Bcstevieb

Google is on the eve of a major battle with European regulators, as the European Commission is set to file antitrust charges against the company. But Google is already preparing: Recode has obtained an internal memo sent to Google employees about the charges.

It's unclear what specific charges the EU will bring against Google, but it's believed the charges will focus on whether Google used its dominance in the search market to favor its own results. In the memo, Google lays out its case, essentially arguing that its services (Google Shopping, specifically) are already open to competition. From the memo:

The competition is just one click away — and it’s growing. People can use Bing, Yahoo, Quora, DuckDuckGo, and a new wave of search...

Continue reading…

Shortly after confirming the rumors of its talks with Alcatel-Lucent yesterday, Nokia has announced today that it does indeed intend to buy the French firm. The deal would combine both European companies' assets under the Nokia Corporation name, with headquarters in Helsinki and a strong presence in France. No cash transactions would be involved, instead the acquisition is a public exchange offer whereby 0.55 Nokia shares are offered for every Alcatel-Lucent share. The valued total amounts to 15,6 Billion Euros.

Read More

Nokia Plans To Merge With Alcatel-Lucent For An All-Shares Deal Of 15.6 Billion Euros, While Hinting At A HERE Maps Sale was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

If you’ve been kidnapped, held hostage, or you’re just looking to become a magician, this video demonstrates how you can break out of a pair of professional, double-locking handcuffs with a standard paperclip.

This video, from YouTuber Grant Thompson—The King of Random—explains each step to unlocking the basic mechanism in a standard pair of handcuffs. When you have your paperclip bent the right way, all it takes is a couple quick turns. As the video points out, you should never try to escape from the police. It will only make things more difficult for you, so respect the law and only use this trick when you’ve been kidnapped, are being held against your will, or performing magic tricks. If your kidnappers are using zip ties instead, there’s a couple ways to break out of those too . Hopefully you’ll never have to worry about escaping from kidnappers, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

How to Escape Professional Handcuffs - With a Paperclip | YouTube

Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's competition commissioner, will reportedly announce formal charges against Google tomorrow. The EU's top antitrust watchdog will go after the search giant for favoring its own services over rivals during web searches. Google tried to settle the case last year, but that fell apart after strong objections from European nations, telecoms, and media companies.

Continue reading…

I've waxed poetic on Weird Sony in the past — the Sony I knew as a child of the ’80s and ’90s, the Sony that wasn't afraid to make really bizarre and amazing gadgets simply because it could. It wasn't just about making an endless stream of high-margin crap; there was an obvious and obsessive attention to detail put into everything the company made, no matter how strange, no matter how outside the mainstream. Its design chops were legendary. You aspired to own Sony products back then, because they were the best and because they looked the part.

Continue reading…

Washing your clothes according to fabric rather than color can not only save you money , it could make laundering your clothes more efficient. Here’s a guide to washing and ironing various fabric types.

The graphic comes from the Alight Fashion Blog and includes characteristics of each fabric, whether you should use warm or cold water, how iron settings to use, and various other tips. Who knew to add salt to spandex to set the color?

How to Care for Every Fabric In Your Closet | Alight Fashing Blog

For daring drivers only: The world’s 10 scariest roads

11 Important Facts You Need To Know About The Cat Circus. Yes, The Cat Circus!

 Google today announced a new developer program called “Designed For Families” which will allow app publishers to opt into an additional review in order have their apps labeled as being “family-friendly.” The new designation will eventually make its way to Google Play, though the company is not yet revealing the specifics around how this group of apps will be made… Read More

 Apple announced ResearchKit at its special event in March, as an open framework that could be employed by scientists and medical research to gather data for studies. At the time, it showcased some apps built using the framework with select partners. Today, it’s opening ResearchKit up to all medical researchers, doctors and scientists and the app developers working with them. Read More

Asus has revealed its newest smartwatch, the VivoWatch, which will have a primary focus of being a fitness tracker. Unlike their previous smartwatch, the Asus ZenWatch, the VivoWatch will have a black and white display with a colored LED strip below, and will not run on Android Wear. With being able to last for 10-days on a single charge, the VivoWatch will have no trouble measuring your heartbeat, tracking your sleep, or running one of the various health-oriented apps that come preloaded.

In addition, the VivoWatch is IP67 certified, which means it will be dust and water resistant. Asus has yet to provide pricing or availability for the upcoming smartwatch, but it is rumored that additional details could be coming during Milan Design Week, which starts April 14.

Source: Engadget

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Featured App

Expense IQ - Expense Manager

This week's roundup is brought to you by Expense IQ - Expense Manager from Handy Apps.

Read More

34 New And Notable Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (3/31/15 - 4/13/15) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Movidius, the company that makes the vision processor that powers Google’s Tango tablet, today announced that it has raised a $40 million funding round led by Summit Bridge Capital — a collaboration between Atlantic Bridge Capital and WestSummit Capital. This marks one of the largest funding rounds in a fabless semiconductor company in recent years. New investors in this round… Read More

What if your mobile contract could be condensed into an app-based subscription service like Spotify or Netflix — one that you could put on pause when you don't need it, switch between phones without swapping SIM cards, and pay for by the gigabyte of data used? Those are the broad strokes of Google's planned wireless service in the US, according to a report from Android Police based on a leaked app. It's not possible to be certain that the leak originated from Google itself, however its level of detail and the way it meshes with earlier reports about Google's plans would suggest there's something to it.

