Google Launches Android 6.0 as Marshmallow

Google has formally introduced the official Android 6.0 SDK along with the final preview of Android M, now being presented as Marshmallow. In his remarks about the name of the latest release, Android product manager, Jamal Eason, explained that “whether you like them straight out of the bag, roasted to a golden brown exterior with a molten centre, or in fluff form, who doesn’t like marshmallows?”

Apart from its traditionally unique name, there are a ton of new and unique features in the new update that were promised in the launch of the M Developer Preview at Google I/O. The changes include, but are not limited to, updates to the Fingerprint API for better error reporting, fingerprint enrolment and greater reliability, along with an update to the permissions user interface. In addition to that, the latest version of android will also feature Doze, which is supposed to reduce background app activity when the device is inactive in order to provide a longer battery life, and a USB-C connector that aims to charge devices three to five times faster than current chargers.

Shenandoah Studios to Launch Renewed 'Battle of the Bulge' on 17th Sept.

The premier strategy game developer that was quite for a long time since its acquisition, i.e. Shenandoah Studio, has finally made a formal announcement about its future plans. Since being acquired by Slitherine, Shenandoah Studio only made one brief statement last April. Now, the company has announced that its first and one of the best strategy games on mobile, Battle of the Bulge, will relaunch on September 17th on PC, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

New “Hacker’s List” Website Allows You to Hire Hackers Anonymously

A screenshot of HackersList.com's homepage 

A new website providing shady services, dubbed as Hacker's List, has vowed to provide professional hackers at discretion of internet users. The site aims to sell the sinister services like breaking in to an ex's email address to taking out an enemy's website. It allows users to anonymously hire “professional” hackers in order to perform hacks ranging from hacking into Facebook and e-mail accounts to changing academic grades.

Google Eyeing Mobile Payment Company, Softcard, Takeover

Several sources have claimed that Google is interested, and is most likely, to buy the mobile payment company, SoftCard. The mobile payment service is currently in collaboration with majority of the top mobile service providers in the United Sates, including AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc.

Softcard has Windows and Android compatibility and also allows its users to make payments via various payment terminals. The company initially entered the market with the name of ISIS but for obvious reasons it had to change its name and went with SoftCard.

Facebook Hires All Partners of Teehan+Lax, Company to Shut Down

Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Français : Logo de Facebook Tiếng Việt: Logo Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook Inc. has dissolved an entire Toronto -based design company, Teehan+Lax's, by hiring all the firm’s partners. According to a company statement issued on Friday, it will be closing its doors for all customers and clients. The Teehan+Lax's partners’ move to Facebook’s San Francisco offices will leave behind almost around 40 staff members unaccounted.

Blackberry Tweet via iPhone Catches Attention

Folks at Canada-based mobile manufacturing company, BlackBerry, are definitely having an awkward day after the company’s official Twitter feed just received a tweet via iPhone, i.e. its top competitor, on January 13, 2015, at 11:08 am. Even though the tweet was deleted immediately after it was posted, the damage had been done.

The message posted on Tuesday afternoon promoted the new BlackBerry Classic phone and urged consumers to “keep up with the conversation” on Twitter, accompanying a lovely looking photo of the BlackBerry Classic.

How Close is Google's 'Autonomous Driver-less Car' From Reality

Perhaps Google is one of many high-status companies investing large lumps of money on the idea of ‘autonomous driverless cars’ which can drive themselves. If you look up Google, several other major automakers and U.S. government agencies like DARPA and the U.S. Army have been effectively running related research projects. But it is Google who has brought some reality to the idea and is now putting  all-hands-on-deck on its project.

This Tuesday, September 25, 2012, California became the third state of the U.S., following Nevada and Florida, to sign a legislation which legally gives permission to Google for testing it driverless cars on the state's roads. Nevada has already granted an official permission in June 2011, whereas Florida did so in April, 2012. Similar legislations are soon expected to be drawn up in Hawaii and Oklahoma as well.

Before all this in March 2011, the Google engineer who led the research which brought this advancement to light today, Sebastian Thrun, gave an aspiring highlight of his project in a TED presentation which is worth watching. He mentioned his primary purpose was to save the lives of those millions of people from all over the world who have faded due to numerous traffic accidents, also the case of his friends when he was 18.

