Davemichels

Bloomberg News reported today that Microsoft is on the verge of what could be its biggest round of layoffs in history. New CEO Satya Nadella will reportedly cut jobs in marketing and engineering, as well as positions made redundant when Microsoft absorbed Nokia’s cell-phone business in April. Where the biggest cuts from will soon tell us a lot about the direction that Microsoft is taking next.

That's crucial information, because Microsoft seems to be taking a new direction with alarming frequency of late. Before outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer left, he proclaimed that the company would be "One Microsoft" organized around "devices and services.". When Nadella took over, he said that Microsoft was focused on “ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence.” Now, Microsoft is a “productivity and platforms” organization, according to Nadella’s recent memo to employees.

The new “One Microsoft” is apparently still many things. But that, too, may soon change.

See also: The New "One Microsoft" Is—Finally—Poised For The Future

Slimming Down The Not-So-Microsoft

Microsoft has its hand in a lot of pies. From the very top levels, the company continues to insist that it can be successful as both a consumer and an enterprise company. Nadella’s email to staffers last week shows Microsoft’s belief that people are “dual users” who use their devices for both work and life. By this theory, Microsoft must continue to cater to both of those worlds.

After attending Microsoft's Build conference in April, I described Microsoft as a company organized around platforms and pillars. The platforms are Windows (including Windows Phone and Windows 8) and the cloud backbone of Azure. The pillars are the services that Microsoft deploys on those platforms (and increasingly to other non-Microsoft platforms, like its Office suite coming to the iPad). 

Office 365, Xbox, OneDrive and Microsoft’s many other apps and services are the pillars on which it builds its next empire. When the layoffs are announced, the brunt of the blow will spare these teams.

Everything else is basically fair game.

The first and most obvious chopping block will be Nokia. It will be curious to see who stays and who goes among the 25,000 employees Microsoft brought on board when it finalized the deal in April. For instance, Microsoft may do with the entire team at Nokia that focuses on developer relations and services in favor of Microsoft's own long-standing developer-relations teams. 

Other redundant Nokia employees may find themselves on the outside as well, including marketing and communications specialists, software engineers, and the middle managers and executives in charge of those operations.

Precedent elsewhere says that Microsoft trimming Nokia employees after the acquisition makes a lot of sense. When Google bought Motorola, it essentially gutted the company, installing a new CEO and wiping out most of the jobs in the manufacturing segment. It would not surprise anyone if Microsoft were to do something similar with Nokia.

Which Way To Go?

The layoffs will also tell us much about the device strategy that Microsoft will take in the future. The question basically becomes: Does Microsoft make its own hardware or does it farm out manufacturing to partners? No easy answer to that question exists. Microsoft has given mixed signals in that regard this year.

On one hand, Microsoft just bought a smartphone manufacturer to, ostensibly, make smartphones. On the other hand, Microsoft created a reference design program for Windows Phone that it announced at Mobile World Congress this year that allows for partners in emerging markets to build cheap smartphones. 

Microsoft also made Windows licenses free for any devices with screens smaller than 9 inches across at Build this year, which would include most smartphones and tablets. On the PC side, Microsoft announced the Surface Pro 3 in May, and it still charges its PC partners licenses for Windows 8.

The most telling sign may be the fact that Microsoft has not yet killed the Nokia X line of devices that do not run Windows Phone. Instead, X devices run Google's Android operating system, but with Microsoft's search, online-storage and maps apps replacing Google's standard apps. 

When Nokia announced the X at Mobile World Congress, shortly before the Microsoft deal closed, its executives said over and over again that Microsoft wanted to get “the next billion people on the cloud.” Hence the Nokia X would be allowed to live in the new Microsoft. A Nokia executive told me at Build earlier this year that it is still planning on making second-generation Nokia X phones. 

Trimming The Fat

The Bloomberg report suggests that global marketing for Xbox may be trimmed along with software testers who have become redundant in a world of cloud-based software, where its easier for engineers to test as they go. It is natural for a company the size of Microsoft to take stock of its portfolio every so often and axe teams that are not necessary to the core vision. That’s what healthy companies do. 

