garykoelling

It’s no longer a question of whether technology plays a role in marketing, but rather what role the CMO needs to play in selecting the best solution to drive marketing, and ...

Harrison Weber / The Next Web:
Confirmed: Microsoft's revamped Kinect for Xbox One will also come to Windows next year  —  Microsoft has clarified that the next iteration of Kinect, the motion tracking peripheral unveiled alongside the Xbox One earlier this week, will be coming to Windows next year.

In a new book, a historian reveals that during WWII, the British kept three groups of Nazi prisoners captive under condititons that an outraged Churchill demanded be stopped.

As seen on Secrets of the Dead. how British Intelligence bugged their Nazi prisoners and learned about the inner workings of the Third Reich.

Federico Viticci / MacStories:
Evernote Launches Reminders  —  In the years I've spent using and recommending Evernote, I've always noticed a chasm between people who rely on the service to store reference material and notes, and those who want to also use Evernote as a “getting things done” system to keep track of their todos.

John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:
Apple's WWDC Keynote Scheduled for Monday, June 10  —  Apple today said the keynote address for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference will occur on Monday, June 10, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.  Not a big surprise, as that is the day the event kicks off.

ROM corruptions are games played in emulators where the files have been run through a program (for example: Corrupster, and The Vinesauce Corrupter) which makes changes to the game data while still allowing it to remain playable. This results in strange graphical and audial glitches, like character models exploding in to chaotic swirls, garbled sprite assignments, and music distorted in to fascinating new compositions. Some other still image examples from Max Capacity (previously). This forum thread has a guide on how to corrupt ROMs yourself. Some Youtube links NWS due to swearing.

Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Google engineer bashes Microsoft's handling of security researchers, discloses Windows zero-day  —  Microsoft confirms probe of vulnerability hackers could use to gain additional privileges on targeted PCs  —  A Google security engineer accused Microsoft of treating outside researchers with …

Consumers watched 13.2 billion online video ads last month, reaching an all-time high, according to a new report by comScore.

Box indicated on its blog Thursday that the cloud-storage company has “acquired the technology” for the Folders iOS app enabling users to open many kinds of files on the iPhone. The deal marks Box’s third acquisition, closely following on news of the Crocodoc deal.

While Box has been taking an industry-by-industry approach to enterprise adoption, the Crocodoc buy showed that Box is also serious about serving up a slick and intuitive consumer-grade user experience for the enterprise. The Folders deal is more proof of that, and offers important capabilities that keep Box competitive as enterprises let employees bring their own devices — many are iOS based — into the workplace.

Folders code viewer. Source: Folders

In picking up Folders, Box gets an app that can do a bunch of neat tricks. Files can be copied and deleted. The app can work with the Mail app, upload files to a cloud and download pictures to an iPhone’s Camera Roll. Offline access is available. Users can search and flip through pages of PDFs. The app opens Microsoft Office files in full screen. A text editor has support for markdown, and a code viewer lets developers highlight code in preview mode.

Users can also search files stored across Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. But perhaps this support for multiple clouds could fall away as Folders gets absorbed into Box — Google and Dropbox, after all, are key competitors against Box in the fight to be the Dropbox of the enterprise.

The Folders technology will be worked into “the next generation Box for iOS” that’s currently in the works, according to the Box blog post from Sam Schillace, Box’s vice president of engineering. (Schillace will talk with my colleague Derrick Harris at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 20.)

The Folders app was designed by Martin Destagnol, the CEO of Reedian. It’s unclear how Reedian will be affected by the acquisition.

Even though getting enterprise adoption is important, in day-to-day reality, sometimes it’s the small things that matter to people. If enterprise employees see that they can open certain documents on their mobile phones, they might be less likely to get annoyed. And if employee discontent is minimal, companies could end up sticking with Box instead of flocking to other cloud-storage providers. The Folders deal looks like it will help Box move closer in that direction.

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With each new Samsung Galaxy flagship phone, the company is breaking records. On Thursday, Samsung announced the latest one: 10 million Galaxy S 4 sales in the first 30 days after launch. That figure is sales to retailers, not consumers, but it’s an accomplishment nonetheless. And strong U.S. sales should continue, as the Galaxy S 4 became available on Verizon today.

It’s interesting to see the time frame for each Galaxy smartphone to hit the 10 million sales number: It shows how much momentum Samsung has achieved in the past four years. It took seven months for the original Galaxy S to cross the 10 million units sold mark, while the Galaxy S 2 did so in five months. Last year’s Galaxy S 3 crossed the milestone in 50 days and now the current model has done the same in just a month.