The Broadway League Releases another Broadway App Titled ‘ILoveNYTheater’

Image via Wikipedia

The Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry, has recently released a new official app entitled, ‘ILoveNYTheater’ for almost all iOS device including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. This release day is very much in line for their annual Tony Awards ceremony, which is scheduled to take place only few days from today, on 12^th of June. This app is largely based on the official website page of league, also having an address of ILoveNYTheater.com, as they both offer the same services to theater lovers. The service includes the quite obvious ticket buying facility in real time for the shows, along with the display of long list of starting and running times of all productions. Moreover, additionally the app will also show the precise locations of all theater, the recommended hotel and dining choices nearby each theater along with the universal social media integration features.

According to the executive director of the league, Charlotte St. Martin, "It's becoming easier and easier for theatergoers to get the best seats at the best prices from official sources." This new app is being retailed completely free of cost; plus impressively, the prices of the tickets sold through the app will also be the same as the price of buying from other sources. It is mentioned that there will be no additional broker markup for any kind od tickets, and even the seats will also be allocated directly from the official theaters' ticketing agencies. This means that the price of the tickets will be the same if you buy if from the new app, or book through telephone or their online website. The mobile companion to the league's Web site also features Broadway news, Google map integration and a full running schedule for the coming week.

Sina Weibo Announces to Launch Its English Version Worldwide, Directly Competing With Twitter Inc.

It is hard to believe that there are still other microblogging services in this world other than Twitter. But one of these unheard of microblogging companies, Sina Weibo from China, is planning to soon make its English version and be as popular in the English-speaking world as it is in the Chinese-speaking world. It was quoted in the The Next Web blog, which had sourced a Chinese-language site TechWeb, that Sina Weibo (pronounced ‘way-bore’) is “actively preparing” to soon release its platform with the support of English language. This English-version of the service will put it in direct and fierce competition with the Twitter, the world-leading microblogging service of United States. It was stated in the article that this English version will be available online as soon as two to three months.

Image via WikipediaMany analysts are measuring as to how much potential damage the English version of Sina Weibo can do to Twitter. It is a tough call and the prediction is not so easy to make, though according to the statistics Twitter may need to start worrying about the rising problem. Sina Weibo, seen by the analysts to be an amalgam of both Twitter and Facebook, currently houses almost 140 million users, whereas as the company hopes to reach around 200 million by the end of this year. Comparing that number to Twitter’s global audience of more than 300 million users, only around 20 million of which are actually from the United States, marks the uncertainty.

Official Biography of Steve Jobs Available for Pre-Order

Cover via Amazon

A biography of Steve Jobs, which has been officially authorized by Mr. Jobs personally, has just been made available on Amazon.com for pre-ordering. This book, entitled ‘iSteve: The Book of Jobs’ is available to pre-order for any Apple user from iBookstore as well. Both the retailing sources have coined the date of 6^th March 6, 2012 to be the official release date, which is almost around nine months from now. The author of this biography, Walter Isaacson, has a very impressionable portfolio of biographies of many famous personalities in the past. He has penned the biography of public figures like Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Einstein: His Life and Universe and Kissinger: A Biography.

Amazon.com and iBookStore both described the book, at the product description section, to be accredited by one of the well-experienced authors of our times, Walter Isaacson. It is exclusively mentioned that ‘iSteve: The Book of Jobs,’ has given an extraordinary story of both the professional and personal lives of Jobs, by the hand of Isaacson. It is stated that the information has been “drawn from his three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson” along with his family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors too.

The price of the book, for pre-orders only, has been set to $16.50 for the physical copy, and $14.99 for the Kindle or iBooks edition. Steve Jobs has always been admired for his successfulness in protecting his private and personal life from his professional and public life. This is a key factor, that an official biography of such a person would be even more interesting. Many aspects of Steve Jobs’s biography have already been made public due to previously written books including Fire in the Valley and The Little Kingdom. But previously just one book, iCon: Steve Jobs, was an authorized and official copy and this will be the second.

