Davemichels

Today, GENBAND launches Kandy: a real-time communications software development platform. Kandy aims to combine the simplicity of web and mobile app development with enterprise grade real-time communications features.

A UK research team has created one of the first robots capable of handling unfamiliar objects, and it may soon become dexterous enough to load a dishwasher, The Financial Times reported.

"Boris 2" was first showcased at the British Science Festival in Birmingham last Thursday. Boris's blue arms and silver hands allow him to grasp objects like a human can.

The machine cost £350,000 ($570,000) and took five years to develop. Once its development is complete, it will represent the answer to one of the most complicated problems in robotics: How can a machine assess the size and weight of an object it has never encountered before, and calculate correctly the best way to pick it up? The problem has a massive number of variables and requires a staggering amount of calculations (and yet humans do it subconsciously).

Here is one the units opening its "eyes":

Boris is one of the first robots capable of grabbing objects in a human-like fashion. For a while now, robots have been able to pick objects up if they have been specifically programmed to do so — but they haven't been able to manipulate unfamiliar, random objects they have not seen before. Before now, robots could only pick up items of a fixed size in a stationary location.

But Boris is able to calculate a 1,000 possible ways to grab an object in the space of 10 seconds:

The team of computer scientists from the University of Birmingham who made the robot believe that it will be capable of carrying out complex tasks such as loading a dishwasher, hopefully by April next year.

Professor Jeremy Wyatt, of the University of Birmingham's computer science department, told Business Insider: "It's a really interesting technology you can apply in many circumstances. Our next step is working with tech organizations to see how we can use robots to assemble industrial parts."

However, the intention with robots like Boris is not to replace humans in the workplace, but to help and work collaboratively with them. "We want to augment existing human abilities, but still get the human to do the parts of the job the robot can't do," says Wyatt.

Researchers taught Boris different ways of grasping objects, for example through a power grip using its whole hand to curve around an object or a pinch grip between two or three fingers. This level of dexterity is required for a robot to manipulate a variety of objects of different sizes in an environment like an office or household. The robot can "see" objects in front of it using depth sensors embedded in its face and wrists. However, Boris still finds some objects hard to pick up — for example, shiny objects, which its sensors often find difficult to detect due to reflections off the material confusing the robot as to where the object actually is.

Wyatt has big plans for the future. "Over the next four to five years, we will see a whole series of algorithms for different robot manipulations. In the seventies and eighties, we saw robotic manipulation under structured and controlled environments, like in factories. Now, we can produce robots that navigate around unstructured environments and identify and grasp unfamiliar objects. That is what is coming to the market now."

Watch a video of Boris in action below.

SEE ALSO: Robotics Researchers Are Turning The Internet Into A Giant Robot Brain

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Some might wonder why Microsoft would pay $2.5 billion for a game with low-res graphics and no real plot-line -- but the reality is that Minecraft is far more of an…

Google just made it a lot easier for college students to try the Chromebook for the first time.

On Friday, Google introduced the Chromebook Lending Library, a three-day, on-campus kiosk where students will be able to borrow Chromebooks for free.

Students can borrow a Chromebook on a first-come, first-serve basis, and can keep it for the entire three days the kiosk is on campus.

The Lending Library is visiting 12 different colleges across the country, starting from this week. It’s already made its first two stops at University of Colorado - Boulder and Penn State University, and is on its way to Syracuse and Texas State next week.

Google said more campuses will be added in the coming weeks.

Here’s the full list of schools:

 

This is a great move by Google to further expand its presence in the education sector. Most of the Chromebook sales came from the education industry last year, accounting for 85% of total sales. In 2013, 22% of U.S. school districts used Chromebooks.

Gartner predicts Chromebook sales will be a little over 5 million this year, which is only about 2% of the entire personal computer market. But sales are growing quickly, as it sold more than a million Chromebooks last quarter alone, compared to 2.1 million in all of last year. Gartner says sales will triple to 14.4 million by 2017.

Chromebooks run on an operating system called Chrome OS, which relies on internet connection for most of its functionality. It offers all the basic computing experience such as web browsing and running simple apps, and comes at a lot lower price than other laptops in the market. 

SEE ALSO: What it was like attending Apple's biggest event of the year

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Plastic. That's the material many people think of when they hear the term "3D printing." Today, there's so much more to it. Here’s a sampling of some of the more exotic materials now being used in 3D printers — an indication of why the technology is revolutionizing virtually every industry:

 

 

 

SEE ALSO: The Most Interesting, Non-Obvious Things You Can Make At Home On A 3D Printer

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, despite contributing to the destruction of the physical bookstore, is a man intensely interested in and passionate about books and reading. 

In the appendix of Brad Stone's new book about Amazon, "The Everything Store," there's a list of books called "Jeff's Reading List," highlighted by Shane Parrish at Farnam Street.

"Books have nurtured Amazon since its creation and shaped its culture and strategy," Stone writes. "Here are a dozen books widely read by executives and employees that are integral to understanding the company." 

The list is not just weighty business tomes, though classics like "The Innovator's Dilemma" are there, but includes novels and biographies as well. They help explain some of Bezos' core management philosophies, like "two pizza teams," the Amazon maxim that no team be larger than the number of people that can share two pizzas. It also includes books that helped inspire the creation of Amazon Web Services, the company's highly lucrative cloud business, and the Kindle.

