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LinkedIn, the social network for the working world now with over 238 million members globally, is presenting an update on its mobile strategy today. As part of that, its parted the curtain a bit to show us how its planning to integrate one of its recent acquisitions, Pulse. Pulse, the news aggregation and news reading app, will become the “content brand” for LinkedIn, according to Ankit Gupta, Pulse's co-founder.

With the new Pulse app, users will be give the ability for people to log in with their LinkedIn identities to receive recommended stories, and it will start to incorporate content from influencers. The idea is that Pulse will be not just a place to read news, but a place for people to read news tailored to their professional lives.

“We will be bringing better content experiences to empower users throughout their day and their careers,” he said. The app will be released later this year, Gupta said.

Pulse, a Flipboard competitor, was acquired by LinkedIn for some $90 million in April of this year. Pulse has remained operational and LinkedIn has up to now not commented on how it planned to use the service. This effectively keeps the service standalone, but tethers it much more closely to LinkedIn.

The concept of a single sign-on and a user's identity that will be used outside of LinkedIn's own platform is an interesting one: it's also something that LinkedIn's acquisition of Rapportive is exploring with its new LinkedIn Intro app for iPhone. Read more on that here.

LinkedIn today also announced a new a new iPad app that it says underscores its new approach to mobile with an updated feed with more visual images and video, as well incorporating its rebuilt search engine, introduced earlier this year on the desktop.

The company said that some 38% of all traffic is on mobile, and next year LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner projects that LinkedIn will cross its “mobile moment,” where mobile traffic will surpass that of desktop traffic.

The evolution of Pulse, as well as the LinkedIn mobile experience in general, is part of the company's push for more personalization. There is, after all, no connected device today that is as constant a companion as your mobile phone. Before today, other mobile moves at the company included improved search, more features in its mobile apps - including the ability to upload and edit resumes and apply for jobs, and a separate app to manage contacts. That is in addition to updates to the desktop experience that have inlcuded a better home page, LinkedIn Today, to include curated content. And LinkedIn's ambition to position itself as the repository for people's “professional graph” has led it into other areas, too. One of these has been to target universities. The effort started in August and now has some 1,500 universities on board, Weiner said.

The ambition is big, but Weiner - possibly aware of some of the “creepy” reputation it has, giving users insight into who has viewed their profiles and so on - is perhaps more Google and less Facebook when he describes it. “We'd like there to be a professional profile for every one of the 3 billion-plus professional people in the world today,” said Weiner, “and then we'd like to step away.” It's something that reminded me of how Google has described its approach to search in the past.

LinkedIn sees mobile as key to how it can do that. “How is mobile allowing us to reinvent LinkedIn?” Weiner asked today. “The expectations of our users today is that those applications are going to continue to evolve… We can't just take the desktop experience and port it over to mobile.” This includes taking into account screen size as well as user expectations and the need for users to find information faster.

It hasn't always been smooth for the company, but it is increasingly trying to up its game lest Facebook decide to become more focused on targeting people in the working world and therefore stealing LinkedIn's thunder. During the presentation today Joff Redfern, VP of mobile products, admitted some of what LinkedIn learned along the way. When it launched its first iPhone app in 2010, it thought it had everything sewn up, he said. “Ten months later we had to completely rewrite it.” And then it had to do it again, and again. Its efforts have included training existing staff, and hiring new people, to think and act mobile-first.

“The magic of mobile is keeping simple simple. I have a five-second rule,” noted Kiran Prasad, Senior Director, Mobile Engineering. He noted that there is no way of putting the 500-odd distinct pages that LinkedIn offers on desktop into its mobile app. It's a step away from trying to achieve parity in a single site, and a move towards a multiple-app strategy.

LookFlow, a startup that describes itself as “an entirely new way to explore images you love,” just announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo and will be joining the Flickr team.

The company writes on its homepage, “Fret not, LookFlow fans. Keep an eye out for our product in future versions of Flickr - with many more wonderful photos and all that Flickr awesomeness!” It also says it will be helping Yahoo to form a new “deep learning group.”

When I emailed Yahoo for confirmation, a company spokesperson told me, “We have acquired LookFlow, an enhanced image recognition company,” and they pointed me to the aforementioned LookFlow homepage.

I wasn't able to find much information about LookFlow online, but according to the LinkedIn profiles of its co-founders Bobby Jaros and Simon Osindero, the company was founded back in 2009. Osindero wrote, “Our approach integrates recent developments from artificial intelligence, information visualization, and interface design.”

The acquisition message also thanks “friends of LookFlow” including Michael Dearing, John Lilly, Reid Hoffman, Alex Rampell, Josh McFarland, Max Ventilla, and Jeff Hammerbacher - I'm guessing at least a few of them invested in the company. (Hammerbacher is listed as an investor on LookFlow's AngelList profile.)