Recently Grown Flickr Alternative, 500px, Raises $525K in Series A

Owing to the towering complaints by the Flickr users, its Toronto-based rival company, 500px, has gotten the opportunity to grow its consumer base substituting the Flickr’s consumer base. The number of users of 500px has risen from 1000 in 2009 to almost up to 85 thousand users today. Even more indicatively, around 45 thousand of these users just signed up for the service in last three months only. So after almost a rough rising since two years, now that the company is on its feet, and even startup has announced that it will be making a $525K Series A round in investment from High Line Venture Capital, Deep Creek Capital and ff Venture Capital.

Image via Wikipedia

According to one of the founders of the company, Oleg Gutsol, “The idea of making 500px arose from Evgeny [Tchebotarev] and I having difficulties with the current available platforms — there wasn’t a good service that would allow us to display our photos is a visually pleasing way and be easy to use. I think we tried every somewhat popular service online and still were not quite satisfied. So we decided to build one ourselves.” While along with the second co-founder, Ian Sobolev, Gutsol translated his Livejournal-based photo sharing community to their freshly created current site on Halloween 2009. It had very little following, if any, and today after attracting the frustrated consumers of Flickr, the website is gathering optimistic praises from everywhere.

Even the big names of the Flickr community, including Thomas Hawk, Troy Holden and Ivan Makarov have transformed their photo-sharing service. While the flocks of Flickr users make the change as the website gew 60% in just the past 30 days only. Consequently the website boasts its huge 2.5 million page views in just the last month. Even after being expanded such largely, 500px is determined to stay loyal to its initial aims, which was to allow the photographers to have larger audiences. ”We encourage young talent,” stated Gutsol Tchebotarev. He added that “It is not uncommon to see someone new joining our site and have their photo appear in our popular feed in a matter of hours.”

US Officials state 'deep concerned' regarding Syria's Internet cut

Image by james.gordon6108 via Flickr

It was officially declared on Saturday, by the officials of the United States government, that it is highly concerned and keeping a sharp eye on the Internet shutdown activates in Syria. The secretary of State, Hillary Clinton passed a threatening statement against the government trying to hush the protesters; she stated that the government "cannot prevent the transition currently taking place." She declared that "we are deeply concerned by reports that Internet service has been shut down across much of Syria, as have some mobile communication networks." The U.S. has been always debating for freedom of speech, hence indirectly supporting all the deadly anti-government protests rage across the Middle Eastern nations, Hillary added that "we condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people's exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association."

According to the collected information from local sources, the Internet lines were non-functional in Damascus and the coastal city of Latakia on Friday. Whereas it was estimated by a US-based Internet monitoring firm that almost around two-third of the whole country did not had access to internet due to the outage of network. Clinton pointed out that the government of Syria, under the command of President Bashar al-Assad, "has a history of restricting the Internet in an attempt to prevent the Syrian people from accessing and sharing information.” One of the elite U.S. diplomat claimed that “The Syrian government must understand that attempting to silence its population cannot prevent the transition currently taking place. We believe that even in the face of significant obstacles, the Syrian people will, and should, find a way to make their voices heard.”

Syrian President Also Suspends Internet Access In The Country To Suppress The Risen Protesters

Image via WikipediaThe internet traffic in Syria was suspended unannounced and abruptly by the orders of the Syrian government, just in attempt to suppress the fast-growing revolt in the Middle Eastern nation. According to an internet traffic monitory firm, Renesys, the blockage “starting at 3:35 UTC today, lead to approximately two thirds of all Syrian networks being unreachable from the global Internet.” It was published on the official website of Renesys that “over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.”

Almost every mobile phone operator and Internet service provider (ISP) was largely affected by this unreasonable act. It was stated in today’s issue of The Wall Street Journal, that all the government-run websites of Syria, like the Oil Ministry’s website, were still operational even at the time of the suspension. Syria has kept a sporadically spread ban on the major online social networking services, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, for the last several months. But this time the internet was not blocked for only these handfuls of websites, but the full time internet access was suspended in the most of the country.

Sony Rival Nintendo Also Reports a Cyber Attack on Its Servers

Nintendo recently announced publicly that it was targeted in yet another cyber attack. Since the start of this year there has been a rapid increase in cyber attacks of mostly data theft, but other kinds too. Though according to Nintendo, this time the targeted data was not compromised, in fact it was stated that no personal or company information was lost at all. Nintendo, famous for its gaming console Wii, made all these official announcements on Sunday.

