Niantic Labs, the startup division within Google, is launching a line of ebooks based on its augmented reality, massive multiplayer online video game Ingress. Ingress, an Android game that launched last November, is invite-only and currently in beta.
Publishers Lunch reported on Friday that the Ingress tie-in ebooks will be part of a line called “The Alignment.” They’re written by Thomas Greanias, who also wrote the New York Times bestselling trilogies “Raising Atlantis” and “Dominium Dei.” The first book, The Alignment: Ingress, will be available in the Google Play store on April 2 and will then be released to other digital bookstores.
The books will tie into the games and feature embedded codes and other perks for players. According to Publishers Lunch, the books will be “co-published by Niantic and his own @tlantis Books,” and print versions may follow the digital versions.
Aerize Alerts has been updated to version 2 and have made all sorts of additions to their popular pop up message alert app. Aerize Alerts will give you a clean and clear popup not matter what you’re doing on your BlackBerry and gives you a call to action with various options.
One of my pet peves with multitasking is having to decide whether to navigate to the messaging app without knowing what I’m going there for. You’ve got to stop what you’re doing in order to determine the importance of an incoming message. I have a bit of a fear of ignoring anything incoming (it might be important right?) so I’m always bouncing around and losing focus of what I’m doing. When I’m playing a game, I just hate my notification light going off while I’m trying to execute a tricky move too.
Enter Aerize Alerts: an app that gives you a call to action for every type of message you could receive without having to leave your current app. The app is customizable and has a few hotkeys for when the popup appears.
Press the BlackBerry Button to snooze for a minute if you’re being bombarded by messages and have to get something done in that app that you’re engaged in. Press “O” to open the message right away. Press “M” to mark the message as read. Press “D” or “alt-backspace” to delete the message instantly. Press “A” to mark all as read, great if you’re at your desktop taking care of those emails anyhow.
Aerize Alerts is available for legacy BlackBerry Oses 5, 6 and 7. The new version 2 features BBM fuctionality and even more customization options. It’s on sale right now for a dollar, a bargain at double the price!
Last year’s disappointing Resident Evil 6 is hoping to find new life on the PC later this month. Part of that revival comes in the form of “No Mercy,” a new multiplayer mode exclusive to the PC version. What’s even more surprising is that Valve is bringing the cast of Left 4 Dead 2 to this mode.
Capcom announced today that Resident Evil 6 players will be able to play as Coach, Ellis, Rochelle and Nick in the exclusive mode. To up the ante even more, Capcom is also bringing two enemies from Left 4 Dead 2 to this mode – the Witch and the Mini-Tank.
As part of the working relationship between Capcom and Valve, the former will be bringing enemies from Resident Evil 6 to Left 4 Dead 2. Capcom is also calling on fans to put the human cast of Resident Evil 6 into Left 4 Dead 2.
The new characters are a nice love letter to the PC fans of both Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead. The new “No Mercy” mode sounds incredibly fun as well. The only disappointment is that the PC version still won’t fix Resident Evil 6′s boring, and lackluster, singleplayer campaign.
How do you know when a company pulled off a successful product announcement? When we know pretty much everything they’ll announce beforehand yet still come away impressed. That was the case for Samsung yesterday. They announced the Galaxy S4 at one of the most highly anticipated mobile events of the young year. The S4 isn’t revolutionary by any means, but the reception was mostly positive.
In other words, Samsung has won over the market — or at least the tech media portion of the market. The S4 will likely dominate the Android smartphone market, just as its Galaxy predecessors. That comes as little surprise. Even as other manufacturers aim for the top of the market — LG with the Optimus G and HTC with the HTC One — it is pretty apparent that Samsung will continue its reign over the Android world. But that might not be the most interesting thing Samsung has going for it these days.
We live in a duopolistic mobile world. You’re either on iOS, or you’re on Android. There are a few stragglers here and there, people who prefer BlackBerry for its messaging and enterprise features, and those who are jumping on the Windows Phone bandwagon. But the represent a tiny fraction of the overall mobile market. In 2013 we know we’re going to see a number of additional competitors. There’s a decent chance that one of them catches on as a serious third alternative. One of the more intriguing entrants is Linux-based Tizen.
Samsung already hinted that it would release a Tizen-based handset in 2013, but yesterday we got a little closer to an actual date. They will launch a Tizen phone in Q3, which really isn’t all that far away at this point. It should come right around the time Apple announces its latest iPhone, which will make for an interesting juxtaposition. How will the newest entrant fare with the gold standard for smartphone platforms?
