If you’ve recently seen a balloon about this big, tell Google. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty ImagesA burst of 12 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Kate Prengaman:
Google this: Where did one of the Internet giant's high-tech, high-atmosphere balloons land?
If Google knows, it's not saying.
But this much we do know — or at least we were told Thursday by the Federal Aviation Administration: It dropped from the sky Wednesday somewhere over Toppenish.
An FAA spokesman in Auburn told the Yakima Herald-Republic that Google notified the federal agency the device was descending so that air traffic control could track it and ensure that all aircraft stayed safely out of its path.
The fate of the falling device remains unknown.
Part of the planned 1.5m balloon systems intended to give 99% internet coverage.
Notebook vendors have asked ODMs and component makers to lower quotes in an attempt to maintain profitability due to stagnant demand, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.
Among notebook vendors, Lenovo was the fist to ask for cut, the sources indicated. At a Lenovo suppliers conference held in China, company CEO Yang Yuan-qing emphasized that reducing production costs is Lenovo's main goal in 2014, the sources noted.
Peter Nowak:
THE future looks curvy. A spate of gadgets sporting concave displays has already been launched, and the big manufacturers will soon be hurling yet more TVs and smartphones with curved screens on to the shelves. Rumours continue to swirl that even Apple's forthcoming iPhone 6 will bend to the craze later this year.
There's more to the trend than just a novel shape, though. It may be tapping into a deep-seated desire to get away from the hard corners and rectangles that have defined our appliances for decades. The craze for curves is also fueling a search for materials and manufacturing techniques that will help companies exploit it to the full.
"The first adjective used by people to describe curves is 'soft'," says Oshin Vartanian, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, Canada. "The story about curvature is a real story about emotion in the brain."
Welcome to "neuroasethetics" - which involves fMRI among other methods. Have you bought a curvy TV?
Junko Yoshida:
Expect Apple to beat Google to the punch by unveiling its Internet of Things (IoT) strategy on its home front at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference next week in San Francisco.
Apple will lay out a plan to connect a plethora of IoT devices -- light bulbs, thermostats, door locks, washing machines, refrigerators -- with iPhone. Apple's iPhone will serve as a screen to set up each of these IoT devices (since some of them are physically too small to have a screen of their own) and automatically connect them to the home network, after which the iPhone becomes the smart home's all-purpose remote control.
EE Times has learned that the key to its execution is a wireless chip - WiFi, Bluetooth, or Zigbee - and an MCU, combined with a piece of software that allows each IoT device to be certified as an MFi (Made For iPhone/iPad/iPod) device.
The beauty of the scheme is twofold.
First, it's simple.
Simple? That's going to disappoint a lot of bloggers.
Motorola, which Google plans to sell, opened the factory in May 2013. A few months later, Dennis Woodside, the handset unit's chief executive at the time, said it would challenge conventional wisdom that manufacturing in the U.S. is too expensive.
At its peak late last year, the plant employed as many as 3,800 people, most on behalf of contract manufacturer Flextronics International. Today, the factory employs about 700 workers who assemble high-end Moto X smartphones that are sold in the US, a Motorola spokesman said.
Market researcher Strategy Analytics said Motorola sold 900,000 Moto X smartphones world-wide in the first quarter. By comparison, Apple sold 26 million units of its newest iPhone 5S in the same period.
"What we found was that the North American market was exceptionally tough," Motorola President Rick Osterloh said in an interview.
…Late last year, Motorola began pursuing a new "value" strategy to sell smartphones at lower prices than rivals, a strategy Mr. Osterloh said will continue. The smaller profit margins may help Motorola regain market share, though they put more pressure on the company to control costs.
Be interesting to see how Lenovo views the "value" strategy. (Subscription required for full story.)