Yahoo has been famously acquisitive since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO last year. The company reported that it spent $163 million in cash on acquisitions in the last quarter. And back in August, it announced that it was acquiring image recognition startup IQ Engine, also for Flickr.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The British are giving their mobile carriers the Guy Fawkes treatment. Per Which?, the United Kingdom's Office of Communications (Ofcom) announced this week that it will let mobile customers ditch contracts without penalty if their carriers decide to jack up prices. An Ofcom representative said that the agency is "making it clear that any increase to the monthly subscription price should trigger a consumer’s right to leave their contract — without penalty." How U.K. carriers adapt to this new rule change remains to be seen, although Ofcom's regulations could become a model for other countries to follow if they're successful in restraining the rise of mobile prices. T-Mobile has been leading the charge in the United States against wireless contracts and has often railed against rivals' unpredictable pricing and sneaky fees in wireless bills.

Android: There are few things more mildly irritating than your phone constantly turning off when you're trying to read it. If you don't want to set your screen timeout to a crazy-long duration, Stay Alive can help fix this problem.

Stay Alive allows you to customize when your display turns on and stays on. You can choose to have it stay active while you're plugged into an outlet, or just for certain apps. The latter option can be particularly handy for reading or movie apps that don't already disable screen time out. If you don't want to install an app to accomplish this, you can usually set the time out duration to something like 10 minutes, which will ensure you probably interact with the screen before it times out in most situations, though you'll have to remember to turn your display off manually all the time.

Stay Alive! | Google Play Store via WonderHowTo

Corning buys out Samsung's stake in LCD joint venture; ten-year supply deal inked

Samsung has acquired a 7.4 percent share in smartphone Gorilla Glass maker Corning, as part of a "strengthening" in the partnership between the two companies. The deal will also see Corning taking full control of Samsung Corning Precision Materials, an LCD panel joint venture in which Samsung currently holds a 43 percent stake. Samsung will make an additional investment of $400 million in Corning by subscribing to new convertible preferred shares, today's press release states.

In return, Samsung will get $1.9 billion worth of convertible preferred shares in Corning, equal to a 7.4 percent stake in the company. At the same time a ten-year new supply agreement between the two has been inked, adding around $2 billion to Corning's annual sales.

Corning's Gorilla Glass is used in many high-end mobile devices, including those of Samsung's competitors — and today's news may be of concern to the company's smartphone rivals, many of whom are already reliant on Samsung for other components.

Source: Corning; via: Engadget

We already use USB cords to charge smartphones and tablets but they could soon let us charge more high-powered devices as well. The Economist has written a lengthy report about the potential of USB cables to deliver an energy-efficient alternative to standard power cords once the new USB Power Delivery (PD) standard is ready for primetime next year. USB PD will give USB cables a major power boost of up to 100 watts and will let users power their laptops, low-voltage LED lightbulbs and even some desktop computers.

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Samsung has first mover advantage in the smartwatch space, launching its Galaxy Gear wearable last month. However the mobile companion device only worked if you also picked up Samsung’s just released Galaxy Note 3 or Galaxy Note 10.1. Which means the vast majority of Samsung’s existing user-base are currently denied the chance to indulge their smartwatch-owning fantasies unless they also upgraded their main phone or bought a new tablet. But not for much longer.

Samsung has announced the Gear will become compatible with a swathe of its existing handsets via two updates: the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean update, and a separate update due to start rolling out globally at the end of this month.

The list of devices that will add Gear compatibility is the Galaxy S4, Galaxy S3, and Galaxy Note 2 (via the 4.3 update). Samsung said it will also extend Galaxy Gear compatibility to “other Galaxy devices” — specifically saying this will include the Galaxy S4 Mini, S4 Active, Mega 5.8, Mega 6.3, and Galaxy S4 Zoom — via a separate update (which suggests those devices aren’t getting Android 4.3. Or not yet, anyway).

One caveat: Android updates are a notoriously fragmented affair, with carriers acting as gatekeepers to hold back the rollout progress of each update. So it may take a considerable time for the Gear update to be successfully pushed out to all carrier combinations across all markets. “Software update schedules for each device will vary by country and carrier,” is how Samsung couches that caveat in its press release.

As well as enabling S4, S3 and Note 2 owners to buy and hook up a Gear, the v4.3 update will add easier text input, updated graphics and multimedia on the Android side, plus Samsung’s Knox security offering, Smart Switch, HomeSync and Group Play 2.5.

Once these existing device owners have successfully updated, and if they then choose to shell out $299 for the Gear add-on, they can expect to be able to make and answer calls on the smartwatch, and view incoming messages and notifications.

The Gear also has a 1.9MP camera attached to the wristband for taking grainy spy shots without reaching for your main cameraphone. It also has a handful of its own apps, such as a pedometer app.

Reviews of the Galaxy Gear have not been too kind, however — so if you’re buying this smartwatch, you are effectively using your own money to volunteer to be a beta tester for an alpha product.

