative/Shutterstock

Xbox users can now access the new subscription video service from Redbox Instant by Verizon, thanks to a new app that launched on Xbox Live Tuesday. This is the first time the service has been available on a game console, and it also marks the beginning of a marketing campaign for Redbox Instant, which went into public beta just a few days ago.

Redbox Instant offers subscribers four Redbox DVD rentals as well as unlimited streaming access to around 4,600 movies for $8 a month. An additional 4,000 newer titles are offered as streaming rentals or purchases. After a limited-time free introductory offer, Redbox Instant customers will need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to use the service on Microsoft’s game console, which will set them back another $5 a month.

The company launched its closed beta test at the end of December, and opened up to the public mid-March after convincing tens of thousands of testers to become paying customers, according to Redbox Instant CEO Shawn Strickland.

Strickland told me last week that the launch on Xbox Live would also kick off the company’s first real marketing efforts, and that Redbox Instant would start to specifically target Verizon and Redbox customers soon after. Apps for LG, Google TV and Vizio devices would follow in the next few weeks, he added.

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There has been a lot of talk about Google and paid links in the news lately, so it’s only fitting that they’re the topic of the latest Webmaster Help video from the company. In this one, Matt Cutts responds to this question:

On our travel site, we recommend and link out to hotels and B&B’s in our niche. Our readers find it useful. They’re not paid links, so we don’t add the nofollow attribute. What stops Google from suspecting these are paid links and penalizing us?

“The short answer is: if you’re linking to high quality sites, and you editorially think that they’re good sites, that’s how most of the web works,” says Cutts. “We get into this tiny little area of search and SEO, and we’re convinced all links are nofollowed, and if a link looks good, it must be paid or something like that, and the fact is that for the most part, whenever you’re looking at links, people are linking to stuff that they like. They’re linking to stuff that they enjoy.”

“So, if we mistakenly thought that those were paid links, and as a result, penalized you, there would be a ton of collateral damage,” he says. “There would be a ton of algorithmic damage to our search rankings. So it’s in our enlightened, best self interest, as well as in the interest of our users to make sure that we don’t accidentally classify links as paid and penalize the site. And normally, even if we would classify links as paid, we might not trust the links from your site, but we wouldn’t have things where your site would necessarily stop ranking as well. It can happen if somebody is selling a lot of links, they’ve been selling them for a long time, and those sorts of things, so we do take strong action in some situations, but a lot of the times if we think that a link might be sold or if we have very good reason to suspect, we might just not trust that site’s links nearly as much or maybe zero.”

Concluding the video, Cutts reiterates that it’s in the company’s best interest to be precise when it comes to getting paid links right.

Hulu has just announced a significant redesign of its Apple TV app – one that they say make finding and viewing things much easier.

“Right away, you’ll notice we’ve added content categories across the top navigation bar to make it easy to for you to jump to your chosen section – whether it is TV, Kids, Latino, Search, or something else. Inside each category, you’ll discover what’s new in our content library so it’s easy to discover new shows and keep up with the shows you already love. You can also jump into your favorite shows right away with the “Shows You Watch” tray. We built this to make sure you never miss a new episode or lose your place in a series,” says Hulu’s Dave Herman.

The UI update also makes playback and viewing simpler. When you find the show you want to watch, all you have to do is press the play button and it will start playing instantly.

Hulu has also added support for a quick on/off trigger for audio/subtitle options. When you’re watching something, all you have to do is press and hold the select button.

To experience the new UI, you have to be up to date on your firmware. Make sure to update your software in your settings if you don’t see the changes.

In other, probably more significant Hulu news, the company just named former SVP of Content Andy Forssell as the acting CEO, replacing Jason Kilar as he departs at the end of Q1.

As previously reported, Demand Media announced today that it has acquired arts and crafts e-learning site Creativebug as part of its push to expand into paid content offerings.