Until relatively recently most in IT looked upon Graphics Processing Units (GPUs[1]) as specialty technology with dozens or hundreds of cores optimized to run complex mathematical modelling and analysis, numerically intense calculations or for driving sophisticated graphics and rendering. In effect GPUs were for where conventional processors did not have the horsepower to solve specific types of 'scientific' problems that could exploit parallel processing. The implicit specialisation that this represented is, however, changing. GPUs are becoming general purpose, with so-called GPGPUs, and these are likely to enter IT's mainstream because of three separate yet coincidental developments which complement each other.
At HERE we recognize that the world is changing quickly and that mapmaking must evolve. Our plans to incorporate Desti technology into our location platform is aimed at enabling us to better anticipate the questions people have throughout their day.
"At HERE we match people with the places that matter to them, so that they feel like a local wherever they are," said Don Zereski, HERE VP of Search and Places. "We want to create a new class of location services that implicitly understands who you are and what you're looking for, sometimes even before you ask."
Though Desti is less than two years old, it is already meeting people's desires for unique travel experiences. According to the Huffington Post it's a "virtual travel agency that aspires to master human-like judgment and taste."
Started as an iPad app. Unclear if it will remain so. (HERE is the maps division of Nokia - it wasn't sold to Microsoft.)
Brian Chen of the New York Times: "I've been told that the split-screen feature for iOS 8 isn't ready yet and won't be shown at WWDC. Still a work in progress."
The Nokia Lumia 520 is still the most popular Windows Phone ever. That said, other devices are slowly gaining popularity and eating into the Windows Phone device market share that is commanded by the Lumia 520. About 33.7% of all Windows Phone devices out in public right now are the Lumia 520, followed by the Lumia 625 in the number two position with 6.7% and the Lumia 920 in third with 6.2%. The surprise is the Lumia 521 (exclusive to T-Mobile here in the United States) jumping seven spots to take the number four position with 6.0%.
That's a huge gulf - the Lumia 520 (the low-end phone) has been Nokia's salvation (such as it is). "Others" - as in other manufacturers - make up 21.9%. Based on total Lumia shipments since 2010, that suggests there are a maximum of 65m Windows Phone in use.
It looks natural and in keeping with the design and functionality of iOS as it stands today, and looking at "iOS Block" for the first time you might be forgiven for thinking it's a leaked feature from iOS 8. The concept works by expanding your fingers on an existing app icon to get a Block with information like weather forecasts, calendar appointments, and music controls. You can then pinch it back to a normal icon, or place it permanently alongside other icons on the home screen. [Designer Jay] Machalani has created three sizes: iPhone, iPad in portrait, and iPad in landscape orientation. You can have multiple Blocks on a home screen, and the iPad versions leverage the additional space on a tablet display.
Widgets, done in a Windows Phone-style way.
As the Amazon-Hachette showdown continues to dominate talk at BookExpo America this week, many industry insiders are wondering whether any retail player can challenge Amazon's dominance.
Research conducted in March by the Codex Group found that in the month Amazon's share of new book unit purchases was 41%, dominating 65% of all online new book units, print and digital. The company achieved that percentage by not only being the largest channel for e-books, where it had a 67% market share in March, but also by having a commanding slice of the sale of print books online, where its share in March was estimated at 64%.
Amazon and Barnes & Noble are the only two book outlets that have a meaningful share of both the e-book and print markets, assets that are becoming increasingly important as book buyers turn more and more to online channels to purchase books. According to the newest figures from Nielsen Market Research, online outlets accounted for 41% of book purchases in 2013, while bookstore chains accounted for 22%.
Anderson had to help out a friend whose PC became infested with adware after they downloaded what they thought was iTunes - via an advert on Google.
Who is to blame for all this? Well, the warning signs may be obvious to those of us in the trade, but frankly it is not that unreasonable to go to your trusted search engine, type in iTunes, and click the download link.
The blame is with Google (and Bing) for taking money from these advertisers whose aim is to get to you download their intrusive ad-laden extras.
Apple iTunes is free software and you can get it from Apple here.
Note that Google is experimenting with removing the address bar altogether, so you can only navigate the web by searching Google (which is what people do anyway). This would make users even more dependent on the search providers to do the right thing, which as you can see from the above, is not something you can count on.
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