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Google Glass is expected to hit consumers by the end of this year and we learn more about the next-generation technology all the time. An app by the name of InSight will allow wearers to identify people simply by analyzing what they’re wearing, and doesn’t even need to see the person’s face. In early tests involving 15 volunteers, Google Glass with InSight was able to correctly identify people 93 percent of the time.

Developed by Srihari Nelakuditi at the University of South Carolina and in collaboration with associates at Duke University, they created a fashion-based recognition system. The system captures photos of a user from web pages, emails, and tweets. Photos are then analyzed for colors, patterns, and textures which are added to a file that makes up a specific user. When InSight detects someone you know, their name appears on Google Glass’ display.

Source: Engadget

Come comment on this article: Google Glass Will Identify People Based On What They’re Wearing

The smartest minds in social innovation are increasingly committed to engaging with the private sector to make significant changes in areas like health, education, and poverty. As Steve Davis, former lead in McKinsey’s Social Innovation practice and president of the global health NGO, Path, has said: “The best social innovations are not necessarily widely adopted. The ‘iPods’ of poverty alleviation and literacy have likely been invented and put to use by small organizations in some corner of the globe, but there is no market for identifying these breakthrough ideas and ensuring widespread adoption.”

While the public sector may be embracing market forces, most corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments still face significant obstacles when it comes to unlocking core capabilities. Gurus Michael Porter and Mark Kramer have tried to reframe the role of CSR by putting forth the concept of Creating Shared Value (CSV) as an alternate model, with “innovation and growth” as one of three primary value propositions. This framework has the potential to reverse the typical role of CSR, currently viewed as a way to “give back” to communities that a business operates in. What happens when you reverse that model and place these investments at the front-end of your corporate innovation strategy? Can you drive both new opportunities and new behavior within your organization while achieving social impact?

The Innovation Continuum

Corporate social impact investments can be re-thought of as a way to “de-risk” new models by investing in market innovators, such as social entrepreneurs, who don’t typically provide market level returns as Matt Bannick, from the Omidyar Network, explains in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. How? Social entrepreneurs can serve as the “R&D function” for learning how to serve underdeveloped markets, according to Jim Koch, director of the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University, which has supported more than 160 social enterprises over the last decade. This approach can often position businesses to be first in line to benefit from new market strategies and scale up innovations that justify further business development within a lower-risk environment because they exist outside the main revenue stream. Consider these examples:

1. Power Generation: Husk Power Systems (HPS) creates small-scale power generation in rural communities in India by converting rice husks (a commonly available agricultural byproduct) into energy. The Shell Foundation provided HPS with market-based expertise and funding to help the company validate and scale its model. The relationship gave HPS the ability to reach more people, and Shell had a front-row seat to learn from HPS’s many innovations, including bamboo-based power lines, pay-per-use tariffs, and ultra-low-cost, anti-theft smart meters, according to a recent report by the Monitor Group.

2. Mobile Messaging: In early 2008, frog embarked on Project Masiluleke, a Public Private Partnership (PPP) to address HIV in South Africa. We worked with a diverse network of partners as part of PopTech’s Innovation Accelerator program. One of the critical early successes was to leverage a technology developed by the Praekelt Foundation in South Africa, an organization which has a close relationship with MTN, South Africa’s second largest mobile network operator. Praekelt identified previously unused messaging space on their network that could be used to send HIV awareness SMS texts. They developed a system to insert these messages into normal data traffic and measure the response through South Africa’s National AIDS Helpline. Not only did this service triple call volume into the National AIDS Helpline, it helped MTN identify a new channel to communicate with customers; a win-win for all parties.

3. Self-Guided Diagnostics: As part of the same initiative to address HIV in South Africa, we worked with iTeach, a local service provider for HIV and tuberculosis patients, to provide design support for a new model for self testing, in which HIV test kits could be distributed like pregnancy tests. These kits combine low-cost diagnostics with user-friendly instructions and mobile support services. It offers a much more cost-effective and scalable model for diagnostics in communities with an estimated infection rate of over 40%. There are significant ethical issues with applying this model to HIV in the USA. But it points toward a future in which end users play a much more significant role in the diagnosis and management of disease, supported by real-time remote counseling. New innovations, such as low-cost, gene-based diagnostics may allow us to identify and manage a wide variety of diseases more independently in the near future with far greater precision and lower costs than we do today. One leading example, GeneRadar, is being piloted for HIV diagnosis in emerging markets on the way to broader application in the developing world.

