Maxim Bange

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

After Earth is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week

Well, it's finally happened.

The reality of the three government crises (budget and debt ceiling in the US, governmental collapse in Italy) is hitting home.

And markets are finally feeling it.

Over the weekend, the US Congress failed to agree on a budget, and the Italian government lurched towards collapse, as Berlusconi's party said it was withdrawing from the coalition.

US futures are sharply in the red with Dow futures off 100 points.

Here's a look at the Dow futures drop from FinViz:

Meanwhile, Japan is really taking it on the chin.

The Nikkei is off nearly 2%.

And dollar-yen is back below 98, as the yen surges thanks to its role as a safe-haven.

For more on what's going on this weekend, see here.

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Mantle aims to replace the need for Direct X offering access to GPU features

It's widely used on Windows PCs

Filed under ‘maybe’

The Long Dark's Kickstarter campaign now includes a $1,000 tier that awards backers all future games from the developer, Hinterland Studio announced via Kickstarter.

The Long Dark is Hinterland's first-person post-disaster sim game in which players must learn to survive in the wilderness after a catastrophic event. There are 10 spots total, two of which have already been claimed, for the Founder's Status tier. This includes early access to the game, limited edition prints, a hardcover coffee table book and more, in addition to future titles. According to the update, receiving Founder's Status is a way of saying thank you "for believing in us." Founder's Status backers receive information on any future projects and access to their betas.

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More than a century has passed since construction began on the Sagrada Familia, the ornate Barcelona church designed by famed architect Antoni Gaudi, and it will be another 13 years before it's finished. This week, the architects responsible for finishing the basilica published a video animation of what the Sagrada Familia will look like in 2026, when construction is expected to be completed.

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HPAKANT, Myanmar (Reuters) - Tin Tun picked all night through teetering heaps of rubble to find the palm-sized lump of jade he now holds in his hand. He hopes it will make him a fortune. It's happened before.

"Last year I found a stone worth 50 million kyat," he said, trekking past the craters and slag heaps of this notorious jade-mining region in northwest Myanmar. That's about $50,000 - and it was more than enough money for Tin Tun, 38, to buy land and build a house in his home village.

But rare finds by small-time prospectors like Tin Tun pale next to the staggering wealth extracted on an industrial scale by Myanmar's military, the tycoons it helped enrich, and companies linked to the country where most jade ends up: China.

Almost half of all jade sales are "unofficial" - that is, spirited over the border into China with little or no formal taxation. This represents billions of dollars in lost revenues that could be spent on rebuilding a nation shattered by nearly half a century of military dictatorship.

Official statistics confirm these missing billions. Myanmar produced more than 43 million kg of jade in fiscal year 2011/12 (April to March). Even valued at a conservative $100 per kg, it was worth $4.3 billion. But official exports of jade that year stood at only $34 million.

Official Chinese statistics only deepen the mystery. China doesn't publicly report how much jade it imports from Myanmar. But jade is included in official imports of precious stones and metals, which in 2012 were worth $293 million - a figure still too small to explain where billions of dollars of Myanmar jade has gone.

Such squandered wealth symbolizes a wider challenge in Myanmar, an impoverished country whose natural resources - including oil, timber and precious metals - have long fueled armed conflicts while enriching only powerful individuals or groups. In a rare visit to the heart of Myanmar's secretive jade-mining industry in Hpakant, Reuters found an anarchic region where soldiers and ethnic rebels clash, and where mainland Chinese traders rub shoulders with heroin-fueled "handpickers" who are routinely buried alive while scavenging for stones.

Myint Aung, Myanmar's Minister of Mines, did not reply to written questions from Reuters about the jade industry's missing millions and social costs.

Since a reformist government took office in March 2011, Myanmar has pinned its economic hopes on the resumption of foreign aid and investment. Some economists argue, however, that Myanmar's prosperity and unity may depend upon claiming more revenue from raw materials.

There are few reliable estimates on total jade sales that include unofficial exports. The Harvard Ash Center, which advises Myanmar's quasi-civilian government, has possibly the best numbers available.

After sending researchers to the area this year, the Harvard Ash Center published a report in July that put sales of Burmese jade at about $8 billion in 2011. That's more than double the country's revenue from natural gas and nearly a sixth of its 2011 GDP.

"Practically nothing is going to the government," David Dapice, the report's co-author, told Reuters. "What you need is a modern system of public finance in which the government collects some part of the rents from mining this stuff."

HIDING STONES

Chinese have prized jade for its beauty and symbolism for millennia. Many believe wearing jade jewelry brings good fortune, prosperity and longevity. It is also viewed as an investment, a major factor driving China's appetite for Burmese jade. "Gold is valuable, but jade is priceless," runs an old Chinese saying.

Jade is not only high value but easy to transport. "Only the stones they cannot hide go to the emporiums," said Tin Soe, 53, a jade trader in Hpakant, referring to the official auctions held in Myanmar's capital of Naypyitaw.

The rest is smuggled by truck to China by so-called "jockeys" through territory belonging to either the Burmese military or the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), both of whom extract tolls. The All China Jade Trade Association, a state-linked industry group based in Beijing, declined repeated requests for an interview.

Hpakant lies in Kachin State, a rugged region sandwiched strategically between China and India. Nowhere on Earth does jade exist in such quantity and quality. "Open the ground, let the country abound," reads the sign outside the Hpakant offices of the Ministry of Mines.

In fact, few places better symbolize how little Myanmar benefits from its fabulous natural wealth. The road to Hpakant has pot-holes bigger than the four-wheel-drive cars that negotiate it. During the rainy season, it can take nine hours to reach from Myitkyina, the Kachin state capital 110 km (68 miles) away.