During a recent earnings call, the company expressed such an initiative, leading us to believe that we’ll be seeing more of these kinds of acquisitions in the near future.

“We plan to leverage our premium video expertise to launch Subscription and On-Demand e-learning content by mid-year,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “We’ve already begun beta testing eHow Now, a product that offers real-time expert advice, where we leverage our studio’s expert talent to provide real-time answers. In our beta, we have experienced strong conversion rates and a 90% customer approval rating. We’re also developing a LIVESTRONG subscription service. We’ve hired senior executives from the makers of P90X to help develop this product offering, which we plan to launch in Q2.”

With an increased interest in sites like Etsy and Pinterest, one can only imagine that consumers are hungry for the kinds of content Creativebug has to offer.

“We believe there is a disruption and reinvention going on, as people become more interested in the craft movement,” the spokesperson says. “People will continue to turn to the visual inspiration provided by Etsy and Pinterest, which will feed their interest in expressing themselves and learning to create things.”

Of course, as far as Creativebug is concerned, they have to care enough to pay to learn.

Creativebug already has hundreds of videos. The top three categories, according to Demand Media, are sewing ,yarn and jewelry. The average video length is about 30 minutes.

But with all the free content already out there, is this stuff really worth paying for? They charge $16.99 a month for access to unlimited workshops, and $9.99 and up to buy single workshops. When asked what users can get for their money that they can’t get from other sites, the company says, “They get to learn from world class experts in the craft field, which is not available on any other site.”

Demand Media is not disclosing the details of the acquisition. They’re also not disclosing how many paying members Creativebug already has.

Samsung not only has the newest phone about to hit the market, but it also may have the fastest. At last week’s Samsung Galaxy S 4 launch event, Android Authority ran a Geekbench 2 test on the handset, where it earned a score of 3163. Primate Labs, the company behind the benchmarking software, then compared that figure to prior tests on currently available handsets, finding that the Galaxy S 4 tops all handsets in this particular performance test — besting Apple’s iPhone 5 by nearly double.

The new Galaxy S 4 — using Qualcomm’s 1.9 GHz Snapdragon 600 — also returned a score higher than the new HTC One, which also uses a Snapdragon 600. The HTC One Score of 2687 is likely due to a slower version of the chip; it clocks at 1.7 GHz, likely to balance performance and battery life. Here’s a full chart of the Geekbench 2 scores:

While synthetic benchmarks are a good indicator of performance, that’s all they are: indicators. There are many tests available to use on smartphones that check performance for specific features. Mozilla’s SunSpider or Google’s Chrome Octane tests, both challenge a phone to run through JavaScript tests, for example. So it’s possible that the Galaxy S 4 won’t be the fastest phone at every single task.

However, raw performance is key when it comes to many smartphone tasks. The responsiveness of the user interface is a perfect example; swiping to another home screen should be instant at this point, for example. Processing of high-definition videos and still camera images is another area that benefits from hardware performance. Samsung’s AirTouch hovering isn’t much use if it takes too long for information to pop up. And of course, if you’re a gamer, you want the chips in your smartphone to offer the fastest frame rates and greatest visual details.

One of the reasons for Samsung’s smartphone success over the past three years is a large marketing effort. I suspect the company will latch onto benchmark tests such as these and pound out the message repeatedly that its phones best all others in terms of speed.

Surely, the next iPhone and other Android devices will offer improved performance thanks to the newest chips from Qualcomm, Nvidia and even Intel, but for until that happens, expect Samsung’s marketing team to make a big deal about this aspect of the Galaxy S 4. And once it debuts the phone with its 8-core Exynos chip, that message of speed will only be amplified.

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President’s Choice Recipe Box is app made by Canadian grocery chain Loblaws. Famous for developing a strong store brand that is recognized as surpassing the quality of their brand-name counterparts, their app is chalk-full of mouth-watering meal suggestions.

The app is heavy on pictures that make my stomach grumble and has a good variety of recipes to search from. Even if you’re searching with a number of ingredients there are enough recipes in the database to offer a good number of suggestions.