Something that we struggle with daily, that eats us up and causes stress and anger: annoying people. You know those people. They cut in line, are rude to you in the office or at the restaurant, cut you off in traffic, talk loudly about obnoxious things, play loud music when you’re trying to concentrate, interrupt you, and so on.

This post originally appeared on Zen Habits.

These offenses are violations of the way you think people should act. And so it burns you up. Don’t worry, I’m the same way. If you just keep letting these offensive people get to you, you’ll always be mad or annoyed. Life won’t be very good. But it’s something you can learn to deal with.

I have to admit I’m not perfect at this, but here are three strategies I use that are helpful:

Get Big

I learned this one from Zen teacher Robert Thomas, who uses “Get Big” as one of his slogans that helps him to be mindful. Imagine you’re a 2-year-old toddler who can’t have a toy or some ice cream right this minute. This problem is your entire universe, because you have no perspective, and so you throw a fit. This is the world of a 2-year-old (I should know, I’ve had six of them). But as adults, we know that this is a very small problem, and in fact there are lots of other things the 2-year-old could do to be happy.

Sure, that’s easy for us—we have a bigger perspective. But when someone offends us, we have a small perspective. This little offense is the biggest thing in the world, and it makes us very angry. We throw the equivalent of a 2-year-old fit. But if we get a bigger perspective ("Get Big"), we can see that this little thing matters very little in the bigger picture. It’s not worth being angry over. So remind yourself to "Get Big," then widen your perspective.

Float Down the Stream

When I drive and other drivers do rude things, I often get angry. Then I remember a trick: I imagine myself floating down a stream in a raft, and the other cars are just twigs and leaves floating past me one way or another on this stream. They don’t have to treat me a certain way, because they’re just twigs. And so I serenely float down this stream, not worrying about how the twigs float around me (though I try not to hit them, because, you know, safety first). And in truth, this is how life is—other people aren’t trying to offend you, don’t even worry about you most of the time. They are just twigs floating by. Be nice to the twigs though.

Give Them a Mental Hug

This little trick can transform the way I feel about someone who makes me angry. Let’s say someone has just said something rude to me. How dare they! Don’t they have any consideration for my feelings? But of course, in this reaction, I’m not having any consideration for their feelings—only mine matter. So I try to empathize with this rude person, and realize that they’re angry, or scared, or both. They are being rude as a coping mechanism for their fear. And so, mentally (and once in a while physically), I give them a hug. I have compassion for this scared person, because I too am often scared. We’re the same. We need a hug, some compassion, a little love.

Try one of these three tricks the next time someone makes you mad or offends you. And then smile in serenity, armed with the comforting knowledge that, like me, you are superior to the rest of the world.

3 Little Tricks to Deal with People Who Offend You | Zen Habits

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Learning a new language is tough enough without having to deal with the method you use to learn it. Last week we asked you which methods of learning a new language were the best, and then we took at look at the five best language learning tools. We put them to a vote, and now we're back to highlight the winner.

Despite only having about six languages, Duolingo took the top spot with just over 58% of the vote because the price is right (it's free) and the method Duolingo uses to teach your target language is fun, functional, and easy to follow. Learning a new language by translating the web is a lot of fun, and you get the opportunity to translate things written by native speakers (and get regular checks on your progress as you move forward.)

First place was far and away, but the rest of the pack were closer together. In second place was the free, cross-platform, flashcard based app and service Anki, with 13% of the vote. Right behind it with just shy of 13% was the Pimsleur Method, the long-standing commercial product that offers an array of languages and a focus on speaking. LiveMocha, recently acquired by Rosetta Stone, picked up over 8% of the vote to land in fourth place. Bringing up the rear with shy of 8% was Memrise, a gamified flashcard and memorization tool with a variety of languages.

For more on each of these as well as the honorable mentions that aren't included here, head back to the full Hive Five post for details.

The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCQM9IwQf78

GaleForce nine's Firefly board game gets shown off in this fancy official advert video.

We're getting our first look at the popularity of the recently released BBM for Android. Fresh out of the gate, the Google Play listing has placed the app in the 1 million to 5 million category. Those are total installations, and not "current" installs, so you've got to keep those numbers in context. Still. More than 1 million installs — and potentially as many as 5 million (we've got an e-mail in seeking more specific numbers) in a day is nothing to sneeze at.

Additionally, BBM's garnered more than 87,000 star reviews on Google Play — with the vast majority a full five stars.

A pretty big caveat, though — remember that there's a waiting list. So you can install the app, but you might not be able to use it just yet.

It's also worth keeping in mind that BBM doesn't work on nearly 30 percent of existing Android phones. BBM runs on Android 4.x, which as of the beginning of October made up 69 percent of active devices, according to the Android platform versions chart.

But either way, it's pretty damned impressive for BlackBerry — and for what many of us consider a dying platform.