Non-Burmese are rarely granted official access to Hpakant, but taxi-drivers routinely take Chinese traders there for exorbitant fees, part of which goes to dispensing bribes at police and military checkpoints. The official reason for restricting access to Hpakant is security: the Burmese military and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) have long vied for control of the road, which is said to be flanked with land-mines. But the restrictions also serve to reduce scrutiny of the industry's biggest players and its horrific social costs: the mass deaths of workers and some of the highest heroin addiction and HIV infection rates in Myanmar.

There are also "obvious" links between jade and conflict in Kachin State, said analyst Richard Horsey, a former United Nations senior official in Myanmar. A 17-year ceasefire between the military and the KIA ended when fighting erupted in June 2011. It has since displaced at least 100,000 people.

"Such vast revenues - in the hands of both sides - have certainly fed into the conflict, helped fund insurgency, and will be a hugely complicating factor in building a sustainable peace economy," Horsey said.

The United States banned imports of jade, rubies and other Burmese gemstones in 2008 in a bid to cut off revenue to the military junta which then ruled Myanmar, also known as Burma. But soaring demand from neighboring China meant the ban had little effect. After Myanmar's reformist government took power, the United States scrapped or suspended almost all economic and political sanctions - but not the ban on jade and rubies. It was renewed by the White House on August 7 in a sign that Myanmar's anarchic jade industry remains a throwback to an era of dictatorship. The U.S. Department of the Treasury included the industry in activities that "contribute to human rights abuses or undermine Burma's democratic reform process."

Foreign companies are not permitted to extract jade. But mining is capital intensive, and it is an open secret that most of the 20 or so largest operations in Hpakant are owned by Chinese companies or their proxies, say gem traders and other industry insiders in Kachin State. "Of course, some (profit) goes to the government," said Yup Zaw Hkawng, chairman of Jadeland Myanmar, the most prominent Kachin mining company in Hpakant. "But mostly it goes into the pockets of Chinese families and the families of the former (Burmese) government."

Other players include the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd (UMEHL), the investment arm of the country's much-feared military, and Burmese tycoons such as Zaw Zaw, chairman of Max Myanmar, who made their fortunes collaborating with the former junta.

THE CHINA CONNECTION

Soldiers guard the big mining companies and sometimes shoot in the air to scare off small-time prospectors. "We run like crazy when we see them," said Tin Tun, the handpicker.

UMEHL is notoriously tight-lipped about its operations. "Stop bothering us," Major Myint Oo, chief of human resources at UMEHL's head office in downtown Yangon, told Reuters. "You can't just come in here and meet our superiors. This is a military company. Some matters must be kept secret."

This arrangement, whereby Chinese companies exploit natural resources with military help, is both familiar and deeply controversial in Myanmar.

Last year, protests outside the Letpadaung copper mine in northwest Myanmar triggered a violent police crackdown. The mine's two operators - UMEHL and Myanmar Wanbao, a unit of Chinese weapons manufacturer China North Industries Corp - shared most of the profits, leaving the government with just 4 percent. That contract was revised in July in an apparent attempt to appease public anger. The government now gets 51 percent of the profits, while UMEHL and Myanmar Wanbao get 30 and 19 percent respectively.

China's domination of the jade trade could feed into a wider resentment over its exploitation of Myanmar's natural wealth. A Chinese-led plan to build a $3.6 million dam at the Irrawaddy River's source in Kachin State - and send most of the power it generated to Yunnan Province - was suspended in 2011 by President Thein Sein amid popular outrage.

The national and local governments should also get a greater share of Kachin State's natural wealth, say analysts and activists. That includes gold, timber and hydropower, but especially jade.

A two-week auction held in the capital Naypyitaw in June sold a record-breaking $2.6 billion in jade and gems. But jade tax revenue in 2011 amounted to only 20 percent of the official sales. Add in all the "unofficial" sales outside of the emporium, and Harvard calculates an effective tax rate of about 7 percent on all Burmese jade.

It is, on the other hand, highly lucrative for the mining companies, whose estimated cost of production is $400 a ton, compared with an official sales figure of $126,000 a ton, the report said.

"Kachin, and by extension Myanmar, cannot be peaceful and politically stable without some equitable sharing of resource revenues with the local people," said analyst Horsey.

THE PECKING ORDER

At the top of the pecking order in Hpakant are cashed-up traders from China, who buy stones displayed on so-called "jade tables" in Hpakant tea-shops. The tables are run by middleman called laoban ("boss" in Chinese), who are often ethnic Chinese. They buy jade from, and sometimes employ, handpickers like Tin Tun.

The handpickers are at the bottom of the heap - literally. They swarm in their hundreds across mountains of rubble dumped by the mining companies. It is perilous work, especially when banks and slag heaps are destabilized by monsoon rain. Landslides routinely swallow 10 or 20 men at a time, said Too Aung, 30, a handpicker from the Kachin town of Bhamo.

"Sometimes we can't even dig out their bodies," he said. "We don't know where to look."

In 2002, at least a thousand people were killed when flood waters inundated a mine, Jadeland Myanmar chairman Yup Zaw Hkawng told Reuters. Deaths are common but routinely concealed by companies eager to avoid suspending operations, he said.

The boom in Hpakant's population coincided with an exponential rise in opium production in Myanmar, the world's second-largest producer after Afghanistan. Its derivative, heroin, is cheap and widely available in Kachin State, and Hpakant's workforce seems to run on it.