4. Top-Up Utilities: In many parts of the developing world, mobile minutes have become a de-facto currency, opening up a new world of financial transactions that were previously unavailable to the poor. The effects of this “Top-Up Revolution” extend beyond financial services, from mobile-payment systems (m-Pesa), to agriculture and energy (Simpa Networks). frog recently kicked off a collaboration with Sarvajal, a social enterprise in India that is combining local water distribution, cloud technology, and mobile payments to create a new sort of micro-utility that allows customers to engage in an “on-demand” basis to access clean water. frog is studying how perception and engagement with a utility changes when consumers can engage with a utility on their own terms, through small transactions that are made at the point of consumption through Sarvajal’s “Water ATM.” Social enterprises like Sarvajal could provide a tremendous opportunity for other utility businesses to learn about the future of energy consumption in developing markets — and beyond.

When social-sector initiatives like these are unleashed from the typical constraints of CSR, corporations often see side benefits in increased innovation, efficiency, and vitality. We’ve seen these partnerships increase organizational capacity by:

1. Changing corporate culture. Social innovation initiatives provide permission to “break the rules.”

2. Driving efficiency. Tackling pressing humanitarian issues creates a sense of urgency, and provides permission to shortcut traditional business processes.

3. Increasing collaboration. Embracing non-traditional partners and collaboration models often changes the dynamics of traditional market competition.

4. Promoting transparency. Creating shared value amongst many partners and constituencies often means testing more open approaches.

5. Encouraging experimentation. The need to learn about drivers and indicators of adoption that might not fit within ordinary market measurement models fosters an environment that encourages experimentation.

To apply lessons from social innovation projects within a larger corporate innovation strategy, organizations need to think differently about how to leverage core competencies. As FSG, the global social impact consulting firm founded by Mark Kramer and Michael Porter, put it in a recent report :

“The effect this change of mindset can have on companies is profound. Rather than making small efforts to comply with local laws, companies that seek to create shared value aggressively pursue fundamentally better operational practices. Rather than seeking merely to improve their reputation, they innovate and work with others to actually discover solutions to social problems.”

This “change in mindset” is not easy to achieve, and we have seen an increasing appreciation of design as a leading driver of this shift. But there can be an enormous payoff, in terms of the overall health and growth of your innovation strategy, in connecting your organization’s core capabilities (and passions) to social innovation initiatives.

Editor's Note: this post originally appeared as part of a series for National Consumer Protection Week on ConsumerFinance.gov.

Filing taxes doesn’t have to be the worst. For some, tax time can offer an opportunity to set some money aside for goals or a rainy day.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit for low to moderate income working individuals and families. EITC can even reduce taxes and result in a refund. Last year, over 27 million consumers received nearly $62 billion in EITC.

Many people who are eligible for free tax services, for example, at IRS-approved Volunteer Income Tax Assistant (VITA) sites, pay to have their taxes prepared. Money saved by using free tax prep, added to part of a refund, could go right into a savings account or be used to pay down debt.

In addition to taking advantage of free tax services, there are many other ways to save. You can save automatically by having a portion of your refund or your paycheck deposited directly to a savings account.

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The BlackBerry Z10, BlackBerry’s latest push to become relavent, has proven to be a minor hit in some markets. It’s true test, however, will come when it launches in the U.S. this month. Those hoping for an early March release won’t be too pleased though as the Z10 will reportedly hit later in the month.

Bloomberg reports that the BlackBerry Z10 will go on sale in the U.S. on March 22 at AT&T. The carrier won’t comment on the rumored launch date, and BlackBerry is remaining silent on its U.S. launch plans. All the other carriers planning to carry the Z10 aren’t saying anything either.

We can assume that the BlackBerry Z10 is still on track to launch in the U.S. in March, but the company’s silence doesn’t inspire confidence. We’re already almost a quarter through the month and we don’t have any new details on the BlackBerry Z10′s U.S. launch. You would think that BlackBerry would want to announce a release date as soon as possible and begin advertising the launch, but that hasn’t happened yet.