Image via CrunchBase

The server on which the data of Nintendo Co. is stored, located within U.S., was illegally accessed a few weeks back, though the data was not compromised at all, confirmed company spokesperson Ken Toyoda said. Toyoda declared that "There were no third-party victims" either, while he refused to further explain the attack in detail. "But it is a fact there was some kind of possible hacking attack," he added. This damage could be form a series after the on-going large cyber attacks in recent days, especially in the case of Nintendo’s own market rival; Sony Corp.

Sony Corporation faced one of the most fierce cyber attacks, which stole such large chunk of data that it is being considered one of the largest data thefts since the advent of internet. The enormous amount of data included personal information, email addresses, names and birth dates. Such personal data of almost 100 million users, if not more, was stolen in the data theft resulting in the immediate suspension of the service. Service was kept out since April due to security reasons, recovery processing and installing better security measures for future. The network service was just recently returned after more than a month of outage. Meanwhile, Sony still faced several hack attacks to their local websites in many countries, including one attack at their Sony Pictures' website last week. It still remains extremely ambiguous, even after long-investigations of agencies like FBI, whether who or which organization is responsible for these hack attacks at Sony or Nintendo.

Chinese Warns That Google Could Hurt Itself by Making False Accusations

It was stated against Google Inc. in the Monday edition of state-run newspaper of China, largely influenced by the Chinese Communist Party, that the latest allegations of cyber hack attacks being originated from China were totally driven by politics. It further straight forwardly warned the Internet Search Giant that if such activates were not stopped, ultimately its own business might suffer. The article in the People’s Daily newspaper mentioned that "Google's accusations against China are fictitious and have ulterior motives and sinister intentions."

Image via CrunchBase

Google Inc. was largely accused of attempting to create disputes between China and the U.S., and intentionally trying to obstruct the cooperation between both the countries to fight cybercrime. It was officially announced by Google last week that it has finally traced the origin of the cyber spying hack attacks, launched in its emailing services, to be near the eastern city of Jinan in China. It was alleged that these spying hack attacks were targeted to victimize hundreds of users of Gmail, specially the U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists. China has been extremely straight forwarded in this regard and refuted every allegation made, blaming it to be related to these attacks in one way or the other. The article further stated that "Google should not be drawn into international political conflicts and serve as a tool for political games, because one fears that if international political winds shift it might be sacrificed and suffer in the marketplace."

China Claims the hacking Allegations to Be “Unacceptable” And Promotes the Idea of International Conference

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The defense minister of China, Liang Guanglie, clearly refuted all the allegations made against China blaming it to be responsible for the Internet attacks on several foreign targets. Moreover, he also seconded the call of US and Britain to hold international talks to tighten the international cyber-security. He stated that "It is hard to attribute the real source of attacks and we need to work together to make sure that this security problem won't be a problem." He was speaking in a security forum in Singapore, when he declared that "actually in China we have also suffered quite a wide range and frequency of cyber-attacks." He added that "the Chinese government attaches importance also to cyber-security and stands firmly against all kinds of cyber-crimes."

China is being accused largely by the United States, Canada and several other nations, who allege that the Chinese government is backing these online hack attacks on their government agencies and companies. Just last week, Google Inc. allegedly exposed a cyber-spying attack supposedly initiated from somewhere in China, aimed to spy on the Gmail accounts of senior US officials, military personnel, journalists and Chinese political activists. Even the U.S. government stated on Friday that it is concerned regarding the Google's accusations towards Beijing, though the Chinese government still asserts that all the allegations, blaming it, are completely "unacceptable".

Instagram Gives Birth to Trendy Fashion Photographers

It is somewhat a little difficult to admit that Instagram, one of the leading iPhone applications for Twitter photo sharing, is popularly used for stylizing among street style photographers. Even more peculiar reality is that most of these fashion photographers were not so active before Instagram; most of the ‘well-followed’ photographers on Twitter are the ones who did not even have any experience of street style photography before they started using Intagram.