About half the handpickers use heroin, while others rely on opium or alcohol, said Tin Soe, 53, a jade trader and a local leader of the opposition National League for Democracy party. "It's very rare to find someone who doesn't do any of these," he said.

Official figures on heroin use in Hpakant are hard to get. The few foreign aid workers operating in the area, mostly working with drug users, declined comment for fear of upsetting relations with the Myanmar government. But health workers say privately about 40 percent of injecting drug users in Hpakant are HIV positive - twice the national average.

Drug use is so intrinsic to jade mining that "shooting galleries" operate openly in Hpakant, with workers often exchanging lumps of jade for hits of heroin.

Soe Moe, 39, came to Hpakant in 1992. Three years later, he was sniffing heroin, then injecting it. His habit now devours his earnings as a handpicker. "When I'm on (heroin), I feel happier and more energetic. I work better," he said. The shooting gallery he frequents accommodates hundreds of users. "The place is so busy it's like a festival," he said. Soe Moe said he didn't fear arrest, because the gallery owners paid off the police.

MOVING MOUNTAINS

Twenty years ago, Hpakant was controlled by KIA insurgents who for a modest fee granted access to small prospectors. Four people with iron picks could live off the jade harvested from a small plot of land, said Yitnang Ze Lum of the Myanmar Gems and Jewellery Entrepreneurs Association (MGJEA) in Myitkyina.

A 1994 ceasefire brought most of Hpakant back under government control, and large-scale extraction began, with hundreds of backhoes, earthmovers and trucks working around the clock. "Now even a mountain lasts only three months," said Yitnang Ze Lum.

Many Kachin businessmen, unable to compete in terms of capital or technology, were shut out of the industry. Non-Kachin workers poured in from across Myanmar, looking for jobs and hoping to strike it rich.

The mines were closed in mid-2012 when the conflict flared up again. Myanmar's military shelled suspected KIA positions; the rebels retaliated with ambushes along the Hpakant road. Thousands of people were displaced.Jade production plunged to just 19.08 million kg in the 2012/13 fiscal year from 43.1 million kg the previous year. But the government forged a preliminary ceasefire with the Kachin rebels in May, and some traders predict Hpakant's mines will re-open when the monsoon ends in October.

When operations are in full swing, the road to Hpakant is clogged with vehicles bringing fuel in and jade out. Such is the scale and speed of modern extraction, said Yitnang Ze Lum, Hpakant's jade could be gone within 10 years.

"Every Kachin feels passionately that their state's resources are being taken away," a leading Myitkyina gem trader told Reuters on condition of anonymity. "But we're powerless to stop them."

(Andrew R.C. Marshall reported from Myitkyina; Min Zayar Oo reported from Hpakant; Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing

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Last week more than a dozen companies had IPOs and among them was an interesting bio-tech company called Foundation Medicine.

Foundation offers to the public the kind of in-detailed genetic cancer testing made famous by Steve Jobs. Jobs was the first well-known person to try this sort of thing.

For about $6,000, this test uncovers all the genetic mutations that lead to a person’s tumor. It's helping to usher in a new era of "personalized medicine" where doctors choose cancer treatments based on genetic knowledge.

Jobs spent some $100,000 to have this kind of test done, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, and in the end, it obviously didn't save him.

But he deeply believed in the value of the attempt, saying “I’m either going to be one of the first to be able to outrun a cancer like this, or I’m going to be one of the last to die from it,” reports Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review.

After Jobs died, the doctors who worked on the test at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, left Broad to start Foundation. Bill Gates and Larry Page both visited Jobs shortly before his death, according to Isaacson,  and while they could do nothing to help him, they did help fund Foundation.

Bill Gates was part of the company's initial $13.5 million round and still owns 4%, according to documents filed with the SEC.

Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google, was part of a long list of VCs that later kicked in cash, and still owns 9%. In fact, foundation raised a whopping $251 million from investors in two years.

With its IPO last week, Foundation raised another $106 million and investors have already done well. It's shares opened at $18, above its range of $14 to $16, and the stock has nearly doubled, to above $35.

SEE ALSO: The Hardware Facebook Invented Is Radically Changing The $150 Billion Enterprise Market

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It's National Coffee Day, which means that coffee lovers are proudly proclaiming their favorite spots for a cup of joe.

Foursquare, a location-based app that allows users to check into certain places, released a list of the most popular coffee shops in the U.S., based on the number of people who checked into them.

Here are the 10 most popular coffee shops in America, according to Foursquare users:

Cafe Du Monde, New Orleans, LA

Famed for its fried beignets and its creamy café au lait, New Orleans' Cafe Du Monde draws in tons of tourists (and some locals) every day.

La Colombe Torrefaction (NOHO location), New York, NY

La Colombe is a coffee roasting company that sources its beans from around the world, including Ethiopia, Panama, and Uganda. It also has several cafes in the U.S. (and one in Seoul), but Foursquare users seem to love their NOHO location, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan.

Stumptown Coffee Roasters, New York, NY

The iconic hipster coffee shop is known for its dark roast blends and its hip atmosphere. It's located inside the Ace Hotel, but locals migrate here for good, strong coffee every day. 

Sightglass Coffee, San Francisco, CA

Tech celebrities often conduct their meetings in this cool, open space. (Jack Dorsey is an investor here, so you'll probably pay with Square.) Foursquare users rave about the quality of the basic espresso shot.

Four Barrel Coffee, San Francisco, CA

Hipsters love this Mission coffee shop, parking themselves at tables for hours to relax or work over a strong cup of espresso. 

Blue Bottle Coffee (Mint Plaza location), San Francisco, CA

Blue Bottle is a local chain with several spots around the Bay Area, but locals and techies love the Mint Plaza location, which is always bustling.