Chances are it won’t stack up well compared to iOS or Android, but we can at least get a glimpse of what it might become. After all, Android wasn’t exactly the most exciting OS when it debuted in 2008. When the iPhone debuted in 2007 it was little more than a big idea for the future — there was no App Store, remember. But both showed huge future potential, and both delivered.
(And yes, this is a subtle hint that I’m not convinced of the future potential for either Windows Phone or BlackBerry.)
A new platform launch isn’t big news on its own. Many will try, and most will fail. But that Samsung, the world’s No. 1 smartphone manufacturer, is on board gives Tizen weight that other platforms lack. Their dominance gives them the ability to take such a risk. It’s not as though they’re going anywhere with Android; think of Tizen as a side project of sorts. Could Samsung turn full-time to Tizen if it works out? Sure. But if it’s another flash in the pan, Samsung will always have Android.
Poker player Greg Raymer may have used all of his luck up at the tables. The 48-year-old was caught this week during a prostitution sting in Wake Forest, North Carolina.
Raleigh news outlet WRAL is reporting that Raymer was one of five men picked up for soliciting prostitution at a hotel sting set up by police on Wednesday, March 13. Raymer and the other men allegedly responded to a fake online ad posted by police.
Raymer has been charged with prostitution and attempted crimes against nature. He was released on a $1,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on April 18.
Raymer won money in the 2001 World Series of Poker, where he left with $1,500 from the Omaha hi-lo split 8 or better event. In 2004, Raymer rocketed to fame when he won the no limit Texas hold ‘em event at that year’s World Series of Poker, claiming a $5 million prize. Since that time, Raymer has gone on to win money at a variety of poker tournaments and now operates a poker training school called Fossilman Poker Training, which offers online classes or in-person seminars at casinos across the U.S.
Facebook has finally filled its vacant Chief Technology Officer position today, and the job is going to Mike Schroepfer.
Schroepfer has served as VP of engineering at Facebook since August of 2008. Before that, he worked at Mozilla for three years where he also served as VP of engineering.
“Mike Schroepfer’s new designation as Facebook’s CTO reflects the unique and important role he plays across the company,” Facebook said in a statement.
The CTO position had been vacant since last summer, when former tech officer Bret Taylor left Facebook to start his own company. Taylor had joined Facebook in 2009 as the head of platform, having previously helmed FriendFeed.
StatCounter’s February tracking results indicate that the iPhone’s global mobile OS market share continued the surprising growth it showed also in January. StatCounter’s trend data reflected disappointingly soft iOS market share in November and December, which dovetailed well with the softer than expected iPhone sales volume Apple (AAPL) reported for the Christmas quarter. But over the past two months, Apple’s mobile market share climbed from December’s 23.3% share to 27.2% in February. This sharp bounce seems to have stopped Android’s strong market share gains, which extended from May to January. Between January and February, the Android OS share stalled at 36.9%.
Etsy had more page views in January that it did in December, which is pretty impressive, considering the December holiday rush.
The company put out its “weather report” for January on Friday (better late than never), revealing that Etsy had 1.67 billion page views on its site in January. That’s compared to 1.53 billion page views in December.
The site also saw $97.6 million worth of goods sold (after refunds and cancellations) during the month, which was 17.1% lower than December’s $117.8 million.
“To most, January is a quiet time,” writes Etsy’s Michelle Traub in a blog post. “The bustle of holiday activity behind us, we hunker down into cozy routines — sleepily caressing fireside toddies and patiently simmering day-long stews. But there’s no rest for the weary when it comes to buying and selling on Etsy!”
“The $97.6 million of goods sold (after refunds and cancellations) represents a 77.8% increase from January 2012′s total,” says Traub. “At the same time, items sold were up 60.3%.”
Etsy saw 4,482,545 items sold in January. 2,699,648 new items were listed during the month (14.2% higher than December’s 2,363,780). 1,128,036 new members joined Etsy (21.8% lower than December’s 1,441,833).
T-Mobile USA is still several months away from officially launching its new LTE network, but it’s actively testing the new technology in the wild. A GigaOM reader came across the network in New York City and mapped out a three-by-five-block nugget of 4G coverage in Astoria, Queens, which you can see on the Sensorly.com website.