Researchers at Finland's Tampere University have identified a set of viruses they believe to be responsible for Type 1 diabetes, and they have formulated a vaccine for it that has had promising results in mice. The enterovirus in question attacks the pancreas, and is similar to the virus that causes polio. They're forming a research syndicate to raise the €700m needed for human trials.

Researchers have looked at more than a hundred different strains of the virus and pinpointed five that could cause diabetes. They believe they could produce a vaccine against those strains.

”We have identified one virus type that carries the biggest risk,” said professor Heikki Hyöty. ”A vaccine could also protect against its close relatives, to give the best possible effect.”

Finnish team makes diabetes vaccine breakthrough (via /.)

Locket, the Android app that pays you (in tiny amounts) just for unlocking your smartphone, is today launching a toolkit for app developers that will allow them to publish their own content to users’ lock screens. That means when users see ads for apps on their phone’s screen, they can open up the app itself with just a swipe, similar to how a push notification works.

Launched this summer, Locket is an early mover in the U.S. market to bring the concept of lockscreen ads to Android users. The company competes with the likes of Seoul, South Korea-based LatteScreen, which only recently began targeting the American audience with its existing product. But Locket is already seeing some traction stateside – it recently hired Charity Sabater, formerly of Candy Crush-maker King, to lead sales, and says that it has grown its footprint to roughly 300,000 users since launching just a few months ago.

The idea, for those unfamiliar, is that of an opt-in experience where Locket displays ads on the phone’s lockscreen that you can choose to engage with or not by swiping to unlock your phone. These ads, for brands, businesses, movies, apps and more, can take users to websites, Facebook Pages, coupons, or movie trailers, for example, or they can just launch the app in question, as is the case with those publishers adopting the new Locket SDK.

The company was founded in March by Yunha Kim, Paul Jang, and Christopher Crawford who were inspired to create a new market in mobile advertising for what they call “first-glance” ads. To date, Locket has served more than 10 million daily impressions and is seeing several big-name advertisers testing its service.

More than 20 advertisers have run campaigns to date, including Hershey’s, Sunny D, Sears, ZipCar, eBay, Spotify and others, and more than 80 percent of advertisers renew with Locket. On average, the CTR on their campaigns is anywhere from 3 to 5 percent, Kim notes.

Whether or not users click through, they’re still paid. At launch, this was 1 cent per swipe, capped at 3 cents per hour. That model has now changed. Instead, users receive 1 cent for the new, unique ad of the day. Explains Kim, “if we show users 30 different ads (because people check their phone 110 times on average), they get 30 cents. Sometimes we show 20 ads (20 cents), sometimes we show 40 ads (40 cents), depending on the ad inventory we have.” In other words, Locket only makes you money when it does.

She tells us that the idea for launching the Locket SDK came from when one of the top three movie app companies reached out to the startup with a request to use a Locket SDK to publish movie ads and commercials to users’ lockscreens.

At launch, the SDK is being adopted by five app publishers, but Locket isn’t allowed to name who, only saying that they are in “movies, entertainment, music, lifestyle as well as games.”

The SDK is also being made available for free to the top 10 apps that Locket is now working with, and Locket will continue to approve which publishers can and cannot use the SDK to serve lockscreen ads. Interested app publishers should reach out to Locket directly to learn more.

The Transportation Security Administration is gearing up for stronger and broader pre-screenings, according to newly released documents. The TSA already checks travelers against a terrorist watch list, but the The New York Times reports that the agency will now begin profiling travelers based on their past travel itineraries, property records, car registrations and employment information. The result is a full background check, directing some towards lighter screenings and others towards more invasive bag checks and pat-downs.

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Apple has officially announced the latest version of its iPad tablet. The newly named iPad Air features a new design that's reminiscent of the iPad mini released last year. It's thinner and lighter than prior versions, and features a smaller bezel, which shrinks the footprint of the tablet down without compromising on screen size. Apple says it's 20 percent thinner at only 7.5mm thick, and weighs just 1.0 pound. This is the first major redesign of Apple's flagship tablet since the iPad 2 was released in March 2011.

The iPad Air features the 64-bit A7 processor and M7 motion coprocessor found in the iPhone 5S, which Apple says is 8 times faster and has 72 times better graphics performance than the old processor. It also has a 5-megapixel...

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Tony Jaa 1, punchbags 0

Vin Diesel has 50 million Facebook friends, which to put into context, is just a few million shy of social media's crown prince, Justin Bieber. To celebrate, Mr Diesel has kindly shared with us, his Facepals, a behind-the-scenes clip of Fast & Furious 7's gruelling training regimen shared by himself and new franchise addition Tony Jaa. If it seems almost specifically designed to make us feel bad for letting our horizontal pull-ups slip, that's because it is. 

