Thursday, May 30, 2013

Microsoft outs the new features in Windows 8.1: Here's what you need to know

from pcworld



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Desktop diehards will find a present waiting for them in Windows 8.1, the impending upgrade colloquially dubbed “Windows Blue.” A wonderful, horrible, oh-so-teasing present.
The Start button is back—but the Start menu isn’t.
Instead, clicking the old familar button will dump you into the modern UI Start screen. While the new feature is notable for adding a helpful visual cue to an operating system rife with hidden menus, it isn’t exactly what people begging for the return of the Start button were looking for.
One much-clamored-for, keyboard- and mouse-friendly feature will be making a debut in Windows 8.1, however. The update adds the option to boot directly to the desktop, bypassing the modern UI start screen completely. (Actually, you can boot into several alternate locations, including the All Apps view.)
Another new option adds the ability to carry your desktop background over to the modern interface, fostering a more unified feel across the OS. If that doesn’t float your boat, new Start screen colors and backgrounds will also be available, including some animated elements. You can also choose to use a slideshow of your pictures for your lock screen, in effect having your PC double as a really expensive digital picture frame when you’re not actively using it.

Moving into modern times

MICROSOFT
The new Snap view in action. Yay split screen!
All that said, most of Windows 8.1’s enhancements are made to bolster the modern environment, not the desktop.
The most welcome improvement is the addition of fully customizable Snap views. No longer will you be locked into the two app, quarter-screen Snap limitations of Windows 8 vanilla. Windows 8.1 adds the ability to resize Snap apps to any ratio you’d like, and includes an option to Snap three apps side-by-side-by-side. You’ll also be able to have multiple instances of an app open and Snapped; Microsoft’s blog post lists two Internet Explorer Windows as an example.
Hate the way that every newly installed app gets plopped on your Start screen? You won’t once Windows 8.1 hits, because that annoying “feature” is going the way of the dodo. Instead, any apps installed from the Windows Store will appear under a new “New” filter in the All Apps view, from which you can chose to pin apps to the Start screen if you so desire. Yay self-determination!
MICROSOFT
The new SkyDrive interface
Windows RT users will be happy to hear that the modern SkyDrive app is gaining the ability to save locally. Currently, you can only use the SkyDrive app to view files already stored in the cloud.
The modern-style PC setting options is also getting a big boost. One of the biggest complaints about Windows 8 is the way it constantly swaps you back and forth between the desktop and modern interfaces, a problem exacerbated by the fact that you have to dive into the desktop control panel to tinker with under-the-hood stuff. No more.
”The updated PC Settings in Windows 8.1 gives you access to all your settings on your device without having to go to the Control Panel on the desktop,” Microsoft’s introductory blog post explains.
Internet Explorer 11 will make its debut in Windows 8.1, as well. While most of the tweaks sounds fairly basic—faster page loads, better touch performance—it’s also adding the tab syncing feature seen in leaked builds of Blue, allowing you to open tabs across multiple Windows 8.1 PCs and tablets.
Speaking of, Windows 8.1 also adds the ability to sync your settings and Start screen apps across multiple devices, assuming you sign in to those devices using an online-connected Microsoft account.
The Windows Store and the default Microsoft apps are also being tweaked, per Microsoft’s new continuous improvement push. The Search charm, meanwhile, is being overhauled to “provide global search results powered by Bing in a rich, simple-to-read, aggregated view of many content sources.” It sounds like it could be either awesome or horrible; I can’t wait to try it.
MICROSOFT
An itty bitty view of the new Bing search. (Click to enlarge slightly.)
More minute improvements include more Live Tile sizing options, additional category filters in the All Apps screen, and a plethora of Start screen tile shuffling options.
So, do these tweaks equate to blue skies or Windows Blah? You’ll be able to judge for yourself on June 26, when Microsoft releases a developer preview of Windows 8.1 to coincide with the BUILD conference.
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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Moto X smartphone is real and will be launched by October