It's an amazing way to get into the mind of Jeff Bezos. 

We've listed the books here, along with Stone's explanation of why each made the list. 

"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"Jeff Bezos’ favorite novel, about a butler who wistfully recalls his career in service during wartime Great Britain. Bezos has said he learns more from novels than nonfiction," Stone writes.

Find "The Remains of the Day" here.

Source: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

"Sam Walton: Made in America" by Sam Walton

"In his autobiography, Walmart’s founder expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action—a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon’s corporate values," Stone writes.

Find "Made in America" here.

Source: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

"Memos from the Chairman" by Alan Greenberg

"A collection of memos to employees by the chairman of the now defunct investment bank Bear Stearns. In his memos, Greenberg is constantly restating the bank’s core values, especially modesty and frugality. His repetition of wisdom from a fictional philosopher presages Amazon’s annual recycling of its original 1997 letter to shareholders," Stone writes.

Find "Memos from the Chairman" here.

Source: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

As you may have heard, Russian hackers have published the passwords for roughly five million Gmail accounts. This follows the publication of millions of passwords for two of Russia's largest email services, Yandex and Mail.Ru,

Chances are, your account is not one of the hacked Gmail accounts because that "five million" figure only represents a small fraction of the number of Gmail accounts that are active in the world today. For instance, the Gmail app has been downloaded one billion times to Android devices.  Even back in 2012, Gmail had 350 million users.

But a group of programmers have decided to help you check your email all the same. A website called Isleaked.com will tell you if your email is one of the 5 million. Just type in your email and if its been hacked, the website will show you the first two letters of your password.

When we tried it it told us our email was not leaked.

We contacted the developers who told us that they originally created the site to help people check with the Yandex and Mail.Ru attacks, and fired up an English website when the database of Gmail addresses became public.

The developers say they are not collecting email addresses to spam you later, and to back that up, they do not require you to tell them your full email. You can substitute asterisks for some of the letters and they'll do the search based on what you've given them.

But, whether your Gmail was leaked or not — or whether or not you want to check it on Isleaked.com — there's one easy thing you can do to better your protect yourself: change your password and then add another security step called "two-step verification." That means Google will send you a special code to use as an extra password to login to your account. While that sounds like a headache, it's not that bad to use, and will protect you from hacks like this one.

We've posted step-by-step instructions here.

SEE ALSO: How To Delete Your Own Nude Photos From Apple's iCloud: A Step-By-Step Guide

SEE ALSO: How To Never, EVER Worry About Your Passwords Getting Hacked Or Stolen

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Peter Thiel — the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and early Facebook investor — took to Reddit on Thursday for an AMA as part of the run-up to the release of his new new book "Zero To One," which will be available on Sept. 16. 

The whole thread is worth the read, but we were intrigued by three targets of Thiel's hyper-articulate ire: b-school grads, the overly dressed, and the cult of Silicon Valley.

Thiel doesn't love to hire MBAs. 

If there's one thing the uber-libertarian Thiel despises, it's people who act like sheep. And MBAs tend to get caught up in groupthink, he says.

While he doesn't have an "absolute ban" on hiring MBAs, he thinks that they tend to be "high extrovert/low conviction people." 

That's "a combination that in my experience leads towards extremely herd-like thinking and behavior," he says. 

Thiel hates suits. 

While he cautions that there are "no absolute and timeless sartorial rules," Thiel says that "in Silicon Valley, wearing a suit in a pitch meeting makes you look like someone who is bad at sales and worse at tech." 

Maybe that's why he has a simple rule for investing: never bet on a CEO in a suit. 

As we've reported before, Thiel says that this rule has helped him avoid making poor bets on slick businessfolk compensating for crap products with well-dressed charm. 

"Maybe we still would have avoided these bad investments if we had taken the time to evaluate each company's technology in detail," Thiel writes in his new book. "But the team insight — never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit — got us to the truth a lot faster."

Thiel thinks Silicon Valley is overrated.

Some of Thiel's A-list entrepreneur/investor peers, like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, insist that Silicon Valley is the place to do great entrepreneurial work, since there are so many influential and intelligent people to bump into and start opportunity-enabling relationships with. 

Thiel is less enthusiastic.

When a Reddit user asked him if it was possible to successfully found a company without living in Silicon Valley, Thiel's answer was "yes." 

"It's more affordable," he says, "in almost all ways."

Of course, that affordability has its costs. "You miss out on the network effects of Silicon Valley" by living elsewhere, Thiel says. "But sometimes these network effects lead to negatives, as people end up behaving more lemming-like in the SOMA hotbed," referring to the hip San Francisco neighborhood. 

Like the MBA, Thiel considers SOMA just another acronym for groupthink.

SEE ALSO: Mark Cuban Shares The 4 Simple Keys To A Perfect Pitch

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This week was a big week for Apple. On Tuesday it announced the iPhone 6, which comes in two sizes at various storage capacities, and the Apple Watch, which will be released early next year.

Apple's website and store were down for most of the event, as they usually are, but once the store came up, eagle-eyed music lovers started noticing something was missing: the iPod Classic.