So, if Xbox's international sales aren't enough to merit paying marketers to reach consumers in some regions, those teams go. If engineering processes can get more efficient, there's no reason to hold onto old ones.

None of this is bad business. The good news is that Nadella has Microsoft focused. The bad news is he's doing a poor job of communicating the changes inside and outside.

Let's just say it for him: It is high time that Nadella made Microsoft as efficient as possible. If that means cutting thousands of jobs, that’s what he needs to do.

Suppose Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner Cable actually happens. What's it herald for competitive access to the Internet?

One couple’s attempt to cancel their Comcast service does not bode well for our future, even if it is a fluke. Just ask (former) Comcast customers Ryan Block and Veronica Belmont. Better yet, listen to the recording Block made of the latter part of a marathon 18-minute call as he and his wife attempted to disconnect their Comcast service.

The eight minute-plus recording Block posted on Soundcloud begins 10 minutes into this nightmare-inducing conversation. Speaking with the growing intensity of a thwarted and mentally imbalanced lover—or perhaps a man with a gun to his head (pick your simile)—the Comcast rep repeatedly demands that Block explain to him specifically why Block wants to leave “the number-one rated Internet service” after nine years.

Block, founder of community site gdgt and former editor-in-chief of Engadget, employes the standard techniques of conflict resolution. He refuses to engage or respond to questions whose answers are of no consequence, and finally breaks out the big guns: “This phone call is a really, actually amazing example of why I don't want to stay with Comcast.”

Rule One of dealing with stalker exes and cable companies: Do not engage. As Block’s experience illustrates, the only answer is not to answer.

Block wrote on Soundcloud:

Please note: this conversation starts about 10 minutes in—by this point my wife and I are both completely flustered by the oppressiveness of the rep.

So! Last week my wife called to disconnect our service with Comcast after we switched to another provider (Astound). We were transferred to cancellations (aka "customer retention").

The representative (name redacted) continued aggressively repeating his questions, despite the answers given, to the point where my wife became so visibly upset she handed me the phone. Overhearing the conversation, I knew this would not be very fun.

What I did not know is how oppressive this conversation would be. Within just a few minutes the representative had gotten so condescending and unhelpful I felt compelled to record the speakerphone conversation on my other phone.

This recording picks up roughly 10 minutes into the call, whereby she and I have already given a myriad of reasons and explanations as to why we are canceling (which is why I simply stopped answering the reps repeated question—it was clear the only sufficient answer was "Okay, please don't disconnect our service after all.").

Please forgive the echoing and ratcheting sound, I was screwing together some speaker wires in an empty living room!

In a statement to ReadWrite (and the rest of the media), Comcast wrote:

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

Bigger Is Badder

Keep in mind as you listen that Comcast is the biggest cable company in the U.S. and the largest media provider on the planet. It’s also the most reviled company in the nation, according to the 2014 American Customer Satisfaction Index. Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable service provider, is also second only to Comcast on that same list of consumer unhappiness and despair.

Should the FCC and the Justice Department allow the Comcast-Time Warner deal through, the only option for refusing to engage with Comcast may be to go without cable and Internet service. The proposed merger would make Comcast the only traditional cable provider available to nearly two-thirds of the U.S. The behemoth would also control a third of the cable and satellite market, and half of the bundled video/Internet market.

Comcast will have power beyond annoying customer service, including and not limited to hiking prices without threat of competition and  choosing just how fast (or how slowly) your Internet runs—depending, for instance, on whether you're accessing its services or those of some rival company, or on where you live.

You’ve got about 40 days left to file your comments to the FCC regarding the impending Comcast behemoth via the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System.

Lead image by Flickr user Steven Depolo

Star Trek fans have always dreamed of having a trusty phaser at their sides, but thankfully, there's not quite a need in everyday life to stun hostile alien lifeforms

Now, Trekkies can now experience a perfect replica phaser — that powers on your TV.

The Wand Company is introducing a universal remote at San Diego Comic-Con (July 24-27) that's a perfect Star Trek Phaser II replica. It was created from 3D scans of the last remaining phaser prop in existence, the company said.