from cnet





Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside said the entire product line would be revamped this summer and fall, and the Moto X would be manufactured in the U.S.
by 
Walt Mossberg (left) with Dennis Woodside and Regina Dugan of Motorola at D11.
(Credit: ATD)
RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. -- Google's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility has not been the search giant's finest hour, at least so far. Motorola lost $271 million for Google in the first quarter of 2013, and it's unclear at this point what the plan is to reinvent the division. And, some Android phone makers aren't totally believing that Motorola won't have some kind of unfair advantage as part of Google. In addition, the European Commission has been looking into how Motorola Mobility might be using its market position to seek and enforce a patent-related injunction against Apple.
Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside attempted to address concerns in an interview Wednesday and let the world know that the company will be launching the rumored Moto X smartphone sometime between now and October. In fact, the entire product line of Motorola smartphones will be revamped, Woodside said during an the D: All Things Digital conference here. "We'll launch a handful of smartphones that aren't the end, but show where the company is heading," he said.
Woodside wouldn't show the Moto X, which he said was in his pocket, but said it was contextually aware of what's going on around it. It can fire up the camera when he takes it out his pocket (he didn't explain how), and it will act differently if you are driving 60 miles an hour in acar.
A phone that persistently understands changes has an impact on battery life. "Motorola has come up with two processors that allow you to do those things" that won't destroy battery life, Woodside said.
"The ability to engage with the phone is different than competitors," he said. The Moto X will be manufactured in the U.S., in a plant outside of Fort Worth, Texas, and employ 2,000 people, Woodside said. He added that carriers are excited about where Motorola is heading.
Woodside addressed how much Google is involved in Motorola's business. He said it is supported by parts of Google, such as finance and legal, but Android is completely independent and Motorola is managed like any other partner. "We are treated as a separate company," he said.
That said, Motorola is doing a deep mind-meld with Google and going for more moonshots, attempting to bring back what Woodside called the "audaciousness and confidence" of the old Motorola, which pioneered the cell phone industry and took its own moonshots, like the failed Iridium satellite project.

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"I sat down with (Google CEO) Larry Page about what we are going to do. We will take it back to the roots of innovation and build devices that have the potential to change people's lives," Woodside said.
Regina Dugan, head of Motorola Advanced Technology & Projects and the former director of DARPA, exhibited some of the projects the company is working on. She showed a wearable, electronic tattoo that could be used for user authentication, as well as a pill with a small chip inside and a battery, from a company called Proteus, that creates a signal in the body and the entire body becomes an authentication token. "That becomes my first superpower," Dugan said. "We aren't shipping this right way.
"Having the boldness to think differently about problems people have every day is a new mindset," Woodside said. He believes that Motorola is now an underdog, despite having Google's money and DNA added to its historic roots, and some of the best and brightest engineers from Google, Apple, and Samsung joining the ranks.
"If you think back to transformative changes in the industry, it's almost never led by a big, incumbent company," Woodside said, noting how Android started as a small company and is now on almost a billion phones. "You don't need to be the biggest guy."
Clearly Apple and Samsung are the dominant smartphone players, but an underdog powered by Google, even at a distance, is a very big dog in the hunt.
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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Google Play For Education Set To Enter Classrooms With A Play Store For Educational Apps [Updates]

from makeuseof




Another one of Google’s I/O announcements, Google Play for Education is a new initiative that aims to make it easier for schools to implement mobile learning in classrooms. Google Play for Education is a customized, curated version of the Play Store designed for K-12 needs. Announcing the launch at the I/O event (Google’s annual developer conference), Google said the education-centric Play Store will launch this fall.
Google Play for Education will contain apps organized by subject and grade level, so when looking for a specific app (e.g. a Math app) for a specific grade level, it will be easily discoverable. The apps will come with recommendations from teachers to ensure quality. App purchases by schools will also be streamlined with app purchases charged to a common school credit card which Google will have on its files. The most interesting feature, however, is that the new Play Store will allow schools to simultaneously download the same app to multiple devices —Google’s cloud infrastructure will push the apps across the board and help schools scale up rapidly.
Playstore
Large scale distribution could enable Google to gain traction in the trending area ofeducational technology. An it won’t end with Android apps, as Google will surely follow this move up with videos and books as well. With Android devices like Nexus 7 on hand, Google could easily cut into Apple’s pie in the education sector. Could it be a win-win situation for schools that can avail of cheaper teaching aids thanks to Google’s push? This remains to be seen.
What do you think of this new initiative? Will you use it?
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Sunday, May 19, 2013