The app in question is called Tycho, and it contains all the usual settings and options you might expect from a carrier app. You can pay...

Continue reading…

The little dude was hanging out in Perth, Australia. These Australian magpies can develop interesting relationships with humans, for better or for worse. On the plus side, they're used to us. And on the scary side, they can and do attack humans when it's breeding season and they feel threatened by our presence. They're also prolific songbirds.

Read the rest

Who's walking who?

This has been a banner month for the future of protests. First, a Snowden statue was replaced with a hologram after being torn down in a Brooklyn park, and on Sunday, a group of hologram protesters marched in front of the Spanish building where the country's Congress of Deputies meets.

As Fusion reports, the march, aside from being an impressive technical feat, was deeply ironic. The group behind the protest, No Somos Delito, was acting against the extremely controversial new "citizen security" law in the country, which places limits on freedom of expression, and specifically freedom of protest. Spaniards in violation of the law, which comes into effect this July unless beaten by a legal challenge, will face fines of several thousand...

Continue reading…

Marvel has put out a new full-length trailer for Ant-Man, its big movie for the summer. This is the first Ant-Man trailer that's actually exciting: we get to see Paul Rudd shrink down to size as Ant-Man, chat with some ants, and fight some presumably evil dudes while really tiny. A lot more of the intended humor of the movie starts to come across, too. Plus, that dude they shouldn't have killed off on House of Cards shows up as a villain. The movie is scheduled to open in theaters on July 17th.

Continue reading…

Phil Lapsley's Exploding the Phone does for the phone phreaks what Steven Levy's Hackers did for computer pioneers, capturing the anarchic move-fast-break-stuff pioneers who went to war against Ma Bell. Read the rest

The nice thing about a United States design patent, as opposed to a more common utility patent, is that it doesn't actually have to work. Hell, it doesn't even have to make sense - it just has to be a mostly-new idea that's concrete enough to put into a technical doodle. So it is with Design Patent D726,140, awarded to LG by the US Patent and Trademark Office last week.

Read More

LG Design Patent D726,140 Dreams Up A Bendable Phone-Watch Hybrid Device was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

As expected, Hillary Clinton has joined Ted Cruz and Rand Paul in the race for the presidential seat. In a campaign video released today, the former Secretary of State has officially declared her intention to run in 2016. The announcement confirms rumors that have been floating around for more than a year and kicks off the Democratic Party's battle for the presidential nomination.

The video wasn't quite the first official confirmation of Clinton's campaign — an email sent out earlier this afternoon by an aide to past donors from the 2008 campaign made the presidential run official. But the YouTube video is the public-facing announcement. It appeals to everyday working Americans and their families, and uses the limelight to paint the...

Continue reading…

100 Best Books of the Decade So Far

Link via mental_floss.

The 1000-Mile Hike That Shaped the National Park Service 

Android/iOS: When you have to take medicine every day, reminders become a necessity. MediSafe allows you to keep track of every med you need to take, and allows other users to give you a nudge when you need it.

The app allows you to enter the list of medications you need to take and on what schedule. Every time you take your pills, you log the entry in the app. If your friends or family use the app, you can set it to show them when you’ve taken them and, more importantly, they can see when you haven’t. They can give you a gentle nudge if you fall behind.

MediSafe | Google Play Store

MediSafe | iTunes App Store

 In the push for more revenue growth, Twitter has been building up its business in areas like advertising and commerce, but a move made late Friday night points to another area where the company is setting its sights: big data analytics. Twitter announced that it will be terminating agreements with third parties for reselling firehose data — the unfiltered, full stream of Tweets and… Read More

With just a little time and a sewing machine, you can hem your own jeans and skip paying someone else to do it.

Do It Yourself Diva’s video tutorial above shows a very simple way to hem jeans by folding over the hem and stitching right under the original hem. Perhaps the best part of this is you keep the original hem intact. As such, though, this probably works best for straight leg jeans. (By the way, you can also skip the tailor for hemming dress pants as well—with or without a sewing machine.)

DIY: Hem Jeans Fast & Easy | Do It Yourself Divas via Good Home Design

 China is widely suspect to be behind the recent attacks on Github and internet freedom group Great Fire. Now we have the most concrete evidence that indeed it was, and it looks like it did so using a new weapon to boot. Read More

Late last year, BitTorrent announced its latest ambitious project for making the web more open: a browser that can access websites that are hosted through the BitTorrent protocol rather than on centralized servers. The Chromium-based Project Maelstrom browser started life in a closed alpha, but as of today BitTorrent is releasing it as an open beta. The only catch right now is that it's for Windows users only, though BitTorrent says future versions of the browser will be available for Mac and Linux users, as well.

BitTorrent also shared a few notes on how the platform has grown since the alpha began last December. The company has enlisted more than 10,000 developers (those BitTorrent described as building Maelstrom-compatible apps and...

Continue reading…

Top 100 (or insert random number here) books have been around for ages. They tend to make great coffee table books, but it takes something really special to start a conversation.

Read the rest