Starbucks (Pike Place location), San Francisco, CA

Before scoffing at the fact that a Starbucks made this list, remember that this is THE original Starbucks location in the U.S., in Seattle's Pike Place market. It even looks different from all other Starbucks, with a different logo and bags of coffee beans for decor. This place is a tourist attraction, so it's always packed.

Birch Coffee (Flatiron location), New York, NY

Sip your coffee on a comfy couch in the hidden library upstairs or fill up a growler of cold brewed coffee and take it to go.

85°C Bakery Cafe, Irvine, CA

85°C Bakery Cafe is a Taiwanese import that has some creative drinks and pastries, like a salted latte, Mochi-filled coffee bread and squid-ink garlic cheese buns.

Intelligentsia Coffee (Millennium Park location), Chicago, IL

Intelligentsia Coffee is Chicago's coffee-loving hipster hangout. The coffee beans are of such high quality that locals recommend ordering it black—and pairing it with a fresh macaron for a sweet taste.

SEE ALSO: The 10 Most Popular Burger Joints In America

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It's International Coffee Day. And there's little doubt that America's love for coffee has had an impact on coffee prices.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes consumer price index (CPI) data, coffee prices have been falling since 2012.

But they're  up 38% in the last decade. This compares to just 14% for other beverage materials.

From the BLS:

The decline in coffee prices in 2012 and 2013 follows a sharp increase in prices in 2011. The CPI for coffee was 21 percent higher in January 2012 than in January 2010. Despite the recent price declines, the CPI for coffee was 38 percent higher in August 2013 than it had been 10 years earlier.

Prices for roasted coffee generally have increased more rapidly over the past decade than prices for instant and freeze dried coffee. The CPI for roasted coffee was 41 percent higher in August 2013 than in August 2003. By comparison, the CPI for instant and freeze dried coffee increased 23 percent over the same time period.

If coffee is not your cup of tea, you may be interested to know that prices for other beverage materials, including tea, increased 14 percent from August 2003 to August 2013.

SEE ALSO: 10 Nasty Things Drinking Too Much Coffee Does To You

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De Cygnus-capsule is na een week vertraging gekoppeld aan het internationale ruimtestation ISS.

De raket met de capsule vertrok op 18 september en zou vorige week zondag aankomen. Door navigatieproblemen werd die datum niet gehaald. De software van de Cygnus-capsule en het ISS bleken niet naast elkaar te kunnen werken.

Aan boord van de capsule zit bijna 600 kilo voedsel en kleding voor de drie bemanningsleden van de ISS. De onbemande raket werd gelanceerd vanaf een ruimtebasis op de Amerikaanse staat Virginia.

Orbital Science voerde de lancering uit. Het bedrijf is de tweede commerciële partner van de NASA die een bevoorradingsvlucht uitvoert. Als NASA tevreden is met de samenwerking, mag Orbital Science het ISS in totaal acht keer bevoorraden.

It's easy to get completely addicted to coffee on Wall Street.

When you start out as a young analyst, the boring hours between spreadsheets and pitch books are spent going on Starbucks runs. 

And of course, everyone needs a pick-me-up working those 14 hour days.

You can drink too much coffee, however, and that  can be harmful to your body. Research indicates that ingesting too much caffeine (500-600 mgs or 5 or more cups of coffee) can cause anything from restlessness to muscle tremors.

So keep all this in mind when you order your next double shot of espresso.

It can make you hear things.

According to a study by the University of Melborune, coffee is "the most commonly used psychoactive drug," and drinking more than 5 cups a day can have you hearing things.

Researchers gave 92 subjects large amounts of coffee and then had them listen to white noise.

From The Daily Mail:

Professor Simon Crowe, of La Trobe University in Melbourne, said: "We also told them that within the white noise there may be parts of the song White Christmas and if you hear it, press a button. We didn’t include White Christmas in the white noise but found that more people who were very stressed and had high levels of caffeine thought they heard the song. The combination of caffeine and stress affect the likelihood of an individual experiencing a psychosis-like symptom."

It can damage your liver.

According to studies by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, while moderate amounts of coffee can help the liver to detoxify the body, too much can have to opposite effect and hinder your liver's function. This is especially true if you're taking high doses of common over-the-counter pain medication.

It can raise your blood pressure.

That's according to a Carnegie Mellon study which also says that coffee can stimulate the heart and cause shallow breathing.

Consider this: You can polish your mind with knowledge until it is a blinding shine, but if you don't externalize it, no one will recognize it.

Success is all about being noticed. You get noticed by showing the goods.

By adopting the following habits, you'll televise your qualities to the world (discreetly, of course).

Just watch how people react to you.

Brag Discreetly

I cannot emphasize the word discreetly enough.

If you trumpet all your achievements and pricey possessions, you will lose everyone's respect. You want people to know that you're making it without coming off as a boaster; slip things into conversation casually. State your accomplishments as matter-of-factly as possible without the detailed trimmings, or slip them into stories.

For instance, say: "I went to New Zealand on vacation. I had some extra money from the bonus I got for increasing our sales one year." This presentation allows you to stick to the facts and incorporate an achievement into a pertinent story.

But don't make it all about you. Give credit where credit is due. By recognizing success in your peers, you invite praise to be reciprocated in the future.

Be A Good Communicator

Do you ever wonder why companies today spend so much money on PR?

The reason is that effective communication has never been so important. You need to have the right words to communicate the right meaning, and remove any room for misinterpretation by people that are hungry to point out flaws.

The trick?

