People often forget that Google and Apple are playing the same game with different goals in mind. Apple strives to maximize profitability in hardware sales. Google, on the other hand, is striving for maximum market share, providing the most users for its services. This is a rare, if not unique, war where both Apple and Google can win, and that seems to be very confusing to people.

Do They Meet a Need? · Seems pretty ob­vi­ous to me; I’m damn sick of haul­ing out my mo­bile to find out what time it is, or to check on my next meet­ing, or to glance at a map, or to snap a quick photo of an in­ter­est­ing street­light or what­ever. <p>

Will They Suc­ceed? · I haven’t got the vaguest. They need work on power con­sump­tion and soft­ware fit/fin­ish and sync­ing and lots of other things, and the man­u­fac­tur­ing cost needs to come way, way down. <p>

A lot of the things Glass does could maybe work just fine on a smart watch or some such. So in a cou­ple years it might be ubiq­ui­tous, maybe it’ll just catch on for cer­tain pro­fes­sional uses, or maybe it just falls flat.<p>

But peo­ple, and there are a lot of them, who are say­ing “Glass is doomed be­cause it’s dorky-look­ing/pri­vacy-in­va­sive/anti-so­cial” are pretty well wrong; it’s more com­plex than that.

Bitpay recently received $3m from Founders Fund, led by Facebook’s first major investor, Peter Thiel.<p>

BitPay CEO Tony Gallippi told me that Thiel invested because he saw how the company could help ease online commerce across borders; the company already handles $5m in transactions each month and says the figure is growing. “Traditional payments such as credit cards don’t even work in half the world, so companies just choose to not service international customers,” Gallippi said. “That leaves a big opportunity.” He plans to take further investment later this year but told me it will be more for reasons of making strategic contacts than a need for cash, since he and his cofounders have significant Bitcoin holdings.<p>One reason Bitcoin is interesting, says Jeremy Liew, a partner with Lightspeed Venture Partners, is that it could displace the practice of wiring money across borders, which underpins much international trade today and can be onerous. “If I’m trying to wire a supplier in China it’s a three- or four-day process with heavy fees,” he says. “Bitcoin transactions can be instant and free.”

BT has won yet another superfast broadband deal, this time in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent, in which the vast majority of the region will be hooked to speeds of at least 24Mbps.<p>
The £27.35m deal will see 472,000 premises – around 97% of the region – receive the high-speed service. The councils involved are investing £7.44m, while £7.44m will come from the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) framework and £12.47m from BT.

Samsung Electronics announced that global channel sales of its GALAXY S4, a life companion for a richer, fuller, simpler life, has surpassed 10 million units sold in less than one month after its commercial debut. Launched globally on April 27 in 60 countries, the phone is estimated to be selling at a rate of four units per second.

Android accounts for approximately 70% of global smartphone shipments and 29% of global profits. This means that the average Android manufacturer creates just 0.41% of profit for each point of market share (0.29/0.70 = 0.414). In other words, the average Android manufacturer needs to capture 2.4 points of market share just to increase their [share of] market profit by 1 percentage point.<p>
Such a low fair share profit index may indicate that Android manufacturers are:<br />– Having difficulty differentiating their product;<br />– Sacrificing profits in order to buy market share (the “race to the bottom”);<br />
– Unable to reach <a href="http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/09/teardown-finds-samsung-galaxy-s4-more-costly-to-build-than-apples-iphone-5">economies of scale in the manufacturing process</a>.

if you’re a Chrome user today, you’ll be more immersed in the Chrome ecosystem a year from now, even if you don’t have an “official” Chromebook. This all depends on how well Google pulls off its strategy to upend the desktop computing world, but so far, it seems to be on track.<p>

Bear in mind the apps in this vision will be truly cross-platform as they’ll run on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer with Chrome installed. If it can get developers on board — and those I spoke with at Google I/O are ready to embrace the effort — Google will have a thriving desktop platform built on top of the platforms created by others. But it will be a desktop that’s far more agile, with new features added within days or weeks, not months or years.<p>

Welcome to Chrome, my desktop today and your desktop of the future.

Troy Newman, an IT specialist who oversees app development for Mayo, adds that the clinic was accustomed to running on a single platform - Windows - and wanted its mobile initiative to be similarly standardized.<p>

"All our developers know how to do Windows development, so we made the same kind of same decision for iOS. We wanted a platform where we could get developers up to speed and train them to develop apps."<p>

Finding that expertise hasn't always been easy.<p>

"Our team's pretty small," says Newman. "As we've grown, it has been difficult to find people with the right skills who want to work in Rochester, Minnesota."