As Bloomberg points out, the U.S. market has to wait longer for phones as testing periods at carriers take longer than in other countries. It could be that the Z10 hit a snag in testing at one of the carriers and it pushed the launch back for everyone. The March 22 launch date could be when everybody is launching, or it could be saying that AT&T will have completed its testing before everybody else.

Even if the Z10 launches on March 22, it may be too late. Samsung will be showing off the Galaxy S IV next week, and that alone may be enough to kill any chance BlackBerry had of catching a significant part of the U.S. market again.

The Powerball jackpot continues to grow, with the total now reaching a whopping $150 million. Though there were nine different tickets that won a $1 Million Match 5 prize and one man from Maine won $2 million, no tickets matched Wednesday’s numbers to win the jackpot.

Wednesdays Powerball drawing numbers were 6, 10, 23, 41, and 45. The Powerball was 1. In all, 645,993 people won a total of $15,409,133 off of Wednesday’s drawing.

As expected, the Twitter buzz surrounding the massive jackpot has begun:

I loved SimCity when I was young and, at least in part, the game might be blamed for my interest in administration and politics.

I remember playing it alongside other city management titles like Pharaoh or Caesar, trying to create the best settlements I could, looking out for the happiness of my citizens, while also trying to balance making a profit with causing a… (read more)

Google’s (GOOG) Project Glass is one of the most highly anticipated devices of the year, even though we still don’t know much about it. As we inch closer to release, which is scheduled for the end of this year, more information about the device is starting to trickle out and new reports suggest the capabilities of Google Glass could be nearly endless. New Scientist reports that Google has helped fund a new application called InSight that’s designed specifically for Glass and is able to identify people based on the clothing they wear.

Continue reading…

Shane Koyczan has a way with words.

Shane Koyczan: "To This Day" … for the bullied and beautiful “I’ve been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself,” he says, beginning today’s talk. “That’s what we were told—stand up for yourself. But that’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.”

Koyczan appeared on the TED2013 stage just a week after his spoken-word poem, “To This Day,” went viral as a crowd-animated video. Live onstage, mixing poetry and prose, Koyczan explains to the audience what prompted to him to write the poem, an ode to anyone who felt bullied or left out as a child, and have it animated by people around the world. Koyczan says it wasn’t just overt bullying he was reacting to — but the subtle discouragement kids receive along the path to adulthood, as they’re required to define themselves in narrower and narrower ways.

“At the same time as we were being told who we were, we were being asked, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” Koyczan’s answers were: a writer, then a professional wrestler. Both ideas were shot down.

“What made my dreams so easy to dismiss?” he asks. “Granted my dreams are shy, because they’re Canadian. My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic—they’re standing alone at the high school dance and they’ve never been kissed. See, my dreams got called names too — silly, foolish, impossible.”

To hear more of Koyczan’s motivation, and to hear a beautiful live rendition of “To This Day,” watch this talk. For more of Koyczan’s poems, read on.

A proud Canuck, Koyczan wrote the poem “We Are More” for the Canadian Tourism Commission. He even performed it at the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, for a television audience of more than 1 billion people. “We’re more than hockey and fishing lines/ off the rocky coast of the Maritimes/ some say what defines us/ is something as simple as please and thank you,” spits Koyczan in this poem. “But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized.” See a version of the poem with visuals.

Koyczan got some help in sharing these “Instructions for a Bad Day” from a group of students at G.P. Vanier secondary school in British Columbia. They wrote the storyboard for the video, handled the cameras, did the acting and collected the props. The piece was created for Pink Shirt Day — a national day devoted to the discussion of bullying.

Here, Koyczan performs “The Crickets Have Arthritis” at Words Aloud in 2007. A heartbreaking love letter to his 9-year-old hospital roommate, Louis, the poem begins, “It doesn’t matter why I was there, where the air is sterile and the sheets sting. It doesn’t matter that I was hooked up to this thing that buzzed and beeped every time my heart leaped like a man whose faith tells him God’s hands are big enough to catch an airplane, or a world.”