T-Mobile’s LTE test in Queens mapped in purple
The reader, Milan Milanović, said that T-Mobile appears to be still deep in testing so the network is nowhere near ready for the kind of soft launch we saw for its HSPA+ network in the PCS-1900 MHz last year. Before T-Mobile officially launched that network, customers all over the country were connecting to it, and T-Mobile actively encouraged iPhone owners in San Francisco to take the reconfigured HSPA+ service for a spin during Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.
Milanović said that the Astoria cells are actually invisible to most phones even if they support LTE at the proper band. He had to force his way onto the network by setting his Nexus 4 (which unofficially supports LTE in T-Mo’s 4G airwaves) to LTE-only mode and manually scan for a network connection. Milanović encountered a 5 MHz-by-5 MHz link in the 1700 MHz/2100 MHz frequencies, but he was allocated only half of the 37 Mbps of bandwidth that the network could theoretically support.
The network was also awfully shy once discovered. Whenever Milanović got a connection, the network would wait between five and 20 minutes to boot him off. Clearly T-Mobile isn’t quite at the point where it’s encouraging customers to try out its new 4G systems.
T-Mobile has already completed construction of its LTE sites in Las Vegas and Kansas City, and we’ve even started hearing reports of LTE sighting out of KC. This is the first activity we’ve heard of in NYC, though. For the most part, the new network has remained underground.
Maker, innovator, and cottage industrialist Dominic Muren wants making to be open, global and modular. He’s just launched his latest project, Alchematter – an online open source platform that breaks down and spells out instructions on how to make, well, anything. He gives us the ins and outs of the site, covering everything from reverse crowdfunding to bricks made of eggshells and pee.
When you first became a Fellow in 2010, you were pretty amped about the concept of skin-skeleton-guts (SSG) manufacturing involving modular electronics — a watch could be modified into a camera, and a camera into a phone, and so on — as well as local production. You wanted to make invention on a small scale possible again.
My design lab the Humblefactory began with this idea of how could I actually be a manufacturer, because it would be fun to make stuff. And then it grew into, “How might I, as an outspoken individual, help this small-scale manufacturing movement grow?” SSG is a design framework that I am still exploring. I’m actually working on putting together a little travel laptop netbook that’s human powered.
But I’m not as single-mindedly focused on electronics anymore. Right now, the main project coming out of Humblefactory is Alchematter.org – a platform that allows makers to share open-source designs for objects. What makes it different from Thingiverse, Instructables and such sites is that what you share on Alchematter is a whole procedure for the creation of objects. Those procedures are defined in a very modular way — which allows them to be really easily remixed or adapted or searched for.
For example, Thingiverse is excellent for describing things 3D printed from plastic or things laser cut, but they basically have to be monolithic, one-off objects. It was meant for: “Here’s a 3D printed part. You want to print this part? Great.”
But what if you wanted to share a procedure for creating, say, a woven piece of cloth? Thingiverse doesn’t have a lot of functionality for instructions. You can write whatever you want, but it doesn’t tell you “Here is the pattern for the cloth, and here is the procedure for using a loom.” Those things — the pattern you follow and the procedure for the loom — are two separate pieces. If you separate those, which Alchematter does, then anytime you want to weave something, you can use the technique for the loom and all you have to switch is the pattern.
Give me an example of something I might want to go to Alchematter for.
Let’s say that you are Peter Haas or one of the other Fellows that has a non-profit that makes a thing, that wants that thing to get massively distributed. The global maker community is a cool way to do that. If you can tell them how to make the thing, then they can just make the thing. You don’t have to spend time replicating it and shipping it, and so on.
The problem with that is the raw materials and the skills and the tools and everything that are available in any one locality are very different from one another. How could you know how to adapt a technique for making a stove, for example?
Let’s say that your non-profit had successfully launched stoves in Rwanda, and you decided, “This is great, we’re going to do it for Bolivia also.” Those are two different places, and it will cost you a lot of money to do the on-the-ground research or partner with an organization. Alchematter lets makers share information about what they’re capable of in Bolivia, building up a knowledge base of what materials are available, what tools are available, even what makers are available — in other words, who are the people who have made projects that look like your stove? And then you can just get on it and say, awesome, here are some of the ways we could tweak it. Here are some of the people we need to get in touch with. These are the materials we might use.
So you’re offering instructions from one place and allowing people with resources, tools, and materials in another place to adapt them.
Yes. The fundamental idea is to separate the description of the object from the restrictions imposed by reality — either because of skills, tools or materials — and to allow much more easy adaptation of designs for things to your local situation.