How often are Metro apps used?<p>
We found that, on average, a Windows 8 user will launch a Metro app 1.52 times a day. Tablet users launch the most Metro apps at 2.71 times per day. People who have touch-screen enabled laptops launch 47% more Metro apps than people with a standard laptop…<p>We found that among desktop and laptop users, 60% of users launch a Metro app less than once a day. This number significantly improves with tablets, but still 44% of Windows 8 tablet users launch a Metro app less than once a day.

Xbox 360 Kinect owners had some trouble today watching Microsoft's Xbox One reveal due to device's response to "Xbox" commands spoken during the livestream.<p>

Several users took to Twitter to document their problems, which included pausing, opening Xbox Live or quitting the stream entirely. Polygon's own reviews editor Arthur Gies experienced similar problems with his Kinect while watching the stream.

Both Flickr and Vimeo will now also be integrated deeply into the new operating system, so users will be able to sign into the respective networks via iOS 7′s built-in Settings application. Like with iOS’s Facebook and Twitter ties, Apple customers will be able to log-in one time into each social network and have full sharing access.

For a select few companies, Watson will begin serving as their customer service representative. IBM may also make Watson available via apps on your smartphone, as well as web chats or email queries.<p>

For many of us, the term “customer service” relates to hold times and an agent on the other end who seems befuddled by that charge on your credit card. Watson may be able to handle that, but the aim and scope seem different. It looks like Watson will concentrate more on the financial matters for now, but could also serve to assist representatives get faster access to more poignant information. Many of Watson’s guinea pigs are banks or other financial institutions, and seem intent on using Watson’s knowledge to better analyze and serve their customers’ needs.

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is on trial once again in Sweden for his role in committing what prosecutors believe may have been the largest data breach in Swedish history.<p>

Warg, who is currently serving a prison sentence after being convicted of copyright infringement in the infamous Pirate Bay trial, is suspected of having perpetrated a years-long hacker attack against Swedish IT-firm Logica through which he gained unauthorized access to personal data of thousands of people.<p>"This is, I believe, the largest hacking case ever in Sweden," prosecutor Henrik Olin told the TT news agency on Monday morning as he prepared to enter the Stockholm District Court for the first day of the trial.<p>

"We're talking about customer information, information from the Sweden debt Enforcement Agency (Kronofogden), and a large number of police officers' organizational affiliations."

…while the exact number will depend on how well the smartphone industry performs as a whole, Nokia is expected generate between $800m and $1.5bn in patent licence fees and royalty payments annually. Considering how IDC estimates that the smartphone industry is expected to double in size between now and 2017, this number can grow considerably. If we assign a P/E ratio of 10 to Nokia's patent portfolio, the patents under the mobile devices segment alone will be worth between $8bn and $15bn.

Chinese hackers who breached Google’s servers several years ago gained access to a sensitive database with years’ worth of information about US surveillance targets, according to current and former government officials.<p>

The breach appears to have been aimed at unearthing the identities of Chinese intelligence operatives in the United States who may have been under surveillance by American law enforcement agencies.

The tech media has long been obsessed with the semantic differences between smartphone shipments and sales. In reality, all figures announced by companies, and those announced by IDC, are shipments (also known as channel sales or sell-in). Gartner is the only research house that tracks sales to end users (also known as sell-through). Comparing data from IDC and Gartner can give us good insight into channel inventory patterns across different smartphone platforms. This data suggests that Nokia & Windows Phone may be in for some trouble in the next few quarters.

We haven't mentioned MacSlash for a while, but there's a rather interesting link to a story on the iWatch - a wristwatch running MacOS on a Transmeta chip. Or is there?

The [US Senate] committee said the [Irish] Government has since the early 1990s negotiated a special tax arrangement with Apple, resulting in it paying corporation tax of less than 2%, and avoiding around $44 billion (€34bn) in US tax over the last four years.<p>
Speaking on his way into a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Mr Gilmore said: "They are not issues which arise from the Irish taxation system."<p>
"They are issues which arise from other jurisdictions. That's an issue which has to be addressed, first of all in those jurisdictions and secondly … it needs to be tackled by having robust international agreements, and Ireland very much is in favour of that," he said.<p>
Mr Gilmore said the Irish tax system was "very transparent".

Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student's invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds.<p>

The fast-charging device is a so-called supercapacitor, a gizmo that can pack a lot of energy into a tiny space, charges quickly and holds its charge for a long time.<p>

What's more, it can last for 10,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with 1,000 cycles for conventional rechargeable batteries, according to Eesha Khare of Saratoga, California.