Yes, Koyczan does on occasion write love poems. Here is “More Often Than Sometimes,” in a new video produced by Amazing Factory Productions and posted just two weeks ago as part of the Giants of the Forest series. “I think of her more often than sometimes/ If she ever hears this/ I want her to know that/ Our first kiss tasted like pepper,” he says. “We loved like two games of solitaire/ Waiting to be played by one another.”

In January, during an event to mark the closing of the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver after 63 years, Koyczan performs the poem “Remember How We Forgot.” His words are beautifully backed, as they were on the TED stage, by violinist Hannah Epperson. “Once upon a time we were young/ our dreams hung like apples waiting to be picked and peeled,” flows Koyczan.

The words that begin the poem “Atlantis,” performed here at Words Aloud in 2007, may just get you: “Your entire body shakes when you laugh/ as if your sense was built on a fault line/ and the coast of your heart falls into the ocean of yourself/ and you’re left looking for Atlantis.”

Here, Koyczan’s poem “Educate the Heart,” created for the Dalai Lama Center. In a video about writing the poem, Koyczan stops reciting and talks boldly about how our culture values the wrong things. “Somewhere along the way we got very invested in things that don’t care about us,” says Koyczan. “Money doesn’t love you. Your car isn’t going to sit down and hold your hand if your kid is sick.”

Want more from this poet? Subscribe to get a new poem from Koyczan every week »

The expansion at Latisys shows no signs of slowing. The company has just announced a new $200 million credit facility, including a 6-year, $180 million institutional term loan and a 5-year $20 million revolving credit facility. This means the company will continue its 2012 momentum, spreading that capital across Latisys’ Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform to drive accelerating growth and customer acquisition. The data center service provider said it will continue to expand its facilities adding high density capacity, enhancing its technology platform, increasing automation, as well as adding high skilled personnel to the team.

“Latisys’ growth strategy centers around ongoing strategic expansion of our IaaS platform and our ability to provide innovative right-sized, hybrid IT solutions that solve business problems,” said Doug Butler, Chief Financial Officer for Latisys. “The new credit facility provides additional capital necessary to maintain technology leadership as well as additional support services required to respond to increased demand for higher margin managed hosting and cloud services.”

The credit facility was substantially oversubscribed, with commitments from several leading sector lenders and institutional investors. The credit facility was arranged by RBC Capital Markets, TD Securities (USA) and SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, and funded by a consortium of over 20 leading financial institutions and institutional investors.

Over the past four years Latisys has invested more than $125 million in expanding its facilities and services to keep pace with demand. Latisys’ national expansion has been ongoing through 2012 and into 2013.  Recent announcements include DEN2—Latisys’ state-of-the-art data center in Denver—along with the ASH1 DC5, CHI DC6 data centers that added 22,000 and 10,000 square feet of secure, ultra high-density raised floor in Northern Virginia and Chicago respectively. In Southern California, Latisys recently announced an additional 12,000 square feet in its Irvine, CA data center.

Latisys’ total data center platform now exceeds 343,000 square feet across seven data centers in four major markets. Product-wise, it launched its next generation managed hosting and cloud platform and launched its unified service desk in 2012.

A common rebuttal to proponents of online privacy is to just not share personal information with services like Facebook, Twitter and the like. It’s a solid argument, but one that’s not practiced, even by those with privacy concerns.

A new study out of Carnegie Mellon University followed over 5,000 Facebook users for six years to observe how much information they shared with others. Those with privacy concerns were able to limit what they shared for the first four years, but the privacy policy changes of the past few years have actually encouraged these same users to share more personal information with others.

Wait, how does that work? Facebook said that the new privacy controls would help limit what information is viewed by others. That’s absolutely true, and the new privacy controls may led to an increase in sharing information as users felt more secure. There may have been a Trojan Horse hidden in the new privacy policy, however, that has led to an increase in sharing.

The researchers point out that Facebook’s relatively new sharing system that allows “friends of friends” to see posts may be leading to this increase in sharing. Some users obviously don’t like that, but it seems that most don’t even notice. Most of us would like to think “friends of friends” would overlap with our own personal friend list. That’s usually the case, but it can sometimes lead to awkward situations where people you don’t like suddenly being able to comment on statuses that have a mutual friend tagged in it.