Diesel, who seems to be starring and running the movie's PR drive at the same time, has added the Muay Thai specialist to the ranks of Fast 7's badass drag-racing outlaws. Jaa bent elephants to his will in Ong Bak; this time he'll helping Toretto (Diesel) and Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) deal with a malevolent Jason Statham, avenging brother of Owen Shaw from Fast 6.

With Diesel, Walker, Russell Statham and Ludacris all aboard, the cast also includes Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Kurt Russell,Tyrese Gibson, Dwayne Johnson, Lucas Black and Djimon Hounsou. James Wan is beavering away on the film for a July 11 release in the US, while Fast & Furious 7 will wheelspin into our cinemas on July 25.

The influence of social media continues to extend beyond platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and today, eBay is throwing its hat into the ring. It is unveiling a series of new features in its Marketplace that will see the company making one of its biggest moves yet to bring itself up to date with today’s younger online audience — and compete more comprehensively against the likes of Amazon. eBay is adding Curators to the site — tastemakers and well-known people who users can follow to see their latest product selections. Also new are profiles for both buyers and sellers to share more public information. And eBay Today will be a redesigned new homepage that will feature goods selected by the site’s new “chief curator and editorial director,” Michael Phillips Moskowitz.

At the same time, eBay is also announcing some upgrades to how it brings goods to users: specifically it will be expanding its  delivery service eBay Now to 25 markets by the end of 2014, with Chicago the latest city to launch today. And it has separately acquired Shutl, a one-hour delivery service that comes out of the UK but has also been building up a business in the U.S. The news comes out of its Future of Shopping event today in New York.

Marketplace is currently eBay’s largest business. In earnings reported last week, it accounted for $2.03 billion out of $3.89 billion in sales overall. But at current growth rates, it looks like it will soon be overtaken by PayPal. That’s a significant shift at the company from its role primarily as a platform for businesses to sell goods to one that processes the financial transactions. The sale of goods, meanwhile, is getting attacked from a couple of different angles — with perhaps the biggest being Amazon — so eBay has been evolving it far beyond its original business as a site for online auctions of used items. One of the verticles it has been betting big on is fashion and design, an today’s addition of curators is specifically pushing that concept.

Adding more social features is part of a longer-term upgrade that eBay has been making to its website for a while now. That has included a Pinterest-inspired redesign to its homepage, launched one year ago. The idea, it seems, is that as sites like Pinterest become strong sources of referral traffic for eBay, eBay itself wants to create a similar environment for activity on its own site, to keep users there and way from potentially shopping elsewhere. With consumers increasingly taking signals from their friends and connections to consume content online, it makes sense that a shopping platform would want to build on that concept, too. That’s also a hat-tip to other sites like Fancy, Lyst and Fab, which have all also built in social features to help users discover goods, and to potentially linger around longer, even when they are not directly buying things.

The moves follow developments last month in the UK, where eBay unveiled a new locker-style service and its Marketplaces president Devin Wenig hinted at a number of other new features to come.

“The world is changing, with the lines between online and offline commerce blurring and the expectations of buyers and sellers rising rapidly,” said Devin Wenig, president of eBay Marketplaces, in a statement. “With eBay’s latest steps, we are bringing together the best of what people need from a shopping experience – speed and convenience – with things people love about shopping, like discovery and inspiration.”

The news comes also just a week after eBay announced the appointment of RJ Pittman as the new chief product officer in the Marketplace division. Pittman, who comes from running e-commerce operations for Apple, will specifically be tasked with updating and upgrading and expanding Marketplace globally when he takes up his new job in November. A large part of that will be about extending eBay into the physical world. “We don’t talk about e-commerce anymore,” he told me in an interview. “We’ve dropped the ‘e’ to talk about commerce.”

Included among the 200 new Curators on eBay is Pharrell Williams, the musician and startup investor who has also backed a fashion site out of Berlin called L’Arco Baleno. “Shopping on eBay is unlike shopping anywhere else – it’s a place to discover things you love and things you never knew you needed. Now, anyone can create their own collection on eBay and fill it with all their dream items,” he said in a statement.

More to come. Refresh for updates.

eBay has announced an agreement to acquire Shutl, the UK-based marketplace that uses a network of couriers to deliver local goods within a couple of hours of an online purchase. Terms were not disclosed.

The company was founded by Tom Allason the founder and former CEO of eCourier.co.uk in 2008. Allason was unavailable for comment, but we understand from sources that he is pretty happy with the deal…

Shutl raised a total of $8.69M form UK Angels alongside Hummingbird Ventures, UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, e.ventures and Notion Capital.

The acquisition comes on the heels of the Click & Collect trial Shutl started with UK retailer Argos. Ebay says there is now an intention to expand eBay Now into London using Shutl’s infrastructure. eBay Now is a service available through iPhone, Android and desktop web that allows shoppers to have products from local stores, delivered in around an hour.

eBay President Devin Wenig said at a media event in New York that “approximately 75 percent of what people buy is local, found within 15 miles from their home” and that “Traditional retail isn’t going away. But it is transforming, and that creates enormous opportunity within the $10 trillion total commerce market.”