Even though the ingredients in these recipes are laden with their own products, they are all pretty generic and can be swapped out for your local store’s equivalent.

Click here to download Recipe Box for BlackBerry 10 and the PlayBook tablet free from BlackBerry World.

There are many mobile keyboards and Minuum sets to make typing even better. Unlike keyboards which use the multiple row QWERTY format, Minuum has managed to condense everything down to a single row while keeping the QWERTY format we’re familiar with. At first glance, it seems very unlikely to be able to type accurately and efficiently. However, Will Walmsley, CEO of Whirlscape, reveals just how wrong that assumption is in a video showing the keyboard in action. An Indiegogo campaign was started to fund the project and a stretched goal of $60,000 has been added to build a wearable development kit. As of writing this, they’ve managed to raise nearly $30,000 with 30 days left on the fundraising campaign. Originally, the goal was to raise just $10,000.

Minuum will work with multiple languages and is even capable of being utilized on multiple surfaces thanks to sensors and motion capture. Here are some of its features:

• Recovering more than half of the usable touchscreen space you lose when you type on traditional virtual keyboards
• Allowing you fast text entry when your typing is sloppy
• Providing you with letter magnification for precise typing—especially useful if you have large fingers
• Giving you the benefit of smart auto-correction
• Respecting your familiarity with the QWERTY keyboard so you don’t have to re-learn the keyboard layout
• Providing convenient access to everything you’d expect in a keyboard (such as, punctuation, space, backspace, and enter) without stealing your screen space
• Letting you type anywhere—with a keyboard you can move around your touchscreen

You can check out the video below which shows how Minuum works and the philosophy behind it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source: The Minuum Keyboard Project

Come comment on this article: Minuum Sets To Revolutionize The Mobile Keyboard, Almost Triples Funding Goal

Evernote Food announced a few updates Tuesday that integrate it with foodie services and let users share recipes to Twitter and Facebook.

OpenTable is now built into Evernote Food so that users can book reservations directly from the app, the company announced on its blog. They can share recipes on Facebook, Twitter and via email. And people who already used Evernote to store recipes, but weren’t using Evernote Food, can import those recipes from Evernote into the Evernote Food app.

Evernote Food has also made some content deals in Asia: “Evernote Food lovers in China and Japan will also now be able to search recipes from top regional publishers,” the company noted.

Evernote Food relaunched as an iOS and Android app last December, beefing up its discovery features like an “Explore Recipes” tab and Foursquare integration. In that way, the app aims to compete with other food discovery apps like Urbanspoon. The recipe storage and sharing features are its answer to recipe-focused apps like Say Mmm, Paprika and Gojee, and aim to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people already use Evernote to store recipes.

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Many people use Really Simple Syndication without actually realizing it. Like SMTP in the background of email, RSS is the backbone of a number of things, including the podcasts you get from the iTunes store. Last week Google set off on an apparent challenge to kill RSS, or at least it seems that way to many of us.

Overshadowed in all of our talk, gripes really, about the loss of Google Reader is removal its RSS extension from the Chrome store. The extension placed the, now familiar, orange square in the URL bar and allowed users to easily subscribe to feeds by clicking and sending them to Google Reader.

Well, that extension was not gone from the Chrome store very long. Australian programmer Justin Kelly has already forked the code and re-uploaded it into the Chrome Web Store (here), but with some changes — gone is the Reader option, replaced by options for Feedly, NewsBlur and The Old Reader (where I remain more than 30,000 down in the queue — just saying). Others can be added from the options page.

Kelly describes it as a replacement extension for “modern, well supported web based RSS readers” — perhaps a bit of a dig at Google and the lack of support and updates it has provided in recent times.

Photo Credit: nasirkhan/Shutterstock

LinkedIn thinks that they know who will will this year’s NCAA Tournament, and they don’t even need to consider basketball. Well, they need to consider the word “basketball,” but that’s about it.