It’s these situations where Facebook’s privacy controls could be more refined to prevent accidental shares with unwanted parties. That being said, the social network’s privacy controls are apparently sufficient enough for the average user. Why would they share so much of their lives if it wasn’t?

[h/t: Huffington Post]

Charlize Theron is pretty good at keeping her private life private. Last we heard from her, baseless rumors in September 2012 were insinuating that she was dating Eric Stonestreet of Modern Family fame and in November 2012 the style press began to go crazy over the actresses new buzz-cut look for the upcoming movie Mad Max: Fury Road.

Now, it appears that the South African star may be shifting her focus slightly from acting to fashion. The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Theron could soon launch a line of denim clothing.

The report states that Theron and celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar are currently shopping around the idea of a “Theron Jeans” line to denim companies.

Celebrity clothing lines are nothing new or special, but a clothing line from Theron could go to support her Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project (CTAOP), which has the mission of preventing the spread of AIDS among Africa’s youth. The actress recently partnered with clothing brand Toms to create a shoe that supports the CTAOP:

Speaking to a group of very international young business students in Switzerland, the room was a good balance of men and women, with a slight preponderance of women. I asked the men to raise their hands if they expected to have the lead career in their relationship. Almost all of them put their hands up. I then asked the women how many of them would be ready to be the secondary career to their partners. None of them raised their hands.

There lies today’s dilemma. Both men and women are looking for something that is rare, and perhaps increasingly so: the partner who will support their career.

A lot of young people today think that “gender issues” are a little bit passé. That Generation Y has a different, more progressive attitude. This is not my experience in speaking regularly at some of the world’s leading business schools. On the contrary, I find these students steeped in stereotypes and expectations that success requires a sort of extreme machismo.

The next ten years will be crucial for accelerating gender balance. I think after that that it will get much harder — not much easier, as many assume. The current generation of leaders running organizations are baby boomers who have been educated and trained in male-dominated companies and environments. For many of them, gender balance is actually a pretty unemotional no-brainer. They may not be overly familiar with professional women, but many of them have daughters, and they all have an eye on the education statistics that are dramatically feminizing. They see the stats on talent, on customers, and they start to move.

One of my key challenges is to get these top guys to understand that balance is less obvious the further down the existing hierarchy you go. They will each need to invest time and energy getting all their managers to buy the need for balance. One CEO was sure his team was aligned behind him — until we ran a session with them, and he made them publicly state whether they believed balance would improve results. Only half said they did. He was stunned. He thought it was so obvious it didn’t even require explanation.

But for today’s young men, it’s a whole different story. They have been to female-dominated universities. They have had girls out-performing them in schools their entire lives (the OECD Pisa studies show girls outperforming boys at almost every grade level, in almost every country). They have a deep understanding of the potential competition they face every day from the ladies. If they find that today’s male dominated corporate cultures give them a competitive edge, I think it is wishful thinking to assume they will be big promoters of balance. They will, like most ambitious men before them, be big promoters of themselves.

These young men have trouble understanding the business case for balance. Only a fraction of men in these talks “gets it.” That running a gender-balanced corporation might actually be better for business, for their companies, for their customers. They are mired in personal perspectives, in ideas about who has children, in their own preferences for wives who will take care of life while they shine professionally. Women, of course, love the business case, but usually discover with a certain degree of horror how retrograde their school chums reveal themselves to be.

What’s to be done? Use the present moment. Many of today’s CEOs are pushing hard on gender. We need to accelerate the pace, and help them do it better and more effectively. Time is short, and Gen Y may not be as progressive on gender as they think — and we hope — they are.

Phil Schiller doesn’t cast a big shadow. Sure he is Apple’s big cheese over global marketing, but in product briefings or Apple keynotes, Schiller never struck me as having much presence, particularly around the charismatic Steve Jobs. Somehow, I expect lead marketer to be more like Don Draper of AMC’s “Mad Men“. Schiller has lots of enthusiasm, but not command. He comes across as too nice a guy.

But make no mistake, his contributions to Apple, over nearly two decades, are immeasurable — and not the topic of this post. There’s another kind of presence, one of brilliant ideas and behind-the-scenes leadership. Yesterday, Schiller showed his brilliance, and scored a tremendous marketing coup for Apple in just four words: “Be safe out there”.