Only last month eBay launched its “Click & Collect” service in the UK, where shoppers can buy goods from eBay online and then select a physical retail location where they can be delivered. It also said it was bringing its same-day delivery option, eBay Now, to the UK, but it didn’t say how.

Post acquisition of Shutl, now we know.

Instead of having its own couriers, as old Dotcom Boom startups like Kozmo did, Shutl creates a marketplace from the capacity of local courier firms and uses retail partners’ local stock to fulfill purchases. It then integrates with all major dispatch software and retailers’ existing technology. The service operates 24/7 in 50+ towns across UK with a ‘virtual fleet’ which adds up to thousands of couriers completing untold deliveries every day.

Posted by Xiangye Xiao, Product Manager

Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog

Gmail and Docs offer wide language support, however in some cases using the keyboard is less than ideal. Whether you’re a student trying to include a foreign phrase in your paper or an international consultant hoping to begin your message with a friendly local greeting, now you’ll be able to use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad.

To try it out, enable input tools in Gmail or Docs and select the handwriting input (represented by a pencil icon) of the language you want to use.
       You can write single or even multiple characters at once in the panel to see them show up in your message or document. Currently, handwriting input is available in Google Docs for over 20 languages and in Gmail for over 50 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Russian.
Handwriting input makes the internet easier to use by people worldwide and is also part of a larger effort to break the barrier between languages, check it out in Google Mobile Search, Google Translate (Web, Android and iOS), and the Chrome browser.

When was the last time you looked at your Facebook feed and actually liked everything you saw? For all of Facebook's fancy algorithms, it can never create the perfect feed for you. Here's how to declutter that feed once and for all and only see the stuff you care about.

Note that most of these tricks apply to your Facebook friends, but the same rules can often be applied to pages you've liked as well, so don't forget to give those a thorough cleaning using the same tips once you're done culling your friends lists.

Unfriend (or Unsubscribe) from People You Aren't Interested In Seeing

Most of you have probably gone on one or two unfriending binges in the past, and it's the most obvious first step in any Facebook cleansing. But unfriending doesn't solve everything. Maybe you have a friend you want to keep in contact with, but don't want to see every update they post. Maybe you have a friend that's excessively political or obsessed with cat pictures that don't interest you. In those cases, unfriending isn't the solution. Luckily, Facebook has another option: Unsubscribing. You can unsubscribe completely from a friend's posts without defriending them completely, meaning you get the best of both worlds.

How to Do It: The easiest place to unfriend and unsubscribe from people en masse is your Friends page. Head to your Timeline, click the "Friends" tab under your cover photo, and start looking for people you'd rather not see. Click on the "Friends" box and select either "Unfriend" or de-select "Show In News Feed." It's that simple.

Move Friends to the "Close Friends" or "Acquaintances" Lists

Now that you've got all the unfriending out of the way, you can further refine your feed by telling Facebook who you'd like to see more or fewer updates from. The easiest way to do this is with Facebook's smart lists, particularly its "Close Friends" and "Acquaintances" lists. They do exactly what they sound like: Friends on your "Close Friends" list will be shown more often, while friends on your "Acquaintances" list will rarely be shown except in important updates, like an engagement.

How to Do It: Head back to your friends list and scan through your list. If you want to see more or less of a person's updates, click the Friends box and select "Close Friends" or "Acquaintances" to move them to that list.

If you don't want to waste a bunch of time, Facebook has a slightly hidden tool that'll recommend friends for your Acquaintances list that you don't interact with often. Head to http://facebook.com/friends/organi... and check the friends you want to see less of. It isn't as good as manually adding all your friends to Acquaintances and Close Friends, but it'll jump start the process and only takes a minute.

Subscribe (or Unsubscribe) to Specific Post Types

Lastly, you really want to fine-tune certain friends, you can do so from the same dropdown menus we've been using thus far. Say you have a friend that posts good updates, but keeps posting pictures of their baby/cat/baked goods and you want to ignore their photos. Or, say you have a friend that is fine except for all the damn Facebook games they play. You can unsubscribe from specific types of posts and fix these problems.

How to Do It: You can do this from your friends list, but generally, I think it's a waste of time to do this for every single friend—instead, do this as you browse your feed day-to-day and see stuff you don't like. The menu, however, is the exact same: just hover over your friend's name in the news feed and click the "Friends" box. This time, head to "Settings." From here, you can unsubscribe from any kind of update: Photos, Games, Life Events, and more.

Note that you'll see one other option in this list, that lets you choose whether you see "All Updates," "Most Updates," or "Important Updates." We recommend ignoring this. Adding friends to your Close Friends or Acquaintances lists achieves the same purpose from what we can tell, only it's easier to edit and view those lists. The only exception is with Facebook pages—for those, the "All Updates," "Most Updates," and "Important Updates" boxes are the only way to change how often you see their posts.