In alternative method to fill out a bracket news, LinkedIn has calculated a “dedication score” for all of the teams participating in March Madness. That “dedication score” is simply the number of current students and alumni with the word “basketball” in their profile divided by the total number of current students and alumni at each school.

Use each school’s score to determine the winners and there you have it. Gonzaga (15,700 students and alumni, 2.5% referencing basketball) wins with a score of 2.46.

#1 seed Kansas does well in this bracket, making it to the Final Four before being upended by Butler. The cinderella of LinkedIn’s bracket is 14th seeded Valparaiso, which makes it all the way to the Final Four, beating top-seeded Louisville in the process.

Check out the bracket below (click to enlarge).

“Now, I know some of you may be thinking ‘What does this have to do with the basketball team’s performance on the court?’ Team Spirit! We believe in the power of willing your team to win. Your chances of picking a bracket 100% correctly are infinitesimally small, regardless of method, so we think the power of willing your team to win is what it will take. So, you could fill out your bracket based on favorite school colors OR you could use our ‘dedication score,’” says LinkedIn’s Sohan Murthy.

I can’t really argue with that, considering all of the ridiculous ways I’ve seen people construct a bracket.

The exterior of the Stockholm Gasometer, which was built in 1893. Swedish ISP and hosting provider Bahnhof hopes to convert the building into a data center. (Photo: Bahnhof)

In one of the more interesting retrofit projects we’ve seen, a Swedish ISP is planning to convert a huge former natural gas holding tank into a five-story data center. The developer is Bahnhof, which has gained notice for its unusual data center designs, including the “James Bond Villain” data center in a former nuclear bunker and a modular unit designed to look like a space station.

This time Bahnhof plans to rehab one of Stockholm’s huge gasometers – a towering building designed to store gas –  and turn it into a five-story data center housing thousands of servers.  The gasometer project is one of two new data centers planned by Bahnhof, both of which will capture waste heat from servers for use in district heating systems that will provide energy for homes and offices.

The second project, known as Nimrod, will be built on the site of one of the plants feeding Stockholm’s district heating and cooling system. The existing building is operated by Fortum, a large energy company in Stockholm.

“Fortum let us construct a data center on top of Europe’s most powerful heat pumps for a direct transfer of heat into their system,” said Jon Karlung, the CEO of Bahnhof, whose love of futuristic design has informed the company’s facilities. “Why vent the energy out?”

Karlung says these projects are envisioned as data centers for large IT companies, and that Bahnhof is in talks with a large US company about one of the sites. ”There is really a substantial interest,” said Karlung. “The concept works for anybody that doesn’t want to ventilate out money in thin air. Our role is to build and provide the concept. We do this as part of our business. We are also a hosting provider, but this is pure design and construction.”

The Gasometer

The gasometer is a cylindrical building erected in 1893, constructed with red bricks and enclosed by a spectacular wood and steel ceiling structure as ceiling, which Bahnhof says contributes to the “sacral character of the space.” Here’s a look at the building’s interior:

Bahnhof has commissioned two designs for the gasometer site. One is from Albert France-Lanord, the designer of Pionen White Mountain, Bahnhof’s stylized high-tech underground fortress 100 feet beneath Stockholm.

Addison Beecher Colvin (A.B.C.) Whipple, author and journalist, has died.

The Associated Press reports that Whipple died on Sunday, March 17 from Pneumonia.

Whipple is, perhaps, best known for his work as a Pentagon correspondent for Life magazine during World War II. He was instrumental in pressuring the U.S. military to allow the publication of a photograph of dead U.S. soldiers. Whipple pressured war censors for the clearance, eventually getting the attention of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who allowed the publication of the image. The AP states that the event ended the censorship rule against publishing photos of dead soldiers.