Yahoo Deal Shows Power Shift

from wsj





Tumblr Commands $1.1 Billion Price as Web Giants Circle Fast-Growing Startups

MORE IN TECH »

By JOANN S. LUBLIN, AMIR EFRATI and SPENCER E. ANTE

Yahoo Inc. YHOO -0.23% has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for Tumblr, a six-year-old company with more than 100 million users but very little revenue, a deal that highlights the shifting balance of power in the technology business.

More on Tumblr

In a 2012 interview, Tumblr's David Karp spoke to the Wall Street Journal about how he started the company and where he's headed with it.Read the interview.

Timeline: A Changing Internet Pioneer

See key dates in the history of Yahoo, which helped to revolutionize the Web.
Veterans like Yahoo have shown they have staying power—and they have cash to spend. But companies like Yahoo's target, a blogging site, have something valuable as well: the rapt attention of fast-growing communities of users. That has pushed up the price tags as more established companies fear getting left behind as people's online habits evolve.
Yahoo's board has approved the all-cash deal to buy Tumblr, people familiar with the matter said Sunday. Tumblr's board also has approved the deal, one of the people said. A deal could be announced as soon as Monday, the person said.
Spokeswomen for Yahoo and Tumblr didn't respond to a request for comment.
The transaction would add Yahoo to the list of established Internet companies, including Google Inc. GOOG +0.59%and Facebook Inc., FB +0.46% that have spent $1 billion or more apiece to buy startup companies in hopes of gaining an edge in growth. Facebook, for instance, last year paid cash and stock initially valued at about $1 billion to buy revenue-free Instagram, a popular photo-sharing service.
Google famously paid $1.65 billion in stock seven years ago for YouTube, the online-video behemoth. In a smaller deal, in dollar terms, but one that reflects the appetite among old-line Internet companies for fresh blood, AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million in 2011.
Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's deal for Tumblr would give Yahoo, one of the original big Internet companies, a fast-growing Web service that could fill one of its many holes—namely, the lack of a thriving social-networking and communications hub. Tumblr is popular with many younger adults, in contrast with Yahoo's older customer base. Tumblr is also growing more quickly on smartphones than Yahoo.
Yahoo would be paying a premium for the company. When Tumblr last raised money, in late 2011, the $85 million venture-capital investment it received valued the company at $800 million.
The deal would be a big win for Tumblr CEO and founder David Karp, who remains a large shareholder, and the site's early venture investors, which include Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital.
The acquisition would be a big bet for Yahoo, given Tumblr's financial performance so far. But Yahoo needs the growth. Its annual revenue has been stuck for years around $5 billion, and the company's big presence on personal computers hasn't translated well to mobile devices, where it lacks the advantage of Apple Inc.'s AAPL -0.30%coveted hardware or Google's ubiquitous smartphone operating software, Android.
image
NBC / Associated Press
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's deal for Tumblr would give her company a social-networking and communications hub.
Meanwhile, Facebook and Google have demonstrated that a vast audience for free content can bring in significant advertising revenue.
New York-based Tumblr, founded in 2007, has 175 employees, more than 108 million blogs and, according tocomScore Inc., SCOR +3.85% had nearly 117 million unique users world-wide in March. That is up from around 58 million a year ago. The site is among a number of fast-growing startups, including online scrapbook Pinterest and news aggregation site Reddit.
Tumblr built that following by making it easy for people to create blogs and post writings, photos and videos. Tumblr users can follow other people's updates the way Facebook users follow friends—and easily share their work. With these features, Tumblr lowered the bar for online publishing and effectively merged blogging with social media.
In a pattern typical of young Internet companies, Mr. Karp, the CEO, has focused on increasing his site's user base while placing a lower priority on making money. The company didn't begin placing ads on its service until last year. In recent news reports, Mr. Karp, who once told the Los Angeles Times he was "pretty opposed to advertising," said Tumblr generated $13 million in revenue last year.