Filter Specific Posts with Social Fixer

The above tricks all use Facebook's built-in options to cultivate your feed, but there is another option for more advanced filtering: Social Fixer, the one extension that infinitely improves Facebook. Not only can you clean up your News Feed and generally improve your Facebook Experience, but you can also filter posts with certain words or from certain friends. It's great for blocking annoying political posts, TV and movie spoilers, and more.

How to Do It: Install the Social Fixer extension and head to its settings and edit your filters. You have a lot of options here, and we won't go into details, but check out our guide to hiding political posts on Facebook. It'll tell you everything you need to know, and you can easily adapt it for any subject or words you don't want to see.

Block Ads and Sponsored Posts with Adblock Plus

So you've filtered all the clutter from your friends, but what about the obnoxious ads and sponsored posts Facebook has been bombarding you with lately? Luckily, Adblock Plus hides these very easily, along with a bunch of other Facebook annoyances.

How to Do It: Just install the Adblock Plus extension (or any other Adblock extension of choice. By default, it'll block ads and sponsored stories on Facebook. (We recommend whitelisting sites you want to support, however...like, I don't know, your favorite tech blog). You can head to this page and hide other, non-ad annoyances on Facebook as well.

Going Forward: How to Keep Your Feed Clean

From here on out, the rest is on you: when you add new friends to Facebook, consider whether you want to see updates from them or not and tweak the above settings accordingly. If you aren't sure, you can decide after you've seen a few posts in your news feed.

Generally, that's the best way to keep up the cleanliness: when you see a post or person in your feed that you'd like to hide, you can change their settings right then and there by hovering over their name and clicking the "Friends" box, just like you did earlier. Weblog Dot Complicated recommends checking that "Birthdays" box every day, too, and unfriending or unsubscribing to people you don't want to see. It may seem harsh to do that on people's birthdays, but it's a good way to keep your subscriptions clean throughout the year.

Title image remixed from John Sargent, Oli Dunkley, and Elnur (Shutterstock).

The UK's Internet censorship rules allow big rightsholders to provide the country's major ISPs with lists of IP addresses that must be blocked, no questions asked -- an no penalties if the wrong site gets blocked. Case in point: the Premier League demanded censorship of a load-balancing content distribution network that carried many sites, including the Radio Times (a TV/radio listings service formerly owned by the BBC). The blacklists generated by big entertainment companies are kept secret, and the Open Rights Group is pushing ISPs to voluntarily publish the list of censorship orders they receive, so that the public can check them for this kind of negligent error.

Under the orders, rights-holders must furnish the ISPs with lists of IP addresses and URLs they want blocked. The ISPs must then ensure those sites are filtered.

Rights-holders are free to update their original blacklists with new entries and can force ISPs to block proxy sites without further orders.

According to the source, the rights-holders failed to check whether some infringing IP addresses were also shared by innocent sites – meaning radiotimes.com but not www.radiotimes.com – was caught up in the block.

Rights-holders taking down legitimate sites in piracy crackdown [Shona Ghosh/PCPro]

(via /.)

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.

This is the app roundup. The game roundup from this week can be found here.

• [New App] µTorrent Releases Full-Function BitTorrent Beta Client For Android
• [New App] µTorrent Gets A Premium Ad-Free Version Of The Android Client For $3
• [New App] Google Maps Engine Android App Allows You To View Custom Maps Created With Maps Engine
• Official uTorrent Remote App Debuts - Manage All Those Perfectly Legal Downloads From Your Android Phone

25 Best New Android Apps And Live Wallpapers From The Last 2 Weeks (10/8/13 - 10/21/13) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

In the wake of countless music streaming services popping up over the past several years, Twitter's own offering never made much of an impact. AllThingsD reports that Twitter will likely be shuttering its own #Music app after downloads have nearly slowed to a halt since Twitter launched the service back in April. Initial numbers were reportedly promising, but Twitter could not maintain the momentum and now Twitter #Music cannot even be found in the App Store's top 1,000 apps according to market data company Onavo Insights.

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Nokia is aiming to make a bigger splash in the mobile market by releasing its first-ever phablet and tablet this year, two among the six final consumer devices that Nokia will ever debut. On Tuesday Nokia announced its new Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1320 phablets as well as its Lumia 2520 tablet. As previous leaks suggested, the Lumia 1520 features a 6-inch 1080p display, a 20-megapixel PureView camera, a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and Windows Phone 8. The Lumia 1320, meanwhile, is the same size as the Lumia 1520 but its display is only 720p and it has just a 5-megapixel camera without PureView technology. The Lumia 1520 will carry an off-contract price of $749 while the Lumia 1320 will have an off-contract price of $339. The Lumia 1520 will be released in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2013 while the Lumia 1320 will be targeted more toward emerging markets.