The Phaser remote control works with televisions and other infrared-based devices. While it doesn't look at all like a traditional universal remote, it can be programmed with 36 different commands and uses some gesture-based controls for quick channel changing Read more...

More about Entertainment, Gadgets, Tv, Tech, and Star Trek

Google today debuted a new resource for learning to develop Android apps: a free Udacity course called “Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals.” The online class is aimed at those who know programming but have no experience with building for Google’s mobile operating system. Google Developer Advocates Reto Meier, Dan Galpin, and Katherine Kuan will give you step-by-step training for how to build an Android app, as well as best practices of mobile development in general and Android development in particular. They will also give you personalized ongoing feedback and guidance. The full course materials (videos, quizzes, and forums) are available...

This story continues at The Next Web

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft plans assault on Chromebooks with $199 HP laptop, $249 laptops from Acer and Toshiba  —  Microsoft launches a price assault on Chromebooks  —  Microsoft is aiming straight for Google's Chromebooks this holiday season.  At the company's partner conference today …

Samsung, ARM, Nest and four other companies have gotten together to build a new radio standard for the smart home. Dubbed Thread, it is a low-power, mesh network protocol that also supports IPv6. The standard is built on the existing radio hardware used by ZigBee devices (802.15.4), which means that a company could update its ZigBee devices to support Thread with software if it chooses.

So does the smart home need a new networking protocol? I think “need” may be a little strong, but there’s certainly a lot of appeal in designing a radio protocol from the ground up. And outside of the companies above, Freescale, Silicon Labs, Yale Security and Big Ass Fans also agreed. Chris Boross from Nest Labs, who is involved in the Thread Group, ran through the issues associated with other radio technologies during an interview Monday.

What’s the matter with Wi-Fi?

According to Boross, Wi-Fi is both power hungry and made for big data while Z-wave is controlled by one company. Bluetooth is low-power, but while the standard is being tweaked to accommodate a more mesh-like structure, it’s not a true mesh network. It also doesn’t yet support IPv6 in the real-world implementations but the specification does allow for it. ZigBee has a range of issues, but suffers in part because it has so many variations that the standard is not as standardized as consumers would like.

To address these perceived flaws and others, the Thread networking protocol supports IPv6 using 6LoWPAN, which is a way to adapt the heavier IPv6 capability for a power-and-packet constrained network. It also can support a mesh network of 250 devices or more. This may seem like overkill, but if you tally every light bulb in your home, every outlet, every switch and then start adding sensors and fun devices, that number starts making sense.

There are two challenges associated with getting a new radio standard into the mass market — even if it’s a software upgrade to an existing radio found on plenty of existing devices. The first is convincing device makers to put an 802.15.4 chip inside everything from a phone to a hub and the second is making sure the standard is really a standard.

You gotta make them love you!

To solve the first problem, using existing radio hardware is a good first step. It’s a lot easier to convince device manufacturers to send a software upgrade to add Thread support to existing ZigBee stuff than it is to convince them to add a new radio. But Thread does have an issue in that so far, ZigBee isn’t popular on tablets or phones, which are the dominant means of controlling a smart home today.

Luckily most hubs on the market have ZigBee radios and service providers such as Comcast are even embedding ZigBee into their set-top boxes. So while, at first you might need a hub or gateway of some sort to control your thread devices, if it becomes popular, then perhaps Samsung, Apple, Asus or another phone or tablet manufacturer adds a new radio. Boross declined to comment on Samsung’s plans for thread, although it could push adoption with the addition of a thread radio in all of its phones.

As for the second problem of creating a true standard, the Thread Group is taking a page from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Much as the Wi-Fi Alliance certifies all Wi-Fi devices, the Thread Group plans to provide similar rigorous testing, certification and enforcement. ZigBee actually lost ground with device makers because it fragmented its standard so much that the devices weren’t actually interoperable. It’s trying to repair that damage now, but it still has two versions of ZigBee for the consumer and pro markets.

Finally, for those confused about how Thread might fit into the bigger picture, this is a radio effort, so things like HomeKit, Nest’s Developer program and even Qualcomm’s AllJoyn would work on top of Thread. The goal here is to supplant Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as the de facto standards for the smart home.

What are the odds?