Choose your words carefully. Be specific and pay attention to context. Words can be warped beyond recognition if used carelessly. Relating only the bare essentials helps in this matter. And if you don't have anything nice to say about people, don't bother saying anything at all.

Listen to others. Really listen. Don't just nod while you wait for them to finish talking. You never know what valuable information could be couched in simple banter. Listen everywhere, even to conversations around the office. Sometimes, there's gold to be found in gossip.

Exit Graciously

Sometimes, you just need to cut a conversation short or leave important company on a dime.

You could just stand there listening politely, but you have better things to do. A successful person knows how to steer conversation with class, and can end one just as gracefully. Don't make excuses for your departure, because you don't have to.

Besides, excuses sound dishonest. Instead, thank the other party for their time and bid them farewell. That's it. It's all about taking command of situations with style.

Like every iPhone processor before it, the A8 chip in Apple's next flagship phone will still be made by Samsung, but according to Korean daily Hankyung, the majority of the manufacturing will be handled by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). Citing industry sources, the newspaper reported Sunday that TSMC will be responsible for 60 to 70 percent of the manufacturing of the A8 processor, with the remainder going to Samsung. The South Korea-based company has reportedly signed a deal to manufacture the chip, though it the contract is estimated to cover just 30 to 40 percent of total production for the A8.

A report published last week revealed that Samsung manufactured the A7 processor in the recently released iPhone 5S,...

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Coffee addicts, rejoice. In honor of National Coffee Day on Sunday, Sept. 29, we're rounding up the best apps you can use to get your coffee fix. 

1. Starbucks, Free — The official app from the coffee giant has a wide variety of handy features. Find the store closest to you with the store locator, view nutrition information, and build your own drink.

You can even manage your Starbucks Card balance, track your Stars in the Starbucks Rewards program, and send an eGift to a friend. 

2. CoffeeGuru, $1.99  — If you love coffee but big chains aren't your thing, this app will make it easy to find independent coffee shops wherever you happen to be. CoffeeGuru lists more than 7,200 coffeehouses in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, so check this app before you travel to a new city.

Use the app's flavor wheel to impress your friends with your description of the coffee's taste. This app will also give you more info about Direct and Fair Trade roasting and which coffee shops roast their own beans. 

3. Spro, $1.99 — Learn to make your favorite coffee drink at home with Spro, an app that provides step-by-step instructions for a ton of different caffeinated beverages. It also includes facts and proper pronunciation for coffee drinks.

4. Percolator, $2.99 — Love the bubbles on top of your coffee? This app makes them appear on your photos. Adjust the size and color of circles to turn your photos into coffee-inspired mosaic masterpieces. This app is only superficially about coffee, but it's still fun. 

5. Art of Coffee, $2.99 — If you ever wondered how your local barista makes those artful foam designs on top of your morning latte, look no further. Art of Coffee teaches users how to make 30 different patterns out of foam, from a rosette to a heart.

6. New York: Coffee Guide, Free — Find reviews, ratings, and photos of independent coffee shops around New York City. This app saves time by only showing coffee shops that are open near you at the time of your search, and you can easily see which stores have free WiFi right from the search results. 

7. CoffeeTalk, $0.99 — Learn the lingo with CoffeeTalk, a dictionary of coffee terms like "affogato," "Americano," and "skinny moo."

SEE ALSO: The Best Coffee Shops In San Francisco

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GTA Online, a free, but separate component of Grand Theft Auto 5, arrives for everyone who purchased the game in an attempt to expand the game's reach and lifespan.

But why?

I sat down with Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser recently to talk to him about the art of game creation, the power of GTA 5's triple protagonist approach and if single player games can still attract a big audience.

That last point, answered easily by GTA 5's record $1 billion sales pace, presents a more meaningful question as well: If single player games are so popular and Rockstar is so good at making them, why bother with online?

But first Houser addresses the question of the value of single player, offline games in an increasingly multiplayer,...

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• Many social media marketers are moving away from metrics that purport to measure ROI. They've realized that social media isn't a transactional engine or sales machine.
• Social media is mainly good at building brand presence and deepening relationships with customers. It makes sense to benchmark social media strategies according to what social media is good at doing, rather than using weak metrics to try and get at the dollar impact of a campaign.
• The metrics to watch are audience reach, engagement, and sentiment. On Facebook, it's always important to remember that due to algorithmic filtering, brand or business posts will only be seen by an average 16% of their fans.
• Most basic metrics like number of fans or likes are known as "vanity metrics," because they don't offer much beyond making social media managers feel good about themselves.
• Insights, Facebook's built-in analytics tool, offers great basic data for measuring reach and engagement. We show you how to transform those numbers into richer and more valuable metrics.
• Facebook shares are particularly valuable, because normal users' posts are seen in a relatively high percentage of friends' news feeds (compared to posts by brand pages); between 29 and 35% according to one study.
• Surprisingly few brands and businesses use metrics to perform a competitive analysis of how they stack up against other brands on social media platforms.

Executive Summary: Why Metrics Are Misused And How To Use Them Properly

Growth in social media budgets means there is more interest than ever among marketers on how to track and improve their social media activity, particularly their Facebook campaigns. Survey results indicate that marketers are starting to move away from tracking dollar-value ROI in favor metrics that measure what social media actually does (i.e., building brand awareness, and cultivating an engaged fan base).

Unfortunately, many of the metrics offered by Facebook Insights and other social media analytics platforms are misused, misunderstood, or both. They're often referred to as "vanity metrics" because they don't do much beyond helping social media managers pad out their PowerPoint presentations.