Another cool thing is that Alchematter modularizes stuff. Again, let’s think about the stove. Let’s say that, in most places, those stoves tend to be made from some kind of factory brick. Let’s say that you wanted to make these stoves in a place that had very low fuel availability, and you wanted to make some kind of method for making a fireproof refractory, so that you didn’t have to fire it — or maybe you had to use a lot less fuel than normal, which would lower the price of the stove.
But this is tricky. How do you do that? There are some methods — for example, there’s this woman who makes bricks out of bacteria and urea, of all things. You can basically pee in a jug, feed it to this bacteria, and its adds urease, an enzyme that breaks down the urea, using that energy to precipitate a calcium ion out of a solution. This makes a marble-like substance.
Out of pee?
Out of pee. It has to be calcium-rich pee, but you could still do that. You could grind up some eggshells with some vinegar that you could make locally using whatever sugar you had. And then you get a bunch of pee. If you put those two solutions together on sand, you get a solid because the calcium sticks the sand together. It’s a ceramic — there’s no glue.
This is the kind of thing that Dow Chemical or Raytheon or somebody develops, but not people in their garages. But Alchematter breaks that fundamental innovation out. You can still define a hypothetical product that uses this pee bacteria thing, and you can say, “Hey, I saw this research that somebody did. I would like to have it adapted to stoves. Here’s the procedure for the stove and here’s the stove I could make if I had this thing and this hypothetical material. I will pay this X bounty for this description.” And then somebody else can come in and say, “Oh, I would pay X bounty,” or “I would pay twice that bounty. My organization can use that too,’ because the thing will be open once it’s shared.
Essentially, you can crowdfund in reverse: instead of a smart person with an idea coming to the community and saying, “Hey, I know how to do this thing. Pay me for it,” you can have someone with a need come to the community and say, “I want this thing pretty bad. Make it for me.” And other people who need it can chip in. So it’s a different model.
How would they know they had a need before the solution was presented?
Since Alchematter is built around these modular procedures, it’s fairly straightforward for a designer to make, say, a table with a marble top. Another maker could pick that procedure up, and make a copy with a hypothetical material in place of the marble — a sort of placeholder, with certain specifications defined. Again, they only know what their limitations are, what skills, materials, costs, levels of energy, or tools do they have access to. So they can pitch in as much as they know, and then rely on the rest of the community to fill in the blanks. In the case above, some other maker might create a new derivative procedure which fills in the marble material with the pee rock from Professor Dosier. That’s how makers help each other be smarter than the sum of their parts.
Where’s all the data coming from, and who’s feeding the information into the system? And who breaks down all the information into modular chunks?
We’re initially targeting hackerspaces, mostly because they do the biggest variety of making. At least in the beginning, this site will look like Thingiverse or Instructables. But when you define a procedure, the platform asks you very clearly: What are the components that are going into this? What’s the technique that transforms them? Defining an entire procedure from scratch is actually a significant amount of work. This is not just like uploading a 3D file and writing a really short description.
But because it’s modular most of the procedures that get made will ultimately actually be remixes of existing pieces. So for example, let’s say that you wanted to make a wood table. You could literally take an existing table and just go into one part which shows the cut list dimensions and change some of the dimensions, or you might add a piece in the assembly drawings that adds a drawer. You append things onto this existing table rather than doing the whole thing from scratch.
But the maker who wants to upload an object is in charge of breaking it out into modular pieces that are going to be understood? That’s a lot of work. Do you provide guidelines?
This is a stepwise, scaffolded process that makes it easy and can distribute the labor. We’re like Wikipedia. Let’s say that you want to define “Barack Obama,” and in order to do that you have to define what a US president is, and in order to do that you have to define what the US is, and that gets complicated. But you can make a stub, and somebody else can improve a procedure by adding what’s missing. And we can encourage people to help flesh out broken pieces of procedures using game mechanics kinds of things — like you get badges or points. Alchematter is just a tool that lives online and has a community that organically participates and grows around it.
We might also offer contests to encourage participation. A competition to make the best stove would encourage a hundred stove design entries. Only one of them wins, but we get a hundred procedures that flesh out the site.