Intense focus requires neglecting almost everything else. David’s focus on pushing the product forward meant that he didn’t want to think about boring stuff: support, scaling, paperwork, and money.<p>

Every time we’d get close to needing more funding, I’d try to convince David to hold out a bit longer or try to become profitable, and he’d convince me that everyone was better off if we’d focus on the product instead. And every time, he was right.

The solar panels make up around 42% of the costs – or £4,200 of a typical £10,000 installation. The inverter adds 10% or £1,000. And the biggest cost? It’s the labour, cabling, roof fixing and Installer profits making up 48% or £4,800 for a £10,000 installation.<p>

As we <a href="http://www.solstats.com/blog/solar-energy/solar-panel-prices-drop-by-half-over-the-last-5-years/">reported in a recent blog</a>, the price of the panels has dropped by half over recent years. Just don’t expect that to mean your quote for a home solar installation will drop by the same amount.

a few weeks after the deal they broke the promise. They added a BlogThis! button to Google Toolbar. It only worked with Blogger. It would have been a simple matter to make it work with any blogging tool. But they didn't see why they should do that.<p>
Back then Google cared a little about what I thought, so the result was a conference call between me and an exec at Google, Marissa Mayer. I was driving cross-country from California to Boston, so I stopped in Utah, in the parking lot of a 7-11 just east of Salt Lake City, and we had the call.
All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarassed. Google didn't do anything to change the BlogThis! button.<p>
All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.

As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out - by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.<p>

In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/02/11/home-virtualization-the-new-power-user">I like to use multiple computers</a> running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me.

Intel is a $53bn-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.”<p>

Intel Labs, the company’s R&D arm, is launching an initiative around what it calls the “data economy”—how consumers might capture more of the value of their personal information, like digital records of their their location or work history. To make this possible, Intel is funding hackathons to urge developers to explore novel uses of personal data. It has also paid for a rebellious-sounding website called <a href="http://www.wethedata.org/">We the Data</a>, featuring raised fists and stories comparing Facebook to Exxon Mobil.

At a health conference last year the CIO of a teaching hospital shared a provocative statistic that his organization had uncovered in their ROI [return on investment] analysis of a large iPad purchase. At the time, the hospital was debating the merits of such a large financial commitment – so they tasked the CIO to do a crude ROI analysis to justify the sizable expense. Was the ROI six months – or maybe a year? The (unscientific) results were jaw dropping. Using some crude calculations around workflow and time-motion analysis the CIO calculated the ROI for an iPad in their hospital would be nine days. That’s right – nine days.

A day before Mr. Cook's appearance, the company revealed the testimony it submitted to Congress. Apple urged Congress to lower corporate-tax rates and reduce the tax on bringing back cash earned overseas, according to testimony that was also posted on its website Monday.<p>

The testimony, which Apple submitted in recent days, also defends the operations of Apple's Irish subsidiaries. It says that the subsidiaries, which employ around 4,000 people, distribute dividends that aren't taxable under US law.

"Apple does not move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the US in order to avoid US tax; it does not use revolving loans from foreign subsidiaries to fund its domestic operations; it does not hold money on a Caribbean island; and it does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands."

The third and biggest wave of sanctions aimed against Torrent and music file-sharing websites is sweeping the internet, with 25 online addresses set to be blocked by the British Recorded Music Industry trade body.<p>

The websites targeted by the campaign include the biggest torrent pages and file-hosting search engines, like ExtraTorrent, Torrentz, TorrentReactor.

“Hello.”<p>

The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses.<p>

“Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something <a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/google-io-2013-liveblog/#50512764920">I learned at Burning Man</a>,” he said. “Here, drink this. You’re slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose.”<p>

I was taken aback. “How did you…” I began, but he was already answering me before I could finish my question.

Dell last week again blamed Windows 8 for contributing to a decline in PC sales revenue during the quarter that ended 3 May.<p>

"Windows 8 has been, from our standpoint, not necessarily the catalyst to drive accelerated growth that we had hoped it would be," said Brian Gladden, Dell's chief financial officer, in a call last week with Wall Street analysts to <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239313/Dell_profit_dives_79_percent_on_falling_PC_sales">discuss the quarter's financials</a>.