That tweet and link to F-Secure report on mobile malware spread across the InterWebs, and I’m still reading about it today. The security firm’s study might otherwise have gotten little notice if not for Schiller’s tweet, which shows that even 140 characters is sometimes too much to have impact. You can do so much more with less.

Like everyone I assume the tweet comes from Apple’s Schiller, being a verified account. But there is no photo of the man associated with the account, and the posts really aren’t about Apple — this one being rare exception. If it is the man, he is the man, doing in a few seconds what Draper couldn’t in an hour-long TV drama. Have meaningful marketing impact.

Hell, I suggest that Apple take “Be Safe out There” and turn it into an advertising campaign, along the lines of “Think Different”. Catchphrases have impact, and there is so much the Cupertino, Calif.-based company could do with this one to take command of mobile security messaging. To put forth iPhone as the safe choice, when Android poses so much risk. Schiller is on to something big. Those four words carry huge connotations, and they’re friendly. “Be safe out there”.

As for the report, it’s a loaded gun just waiting to be fired again, since Schiller already pulled the trigger once. During fourth quarter, the number of new malware variants targeting Android jumped to 96 from 49. Meanwhile, those for iOS fell from two to zero. For all 2012, Android accounted for 79 percent of all malware, up from 66.7 percent a year earlier. By comparison, iOS was too low to measure in 2011, and 0.7 percent last year.

“The rise of Android malware can be largely attributed to the operating system’s increasing foothold in the mobile market”, according to F-Secure. Gartner puts Android’s smartphone sales share at 69.7 percent. Meanwhile, iOS: 20.9 percent, but less than 1 percent of mobile malware. The disparity begs to be highlighted.

Other platforms — BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Phone — are minuscule, too. But in guerrilla marketing, information like that is discarded. Apple has much to gain from promoting iOS as the safer choice over Android, particularly with Samsung Galaxy S IV set to launch a week from today in New York. Caesar, beware the Ides of March.

Samsung is the global leader for smartphones and all handsets, according to Gartner. iPhone follows far behind (well, not in the United States). Apple should seize the marketing high ground by focusing on Android’s perceived security weakness. iPhone can’t win a feature fight with S4 — or even S3. So drop the safe bomb instead, by playing off people’s fears and offering them something to trust.

“Be safe out there” is just beginning.

Apple’s (AAPL) famous secrecy may have just gotten it into some legal trouble. Bloomberg reports that San Jose-based U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal has issued a scathing ruling in a privacy suit involving the company in which he questions Apple’s integrity and says that he will no longer take what the company says and face value. At issue is Apple’s alleged refusal to comply with Grewal’s three-month-old order that the company turn over some sensitive documents that Bloomberg says could “reveal inner workings that the company normally goes to great lengths to hide.”

Continue reading…

Fantastic news for HTC One X owners tired of waiting for the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OTA…your wait is over!  Assuming you were patient and are still running the stock firmware, you can now download it to your handset and update it yourself.

To install the update on your stock device (AT&T version ONLY), simply:

1. Download the flash image here.

2. Place the downloaded file in a root directory folder on your device (e.g. /sdcard/).

3. Boot the phone into recovery mode by:

a. Restarting the phone
b. Hold down the Volume Down rocker switch while at the same time pressing and holding the power button down for about 10 seconds.
c. Once the fastboot screen appears, use the volume keys to navigate to the “Recovery” option, then press the power button again.
d. You will see the HTC logo, followed by a blank screen, and finally, an image of a smartphone laying on its back complete with triange containing a bang (exclamation mark for you non-programmers).
e. Once this occurs, press and hold down the volume  rocker in the center (between the up and down), and press and release the power button.
f. Release all buttons and viola you will be taken to the blue Recovery Mode menu.

4. Flash the update image from the location you saved it to in step 1.  You will need to do the following to get this to work:

a. On the Recovery Mode menu, navigate using the volume buttons and select “Apply update from internal storage” option.
b. Select the Power button and the phone should find the upgrade image in the root directory.
c. Navigate to the file (if necessary) and hit the power button again to select it.  This will immediately begin the update process.

5. Once the update has completed your phone will reboot automatically.

Assuming everything went well, you should be enjoying some Android 4.1 Jelly Bean goodness within minutes.