All of this makes it more difficult for the Android manufacturers to break back into the market they once enjoyed. For the first quarter of 2013, Strategy Analytics estimated that Samsung has earned nearly 95 percent of the global Android smartphone market profits, leaving a pittance to be divided among LG, HTC and others.

No other Android handset maker has the supply chain chops and component factories to compete with Samsung at this point. And that’s bad news for companies such as HTC, which is facing a time of uncertainty as key executives are leaving the company.

It’s also not the best of situations for consumers. If Samsung continues to dominate, there could be fewer handset choices from other companies. Either that, or we’ll all be using Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface in the future.

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Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:
Lyft Lifts $60 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Gives 30,000 Rides A Week A Year After Launch  —  It was almost one year ago (to the day!) that my colleague Kim Mai-Cutler wrote our first story on Lyft, and how the company was going to offer some lower-priced competition to on-demand ride leader Uber in San Francisco.

Brooklyn mobile app design and development shop Thumb Labs has been acquired — or acqui-hired — by Adobe. Thumb Labs is the group behind the mobile apps for Behance, the design community startup that was bought by Adobe late last year, and Thumb Labs says it specializes in stylish and hip apps for iOS.

Details about the price of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Adobe acquired Behance for close to $150 million, we reported last year. Thumb Labs says in a release:

At the end of this month, the Thumb Labs team will begin focusing our mobile talents on a united mission to empower the creative world.

Thumb Labs has worked on apps like Bondsy, an iPhone app for buying, selling and trading stuff with your friends. Fast.co.design described it recently as eBay for the Instagram set.

The mobile app design purchase is part of Adobe’s vision of using the cloud to empower designers and the design tech community. Adobe has been integrating Behance into its own Creative Cloud community and tool-sharing site that it launched for designers and developers early last year.

Designers are officially the rockstars of the tech industry. We’ll be featuring the tech industry’s most innovative and forward-thinking experience designers at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco (tickets will go on sale this Summer, and sign up here to get first access to them).

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Magic Hat Brewery is facing a ban in several Lexington, Kentucky establishments after a recent lawsuit against local business West Sixth Brewery. Many are dubious about the claims being made regarding copyright infringement. The Consumerist offers a visual guide to some of the potential similarities between the designs. West Sixth claims that they are experiencing corporate bullying and have asked the community to sign a petition and stop drinking Magic Hat, while Magic Hat argues that West Sixth has been less than straightforward with the public. West Sixth responds with further claims of corporate chicanery.

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Shazam Revamps Its iPad App For Second Screen Action, Can Now “AutoTag” In Background While You Watch TV  —  Although the majority of Shazam's over 93 million U.S. users still use the app on their smartphones to identify, tag and share the songs they're “hearing,” a growing chunk of that user base …

Apple is well known for not putting a whole lot of effort into its D.C. lobbying game. But after a week that saw it unwittingly become the poster child for tax-dodging multinational corporations, it might need to step it up — if only to get some politicians off its back. But according to a report on Thursday, Apple is already on pace to spread more money around Washington this year than ever before.

Apple may spend almost $4 million on lobbying this year as in 2012, reports Reuters. That’s low of course, but for Apple it’s a pretty hefty increase:

The company spent about $2 million on lobbying last year, up from $180,000 in 1999, records show. This year it is on pace to nearly double last year’s figure.

As the report notes, what Apple is spending on policy efforts is tiny compared to its peers Google and Microsoft, which spent $16.5 million and $8.1 million, respectively, on lobbying efforts last year.

But having a larger presence in the nation’s capital and making friends with the policymakers that can wield great power over its reputation and fortunes may just be something Apple has to do. (One political reporter described Apple’s tax hearing as simply a “shakedown” by politicians angered by Apple’s proud D.C. outsider stance.)

CEO Tim Cook fared very well under questioning from senators on Tuesday, deflecting questions patiently about his company’s legal tax practices. He said he wanted people to hear Apple’s story directly from him, which is why he appeared before a Senate subcommittee this week. But it’s probably not something he wants to do on a regular basis. And making suggestions about corporate tax policy changes, as he did, may not be enough. What money Apple decides to spend on lobbying in the future will probably need to support his policy proposals if he wants to see any of them taken seriously — and keep Apple out of the spotlight.