Jolla has just unveiled its first smartphone, which will go on sale this year for €399 (roughly $510). Running the company's MeeGo-derived Sailfish OS, it features a 4.5-inch display, a dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel camera, LTE (in selected markets), removable back covers, 16GB of onboard storage, and a microSD slot. According to Jolla, the handset will be "compliant" with Android apps, although it's not sure how many apps will be supported, nor is it clear where users will download the apps from.

smartphone take-up rates vary across the countries from 30% in Indonesia to more than twofold in Philippines (146%), Thailand (140%) and Vietnam (118%).<p>

"Growth in this region is primarily driven by affordable smartphones which averaged in the price range of US$100-$200," said [GfK director Gerard] Tan. "However, the rise of local brands in countries such as Philippines and Indonesia has resulted in the growing market share of those in the US$50-$100 price segment - the budget price range which bridges the transition from basic mobile phones to smartphones."<p>

Within the smartphone segment, two specific features that are increasingly popular with buyers and often the deciding factor of which model to purchase are the display sizes and operating system.

you can consider this the canonical answer to that question.<p>

Both Apple and Google tabulate unique downloads of apps per user account. This means that they count only one download of an app no matter how many devices that you install that app on after you purchase it. Neither company counts updates in its app download numbers. These are purely single downloads from their stores.

Stealthy Mac OS X spyware that was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID has been detected on the laptop of an Angolan activist attending a human rights conference, researchers said.<p>

The backdoor, which is programmed to take screenshots and send them to remote servers under the control of the attackers, was <a href="https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/335161266941353985">spread using a spear phishing email</a>, according to privacy activist Jacob Appelbaum. Spear phishing is a term for highly targeted emails that address the receiver by name and usually appear to come from someone the receiver knows.

Some Marks and Spencer customers have told the BBC of cases where the chain's contactless payment terminals have taken money from cards other than the ones intended for payment.<p>

Card are supposed to be within about 4cm of the front of the contactless terminal to work.<p>

But some customers say payments have been taken from cards while in purses and wallets at much greater distances.

It's been years since Samsung reported any unit sales numbers at all for its mobile phones, so the tech press took notice Thursday when the South Korean manufacturing giant decided it had something to brag about.<p>Samsung Electronics co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun told reporters at an industry forum in Seoul that he is confident shipments of the Galaxy S4 will top 10m next week - four weeks after the device went on sale in 60 countries, including Korea, China, India and the US.
<p>"That would make the mobile device the fastest-selling selling smartphone in Samsung's history," the <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2013/05/133_135811.html"><em>Korea Times</em></a> reported - a line echoed in the <a href="http://www.techmeme.com/130517/p11#a130517p11">U.S. press</a>.
<p>That kind of coverage must drive Tim Cook crazy.
<p>Because when Apple (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=AAPL">AAPL</a>) reported last September that it sold 5m iPhone 5 units in three days, analysts expressed <a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/24/apples-5-million-iphone-5-sales-what-analysts-are-saying/">"disappointment"</a> and Business Insider ran this headline:

<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-5-sales-opening-weekend-2012-9">IPHONE 5 OPENING WEEKEND SALES COME IN WORSE THAN EXPECTED</a>

<p>And what was its headline Friday?

<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-s4-sales-2013-5?op=1">Samsung's S4 Starts Strong: 10 Million Units In Less Than A Month</a>

Despite advertising 16GB of internal storage, the Samsung Galaxy S4 only offers roughly 9GB of user available storage <a href="http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/samsung-galaxy-s4-gets-wrists-slapped-by-bbc-watchdog-investigation">highlighted by the BBC Watchdog exposé</a>. The Samsung flagship does offer microSD card expansion options, but early purchasers have complained about the memory discrepancy.<p>

“We appreciate this issue being raised and we will improve our communications,” said a Samsung spokesperson to CNET UK. “We are reviewing the possibility to secure more memory space through further software optimisation.”

You'll need to provide your personal information to Google to get this license, and section 9 makes clear the company may well use it at some point to contact you and even use your name in its publicity, according to section 15.<p>

That restriction is probably tolerable for a corporation that can execute the agreement once for all products and staff, but for an open source project it's a big problem. Open source communities may not have a legal entity able to sign on behalf of the community, either because there's no actual legal entity or because the community of developers has too loose a relationship with any legal entity to be counted as the equivalent employees. By requiring individual, nontransferrable registration, Google is erecting a barrier that at the very least will provoke suspicion from open source projects.