The iPod debuted in 2001, and promised "1,000 songs in your pocket." Over the years, the iPod saw many iterations, including the Shuffle, Nano, and iPod Touch.

Check out the first commercial for the original iPod:

The Classic debuted a few months after the first iPhone in 2007, and was the only iPod to still use the "click wheel." The largest size, at 160GB, could hold 40,000 songs. 

Now when you go to apple.com/ipodclassic, it silently redirects you to the main iPod homepage. 

Not A Big Surprise

It's not that much of a surprise that the company killed the Classic. It's been rumored to be going away for at least a few years. 

In January, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the "iPod is a declining business." And with the new iPhones topping out at 128 GB, the dedicated music player was pretty much rendered irrelevant. 

In fact, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that Apple quietly killed a device at all. When the iPhone 5S and 5C were announced, you could no longer buy the iPhone 5, not even at a reduced price. When the new MacBooks came out in 2011, Apple quietly got rid of the entry-level white MacBooks. When the iPod Nano was released in 2005, the iPod Mini (which also had a click wheel) was discontinued. 

And just this week with the iPhone 6 launch, Apple got rid of the 64 GB iPhone 5S.

But people are taking the news of the iPod Classic's death surprisingly hard. 

Where Did They Go?

A reader told Business Insider that when he called a local store in Southern California, he was told that Apple "forced" stores to return unsold Classics.

So we called a few Apple stores in the San Francisco Bay Area to see if we could find a Classic before it was gone forever. A saleswoman at the downtown San Francisco store told us that she couldn't check what the stock numbers were like, but that we could come check and see if there were any left. 

A woman we spoke with at the Chestnut Street store told us that there weren't any in stock, but didn't have any further information on what happened to it.

A salesperson we spoke with at the Burlingame Avenue store said that the Classic has gone into "end-of-life production," which means that it's been discontinued, and there aren't any left in stock because they've been "removed." He also said that "Apple likes to keep the best and brightest products out there" and the company removes products that it discontinues from stores. 

There's Still Hope

But don't fret. You can still stock up on Classics and click that "click wheel" for at least a limited time. 

As of this writing, Amazon is still selling the iPod Classic. Even the way discontinued sixth-generation one, if you're into really going retro. 

If you don't mind shelling out for a possibly used Classic, you could try eBay. You could even get a nonworking one and use it for parts, should your beloved iPod eventually die. 

We tried searching on Target's site. It's not available anymore online, but it was available for in-store pickup at a couple stores in the Bay Area. 

And it looks like Best Buy might still have a few left. 

Apple still sells its other iPods. The largest capacity you can get is the $299 64GB iPod Touch. It's not the same as the beloved iPod Classic, of course. But in an iPhone world, you have to take what you can get. 

SEE ALSO: Fitness buffs should be super excited about the Apple Watch

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Following the company’s gigantic iPhone and Watch announcement in Cupertino, California, Apple announced new iCloud pricing on its website. 

The news, which we first spotted on MacRumors, comes right before Apple’s cloud service gets a major boost in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite; iOS 8 will launch to the public on Sept. 17, and OS X Yosemite will arrive sometime this fall.

As they did before, iCloud customers will still get 5GB of storage for free, but now, they can purchase an extra 20GB of space for $0.99 per month. For 1TB of storage, users will pay $20 a month.

The pricing plan is certainly improved over the former deal, considering many users don’t use all that storage. But Apple’s iCloud mainly handles documents, photos, apps, and music — specifically within Apple’s ecosystem devices and services. 

Professionals and businesspeople who rely on full cloud services across a wider range of devices for things like videos, large photos, and back-end services, might want to consider Google Drive or Dropbox, which gives users the same terabyte of storage for half of Apple’s price ($9.99 a month, each). Amazon also charges $0.03 per GB per month for its S3 cloud service, which is a favorite among developers (Dropbox included). 

That said, Apple users will likely start using iCloud a bit more once iOS 8 releases to the public, since that new mobile operating system includes many improvements to iCloud. Syncing is highly improved, iCloud Photo Library will keep all of your photos in iCloud forever (instead of the current 30-day period), and it will soon support and open all document types on any Mac or iOS device. Apple will make several other improvements to iCloud as well, which will become effective starting Sept. 17.

SEE ALSO: 6 Ways Apple Will Fix iCloud In iOS 8

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OK Go claims Apple ripped off one of its videos to promote its iPhone 6 and Apple Watch launch event yesterday, Andy Gershon, manager of the indie-pop band OK Go told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. 

It's not a mere coincidence, Gershon says:

He says the band met with Apple in April to pitch that visual concept as a potential video collaboration. Apple declined, so the band made its own video. Apple then hired 1stAveMachine, the production company behind OK Go’s video, to make a video for its iPhone launch event; it also used the same director. Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Watch the Apple video below:

The Apple video involves using different colored shapes shot from a variety of angles. As the camera pans about, the shapes form coherent messages, like an optical illusion.

The same visual trick is used in OK Go song "The Writing's On The Wall."

Here's the video for the OK Go song:

In this video, the band use visual illusions to make it appear as if they are doing something they're not. For example, at one point it looks like they are climbing stairs — a second later, the video reveals it is not an actual staircase. 