Or there could be a contest asking: “What could you do with pee and eggshells?” It’s really meant to be a cross-disciplinary experience. We want to give undergraduates in mechanical engineering and chemistry and electrical engineering an opportunity to a Capstone project that actually matters rather than a fake startup that you know will never go anywhere. I was part of that machine. The engineering and sciences in undergrad create a lot of work that is unvalued, never given a chance to be used. Alchematter gives such ideas a chance to become a real, practical resource.
How do you ensure safety and quality?
We are actually in the process of figuring out how to deal with liability for users and liability for the community as a whole. Within the method of description, it asks you a number of times, “Enumerate the dangers of this process.” Once you have those things checked, it can do a rating of procedures and it can this is this difficult and dangerous, this is less difficult and dangerous. We also will have a terms of use that basically outlines what is appropriate for the community. It will be very specific. And we will have a community standards review process.
What are the components of the site?
The main two pieces would be that you have a procedure editing facility, searching and editing facility. You can browse as a non-user, but as soon as you want to make something you’ve got to be on the system, because we need to know where that thing came from and how you did it. So you can search for something, browse through, pick up bits and pieces either by taking a procedure and saying, “I want to start with that and I want to make some adjustments,” and that will copy it into your editing space. You can also learn techniques for materials or tools. So in your editing space you have these pallettes of commonly used materials and commonly used techniques and that sort of thing. This chain of nodes combines and combines until you get to one final thing until you get to the point where you find what you want to make.
The site is GUI based. You can also upload photographs, and we encourage videos. But it does have to be scaffolded within that structure: just having one giant video is not the best way. Instruction needs to be modular.
All of the stuff on Alchematter will be on a viral license, a “you have to share and share alike” license. So if you use this thing and you want to share it, then you need to share it in some way, you need to show the whole thing. We would hope that people would be excited to contribute back, but really we’re much more interested in getting to the point where somebody makes the thing from the site. That’s number one. And thing number two is somebody contributes something back to the site.
Dominic Muren on why electronics recycling is stupid, filmed at TEDGlobal 2010.
Do you cater to any kind of maker? Chemists, woodworkers, cooks, knitters?
That’s the most important piece. The coolest things that happen in making happen because you get experts in various domains interacting. You smush them together and end up with something that’s actually new — something that actually never would have happened before.
Whenever I talk about this, everybody immediately says, “Oh, yeah. And the wealthy people in the West would totally be able to give all their knowledge to those people in the developing world.” To me, that misses the point: most of the knowledge that people in the developed West for making stuff is crappy because it requires huge infrastructure and a lot of capital investment and a lot of space. Much of the manufacturing technologies that are being used in the very informal developing world – even the more formalized developed developing world – are smaller-scale tools and small shops and raw materials that actually come from farms rather than coming from Dow Chemical.
I want to catch that information, number one, before globalization of the economy succeeds and wipes them out; or, number two, before shit hits the fan — this massively centralized, industrialized economy runs on oil and it runs on a stable climate — and Dow goes out of business and we don’t have any raw materials. There’s so much good knowledge that is out there that is in danger of dying, either by success or by failure. Both of them are going to kill it.
I’m hopeful that through efforts like Alchematter will be able to capture enough of the knowledge that exists as well as generate new knowledge that doesn’t exist yet that will help us to more gracefully make the continuing transition. It’s going to be all transitions from here on out. We’ve never had stasis. I don’t know if we’ve ever had stasis, but we want to be more graceful in our transition and more resilient in our response.
I also want Alchematter to be an active exchange between art and science. I intend to see, artists who work with science — such as Fellows Kate Nichols or Suzanne Lee — come on the site and learn how to do scientific procedures in order to serve the arts. And I intend to see scientists doing stuff in order to serve the arts rather than only to serve biotech startups because they pay you a lot of money. That’s not the only reason that you should be excited to be a scientist.
How will you get to far-flung places that don’t have the digital reach?
The maker community is quite well distributed around the world. We also have some exciting partners in the Maker community. TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is working with us with Open Source Ecology, Fellow Catarina Mota with Smart Materials, and PopTech Fellow Amy Sun, who runs FabFolk, the social organization that is aligned with fab labs.
This is a powerful community to start with, but we recognize that there will be parts of society that we’ll never be able to reach through a rich web content application. We already are thinking about how are we going to deal with using SMS, or how are we are gisting this stuff so that it can be made into a PDF, or printed on paper. The exciting thing is, because we are modularizing these pieces, it’s easy to omit stuff or restructure this data so that it can fit into a different viewing format, and fit into bit-sized chunks. We know that that is a crucial piece, and we want to capture that information. I want to know how the Maasai make everything. I want to know how the Yanomami make everything. I don’t know how to get to those guys. They don’t even have cell phones. We may have to send Fellows out to gather that information at some point.