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Live on stage at Nokia World 2013, WhatsApp CEO Jim Balsamic announced the instant messaging service now has 350 million monthly active users. That's up by 50 million since August, when the network announced it had hit 300 million. Balsamic also announced that some 250,000 users per day are registering for WhatsApp using Nokia devices — including Symbian, Asha and Lumia handsets — over 7 million per month.

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It's 2013, the era of the cloud. But for whatever reason — it really doesn't matter why — BlackBerry's still stuck in a one-device frame of mind.

We live in a world of multiple screens. Some of us use more than one phone. More likely, however, is the combination of using a phone and a tablet. Being able to access your data anywhere is the crux of everything Google — and therefore Android — does. Apple's stumbled with iCloud, but damned if it's not trying. And for all its faults in the past, even Microsoft had this one figured out long ago with its "Three screens and the cloud" strategy. 

And then there's BlackBerry. BBM — BlackBerry Messenger — is finally available for iOS and Android. Sort of. You can download the app, then get on a waiting list, as BlackBerry's ramping things up slowly. But know this: You can only use one BBM ID on one device at a time. One ID, one phone. Or one tablet. 

And not at all (yet — it's coming) on a desktop or laptop computer.

Anyhoo. This isn't a surprise to anyone who's used BBM before. (Or the popular WhatsApp, for that matter.) But for those of us used to accessing our conversations on any connected device, it's a bit of a shock.

And it's really not how things work in 2013. 

After a number of delays and an untold number of fake spam apps, BBM for Android is about to really arrive in Google Play. This will mark the first time Blackberry's premier messaging service has been available on a non-Blackberry device. You'll be able to download the app today, but you might not be able to actually use it.

BBM was leaked a few weeks back and the flood of users caused all manner of server issues for the company.

• PSA: This "Blackberry Messenger BBM" Published By Developer RIM Has 100k+ Installs But Is As Fake As It Gets
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• Netflix Announces Family Member Profiles, Coming To Android "Soon"

BBM Rolling Out In Google Play Today, Will Come With A Waiting List To Ensure No Servers Are Harmed [Update: It's Live] was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Got BBM on Android? Here are the basics.

BBM is starting to get (kinda-sorta) rolled out today on Android, and to get folks acclimatized, BlackBerry has posted a few how-to videos on their YouTube channel. Videos show how to manage groups, how read/delivered receipts work, handling multi-person chat, checking status updates, sharing files, and adding contacts.

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Experian, the massive data-broker with far-reaching influence over your ability to get a mortgage, credit-card, or job, sold extensive consumer records to an identity thieves' service called Superget.info. Superget specialized in supplying identity thieves with "fullz" -- full records of their victims, useful for impersonating them and for knowing where their assets are. Experian sold the data through a third part called "Court Ventures" -- which they later acquired -- and the sales continued for about a year. Experian bills itself as a service for people worried about identity theft. It's not clear whether Experian will face any penalty for the wrongdoing.

These services specialized in selling “fullz” or “fulls,” a slang term that cybercrooks use to describe a package of personally identifiable information that typically includes the following information: an individual’s name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, place of work, duration of work, state driver’s license number, mother’s maiden name, bank account number(s), bank routing number(s), email account(s) and other account passwords. Fulls are most commonly used to take over the identity of a person in order to engage in other fraud, such as taking out loans in the victim’s name or filing fraudulent tax refund requests with the IRS.

All told, findget.me and superget.info acquired or sold fullz information on more than a half million people, the government alleges.

The U.S. Secret Service declined to discuss the case, but a source familiar with the matter said undercover federal agents set up a phony business deal to lure Ngo out of Vietnam and into Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean. The source said that Ngo was arrested upon his arrival in Guam and transferred to New Hampshire. There he is currently facing 15 separate criminal charges, including conspiracy to commit identification fraud, aggravated identity theft, and wire fraud, among others.

Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service [Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security]

iOS: There are a lot of great alternate texting apps out there, but many of them are only useful if all your friends use them too. If you have a lot of BlackBerry-using friends, you can now BBM them with the free BlackBerry Messenger app for iOS.

If you have BlackBerry-using friends, you've probably heard of BBM before: it's the previously BlackBerry-only service that lets you send messages, pictures, and more over your data connection with other BBM users. You can see when messages have been delivered and read, and control who can message you by adding their PIN number to your contacts list. It's basically like iMessage, but for BlackBerry users (and it came first).

Now, iOS users can get in on the fun with the new BBM app for iOS. Just download the app, set up your profile, and you can BBM back and forth with other BlackBerry- or BBM-using friends just by trading PIN numbers. Unfortunately BBM is rolling out gradually, so you'll have to enter your email upon startup and wait for a message before you can start using it.

Check out BBM's home page for more info on how the whole thing works, or hit the link below to try it out for yourself. An Android version is rumored to be coming soon (hopefully today), so keep an eye out for that as well.

BBM | iTunes App Store