Ok Go has enjoyed viral success with the song and the video, which has garnered nearly 10.5 million views on YouTube in less than three months. With help from directors 1stAveMachine, the band won this year's MTV Video Music Award for Best Visual Effects.

OK Go is exploring its potential legal options.

This isn't the first time that Apple has experienced legal issues involving musicians. One of the most famous cases was when The Beatles's record label Apple Corps sued Apple for breaching a trade mark agreement by selling music in the iTunes store in 2003.

SEE ALSO: A Chinese Company Says Apple Stole Its Technology For Siri

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New Zealand's main internet provider, Spark, suffered a major nationwide failure this weekend after a handful of users found themselves installing malware on their computers when they clicked on links promising nude photos of celebrities. 

On Aug. 31, a massive hack led to a leak of tons of nude photos of major celebrities. Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, and Kim Kardashian were all victims of the breach after their private images were taken out of their iCloud storage systems and posted to online communities within Reddit and 4chan.

New Zealand residents looking to see the photos for themselves ended up turning Spark on its head, causing 600,000 users to be down and out of an internet connection for over 24 hours.

The New Zealand Herald reports "Spark said it was aware that when people clicked on some celebrity nude snaps, they've inadvertently installed the kind of software that created distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks such as this weekend's," but said it wasn't entirely clear that the frenzy for nude images was what caused the unusual failure.

But security experts TrendMicro tells Stuff.Co.NZ that they traced the malignant links back to Twitter, where a user tweeted a link with "hashtags that contain the name of one of the leak's victims - Jennifer Lawrence."

Spark spokesman Conor Roberts said the internet was back to normal a day later, warning users to "not click on 'dodgy' emails and files if they did not know what was in them or where they came from."

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Shutterstock / JMicic

Lately, we’ve been getting pitched on so many new wearable gadgets that it has been difficult to determine what seems like a viable product rather than a “me-too” device.

And, with Apple expected to show off some sort of wearable device on Sept. 9 (at an event that will “suck the oxygen out of the tech media,” as Walt Mossberg so aptly put it), everything announced this week is running up against whatever Apple might, quite literally, have up its sleeve.

So rather than make you read several hundred words on each new product, we’ve summarized everything you need to know below. Keep in mind, we haven’t tested these yet, and this is not a full review. But it should give you a good idea of what to expect if you’re eyeing wearables right now.

Asus

Welcome to the club, Asus: Yesterday the Taiwanese computer maker introduced its very first smartwatch at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin. Called the ZenWatch, the classic-looking timepiece is running Android Wear and features a curved 1.63-inch, 320-by-320-pixel display. It comes with a brown leather strap that can be swapped for any standard 22mm watchband.

Compatible with devices running Android 4.3 or higher, the ZenWatch offers a lot of the same features as other smartwatches, including phone notifications and activity tracking.

But it does have some unique aspects, such as the ability to silence incoming phone calls by placing a palm over the watch’s face and a built-in bio sensor that Asus claims can measure relaxation levels.

The ZenWatch is expected to ship in Q3 for around 199 euros (around $262 U.S.), but Asus didn’t provide any information about market availability at this time.

Sony

If you bought Sony’s first SmartBand, then you may not want to read the rest of this.

The company announced an updated version of its activity tracker this week, and it looks to be a lot better than its predecessor. For one, it now has a 1.6-inch E-Ink display so you can easily see the time, your fitness stats, phone notifications and other information at a glance. Sony also added an accelerometer and altimeter to capture more data about your physical activity.

Lastly, there’s a built-in microphone and speaker for making quick phone calls using the band.

In addition to the SmartBand Talk, Sony introduced the SmartWatch 3. As its name would suggest, this isn’t the first smartwatch for Sony, but it is the company’s first smartwatch to run Android Wear. It sports a 1.6-inch, 320-by-320 display and waterproof design. There are four gigabytes of onboard memory, and a built-in microphone, GPS, compass and gyroscope.

Both the SmartBand Talk and SmartWatch 3 are expected to ship this fall, with a price of 160 euros ($210) and 229 euros ($300), respectively.

Intel

The chip giant has made it very clear it wants to be at the forefront of the wearables market, having shown off in recent months everything from a “smart” shirt to a device dedicated to Parkinson’s research to heart-rate-tracking earphones made in collaboration with 50 Cent. Now another Intel-powered wearable is literally being trotted out down the runway.

The new MICA smartwatch, first teased back at CES in January as a joint effort between Intel, Opening Ceremony and Barneys, will be making an appearance at New York Fashion Week this week. The cuff-like wristwatch will have a 1.6-inch touchscreen sapphire display and will come in two distinct styles. Intel’s still keeping mum on a lot of its capabilities, but we do know this: It will show SMS alerts, calendar reminders and messages, and apparently will have a 3G cellular radio for two-way communications (read: Talking through your bracelet).

We’ve also been told that the MICA will come to market this holiday season, and will cost — wait for it — under $1,000.

Well that’s a relief.

Garmin

Garmin has evidently adopted the motto “Know thyself,” as the GPS-and-fitness-device-maker has introduced neither an expensive fashion bracelet nor a metal watch that can’t handle a little sweat.