Last night, Samsung finally unveiled its latest flagship device – the Galaxy S 4. You might have missed out on the announcement, though, and now you want all the information in one place. Besides watching the launch announcement video, is there any other way to catch up on all things Galaxy S 4?
It turns out that there is as Samsung has released an official infographic detailing the specs of its latest flagship device. The infographic includes all the necessary information you need to know about the Galaxy S 4 including its 5-inch Super AMOLED display, it’s 1.6GHz octa-cor processor, and its 13MP rear camera.
What the infographic fails to mention (or didn’t have room for) is that the Galaxy S 4 will also come equipped with some new software that’s part gimmick and part amazing. “Smart Pause” and “Smart Scroll” will use head and eye tracking technology to pause video and scroll Web pages all based on where your eyes are looking. “Air View” will provide previews of content when you hold your finger over an area.
We’re sure to learn more about the Galaxy S 4 as we approach its launch in the second quarter of this year, including its sure to be expensive price.
And today, the senior engineer on the Google+ team is asking Google+ users to tell him exactly what they love about Google Reader, because he would “like to integrate those ideas into future versions of many Google products, and try to capture that value.”
Earlier today, Yonatan Zunger asked this question of his followers:
“I have a question for avid Google Reader users: what are the aspects of the way Reader works that made it so useful for you? I’ve heard a number of things floated in the past day — e.g., the particular sources available, the way of managing read/unread state, various aspects of the UI — but I’d like to understand better what the concrete things about Reader were which people found the most useful, because I’d like to integrate those ideas into future versions of many Google products, and try to capture that value.”
The responses have come fast and furious. Furious being the key word here. Zunger had to make an edit to his post, stating that:
“Warning: This is not a thread to simply complain about the shutdown, or to ask Google to keep Reader. That’s not something that I can help you with, nor is it a decision that I had anything to do with, and this is not a good place to get anyone’s attention about that. This thread is a place to talk about specific things which are useful about it so that we can think about good ways to capture that usefulness in the modern world.”
Some of the comments suggest that the most popular aspect of Google Reader is its simplicity.
“Simple logical layout. I always read in the minimal format- if a headline caught my interest I would expand. If further description really caught my attention, I would share out. Each of these functions were nested within each other, matching my increasing interest,” said one user.
“A big part of why I never hesitated to stop using it even being an early adopter of G+ was it’s clean interface. Even using sparks (I think that’s the name) wasn’t clean. It didn’t have the efficient notifications of new articles/post/content.,” said another.
Yesterday, a former Google product manager said that he thinks Google Reader’s demise is all tied up in Google+. His argument was that the Google Reader shutdown likely has nothing to do with operating costs. In fact, it more likely has to do with Google wanting to move resources into Google+.
Ars Technica, among others, suggested that Google Reader (or at least some sort of Google RSS feed product) could wind up, in some incarnation, as a part of Google+.
But for now, this is simply the chief architect for Google+ asking people to tell him what they like about Reader.
You may have noticed that Samsung (005930) rarely said the word “Android” on Thursday while unveiling its new Android-based Galaxy S 4 flagship phone. And according to ABI Research analyst Aapo Markkanen, there’s a very good reason for that: Samsung is trying to distance itself from Android as much as possible in preparation for a “Great OS Escape” that will reduce its dependence on the platform over the next two years. Markkanen’s thesis is that Samsung wants more control over its own destiny going forward and doesn’t want to be solely tied down to another company’s mobile operating system. So its goal with the Galaxy S 4 is to build as many of its own features as possible onto the device to begin weaning its customers away from Google (GOOG) services.
Rob Portman, the junior U.S. Senator from Ohio, has become the first senate Republican to openly support gay marriage. Portman was previously an opponent of gay marriage and voted for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prevents gay marriages from being recognized at a federal level.
In an editorial in The Columbus Dispatch, Portman outlined his changing feelings on the issue of gay marriage. He reveals that one of his sons came out as gay two years ago. From the editorial:
I have come to believe that if two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love and care for each other in good times and in bad, the government shouldn’t deny them the opportunity to get married.
Portman went on to say that his opposition to gay rights in the past was, unsurprisingly, based on his religious beliefs. He stated that he struggled to reconcile his Christianity with his love for his son and ultimately came to his conclusion on the basis of “the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God.”