Enjoy!

A WORD OF CAUTION! TalkAndroid can not be held accountable for any damage this update method might do to your device.  Please err on the side of caution on this one and if you don’t think you are tech savvy enough to do it yourself, go grab the geek down the street to help you out.  Hi neighbor!

Source: Android Police

Come comment on this article: Download and Install the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Update for the AT&T HTC One X

If there’s one franchise that’s emblematic of PlayStation consoles, it’s the God of War one, which appeared on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation 3.

Now, after plenty of installments and the supposed end of the story, developer Sony Santa Monica is back with God of War: Ascension, a prequel of sorts that not only brings a fresh stor… (read more)

Bad news for Nokia if it had serious hopes of extracting licensing fees from Android manufacturer HTC: a German court has just booted out two of the patent claims it launched there in May last year.

The patents in question cover the use of “intelligent network” services such as alternative billing – the premise of this case was that HTC was supposedly infringing by using the Google Play app store — and a method for brightening and dimming phone screens. According to CIO, the Mannheim district court found in two separate judgements that HTC was not infringing on the patents in question.

A Nokia spokesman was quoted as pointing out that the company still has 34 patents in suit against HTC, both in Germany and the U.S. He also hinted at an appeal. It’s worth pointing out that BlackBerry — known as Research In Motion at the time — was also one of the companies sued by Nokia, and it ended up agreeing to pay royalties (though not necessarily over these precise patents — such deals are usually pretty murky).

It’s hard to feel sorry for Nokia when it comes to these HTC suits. It looks like the court agreed with HTC that Nokia was exaggerating the applicability of the network services patent – I certainly struggled to see how it could give Nokia a monopoly on app store functionality – and a win for Nokia might have meant unnecessary hassle for other Android manufacturers, too. I guess Nokia will just need to forge ahead with its turnaround on other merits.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Android’s challenges spell opportunity for Windows Phone

NetApp (NTAP) is targeting big data and high performance computing customers with an expansion of its E-Series storage platform, featuring a new E5500 model promising to improve scale, density and uptime.

NetApp  announced the new NetApp E5500, designed to provide improved performance, efficiency, and reliability for big data and high-performance computing (HPC). As a seventh generation E-Series platform the E5500 provides a robust high-performance architecture, improved storage density, and additional support enhancements. The new E5500 has a modular architecture that can be used with file systems, such as Lustre and Hadoop, to scale to unlimited performance efficiently.  The NetApp AutoSupport tool is now available for the E-Series product line, providing improved service and uptime to customers.

“HPC and big data customers need high performance to ingest and analyze huge amounts of data, while still managing power and cost efficiently,” said Brendon Howe, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, NetApp. “High performance at a reasonable cost can be a difficult balance to strike; however, with over 500,000 E-Series systems deployed, NetApp’s deep industry and storage experience created a strong foundation for the new E5500. The momentum of E-Series enabled us to build a new product that provides industry-leading bandwidth per dollar spent while improving density and reliability.”

The SGI InfiniteStorage 5600, which is an OEM version of the NetApp E5500, has produced a new SPC-2 result confirming the performance and cost efficiency of the new E5500. “Our customers are turning massive amounts of data into new business and scientific discoveries, so they need solutions that provide the best price/performance possible,” said Jose Reinoso, vice president, Storage Engineering at SGI. “With SGI’s impressive new SPC-2 result achieving a SPC-2 best price/performance, it’s clear that the NetApp E5500 meets those expectations. The results clearly show that the E5500 provides organizations the high bandwidth and density needed to address big data and HPC challenges.”

Bull also uses the E5500 for a storage system on its supercomputers. ”The research carried out on the HPC systems of the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at the TU Dresden comprises numerous disciplines, each with their own storage requirements,” said Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nagel, director of the center. “Our new supercomputer, delivered by Bull, uses the new NetApp E5500 as the base for an excellent storage system that will allow our researchers to get their results faster. The enhanced reliability features and the performance analysis possibilities significantly increase our capabilities to support the users. We are already using NetApp FAS systems for central IT services at the TU Dresden and are happy that the AutoSupport feature has also been extended to the E-Series products.”