It's important to remember that metrics are indicators. Even the best ones can only tell part of the story, not the whole story. Using complementary indicators to cover weak spots in individual metrics makes it possible to extract actionable insights from a number. In this report, we offer a handful of examples on how to do this, including how to get a better idea of brand awareness from reach indicators.

The best package of social media metrics will analyze activity, impact, and competitive context.

Activity metrics measure what the social media manager is doing. Impact indicators measure results. Competition indicators put activity and impact indicators in context by comparing them to numbers attained by competing brands in the same industry.

In this report, we'll focus on Facebook, but our advice and guidelines can be easily adapted for other social media platforms.

Click here for the PDF version of this report »
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The End Of Social ROI

Most social media professionals are awash in data. Their high-tech tools produce a fire hose-stream of analytics. But there's a sense in the social media industry that most of the data is dispensable, at least in its raw form.

The frustration is palpable. But trying to measure and single out ROI as the holy grail of social media analytics is not the answer.

The obsession with ROI is still out there. In a survey earlier this year, marketers said that figuring out how to measure ROI ranked third on the list of the questions about social media they needed answered.

But many social media managers are moving to metrics that benchmark social media's primary value — as a powerful audience-building and customer relations platform. They're getting away from half-baked indicators that gauge secondary effects, such as financial return.

Industry participants have begun to realize that it's often wrongheaded to view social media as a direct revenue-driver. Of course there are exceptions. Some social commerce applications and certain types of direct response campaigns will achieve measurable results on Facebook, or other social networks. Facebook chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, mentioned in the last earnings call in July that direct-response spend on Facebook has doubled.

And placing social media in the attribution chain can offer valuable insights. We've discussed how 1-800 Flowers used Facebook mobile app-install ads to drive holiday customer acquisition, and how Caesars, the hotel and casino operator, discovered that its Facebook apps were referring customers to hotel and travel reservations pages.

However, in general, clients are less interested in ROI, says Jessica Jacobs, marketing manager at Unmetric, a social media analytics firm. She adds, "Social serves a lot of purposes beyond just driving transactions, so it's difficult to calculate true ROI."

The 2013 CMO Survey found that ROI-flavored metrics are falling out of favor.

• Between 2010 and 2013, the percentage of marketers using a "revenue per customer" metric on social media went from 17% to 9%.
• The percentage using a "conversion rate" metric that tracked how many social media visitors became buyers also dropped, from 25% to 21%.
• Use of "sales levels" metrics fell from 18% to 9%.

A big argument in favor of ROI metrics was that social media would need to prove with data that it was a revenue-driver if it was ever going to grab a larger share of marketing budgets.

But it turns out that fear was unfounded (and a bit mystifying, since TV marketing budgets never had that burden placed on them).

How do we know that fear was unfounded? Even as the vogue for ROI indicators fades, social media budgets are ballooning. The 2013 CMO Survey found that, on average, top marketers expect to devote 9% of their budgets to social media spend in 2014, and 16% by 2018.

How To Avoid Vanity And Junk Metrics

The end of the ROI obsession doesn't mean that metrics can be thrown out the window. As social media budgets grow, there will actually be more scrutiny on social media campaigns and a need for numbers that prove they're having a real impact. These metrics won't be fixated on ROI, but they will be concerned with audience and engagement, and the quality of fan-brand interactions.

There are an endless number or metrics offered in the crowded world of social media analytics. How to separate the wheat from the chaff?

First, let's look at what to avoid.

Many out-of-the-box metrics provided by social media sites and social analytics platforms are vanity metrics. They're deceptive in that they appear straightforward, easy to understand, and indispensable. But they don't tell the story that they appear to tell.

A great example of a worthless vanity metric is Facebook fans. At first glance, the number of fans a brand page has appears to indicate the brand's audience, but this is misleading for at least two reasons:

People are fans of the ad, but not the brand. Facebook sells paid ads that can drive massive increases in a page’s number of fans, but that doesn't mean that those fans know what they are becoming a fan of. They're clicking to like a particular photo or post, and they may not ever give a second thought to the brand.

More concretely, posts don't show up in every fan's News Feed. Social media managers know this, but it bears repeating because they seem to conveniently forget this fact every time they use fans as a rough indicator of audience. Facebook filters posts based on an algorithm that decides what a fan will find interesting, based on their past social media behavior.

Recently, Facebook announced that, on average, a brand's organic posts (i.e., without paid promotion) only reach about 16% of fans.

In other words, a brand that does a great job of building a modest audience that's highly interested in its content may actually achieve greater effective reach for their posts than a brand with a massive fan base, but no real connection with its audience.

The upshot is that just because someone likes your page does not mean that they see your posts. So Facebook fans doesn't say much by itself.

Realistic Metrics

These days, activity, engagement, reach and competitive analysis are the most important concepts to keep top-of-mind.

Concepts like engagement and reach are too complex to be explained with one metric. Too many social media managers reach for one "killer stat," and then leave it at that. A combination of metrics chasing similar ends, and evaluated alongside one another, are usually what's needed to convey actionable information.

Also, the efficacy of metrics as sources of insights is improved if they're analyzed with a concrete and fairly specific question in mind, rather than expecting the metrics themselves to guide the analysis.

Activity Metrics

Activity Indicators are straightforward and useful. In tandem with other indicators, they can be used to gauge how well a social media manager is performing and what actions are working.