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Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Nvidia launches its GeForce GTX 780 for PC gaming that is faster than Xbox One  —  You could wait for the Microsoft Xbox One or the Sony PlayStation 4 to arrive this fall, or you could play PC games with better graphics now.  Nvidia is launching its GeForce GTX 780 graphics chip today …

While national media coverage of state politics has focused on hot-button topics like gun control and gay rights, a storm has been quietly brewing in Raleigh, NC, where the NAACP has organized protests calling attention to the regressive agenda of the Republican governor and NC General Assembly. Known as "Moral Mondays," these protests have resulted in nearly 160 arrests -- and they're getting bigger each week. With the GA taking a break for Memorial Day, the next showdown is set for June 3.

Intel has been angling to get its processors into the mobile network for years. Now thanks to partnership with Nokia Siemens Networks it’s finally getting its chance.

At CTIA Wireless Thursday, NSN and Intel said they have begun jointly building a mobile edge computing architecture that would put applications servers at every cell site. The partnership is an extension of NSN’s Liquid Applications strategy, which it unveiled at Mobile World Congress with IBM.

The idea is to transform the radio access network from a mere delivery network to one that hosts content and services. Such an architecture would not only put video and content closer to mobile subscribers, but it would make such Liquid Apps much more network-aware apps. Here’s how I described when NSN first partnered with IBM:

Mobile applications and radio infrastructure have always been walled off from one another – applications just barrel ahead onto their radio on-ramps oblivious to the highway traffic conditions ahead. What NSN proposes to do with Liquid Apps is to make those disparate portions of the network work in unison.

For example, mobile video today can be a precarious proposition. As video viewers rack up in a particular cell, the network will keep trying to cram those video streams into the same limited airwaves, The result is a backed-up network with no one getting a quality video stream – or any stream at all. By processing video at the cell site, though, the base station could make decisions how to deliver those individual video feeds based on the prevailing network conditions.

If the cell is congested, then the base station downgrades the video quality of every stream, ensuring everyone sees a decent-quality picture. And as users gradually vacate the cell, the base station could gradually boost video quality for those that remain.

At the heart of Liquid Apps is an application server utilizing Intel’s Crystal Forest platform for network infrastructure and a boatload of Xeon silicon. Those servers would perform the localized processing and content storage as well as maintain a constant collaborative link with the radio base station.

This is some pretty cool technology, but there’s a scary aspect to it, too. Technically the Liquid Apps architecture could be used to optimize all content traversing the network by acting as a traffic cop that dictates the flow of different types of data before they enter the airwaves. But Intel and NSN are also proposing that carriers sell Liquid Apps as a service to developers and content providers.

In such a scenario, a YouTube or a Netflix could pay to have their content not just hosted at then cell site but also prioritized as it leaves the tower. It’s a pay to play model that doesn’t exactly sit well with net neutrality principles — content providers that choose not to participate might see their customers’ experience suffer.

U.S. carriers like Verizon and AT&T are already talking up two-sided revenue models in which content providers subsidize their customers’ data usage on the mobile internet. Liquid Apps could become another tool in that pay-to-play arsenal.

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Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:
With New Mobile App, Nextdoor Unveils Its Take on the Neighborhood Watch  —  Think of what you're used to in a local neighborhood-watch group: Signs posted around a community with contact information, perhaps monthly meetings to discuss safety issues and concerns.

While the goals of your business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DC) plans haven’t changed much, the tools available to support them have. On-premise storage has become cheaper and more manageable, while cloud-based solutions are faster, more secure and more reliable than ever before. From tape to disk to cloud to the software and appliances that ties them together, the BC/DR landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Understanding the new value propositions of each type of tool will help businesses revamp their BC/DR infrastructure to build a more responsive, cost-effective, future-proof system and avoid costly surprises.

In this webinar, our panel will address these questions:

• What tools and technologies are leading-edge businesses using for BC/DR, and how are they using them?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of tape, disk, cloud and other BC/DR technologies?
• What does the future look like for BC/DR technologies?
• What balance of on-site and cloud-based technologies is appropriate for a modern, cost-effective BC/DR strategy?

Our speakers include:

• Cormac Foster, research director, GigaOM Research
• Logan Kleier, GigaOM Research analyst and information security officer, City of Portland
• George Crump, GigaOM Research analyst and chief steward, Storage Switzerland
• Justin Moore, Chief Executive Officer, Axcient

Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Axcient for “Future-proofing business continuity and disaster recovery,” a free analyst webinar on June 6, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. PT.