Image via CrunchBase

“I started using Instagram about two weeks after it launched in the App Store and just fiddled around with pictures of my family and friends,” stated one of the photographer from NY, Anthony Danielle, who has acquired almost 18,000 followers with her username takinyerphoto. He said that “I’d see other people doing street work and thought, ‘I could do that,’ and I just started taking pictures of people on the street.” In addition to the amazing styling feature of the app, the experience is even more enhanced with the iPhone’s portability and camera reliability. Instagram has helped strengthen, rather develop, the hobby of Danielle which he never thought he’d end up doing. He claims that even the most darkest and useless photos he takes, are often ‘stylized’ into art with Instagram’s and Camera+‘s filters.

Kno Launches Its New Textbook App for iPad

Image via Wikipedia

Just this Friday, Kno textbook app was released in the app store for iPad, this means discounted textbooks are now more convenient to get for the students. As the app description section in the app store states, Kno app is offering customers “the world’s largest selection of over 70,000 titles at 30-50% off the list price.” This 30 to 50 percent discount on the total price of the expenses of text books can mean a lot of money for a college student. The app is enrolled with already a full textbook and PDF reader with full integration. Additionally, the package contains a course manager, which is a feature that will allow the users to easily sort out their textbooks to keep them classified according to their courses and term. Moreover, miscellaneous features like the one-touch text highlighting, annotation capabilities, and the ability to “ask questions, post comments or share your location with study buddies,” are the selling points mentioned regarding the app in the Apple App Store listing.

RIM Keeps Losing Its Market Share to Apple, Google

According to the report of a recently conducted research, the analysts have declared that Research In Motion has laid off even more of its market share to the giants, Apple and Google, in the extremely competitive U.S. smartphone market than ever before. Now that the two mobile phone giants are attempting to cut price targets, it has raised even more concerns for the BlackBerry maker. Even this Friday, the shares of RIM kept on declining, as the research firm stated that the market share of company has been reducing constantly since three months now.

Image via CrunchBase

Meanwhile the rapidly grown Android platform of Google has peaked up to a 36.4 percent shares in its value and Apple's iPhone increased to a 26 percent, whereas, RIM kept falling down and has lessened down to 25.7 percent from its 30.4 percent share last quarter. These statistics were published in the report of comScore, whereas it has lead to a drop of RIM’s position from second to third in the market. This on-going struggle of RIM is very much unlikely to get easier any soon, the upcoming new iCloud service of Apple is anticipated to cause even more troubles for RIM, predicts Sterne Agee analyst, Shaw Wu.

The shares of RIM, who was once the leader in the corporate smartphone market, have almost lost all of their value since Apple's iPhone and Google's Android software completely transformed the whole sector. The shares of RIM have gone 3.7 percent lower on the Nasdaq at $38.93, which is the first time they ever went below $40 since March 2009. Many analysts claim this downfall of RIM to be aided by its poor price targeting in stock citing concerns, increasing competition and uncertainty in the timings of launch of new product.

The new BlackBerry Bold, a touchscreen model of RIM, was actually announced to be released in "summer," i.e. somewhere early May. But this mobile is not even reaches the stores until September yet, pointed out the tech blog Boy Genius.

Lawyers State That Request for Reconsideration of Rambus Case Is Very Much "Likely"

According to one of the attorneys of Rambus, it will be logging a request to the U.S. appeals court to revisit the recent patent rulings which involved the chip maker, he told after the hearing on Friday. Recently most of the income of Rambus is coming from its patent litigation against companies, as it constantly keeps filing lawsuit against the clients not paying for their patented technology. Most of the time winning the legal battle makes it easier for the company to negotiate additional licensing deal with the companies.

Image via CrunchBaseJust last month it was revealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, that Rambus had been wrong in its actions to shred hundreds of boxes of documents which were relevant to two of its patent infringement lawsuits it had filed earlier. This act brought down the shares of the company almost 18 percent in just one day. Out of the two simultaneously running rulings, the U.S. appeals court has discovered that Rambus has destroyed important documents regarding one of them. These documents were allegedly related to a patent suit which it had previously won in a judgment of $350 million along with an additional interest with South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor. It has been requested by the appeals court that U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte in San Jose, Calif. should review his decision of the case, after it has been brought to life that those document were destroyed by the company.