Month: April 2013

Culture Government Military Security

They’re watching: why city-wide surveillance failed to stop the Boston bombing

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As reported on The Verge. By Matt Stroud “If everyone becomes a suspect, then nobody is a suspect.”   All day Sunday, police directed traffic around a blocked-off section of Boylston Street in downtown Boston where bombs had gone off nearly a week earlier, killing three and wounding hundreds. A makeshift memorial had been set up to honor the dead with personal messages and flowers, and old running shoes hung from metal barricades. Similar makeshift memorials…

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Android Application

Taking A Spin With Joyride, Which Aims To Liven Up Your Commute With Its Android App

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As reported on TechCrunch. by ANTHONY HA Last month, a startup called Joyride came out of stealth mode and announced that it has raised $1 million in funding. Since the company is building a platform for creating entertaining drivetime experiences, we decided that the best place to see the Joyride app in action was on the road. Co-founder and CEO Jeff Chen described Joyride as an attempt to “make drive times more fun and more interesting” — instead of…

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Business IT

Soluto Brings Web-Based PC Management To Small Business, Ranks The Best Windows Laptops For SMBs (It’s A Mac)

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As reported on TechCrunch. by RIP EMPSON Over the last few years, Israeli IT startupSoluto has morphed from simply being PC software that helps users run diagnostics on their hard drives, to a web-based platform that aims to turn you into a one-person Help Desk. In other words, Soluto now allows anyone to offer remote tech support and run diagnostics, whether that be for your mom’s computer or dozens of customers. From the beginning, Soluto has been…

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Business Verizon

Verizon Reportedly Preparing $100B Bid For Vodafone’s Verizon Wireless Stake

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As reported on TechCrunch. by CATHERINE SHU Verizon Communications is preparing a $100 billion cash and stock bid to take full control of Verizon Wireless from Vodafone Group,reports Reuters. Verizon’s board is expected to discuss the potential buyout next week ahead of its annual shareholder meeting. Verizon Communications and UK-based Vodafone formed Verizon Wireless as a joint venture in 1999. Though Verizon has not yet made an official proposal to Vodafone, it has hired banking and…

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Application

MightyText, “The iMessage for Android,” Targets iCloud With New Cross-Device Photo And Video Sync

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As reported on TechCrunch. by RIP EMPSON Today, our lives are spread across a growing array of digital devices, from smartphones and laptops to tablets and connected TVs. While each device tends to perform certain tasks better than others, as we use tablets to read books and shop, laptops for work-related tasks and smartphones to check the weather, stocks and email, increasingly, our devices are working together in concert and becoming interchangeable by keeping us connected…

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Business Microsoft Tablet

Strategy Analytics: Microsoft’s share of tablet market quadrupled after Windows 8

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As reported on Engadget. By Sharif Sakr Say what you like about Windows 8, but before it arrived Microsoft’s presence in the tablet sphere was as small as it was stagnant. By the reckoning of number-crunchers at Strategy Analytics, just 400,000 Windows-running slates were shipped globally in Q3 of last year — a figure that was largely unchanged from the year before and which represented just 1.6 percent of the global tablet market. Six months later, now that…

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Business Tech

TechShop: an industrial revolution for $125 a month

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As reported on Engadget. By Brian Heater Someone, Mark Hatch, if I had to guess, has left a Square reader just to the left of where we’ve set up our cameras. It’s on a table next to a small, but exceptionally diverse array of gadgets. There’s a wooden book that unfolds into a desk lamp and a polymer incubation blanket for infants that’s “on track to save 100,000 children’s lives,” according to Hatch, TechShop’s spikey-white-haired CEO. But it’s the little…

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Business

Legal pot growers struggle to reap profits

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As reported on The Verge. By Jeff Blagdon The recent recreational marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington illustrates just how mainstream cannabis consumption has become, but despite an unprecedented demand, industrial grow operations are having a hard time turning a profit. The Wall Street Journal reports on the billion-dollar industry of legal pot production, finding that the labor-intensive nature of the business, coupled with a lack of access to investment capital, are making it tough for growers. And of…

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Apple Business

Tim Cook teases ‘exciting new product category’ and ‘more surprises’ from Apple in the fall

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As reported on The Verge. By T.C. Sottek During Apple’s Q2 investor call, CEO Tim Cook teased “the potential of exciting new product categories,” and suggested that the company will announce new products in the fall. “We’ve got a lot more surprises in the works,” Cook said. “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software, and services that we can’t wait to introduce in the fall and into 2014. We continue to…

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Application

Swype Finally Rolls Out Of Beta, Hits The Google Play Store For $0.99

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As reported on TechCrunch. by GREG KUMPARAK Way back in March of 2010, Swype launched a super private Beta of its then totally mind-blowing (and now often imitated) swipe-to-type Android keyboard. While they’ve since shipped it out-of-the-box on dozens of handsets, opened the Beta to pretty much anyone, andsold for $100M, they’ve never gotten around to ditching that Beta tag — until today. (Three years in Beta? Who do they think they are, Google? ZING.) This…

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