Instead, Garmin is following up its sleeper-hit Vivofit with the new Vivosmart, another activity-tracking wristband. Unlike the Vivofit, which has an LCD display and two coin batteries that last up to a year, Vivosmart has a swipeable OLED display and lasts around seven days between charges. The Vivosmart also pairs with a chest strap to show heart-rate levels, sends vibration alerts on the hour to remind you to move around and can even be used to control the Garmin Virb action camera.

The Vivosmart will be available through Best Buy for $170. A wristband-and-heart-strap bundle will cost $200.

Samsung, LG and More

Do virtual reality headsets count as wearables? Well, you do wear them, so we’re going with it.

In case you missed the announcement yesterday, Samsung showed off a pair of virtual-reality goggles that the Korean electronics giant developed with Oculus (now owned by Facebook). This came on the heels of Samsung announcing yet another smartwatch, the Samsung Gear S. As Re/code’s Ina Fried pointed out, “For those keeping track, Samsung this year has now introduced the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo, the Gear Fit, the Gear Live and the Gear S.”

Korean rival LG Electronics also announced another smartwatch this week, an Android Wear-based watch called the LG G Watch R. Unlike the rectangular LG G Watch, the G Watch R has a round face.

The Samsung Gear VR goggles, which work in conjunction with the new Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, will be available later this fall; no word yet on pricing.

Neither Samsung nor LG has announced pricing or availability for the new smartwatches.

Finally, let’s not forget about Motorola: Later today, the company is widely expected to launch its round-faced Motorola 360 smartwatch.

Proponents of wearable technology might say this influx of products only validates the relatively young market. Still, a couple of these show just incremental improvements over previous models, or might not necessarily have broad appeal — so for now, we’re keeping our skeptic caps on.

Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.

Rather than offering you cellphone service, the towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts. 

Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, used ESD's CryptoPhone 500 to detect 17 bogus cellphone towers. ESD is a leading American defense and law enforcement technology provider based in Las Vegas. 

With most phones, these fake communication towers towers are undetectable. But not for the CryptoPhone 500. It is a customized Android device that is disguised as a Samsung Galaxy S III, but has highly-advanced encryption.

Goldsmith told Popular Science: "Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found eight different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

The towers were found in July, but the report implied that there may have been more out there.

Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several of them were located near U.S. military bases. 

"Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don't really know whose they are," Goldsmith said to Popular Science.

It's probably not the NSA — that agency can tap all it wants without the need for bogus towers, VentureBeat reported:

Not the NSA, cloud security firm SilverSky CTO/SVP Andrew Jaquith told us. “The NSA doesn’t need a fake tower,” he said. “They can just go to the carrier” to tap your line.

ComputerWorld points out that the fake towers give themselves away by crushing down the performance of your phone from 4G to 2G while the intercept is taking place. So if you see your phone operating on a slow download signal while you're near a military base ... maybe make that call from somewhere else.

In an amazing coincidence, police departments in a handful of U.S. cities have been operating "Stingray" or "Hailstorm" towers which — you guessed it — conduct surveillance on mobile phone activity. They do that by jamming mobile phone signals, forcing phones to drop down from 4G and 3G network bands to the older, more insecure 2G band.

SEE ALSO: The CEO Of Secret Told Us How You Can Hack Yo And Get Anyone's Phone Number In Just 3 Minutes

SEE ALSO: Kate Middleton’s Phone Was Hacked 'At Least' 155 Times By Former Reporter

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Despite reaching end-of-support this year, Windows XP remains in second place behind Windows 8 and WIndows 8.1.

What about OneNote?

It’s a question that Evernote CEO Phil Libin gets asked all the time, especially after Microsoft made the note-taking app free earlier this year. But, Libin says, it’s the wrong question.

Libin makes no bones about having Microsoft in his sights, but it is Office he wants to dethrone, not OneNote.

The world, he said, would be a better place if OneNote were popular. Instead, workers spend their time in programs like Word and Outlook, which he says are relics that should be placed in the Recycle Bin.

He saves his sharpest words for PowerPoint, which he says has turned every meeting into a pitch rather than an intellectual discussion — it’s not about trying to make people smarter, it’s about making people agree with you.

“It just dumbs everything down,” he said. “The cognitive style of it is wrong. It’s corrupt.”

The only part of the Office suite Libin said is actually good software is Excel. Even there, though, he said it is more often used for making lists than for doing the kinds of financial modeling that Excel is actually good at.

Libin’s sharp words for Microsoft come as Evernote itself is in the midst of a transition, aiming to shift from a consumer tool also used by businesses into one with workers in mind.

“We’ve definitely focused the company on work — on your life’s work,” Libin said. “We want to own the workspace. … Our goal is very much to make the general solution for modern busy people.”

Doing that means expanding Evernote, particularly on the communications front. Its current communications tools, Libin admits, are more rudimentary than functional. Although there are tens of millions of shared notebooks today, only one in ten Evernote customers is using the product collaboratively at least once per month.

“It’s kind of a marginal use case,” Libin said. “That’s really something that should be closer to 50 percent.”

Evernote is also looking at new ways to fund its efforts. The company is preparing to hike the fees for the first time for the premium version of its service, currently priced at $5 per month or $45 per year. Existing paid customers won’t see their rates go up, Libin promised.