As John Naughton feels obliged to remind folk every now and again, the web is not the internet. Because we all know that for many people, Facebook apparently is. Or Google is.<p>

And as anyone following my tweets over the last year or two will know, I’ve started finding Google more and more irksome.<p>

It’s not just that the one or two people I know who use Google Plus (Google+?) are now all but lost to me as sources of neat ideas because I don’t do Gooplus and it doesn’t do RSS…

Asha… has worse specifications than a cheap Android phone, and a much worse app selection. Thus it has been largely ignored by a tech press that <a href="http://stratechery.com/2013/value-chains/">considers little more</a> than features and price.<p>

However, finding a market is about finding a new axis of differentiation. In the case of low-end smartphones, are there things that matter beyond price and performance?<p>

Consider again where Asha will be sold: India, Africa, Latin America – all have markets where mobile phones are the primary form of computing, as well as areas without consistent electricity. In such markets, nothing matters more than battery life.

When I go to Google in search of music, it’s fair to say that the results I’m served are exceptionally poor.<p>

In this instance, the results that Google serve me do not match my search intent. I want to download Incubus’ album – but instead Google is pointing me in the direction of illegal download sites, music videos, and a streaming platform.<p>

To paraphrase Google’s mission statement, they want to offer me the most relevant result in as few clicks as possible – and at the moment there are no legal and relevant results within 3-4 clicks away. Surely Google can do better?<p>

So here is where I think we’re heading. Please note that these are photo-shopped images, and not actual screenshots.

Incredible colour footage of 1920s London shot by an early British pioneer of film named Claude Friese-Greene, who made a series of travelogues using the colour process his father William - a noted cinematographer - was experimenting with. It's like a beautifully dusty old postcard you'd find in a junk store, but moving.

With WWDC just a few weeks away, I thought it’d be beneficial to the Internet at large to compile a working list of everything that is expected of Apple during their Keynote and subsequent “State of the Union” addresses in order to appease the Internet.

Stop to consider what you’re getting, however, and the Surface Pro really isn’t bad value for money at all. The hardware is impeccably well constructed, the performance good, and the Wacom digitiser, stylus and Full HD display make for a great combination. The ergonomic irritations in laptop mode, together with modest battery life, mean that it won’t suit everyone, but the Surface Pro is a great choice for those who want power and full Windows compatibility in such a tiny device.

Google Maps on the desktop has been rebuilt from the ground up, ushering in its most significant changes since its launch eight years ago. After spending some time with the new Maps, and with its lead designer, we’re struck by Google’s choice to do away with most of the user interface elements and let the map reach from edge to edge in your browser. A lone search box in the upper left gives you access to Maps’ features, as does clicking on elements within the map. Google has integrated Google Now’s card metaphor to present information from a newly built-in version of Google Earth, reviews from Zagat and Google+, Street View, and directions. And new user interface tweaks surface locations and transit routes before you even search for them.

Jake Davis, who went by the online alias Topiary, says he now regrets "95% of the things I've ever typed on the internet".<p>

"It was my world, but it was a very limited world. You can see and hear it, but you can't touch the internet. It's a world devoid of empathy - and that shows on Twitter, and the mob mentality against politicians and public figures. There is no empathy.<p>

"So it was my world, and it was a very cynical world and I became a very cynical person."

The hottest space in mobile tech right now is messaging, with all the apps that let you skip past high-priced SMS and send texts for free (or very cheap). Just this week, we've heard that BlackBerry Messenger will soon work on iPhone and Android — and yesterday, Google Hangouts launched on those same platforms. Facebook, too, has made a big push to promote its Messenger solution with Facebook Home and Chat Heads just last month. Added together, these apps have surpassed traditional SMS in the total number of messages sent.<p>

Yet for all that innovation in chat, there's still a problem. All these communication apps can't communicate with each other.

Despite the hype surrounding the upcoming launch of Google Glass, only one in 10 Americans who own a smartphone say they would actually wear it all the time – even if priced within their personal budget. The findings are according to the Google Glass Adoption Forecast released today from BiTE interactive, the mobile application specialist for Fortune 1000 brands, which commissioned YouGov to poll the views of a nationally representative sample of American adults towards Google’s latest innovation.

Whitaker recorded a phone conversation with his California Google rep, walking them through the website in real time while explaining how the scam worked. He deliberately showed how PVD was a conduit for the rogue online pharmacies, confirming that his rep was following him every step of the way. At one point, the rep asked if the rogue sites had been approved by PharmacyChecker. Of course Whitaker admitted that they hadn’t been, but it didn’t matter; PVD never lost its approval, and the illegal sites were allowed to continue to operate.<p>

The investigation, the agents decided, was now complete.

Neil Shah, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, “We estimate the global Android smartphone industry generated total operating profits of US$5.3bn during Q1 2013. The Android platform accounted for 43% share of the entire smartphone industry’s operating profits, which reached US$12.5bn worldwide in the first quarter of this year.”