Indicators to track include:

1. Post rate: This tells you how often you post. You just divide your number of posts by the unit of time you're interested in. So you can track posts-per-week, posts-per-month, etc.
2. Post rate by type: Same as above, except you only look at certain types of posts. This lets you know how often you use particular types of content, like photos, links, quizzes, etc.
3. Post rate by topic: This helps you understand the message your brand is sending. You need to classify your posts by topics, and then use the same technique to see the frequency with which you hit certain themes (broad categories are helpful unless you want to lose your mind creating detailed classification systems).
4. Response rate: This one's different, because your denominator is not a unit of time. You divide the number of audience comments by the number of your responses (over the course of a day, month, or week). This metric tells you how often you are getting back to your fans. You can track your responses to Facebook comments, @tweets, etc.

Impact Metrics — Reach And Engagement

While reach and engagement don't give a dollar value for return on investment, they do paint a picture of whether the right audience is being reached and cultivated, and whether brand awareness is being boosted.

We offer simple ways to enhance the numbers that Facebook Insights generates. The metrics and screenshots we provide are from the opt-in beta version of the Insights interface, which has recently been made available by Facebook.

The beta version of Insights is built to give simple metrics that are easy to understand outside of the context of Facebook, in order to help marketing professionals compare apples to apples when they try to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns on Facebook to those they may be conducting outside the network.

For example, "engagement rate" has now replaced "virality" as the main measure of engagement. Virality tracked comments, likes, and shares on posts. Engagement rate, meanwhile, includes all clicks on a post as engagement. If someone clicks on a photo to enlarge it, it's weighed the same as a like.

"The feedback we got from advertisers on the old dashboard was that many of the metrics offered were too Facebook-specific" says Galyn Burke of Facebook, "So the new dashboard uses broader metrics."

• Take Post Reach Further

Tracking post reach can help determine whether or not a campaign is worth investing in. For example, producing a $10,000 video may not make sense for a brand if its average reach on a post is only 500 Facebook users.

Found on the Facebook Insights interface, post reach indicates how many users have seen your posts in their news feeds, on the desktop, and on mobile. Total reach is less relevant since it also adds in direct visits to your Facebook page, which is not where audiences typically see your content (they see it in their news feeds).

To get more mileage out of the post reach number, divide it by fans in order to see what percentage of your fans are seeing at least one of your posts.

First, take average post reach for your desired time period. You can do this from the "Post Reach" tab on the "Page" menu. The Insights dashboard allows you to break post reach time-series down to months, weeks, days, and quarters. You then divide post reach for that period by average number of fans for that same time interval.

This will tell you what percentage of your fans, on average, are seeing your content. It serves as an indicator of how effective your messages are.

You can track the reach of individual posts in the same way by clicking on the "Posts" menu on the dashboard.

Remember that the post reach of any single post is typically only 16% of your fan base, though this number can be improved with a good content strategy.

In the perfect scenario, the reach of all your posts as a percentage of fans should be increasing even as you add fans. This would indicate you are recruiting fans to your page who are actually interested in your message, and that you are becoming more effective in sustaining relevant communication with them.

• How To Understand Engagement With Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights offers many tools to understand how engaged your audience is. Similar to Post Reach, Facebook also provides its users with an engagement metric.

Engagement is the number of people who clicked on a post. An important note: Facebook uses all clicks on a post to quantify engagement — including shares, likes, comments, and user actions such as enlarging a photo. Engagement is available for all posts, on the "Overview" page, or on a per-post basis.

Engagement doesn't say much without context. To take it further Facebook also provides an engagement rate metric, which is engagement (the number of people who clicked anywhere on one of your posts) as a percentage of reach. Engagement rate is not aggregated as a metric for all your posts, but shown on a post-by-post basis. (See screenshot, below.)

This metric tells you how well your posts are engaging the audience that sees your content.

Engagement rate is useful, but it weights all clicks equally. This is counterintuitive because some users' actions, like comments, seem like they require more engagement from a user than likes.

To drill down further you can look at some complementary indicators. Luckily, Facebook breaks user actions down according to type. Dividing the number of times a certain action was performed on a post by the reach of that post can provide useful indicators for fine-tuning a social campaign.

If brand awareness is a priority, you'll be interested in boosting shares and likes as a percentage of post reach since these actions are more likely to be seen by friends of fans in their news feeds. Shares can be huge, because normal users' posts are seen in a relatively high percentage of friends' news feeds (compared to posts by brand pages), between 29 and 35% according to one study.

If you’re after depth of engagement, look for increases in comments and shares as a percentage of reach because these take the most effort of any action, and shares only result from the most relevant or compelling content.

Competitive Analysis, Tools And Tricks

Jacobs of Unmetric says, "One thing that brands are really interested in is industry comparisons and reports. You can’t compare the performance of Home Depot to McDonald’s because that is comparing apples to oranges and you want to be comparing apples to apples. [Brands] want to be able to figure out a competitor's or peer's content strategy without having to go through post-by-post."

Unfortunately, it is difficult if not impossible to get reach statistics on competitors. And other pages' engagement rate, as calculated by Insights, can't be pulled for competitive analysis either.

Burke says that although they get lots of requests for this metric, Facebook has no plans to provide it.

This makes it difficult to benchmark a strategy against industry rivals.

A quick-and-ready way to sidestep this problem — without an analytics partner — is to check engagement by taking Facebook's public page metric, "People talking about this," and dividing it by the number of your competitors' page fans.

Using this back-of-the-envelope technique, many brands will have engagement rates between 0.5 and 3%, and you can compare your results to theirs, or average results across competitors to get an industry benchmark.

People talking about this is calculated by Facebook insights using likes, comments, and shares as well as less common actions (i.e., confirming attendance at an event). People talking about this is calculated as a seven-day average. So, it's important to remember that the engagement rate is only relevant for the last week.