As part of its shift toward a workplace focus, Libin said he made the decision to kill several projects that would have been more consumer-oriented, including Evernote Baby, a tool for new parents.

Libin said he personally loved the product, but it just didn’t fit with the new Evernote. The company will also stop investing in existing consumer products, including Evernote Food.

One area where Libin isn’t pulling back is Evernote’s storefront, which sells things such as limited-edition backpacks and a custom scanner. Earlier this week, the company added a shop in China and a new collection of wood desk accessories.

The profit margins are great, Libin said, and over half of the Evernote market customers are people who have never paid the company.

Plus, buyers are stocking up on the styli, scanners and socks that the company offers for sale.

“Almost everything sells out all the time,” Libin said.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up as a surprise guest at Cisco's huge internal sales conference that took place this week.

She was interviewed on stage by CEO John Chambers.

That's a politically interesting combination. Chambers is a Republican who endorsed Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign. But that same year, he also said he was a fan of Hillary's hubby, Bill. He told Arik Hesseldahl at AllThingsD that year:

"I’m a strong Republican, but I think President Clinton got it right with business and knocked the ball out of the park."

Clinton's speech and interview was not taped, a source close to the company told us. So we can't listen on the conversation now that it's over. Cisco would not even officially confirm her visit.

But it was all over Twitter.

#GSX #Cisco Closing Session with @HillaryClinton - #BeBold pic.twitter.com/NkklN2l4TB

— Chase Dalton (@ugachase) August 28, 2014

John interviewing Hillary at GSX @GoAllInCSA #GSX pic.twitter.com/IpffkYmCDR

— Tim Carter (@tcarter12) August 28, 2014

.@HillaryClinton and @Cisco CEO John Chambers. Thank you for a great talk. #CiscoGSX #GoCisco ! pic.twitter.com/r2v5vGEA6s

— Cisco Jobs (@ciscojobs) August 29, 2014

That same day, Clinton also gave an official, public appearance in the Valley. She spoke at the OpenSDx Summit sponsored by startup Nexenta Systems. At that appearance she was asked about one of Chambers' favorite political subjects: bringing corporate offshore money back to the U.S. (known as repatriation).

At that conference she was asked about a plan floated by Chambers and others to create an infrastructure bank where companies can invest offshore cash, reports The Wall Street Journal's Rachael King.

Clinton said she hasn't looked into that idea but noted, “It doesn’t do our economy any good to have this money parked somewhere else in the world.”

She's been lately talking to a lot of tech companies. In July she visited Google, Facebook, and Twitter, she tweeted.

Still, if she runs for president and gets John Chambers' endorsement, that would be something of a coup.

SEE ALSO: Term of the day: "Google Dorking"

Join the conversation about this story »

Ting's customers may use less cellular data than the national average, but they're also a paying a lot less each month. That reflects the company's pay-for-what-you-consume billing model.

Ting: Our average smartphone customer pays just $26 a month originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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It may have disappeared in the rest of the world last year, but MSN/Windows Live Messenger still hung on in China -- until now.

MSN Messenger to shut down in China, its final stronghold originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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A career doesn't move linearly, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously advised — it can ratchet up suddenly with one critical insight, meeting, or opportunity. 

You call it a big break. 

Every success story has one.

Even luminaries like Sheryl Sandberg, Steve Jobs, and Howard Schultz had a moment where the path of their future clicked into focus. 

Here are the big breaks that helped these execs build 10-digit fortunes.

Richard Branson discovered a singer who became a huge success.

When Richard Branson was 16, he started a magazine called Student. But his big break came six years later when he opened a recording studio and brought in a singer named Mike Oldfield. 

Oldfield released "Tubular Bells," a mega-single that would stay on the U.K. charts for 247 weeks. 

"On the back of that, we built a record company," he told us, "and one thing led on to another from there."

Henry Ford impressed the mayor of Detroit.

In 1898, Henry Ford won the loyalty of Detroit mayor William C. Maybury after he built a carburetor, for which Maybury awarded him a patent.

Maybury would prove instrumental in helping Ford become an automobile maker. 

"Maybury's support, combined with Ford's bold ideas and charisma, helped assemble a group of investors who contributed some $150,000 to establish the Detroit Automobile Company in early August 1899," says History.com. 

That allowed Ford to quit his day job at the Edison Illuminating Company — and found the companies that would make the first mass production cars. 

Bill Gates landed an IBM contract.

In 1980, Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard and was leading a tiny company called Microsoft that was trying to worm its way into the nascent personal computer industry. 

He — and the company — soon got a giant break, in the form of IBM. 

Big Blue wanted to bring a cheap personal computer to market fast. It contracted Microsoft to provide the operating system. At the time, it didn't have one to sell, but soon cobbled one together. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

1984. It's a year synonymous with George Orwell's novel about a dystopian society ruled by omnipresent government surveillance.

The real 1984 was a far cry from that. While today, we do have scary government surveillance, that's largely thanks to email, social media, smartphones, and cloud computing. Those things didn't exist in 1984.

In fact, 1984 was 10 years before the World Wide Web (commonly called the internet) was born. It was the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected as president; the telephone monopoly Bell System was officially dismantled and AT&T launched; and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was born.

Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh commercial aired during the Super Bowl ...

Two days later, Steve Jobs officially launched the Macintosh PC.

In 1984, Dell Computer launched. This is what Michael Dell looked like.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The first images released by DigitalGlobe show an airport and neighborhoods in Madrid. Their quality had to be reduced because it is not yet legal for the company to release images accurate at such a small scale.

After two weeks in space, the most powerful commercial satellite ever launched is sending back pics originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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There are growing demands for workers to be given the right to enjoy their downtime without being constantly on call, and now this could even become law in Germany.

Germany mulls ban on after-hours work emails and calls originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Facebook will start targeting mobile ads based on cell signal strength and type of connection.

Why the strength of your cell signal will affect the types of Facebook ads you receive originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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So you want to buy a 3D printer.

The appeals are obvious: Manufacture anything you want out of plastic, right on your desktop. There's no cause to go to the store to buy something that was made in China, put on a boat, loaded onto a truck, and placed on a shelf.

3D printers can make nearly any object you can dream up by laying down small layers of plastic on top of each other. People around the world use them to make everything from artwork to practical everyday items.

3D print a fork. 3D print a whistle. You're limited only by your imagination, and you can get started by printing innumerable things people have already designed and uploaded for you to experiment with.

But before you can do any of that, you need to figure out which printer is right for you.

SEE ALSO: The Most Interesting, Non-Obvious Things You Can Make At Home On A 3D Printer

New Matter MOD-t — $279

Easily the most affordable 3D printer for consumers out there, the MOD-t features a reimagined design to reduce the number of parts it needs to function. The company behind it, New Matter, ran its pre-orders through IndieGogo, and those who got in at the ground floor were able to scoop them up at a surprisingly low $200.

Pre-orders have since ended, so you'll have to spend a little more money to get your hands on one, but this printer is perfect for those who want to dip their toes in the 3D printing pond without breaking the bank. It performs at a level comparable to much pricier 3D printers.

Check it out here »

MakerBot Replicator —$2,899

MakerBot is easily credited with being one of the first companies to mainstream the idea of consumer 3D printing. It's made a number of 3D printers available over the years and its Replicator is from the company's fifth generation of products, so you know it's been tweaked and refined many times over.

The MakerBot community is especially strong — users frequently upload and share the digital files necessary for others to create 3D models at home on their own devices by way of a site called Thingiverse. (And you don't even necessarily need to own a MakerBot product to take advantage of it!)

Check it out here »

Printrbot Simple — $349

You'll have to put it together from parts, but that's why this one's so affordable (and is arguably why it's appealing to those who want to get their hands dirty and learn their printer from the inside out).

Considering its low price point and the fact that you have to assemble it yourself, this might just be the perfect printer for someone who wants to know everything about 3D printing.

Check it out here »

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

E-commerce has yet to prove that it can make a serious dent in the $600 billion a year grocery industry in the U.S., but one promising opportunity is in selling specialty foods, including gourmet, health-conscious, ethnic, or otherwise hard-to-find food and beverage items.

The move toward e-commerce coincides with greater consumer interest in these niche categories. This is an important trend for consumer packaged good brands, many of whom have bought specialty brands in recent years. 

The chart above comes from a new study from BI Intelligence, on how e-commerce may finally begin to gain market share from offline shopping in the grocery market. 

We also found that concierge shopping and subscription prepared meals are persuading consumers to buy groceries online, as are same-day delivery services. 

Here are some of our findings related to groceries: 

• E-commerce has the advantage of offering a large depth and breadth of products. Only 15% of U.S. adults have purchased general food items online, but 25% said they have bought specialty food and beverages online, which are hard to find elsewhere. That's according to a new survey from Harris Interactive. 
• Consumers are also relatively open to buying specialty food items online. Among U.S. adults, only 57% said they prefer to buy specialty food and beverage items in-person compared to 78% who said so about general groceries.

This suggests that e-commerce companies can compete against legacy grocers on selection of products, and depth of offerings. 

BI Intelligence is a subscription tech research service, covering the e-commerce, payments, and digital media industries. For full access to all our downloadable charts and reports, sign up for a free trial.

SEE ALSO: The Surprising Demographics Of Who Shops Online And On Mobile

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Latest research figures suggest Amazon sold a meager 35,000 handsets of its flagship smartphone since it first launched. A tepid debut, or a frosty winter ahead?

E-commerce giant eBay has revealed the most popular item in every state. 

Californians favored high-end women's accessories, while men's cologne ruled in New Jersey. 

Some states were more practical. People in Ohio purchased outdoor equipment. North Carolina residents spent their money on baby products, while Connecticut customers bought batteries. 

Texans ordered "tactical and hunting goods," while New Yorkers favored firearms. 

Here's the full graphic. 

NOW WATCH: 5 Ways Retailers Trick You Into Spending More Money

 

SEE ALSO: Dunkin' Donuts Line-Up Of Pumpkin Products

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This is the second part of ReadWrite's four-part series on the future of messaging.

The central paradox of the social age is this: We share at once too much and too little.

We share too much, because it's impossible to do more than dip into the endless stream of updates from your friends, family, coworkers—everybody.