Let’s start with Banking and ask a very simple question.  Of the Top-10 banks in the U.S. how many have apps available for Windows Phone?  Three.  And one of those is just for its credit cards.  Want to guess how many of those banks have apps in the Apple App Store?  All ten.<p>

You might think this is just a banking problem, but it is anything in finance.  Windows Phone has apps for Zero of the Top-10 Mutual Fund companies.  Seven of those companies provide apps for the iPhone.  How about if you just want to do research on mutual funds?  Sorry, you’ll need an iPhone, Android Phone, or Blackberry for that.<p>

Moving on, how many of the Top-10 US Airlines have apps for Windows Phone?  Three.  For the iPhone it is eight.<p>

Now the truth is I was going to do this for several more categories but it is too depressing for me to continue.

Beginning on June 26, Google will start selling through the Google Play store a version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that basically strips all the Samsung-specific features out of it.<p>

Instead, it ships with the latest version of Android - 4.2.2., a recent update to Android "Jelly Bean" - and the "Nexus experience" that shipped on the Nexus 4, which was manufactured by HTC, last fall. The phone is unlocked, so users can switch carriers, and "bootloader unlocked," which means users can easily install their own software on it. And Google promises that it will push the latest updates of Android to it as they come out.<p>

Sounds great, right?<p>

But you'll pay for the privilege - because it's unlocked, there's no carrier subsidy, which means users have to pay the full smartphone price of $649.<p>

In other words, this is a phone for Android fans and developers who want cutting-edge hardware combined with the latest, most Google-friendly version of Android. Not a consumer product.

On the one hand, you have a CEO who seems to understand ideas around the death of the PC, relationship-centric computing, post-PC, etc., but seems keen to actively avoid pushing his vision into the tablet space. If tablets are going to be replaced by some modular computing doodad or doodads, surely [BlackBerry CEO Thorsten] Heins would like to be the one to tell everyone how it would be done?<p>

But there isn't any leadership from Heins in this direction. I get that marketing is complex and it's not a good thing to confuse, but if Heins is talking with authority about the tablet going away, surely it would be a good idea for him and his team to set the tone of that discussion with more clarity.

As notebooks and other Windows-based PCs have lost ground, first to Apple tablets and now to Android-based designs, even Microsoft has been indicating dissatisfaction with the pace of PC innovation in Taiwan. Despite a longtime aversion to hardware, Microsoft recently introduced its own Surface tablet.<p>

“The Surface tablet is a pretty strong signal to the whole Taiwan PC ecosystem that they’re not innovating enough,” said Bill Whyman, a senior managing director at the ISI research firm.<p>

One exception to Taiwan’s difficulties is Asus. Its many new Android-based tablets, including one that it has branded with Google, allowed it to surpass Amazon in the first quarter of this year to become the third-largest player in the global tablet computer market, behind Apple and Samsung, according to IDC.

PC shipments in Western Europe totaled 12.3m units in the first quarter of 2013, a decline of 20.5% from the corresponding period of 2012, according to Gartner.<p>
"The first quarter of 2013 brought the worst quarterly decline in Western Europe since Gartner started tracking PC shipments in this region," said Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner. "Wide availability of Windows 8-based PCs could not boost consumer PC purchases during the quarter. Although the new Metro-style user interface suits new form factors, users wonder about its suitability for traditional PCs — non-touchscreen desktops and notebooks."<p>
All PC segments in Western Europe exhibited year-on-year declines in the first quarter of 2013. Mobile and desktop PC shipments fell by 24.6% and 13.8%, respectively. Shipments to the professional PC market declined by 17.2%, while those to the consumer PC market decreased by 23.7%.

every single one of Apple's major mobile competitors now makes apps for iOS. Google, who also has Android, makes many very popular apps including Gmail, Maps, Google+, etc. Microsoft, who also has Windows Phone, makes a bunch of apps and games for iOS, including OneNote and Kinnectimals. Nokia, Microsoft's primary Windows Phone partner, also makes Here Maps.<p>

Now, BlackBerry makes BBM.<p>

Apple, by contrast, makes precisely nothing for Android, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry. Not even iTunes.

Today at the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston, Tami Reller shared with the audience that the update previously referred to as “Windows Blue” will be called Windows 8.1 and will be a free update to Windows 8 for consumers through the Windows Store.<p>

During her remarks today, Tami reiterated our goal of delivering continual updates to create a richer experience for Windows customers. Windows 8.1 is part of that and continues the journey we first began with Windows 8 last fall. Windows 8.1 will help us to deliver the next generation of PCs and tablets with our OEM partners and to deliver the experiences customers — both consumers and businesses alike —need and will just expect moving forward.