After the war, Whipple continued to report for Life and began writing books, most of them about sailing and seafaring. Throughout his career, Whipple authored more than 20 workss, such as Vintage Nantucket, The Whalers, and The Mysterious voyage of Captain Kidd.

Whipple went on to become an executive editor at Time-Life Books.

What you see above is not a new Samsung model, though it looks suspiciously like something straight out of the Galaxy lineup. As the branding suggests, it’s from a company called Blu Products, and the phone is called the LIFE One. You might not have heard of this yet, and that’s understandable. Blu isn’t the most known name in the smartphone game. You won’t even see them on market share reports; they’re always tucked into that “others” category. But they stand to make an impact.

At this point we’re all familiar with the sales model for smartphones. Manufacturers sell them to carriers, who in turn offer considerable subsidies in exchange for a two-year commitment. The full retail price of the Samsung Galaxy Note II is $700, but you pay just $200. That’s not some gift from a benevolent carrier. You pay back that $500 difference during the course of your two-year commitment, in the form of your monthly bill.

Yet that doesn’t tell the story of why smartphones cost so much in the first place. Are there really $700 worth of components in the Note II? Hardly. For starters there’s the standard retail markup, though carriers claim that the retail price is very close to the wholesale price. (In other words, they make almost all their money on service, not phones.) The manufacturer applies significant markups to each phone, because it has plenty of costs to cover itself: personnel, R&D, processing, and of course marketing. So while it cost Samsung nowhere near $700 to create the Note II, it marks up the device so that it can cover those costs and make a tidy profit.

The sheer size of companies like Apple and Samsung mean that we won’t see changes to this model any time soon. That strikes a blow with carriers like T-Mobile, which want to abolish the carrier subsidy model, and prepaid carriers. They can’t offer the latest phones, because they’re too expensive without the subsidy. And so the major carrier model prevails — and according to the latest numbers it is working.

Blu stands to disrupt this comfortable model. As a startup, it isn’t burdened with massive overhead. It can merely build a phone and sell it at a reasonable markup. They’ve done that to an impressive degree, especially given their lack of familiarity in the market. Last year they sold 4.1 million units worldwide, mostly in Latin American markets. They do have a presence in the States, but without the marketing power of Samsung, or even HTC for that matter, they haven’t made significant inroads. Perhaps their latest offerings will help.

Pictured above is the Life One, a device we can compare perhaps to the Samsung Galaxy S4. It’s not quite as souped up, but it does have a 1.2GHz quad-core processor, so it’s plenty speedy. It features a 5-inch screen with Gorilla Glass 2. Its camera boasts 13 megapixels, and it has a hefty internal storage of 16GB each of ROM and RAM. Best of all, it runs 4.2 Jelly Bean, something you don’t get from every new release these days.

Along with the Life One, Blu announced two other companion phones, the Life View, with a 5.7-inch screen, and the Life Play, with a 4.7-inch screen. They all have that powerful 1.2GHz quad-core processor, though the screens, camera, and memory differ. The Life Play is the low-end model, while the Life View is Blue’s take on the phablet form factor.

How much do you think they charge for these relatively high-end, unlocked devices? The One and View cost $299, while the Play is $229. That’s an incredible value, given what you can get for similar prices. There won’t be people lining up for these phones when Blu ships them in late April, but there should certainly be some level of interest.

The biggest downside: no LTE compatibility. That’s fine for now, because LTE isn’t something that most prepaid carriers offer. Right now the phones have radios that put them on GSM Quad Band and Tri-Band HSPA 850/1900/2100. That limits their usefulness right now. But it’s still early in the game for Blu, and their primacy in Latin America can afford them time to grow in the US. Who knows: maybe they’ll prove to be perfect partners for T-Mobile and its drive to eliminate subsidies.

If you’re looking for a cheap handset to bring to your favorite prepaid carrier, check out Blu’s stock on Amazon. You can probably find something within your price range that will work with a prepaid carrier.

Via The Verge.

The post What Are You Really Paying For With A Smartphone? appeared first on MobileMoo.