Yahoo plans to allow Mr. Karp to continue to run the site and operate largely separately from the rest of Yahoo, people familiar with the matter said.
Yahoo believes it could help Tumblr bring in more money by selling ads—boosting its own revenue in the process, people familiar with the matter said. Tumblr potentially offers personal data on millions of individual users, and an ability to help Web content go "viral" as friends share popular posts. Data is at the heart of Yahoo's ability to sell online advertising across its sites, based on what it knows about its people's interests.
Ms. Mayer, recruited to lead Yahoo last summer after a 13-year career at Google, became interested in Tumblr a couple of months ago, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Its sleek aesthetic fit with her vision for Yahoo, another person said. Last week, All Things Digital, which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.'s NWSA +1.10% Dow Jones & Co., reported that the two companies were in talks.
There are several risks for Yahoo. A popular venue for teens, Tumblr includes many Web pages of racially insensitive, pornographic and other sexually oriented content. Such pages wouldn't be attractive to advertisers. There is also the risk of diminishing Tumblr's appeal among some users with too-aggressive a push to bring in advertising revenue. Writing on his Tumblr blog Saturday, John Saroff, a former Google executive, estimated Tumblr could generate $108 million or more a year based on the rates advertisers generally are willing to pay for graphical ads online.
But he said Tumblr was "correct" to resist filling its site with advertising since doing so could upset its core audience. He added that Tumblr, as a blogging platform, would likely have to get permission from Tumblr blog writers like him before it could place ads on the blogs and share revenue. He compared the business model to that of Google's YouTube video site, where the company shares revenue with video creators.
"It requires product vision, engineering talent, business development work and account management skills that took Google/YouTube years to grow with many fits and starts," Mr. Saroff wrote.
Facebook, concerned about alienating users, has yet to place ads in Instagram. Google also moved carefully in placing ads on YouTube, but the video site has since become a significant revenue generator. Google doesn't break out YouTube's financial information, but Morgan Stanley MS +2.48% recently estimated that YouTube is on track to generate more than $700 million in operating income on about $4 billion in sales.
Ms. Mayer has made a number of moves to expand Yahoo's presence on mobile devices, freshen up its sites and boost its revenue. Acquisitions, however, also have long been expected to be part of her strategy.
Yahoo has a mixed record on the deal front. It acquired photo sharing site Flickr eight years ago but allowed it to be outpaced by new rivals like Instagram. It also explored but never consummated deals over the years with companies like YouTube, ecommerce site eBay Inc., EBAY +1.63% online advertising company DoubleClick and Facebook.
While Ms. Mayer has continued to engage in early-stage deal talks with a wide range of video, social-networking and advertising-technology companies, according to people familiar with the talks, to date, she only has bought small companies for their engineering and product-management talent.
Yahoo recently pulled out of a roughly $200 million deal to buy a controlling interest in the video website Dailymotion, owned by France Telecom SA, because the French government said it would object to the deal, people familiar with the matter have said.
The valuations placed on social media sites like Tumblr make little sense under typical financial analysis. But big technology companies have become more willing to spend large amounts of money on such companies given the financial performance of social media companies such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, executives and investors said.
In the first quarter, Facebook saw $219 million in net income on almost $1.5 billion in sales, as mobile advertising soared to about 30% of its total ad revenue. Last year, Twitter generated $288 million in advertising revenue, according to research firm eMarketer Inc.
image
Bloomberg News
Yahoo recently pulled out of a roughly $200 million deal to buy a controlling interest in the video website Dailymotion.
Write to Joann S. Lublin atjoann.lublin@wsj.com, Amir Efrati atamir.efrati@wsj.com and Spencer E. Ante at spencer.ante@wsj.com
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