This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways. (How is a pirated music file like a 21st century mortgage?) Lanier argues that there is little essential difference between Facebook and a digital trading company, or Amazon and an enormous bank. (“Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies.”)<p>

Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.<p>

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

Acer has reported April consolidated revenues of NT$25.772 billion (US$868 million) down on month by 31.02%, while Asustek Computer saw revenues of NT$32.594 billion, down 22.11%, according to the companies.

Microsoft believes nearly all major apps that can be found in Apple's iTunes store will also be available on Windows 8 by the fall, but it expects one glaring hole to remain.<p>
"You shouldn't expect an iTunes app on Windows 8 any time soon," said Tami Reller, chief financial officer of Microsoft's (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows division. "ITunes is in high demand. The welcome mat has been laid out. It's not for lack of trying."

Microsoft appears to be sticking a finger in Google's eye with the launch of its new YouTube app for Windows Phone. The app, ReadWrite has confirmed, strips out YouTube ads when it plays back videos and allows users to easily download video by way of a prominent "download" button.<p>

Both behaviors violate the cardinal rules YouTube imposes on developers who use its service. To get around those restrictions, it appears that Microsoft reverse-engineered some portion of the software used to access YouTube's basic functions, which are generally known as application programming interfaces, or APIs. If so, that could mean Microsoft can do just about whatever it wants with its YouTube app.

Plenty of people are outraged that Adobe is moving to subscription plans and scrapping perpetual licenses. But should they be?<p>
To shed some light on the situation, CNET broke out the spreadsheet software, dug into pricing information from Adobe and retail outlets, and put together some actual comparisons to see whether that wrath is deserved.<p>
The answer, as with all things complicated, is that it depends. But at least in some reasonable situations - not just power users but also middle-end customers who upgrade to Adobe's latest releases - the Creative Cloud isn't a bad deal at all.

Let’s start with what is definitely not a goal for Windows 8, broad-based Enterprise adoption. By that I mean, the rollout of Windows 8 to traditional desktop and notebook computing. Keep in mind that back when Windows 8 was being planned Windows 7 had just shipped. Because of the time, cost, and complexity of enterprise-wide operating system rollouts most enterprises would either still be rolling out Windows 7 or have just completed their rollout around the time Windows 8 shipped.  Indeed Windows 7 just recently passed Windows XP as the most popular version of the operating system in use. No enterprise would have the appetite to immediately start the cycle over again so quickly, and so (I believe) the prevailing wisdom inside Microsoft was that they would skip Windows 8. In other words, before Microsoft had decided on the details of a new app model, the Windows Store, the Start Screen, or removing the Start button they knew there was no point in targeting enterprise desktops as Windows 8 upgrade targets.

Earlier today the @skynewsbreak twitter feed was hacked and a single message sent.<p>
Action was swiftly taken and we are working with Twitter and our in house security to ensure this cannot happen again.

Announced in January as Project Shield, Nvidia's intriguing new handheld now has a price, a June release window, and the promise of Double Fine's Broken Age. Who's ready to spend $350 on a dedicated Android gaming device?

The HTC First, or “Facebook phone” as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when <a href="http://bgr.com/2013/05/08/htc-first-sales-facebook/">AT&T dropped the price of HTC’s First to $0.99 just one month after its debut</a>, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone.

As part of our investment process, we do a bunch of fact gathering/checking work that is called Due Diligence in the vernacular of the VC business. So my partner Brad Burnham and I put together a list of leading blogs and online publishers who had popular RSS feeds at the time. I think there were a dozen or so publications on that list. It included Weblogs (Engadget), Gawker (Gawker), NY Times, and a bunch more. We know most everyone who ran those operations so we called them.<p>

What we heard was surprising. Not one of them was willing to hand over their RSS feed to a third party for analytics and monetization. We were very surprised to hear that and thought a bit about it. But, we decided, we could not invest in something that the big publishers would not support.

The technique involves growing an ultra perfect grapheme film over a ruthenium single crystal inside an ultra high vacuum chamber whereorganic molecules of tetracyano-p-quinodimethane (TCNQ) are evaporated on the grapheme surface. TCNQ is a molecule that acts as a semiconductor at very low temperatures in certain compounds.