And we share too little because we have the sense of being on display when we post on Twitter and Facebook—either to a public audience or a diffuse, ill-defined set of "friends" who don't reflect our real networks of intimacy. 

The answer to that paradox has come in the form of a big, fast-growing category of mobile experiences: messaging apps.

Why Messaging Fills A Social Need

In the first part of our series on the future of messaging, we explored how messaging apps displaced texting and social networking—and why there won't likely be one dominant messaging app.

See also: Why No One's Going To Win The Messaging War

The rise of smartphones and mobile broadband help explain why messaging apps have attracted hundreds of millions of users around the world. But those factors don't fully explain their popularity. To understand them properly, we have to grapple with the psychology of messaging.

In the early days of social network, there was room to breathe and express yourself. When I was a freshman in college, I had 30 Facebook friends, and followed 10 people on Twitter who also followed me. Those social networks were intimate spaces for sharing private thoughts.

That has changed. Twitter is an online version of the town square—a decidedly public space. On Facebook, we feel only slightly less exposed—whatever we post goes to a large group of friends and followers, mixed in with updates and photos you see from brands and advertisers. Even our likes and favorites have become subject to scrutiny.

See Also: How Social Giants Are Trying To Take Over Your Text Messages

Before Facebook introduced its own private-messaging service, users communicated by leaving public wall posts for each other. That made sense when the service was limited just to college students. But once parents started joining Facebook, the need for more private options became clear. Teens didn't abandon Facebook—but they shifted more of their interactions to apps like Snapchat.

Changing Your Behavior To Fit Your Online Identity

On public social networks, it’s hard to be your authentic self. We work to construct the best possible narratives of our lives to present to our friends and family.

And that means not sharing some of our more private thoughts and opinions. According to a study by researchers from the University of Michigan, the more friends a college student has on Facebook, the less they talk about controversial issues.

The researchers wrote:

Users who have a large number of Facebook friends are less likely to talk about politics and gay rights issues on Facebook despite having access to increasing human and information resources.

Because such topics tend to spark negative reactions on Facebook, people often avoid posting about them all together. With a smaller audience, our online identities are likely to be more authentic.

With a continuously increasing number of options for communication, we’ve begun to think more about what we share, where we’re sharing it and who we want to share with. On Facebook, someone might post about an accomplishment, whereas on Snapchat, they might share a selfie with some scribbled text over it with a friend describing how frustrated they felt about how long it took to achieve it. That frustration might be an evanescent emotion—which makes Snapchat, where messages are meant to disappear after they're read, the appropriate medium.

These fractured communications may be here to stay. According to Forrester analyst Thomas Husson, author of the report "Messaging Apps: Mobile Becomes The New Face Of Social," people will become accustomed to using a number of different apps to chat with friends.

“The social media ecosystem is somehow fragmented by nature, due to the fact that individuals have multiple identities and will switch between apps that will provide different voices,” Husson told me. “These apps are ways to manage your identities ... people assume and drop personalities while allowing them to connect.”

Creating New Social Networks, Through Messages

Social networks ask us to define the people we know in groups—friends or acquaintances, followed or not. Google+ takes this to a ludicrous stream, asking us to categorize everyone we know into one or more overlapping "circles." But messaging apps let us discard those constraining categories and form ad hoc friend groups for every occasion.

“Sometimes apps seem safer—you can have a small group and create your own boundaries, which is what these messaging apps do,” Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, said in an interview. “So people create a messaging group that is a social network, where you’ve created the boundaries, not someone else.”

Teens might be the model for this transition, thanks to youngsters who want a place to chat with friends and not parents, but it also applies to a greater number of people that want more privacy.

“There’s an increasing awareness of the need for privacy, and the need to understand privacy settings,” Rutledge said. “Not across the board and not in a totally effective way, but we’re seeing an awareness about it which makes things like Snapchat appealing in a very face-value kind of way.”

Even though your pictures don’t technically disappear from Snapchat’s servers the way the startup originally advertised, there’s comfort in the idea that the photo or video you take in the moment will disappear soon after its viewed—not stored in your timeline for eternity.

Snapchat's disappearing messages are its distinctive feature. Other chat services have their own nuances, like Kik's emoticon stickers, WhatsApp location sharing, or Line's built-in games. These all contribute to the texture of the conversations they draw. What they have in common, though, is a sense that the messages aren't part of our permanent record—they're just part of a flow of communication.

“These [messaging] apps allow you to have a multi-sensory communication in a way that’s transitive—it isn’t too precious,” Rutledge said. “When we talk to each other, those words aren’t immortalized on paper. These apps really replicate features of face-to-face conversation.

"We want whatever is going to get the job done best. All these app developers are trying to figure out how to offer a big enough array of features so they capture the audience when they finally come to rest.”

New messaging apps are cropping up every day, but whatever service ultimately wins out is going to be where our friends are—and that’s not going to necessarily be just one place.

Just like people use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr for different purposes, different friend and interest groups will gravitate towards distinct tools that offer the best possible way of communicating.

The rise of messaging applications doesn’t mean the downfall of more public social networks. Rather, it signals a shift among Internet users who are realizing that in-jokes and baby pictures might best be delivered to a small group of friends who truly understand and welcome our true, authentic selves.  

Lead image courtesy of Henry Lockyer on Flickr