Portman said that he believes individual states should make decisions regarding gay marriage, and that he believes no law should force religious institutions to recognize gay marriages. He also stated that he believes his conservative views support his new position:
British Prime Minister David Cameron has said he supports allowing gay couples to marry because he is a conservative, not in spite of it. I feel the same way. We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives. We also consider the family unit to be the fundamental building block of society. We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.
With Republicans such as Portman and former Vice President Dick Cheney supporting gay marriage, it is beginning to seem as if the gay marriage debate, at least politically, is over in the U.S. The tipping point may have been one year ago, when President Obama announced his support for gay marriage.
The Supreme Court will soon hear cases involving the constitutionality of both DOMA and California’s Proposition 8 law. If the court decides to strike down the laws, the issue of gay marriage could cease to be a political issue sooner rather than later.
Fan of Google Reader and RSS feeds in general? You’re going to love this. Not only has Google announced the demise of Google Reader, but they’ve also killed the RSS Subscription Chrome extension. It’s no longer in the Chrome Web Store.
TechCrunch reported on this after a few other noticed. The extension appears to still be working for those of us who have already downloaded it, but its landing page in the Store now presents an error message.
So, I guess it’s official. Google is not just ending a product it has no interest in running anymore. It simply doesn’t want us to use RSS. This doesn’t seem in line with Google’s stated mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. They seem to be tossing that out the window a lot lately. Maybe it’s time to change it.
It’s unclear exactly when Google pulled the extension.
Most sites with feeds offer their own subscribe buttons, so the loss of the extension is not a huge blow, but it’s still been a nice thing to have for a quick easy way to subscribe to new sites.
3D printers are making waves in the world of medicine as researchers continue to advance the technology’s ability to create parts of the human body. The latest 3D printer – coming from the University of Iowa’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department – is one step closer to printing human organs.
Much like past 3D bio-printers, the University of Iowa is using the new 3D printer to create working blood vessels. The team seems to have already made great strides towards that goal. Their next goal is to create the insulin creating part of the pancreas so that they can have a chance at curing Diabetes. From there, we may start seeing fully functioning organs coming out of labs.
Not all of the advancements being made at the University of Iowa apply to medicine though. The engineering team has made a 3D printer with two arms. That’s typically never seen in 3D printers as people can’t figure out a way to keep the arms from hitting each other as they move around the build space. The video doesn’t go into detail over how the team accomplished the feat, but regular 3D printers would benefit greatly from multiple arms printing at once by completing jobs faster, and perhaps with even more detail.
All it takes is a little bit of editing and the cast of Mad Men come alive to discuss…
March Madness of course! Check on Don, Betty, Pete, Peggy, Roger, and Bert discuss their pool, brackets, and all the upsets. Both March Madness and Mad Men are going to be gracing your TV screens soon, so why not celebrate the two together?
Apps used on tablets like the iPad and various Android slates are expected to generate $8.8 billion in revenue in 2013, accounting for 35% of all app revenue this year, while smartphone apps generate $16.4 billion. According to market research firm ABI, the scales will finally tip by 2018, when tablet app revenue surpasses smartphones. “The dynamic is quite straightforward,” ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen said. “The larger screen makes apps and content look and feel better, so there are more lucrative opportunities. One might think that the bigger installed base of smartphones would compensate for the disparity, but that notion fails to take into account the arrival of low-cost tablets, which hasn’t even started yet at its earnest. The smartphones paved the way for them, but in the end we believe that it’s the tablets that will prove the more transformative device segment of the two.” ABI estimates that tablet and smartphone apps will generate a combined $92 billion in revenue in 2018.
Jack Greene, the country music star famous for 60s hits such at “There Goes My Everything,” has died. The singer reportedly suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, and died from complications of the disease at his Nashville home on March 14.
Greene was born in Tennessee in 1930, and moved to Atlanta to start a band in the early 1950s. By 1960 he had moved to Nashshville to pursue his music career further, and began opening for Ernest Tubb. Greene’s success began in earnest in 1966 with the release of “There Goes My Everything,” which topped country music charts for weeks. He followed that up with the chart-topping album All The Time.
In 1967 Greene won awards for Male Vocalist of the Year, Single of the Year, and Album of the Year from the Country Music Association. That same year, he became a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Greene went on to have nine number one country hits throughout his career.