Does the first-sale doctrine apply to items bought overseas? That was the question before the Supreme Court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It was an extremely important case that bode poorly for the consumer if the Court were to side with the publisher, but thankfully it proved to be pro-consumer in this case.

For those new to this particular case, it’s rather easy to breakdown. A student was sued by John Wiley & Sons after he had purchased the publisher’s textbooks overseas, at a much cheaper price, and sold them in the states for a profit. The student argued that his right to sell the textbooks fell under the first-sale doctrine that allows consumers to sell copyrighted materials after they have been purchased. In other words, used book stores and libraries are legal because of the first-sale doctrine.

The publisher, on the other hand, argued that the first-sale doctrine only applied to items produced in the U.S. It didn’t matter if the work, like a textbook, was written in the U.S. If it was printed overseas, the first-sale doctrine didn’t apply under their interpretation of the law. Under their interpretation, it would be a violation of copyright for a consumer to sell any copyrighted item sold overseas in the U.S. without the publishers or manufacturers permission.

The Supreme Court, in a six to three decision, ruled in favor of Kirtsaeng’s argument saying that the first-sale doctrine applies to any copyrighted work regardless of its geographic origin:

In our view, §109(a)’s language, its context, and the common-law history of the “first sale” doctrine, taken together, favor a non-geographical interpretation. We also doubt that Congress would have intended to create the practical copyright-related harms with which a geographical interpretation would threaten ordinary scholarly, artistic, commercial, and consumer activities…. We consequently conclude that Kirtsaeng’s nongeographical reading is the better reading of the Act.

As you can imagine, this is an incredibly important ruling. There was far more at stake than just the ability to resell books or CDs. Computers, software and other technology also fall under the ruling, and the market for reselling these items would be all but demolished if the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the publisher.

As TechDirt points out, the Supreme Court ruling is not the end of this particular fight by a long shot. Publishers were pushing hard for a ruling in their favor, and will now focus their collective attention on Congress to pass laws that limit what the first-sale doctrine actually covers. There’s also a chance that we’ll see limitations on the first-sale doctrine pop up in new international trade treaties.

Until then, however, we can rest easy knowing that one of the few protections we as consumers enjoy is safe for now.

Google is looking to bring all its communications products into a single product, Babble, according to a report in Geek.com.  When asked to comment, a Google spokesperson declined to speculate on rumors. The report goes on to outline:

Google’s got a huge communication problem right now. If you take a look at all of their services, you’ll find a series of communications platforms that don’t interact with each other very well, if at all. Google Talk, Hangout, Voice, Messenger, Chat for Drive collaboration, and the pseudo Google Talk for G+ all function just a little differently from one another. The only two to really function together are Google Talk for Gmail and G+, but ask anyone using the two systems and you’ll hear just how bad things are right now. There’s not an easy fix for the situation, but a cross platform solution would enable Google to overtake platforms like iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger in one sweeping gesture. According to multiple sources reporting separately to Geek.com, this service is being called Babble, and it’s being built fresh from the ground up to solve these problems.

If this is true, then I think it is a capital idea, and I’m glad to see Google finally getting around to this kind of thinking. About two years ago, I wrote How Google can beat Facebook. No, it’s not on the web, where I proposed that Google should build a Babble-like service.

…instead of getting bogged down by the old-fashioned notion of communication – phone calls, emails, instant messages and text messages – it needs to think about interactions. In other words, Google needs to think of a world beyond Google Talk, Google Chat and Google Voice. To me, interactions are synchronous, are highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it’s photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical. Google has access to real-world intimacy – the mobile phone address book – thanks to Android OS. All it has to do is use that as a lever to facilitate interactions. Ability to interact on an ongoing basis anywhere, any time and sharing everything, from moments to emotions – is what social is all about. From my vantage point, this is what Google should focus on.

Looks like they listened. Hey Vic, next time you are paying for coffee.

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