There will be a special attraction for deaf people in theaters nationwide soon. By the end of this month, Regal Cinemas plans to have distributed closed-captioning glasses to more than 6,000 theaters across the [US].<p>

Sony Entertainment Access Glasses are sort of like 3-D glasses, but for captioning. The captions are projected onto the glasses and appear to float about 10 feet in front of the user. They also come with audio tracks that describe the action on the screen for blind people, or they can boost the audio levels of the movie for those who are hard of hearing.<p>

This is a big moment for the deaf, many of whom haven't been to the movies in a long time. Captioned screenings are few and far between, and current personal captioning devices that fit inside a cup holder with a screen attached are bulky, display the text out of their line of vision to the screen, and distract the other patrons.

Google created SMS Search as a way for users with limited or no data on their phones to access search information. You could text a search query to 466453 and receive an SMS reply containing only text, no links. It was useful to a lot of people back in the day, but it's not surprising that the service has been losing popularity.

Full disclosure: I like [Microsoft head of PR] Frank Shaw quite a bit. He’s got a tough job and to be fair he’s doing the right thing in defending his company.<p>

But in <a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/05/10/staying-centered.aspx">a recent post to the Official Microsoft Blog</a>, Mr. Shaw called out The Financial Times and The Economist, two staid publications that made the mistake of correctly identifying the core problem with Windows these days. I can only imagine what he thinks of me right now.<p>

In the wake of a mini-publicity tour in which Microsoft executives tried to paint its about-face with Windows 8.1 “Blue” as an example of it “listening to customer feedback,” these publications have correctly suggested that this never would have happened had the Windows team simply listened to customer feedback during the six-year buildup to Windows 8 instead.

I used to sing the praises of my iPhone above all competitors. Now, when I am jarred from my fanboy-hypnosis, staring down at an alleged life-changer that doesn’t know how to get me from point A to point B, I’m not so convinced I can defend it.<p>

In order for Apple’s customers to continue “reporting a problem” with Maps, they need to feel that their reports are having some impact. They need to feel respected. Ideally, good reports would lead to timely corrections on a mass level that would benefit all other iOS users. Anecdotally, this is not happening. So at a minimum a user’s own report should be respected by the device they hold in their hands. Let the customer know their voice was heard by improving the usability of their device immediately. Customers demand confidence in map data, whether it be from Apple or fine-tuned by their own hand. If we can’t count on map data, we won’t use the app, we won’t report problems, and we won’t help Apple one iota in shoring up this massive shortcoming.

Wikipedia has a real blind spot when it comes to covering to Africa – there are more articles on “Middle Earth” than many African states and there are perhaps 10 times as many wikipedia edits (in any language) originated in the United Kingdom than in all of Africa.<p>

And that’s not the only problem – 91% of Wikipedia editors are male and, of course, that is contributing to Wikipedia’s growing reputation as the home of the same sort of maladjusted and poor socialised individuals who inhabit various parts of the “open source” software world.

The Tracking Protection Working Group is meeting this week in Sunnyvale, Calif. in its latest attempt to create a tech spec for the Do Not Track browser feature. Progress has been excruciatingly slow for the group, which operates under the aegis of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Disparate interests have been unable to agree on even basic issues such as the definition of "tracking."<p>
Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford, is among the most visible and technology-fluent members of the privacy constituent within the working group. And he is losing faith in the negotiations.

The card was part of Google’s larger strategic goal to know more about consumer purchases, given the immense potential value of that mostly offline-level data for its massive online advertising business.<p>
Google is already sucking in that purchase data on many fronts — between Google Play payments, Google Checkout on the Web and also advertiser payments — in addition to the dedicated Google Wallet project.<p>
But Wallet has been hampered by its focus on and use of NFC technology, which requires certain phones and special readers to make transactions. Google tried to make that easier by introducing a “cloud wallet” last year that accommodated existing credit and debit cards, but it could still go further toward mobile payments at the register without using NFC.<p>
The dumping of the physical card plan was certainly abrupt, since it had actually been built into the new update of Google Wallet, said sources, and some partners had thought the search giant might be demoing it at the [Google I/O] event.

<strong>Shoppers who use mobile more, spend more in store</strong><br />
While many businesses might assume that smartphone use in store drives shoppers to seek better prices elsewhere and order online, we found that the opposite was true. We compared the in-store purchases of moderate and frequent smartphone users and found that basket sizes of frequent mobile shoppers were 25-50% higher. For instance, while the average appliance smartphone shoppers spends $250 per shopping trip, frequent smartphone shoppers spend $350. Marketers shouldn’t shy away from the showrooming challenge, and should instead, meet it head on.