But there are two metrics that can be used to evaluate performance on a broader scale, going beyond Facebook to encompass other social networks. The best way to get both of these indicators is to use text analysis tools found in many analytics platforms (i.e., Radian6).

The first indicator is share of voice. Share of voice allows you to see what percentage of people talking about brands in your industry are talking about your brand. This is helpful for understanding both how big the chatter about your industry is, and how effective your strategy has been at carving out a share of that buzz.

The second metric, share of conversation, indicates whether your brand is being mentioned in the "right" conversations.

For example, a brand might look at what percentage of "Super Bowl"-related comments it was mentioned in versus the percentage of mentions that other brands got, after buying a TV ad spot during the Super Bowl.

With social media marketing, competition isn't limited to companies producing similar products. Competition can also be for a consumer's attention, in which case all brands focusing on a particular audience could be considered competitors.

A Note On Soft, Sentiment Metrics

The softest metrics out there are those that are used to gauge how an audience feels about a brand.

Many technologies have been developed to gauge how an audience feels. These sentiment analysis tools can be used as alarm bells for PR crises, but because they overlook important conversational elements like sarcasm they shouldn't be used as a replacement for human analysts.

Actually reading and manually recording the mood of comments is the most accurate, albeit resource-intensive way to gauge sentiment.

THE BOTTOM LINE

• Social media marketers are moving quickly away from metrics that purport to measure ROI. They've realized that social media isn't a transactional engine or sales machine.
• Social media is mainly good at building brand presence and deepening relationships with customers. It makes sense to benchmark social media strategies according to what social media is good at doing, rather than using weak metrics to try and get at the dollar impact of a campaign.
• The metrics to watch are audience reach, engagement, and sentiment.
• Most basic metrics like number of fans or likes are known as "vanity metrics," because they don't offer much beyond making social media managers feel good about themselves.
• Insights, Facebook's built-in analytics tool, offers great basic data for measuring reach and engagement, we show you how to transform those numbers into richer and more valuable metrics.
• Surprisingly few brands use metrics to perform a competitive analysis of how they stack up against other brands on social media platforms.

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The whiskey renaissance continues.

Reddit user vamonos_pest came upon this deal in their local Sam's Club, a barrel of "Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Select" for $9,660.

Another reddit user noted that a barrel of Jack's flagship brand retails for a cool $7,680 at his store. Bargain!

Here's the photo via the Huffington Post.

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Microsoft released Windows 8 nearly a year ago with the new Windows Store, and the company introduced a limit on the number of systems a single account could install apps on. Today, Microsoft is practically lifting the limit of five machines and changing it to 81 devices. You read that correctly, 81. The massive change appears to be a symbolic link to the upcoming Windows 8.1 update, but it also means that the majority of Windows Store users will no longer have to worry about what PCs they install paid apps to.

"Since we launched Windows 8, we heard growing feedback from many developers and from our most enthusiastic customers that the limit of 5 was not enough for their needs," explains a spokesperson for the Windows apps team. "In...

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The fourth annual National Beard and Moustache Championships, sponsored by Just for Men, took place a few weeks ago in New Orleans and one photographer was there to capture all the action. Greg Anderson, a commercial photographer based in Las Vegas, took portraits that showcase the contestants’ bizarre and incredible facial hair in never-before-seen glory. 

More than 150 people competed in the championship in 17 categories, including Amish, natural full beards, free-style, imperial mustache, and English mustache.

"After spending two days with the contestants, I realized most of them originally came to the competition out of curiosity and they come back every year for the camaraderie," Anderson told Business Insider. "They're serious about the competition, but even more serious about catching up with old friends and having a great time." 

The winners' lists is available here and here. 

Al Underwood of Los Angeles scored a perfect 25 and won gold in the Musketeer category.

Jeff Langum of Los Angeles won gold for Natural Full Beard.

Michael Johnson of Minneapolis won the gold medal for the Partial Imperial Beard. All facial hair not growing from the cheeks and upper lip must be shaved.

Windows users rejoice: the days of only being able to install apps on five different devices will soon be over. Starting October 9th, apps purchased with a single Windows Store account will be sharable among up to 81 devices. If you recall, we learned back at Build that Microsoft would be increasing the app roaming limit, but today’s announcement clarifies some key details nonetheless. Says the company in a blog post: “The change we’re introducing will reduce the friction that most active customers have in being able to access their favorite apps from any device, and will give developers additional opportunities to monetize.” This of course means one other thing: you’re going to need a bigger backpack.

Filed under: Software, Microsoft

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Source: Windows App Builder Blog

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Delta Air Lines is planning to equip each of its pilots with a Microsoft Surface 2 tablet running Windows 8.1 RT, according to a report from Windows IT Pro magazine. The rumored move follows Delta's August announcement that it would give each of its more than 19,000 flight attendants Windows Phone 8 handsets — specifically the Nokia Lumia 820 — in a bid to simplify the process of buying a drink or meal in flight. The report said that Delta had originally planned to purchase Nokia's rumored Windows 8.1 tablets, but that somewhere along the line plans changed.

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Scotland Yard has a new secret weapon when it comes to finding suspects: a group of psychological outliers known as "super-recognizers." They've got the ability to a far greater range of faces over much longer periods of time than the average person. The condition is still controversial, but after recent peer-reviewed studies have found evidence for it, London's police force wants to use it to their advantage, employing a squad of super-recognizers to help recognize wanted criminals captured on surveillance feeds. As detective chief inspector Mike Neville says, "When we have an image of an unidentified criminal, I know exactly who to ask."

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