Today, the Nest thermostat is running a version of Thread, and later this year the spec will be defined enough that other manufacturers could start building Thread-based products. Boross said that the thread Group will start certifying devices in mid-2015, which means that while companies may support thread and build it into their products, there won’t be certified devices until the middle of next year.

Will this succeed? It’s tough to say. In may ways this will add to consumer confusion, and there are smart people at many chip companies that make Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips trying to tweak the radios for more efficiency in the smart home. That being said, connected devices do behave differently from laptops or phones, and building a radio specification optimized for those devices — especially when we’re anticipating so many of them isn’t crazy.

The Thread backers have done what they can to mitigate the risks that new radio specifications face and certainly have a lot of marketing product muscle. I’ll be eager to see the first devices to get the Thread seal of approval. If we see hubs and vendors like GreenPeak, which sells ZigBee chips into set-top boxes, then this Thread protocol might lead us to a better connected home network.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• How Apple’s HomeKit will change the smart home market
• Why renewable energy and the smart home ruled cleantech in the second quarter
• How IoT Can Deliver on Its Promise

The Redmond giant is expected to announce a round of job cuts which could be the largest in the company's history.

For all of their popularity, Apple’s iPhones and iPads have sometimes been knocked for lacking the ability to accept USB thumb drives. With a thumb drive, users would be able to quickly and easily transfer files between their mobile devices and their computers. Microsoft has even been using the lack of a USB port on the iPad as a selling point in ads for its latest Surface tablet.

It’s not that you can’t transfer files back and forth between, say, an iPad and a laptop. It’s just that you have to use less direct, and sometimes slower, methods than you’re used to when using thumb drives between two computers. For instance, you can use email attachments, or cloud services like Dropbox, or you can transfer files via an obscure feature of iTunes. And, this coming fall, Apple is introducing a cloud-based file storage service and expanding its file-exchanging wireless AirDrop feature so it works between Macs and iOS devices that are near each other.

But, late next month, a small California company plans to introduce an actual iOS-compatible thumb drive called iStick. It’s specifically designed to move files in both directions between computers and iOS devices that use Apple’s current charging and syncing port, which is called the Lightning connector. It also allows you to view or play the files right from the drive itself, so you don’t have to transfer them and take up space on your target device if you’d rather not.

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The company funded iStick on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. It was seeking $100,000, but raised $1.1 million.

I’ve been testing an early, pre-production version of iStick and its companion app of the same name, and found that it does indeed work as advertised for file transfers. It still has a few bugs to work out before shipping, and the process isn’t quite as simple as it is between two computers, due to the unusual file system used by iOS. But the product works, and I suspect it will be welcomed by many iPhone and iPad users.

The iStick is a small, rectangular plastic device with a light-up slider button in the middle. You slide the button one way to expose a standard USB jack you can use in a Mac or PC, and slide it the other way to expose a Lightning connector you can plug into a late-model iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

It’s made by a company called Sanho, based in Fremont, Calif., whose mostly Apple-oriented hardware accessories go by the brand Hyper. And it’s much pricier than a simple, commodity USB thumb drive. It starts at $80 for an eight gigabyte model, and ranges up to $250 for 128GB of storage. The company says the higher prices are required to license the Lightning connector and to meet stringent Apple requirements.

The iStick is billed as the first USB thumb drive for the Lightning connector, but there have been some predecessors. A company called PhotoFast makes a product called i-FlashDrive that works similarly, but it uses the older, wider, 30-pin connector and requires an adapter for the latest iPhones and iPads. And other companies have made thumb drives, such as AirStash, which have no iOS connector at all, and beam files to iPhones and iPads wirelessly.

In my tests, iStick file transfers worked between a variety of devices, including an iPhone 5s, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, a Mac and a Windows laptop. I was able to move and use files ranging from pictures, songs and videos to Microsoft Office files and PDFs — in both directions.

After loading up the iStick with files from your computer, you just slide the button to pop out the Lightning connector and plug it into the charging port on your iOS device. Immediately, the iStick app pops up; you use that app to view, play or transfer the files on the thumb drive to a local file repository on your mobile device. No wireless or Internet connection is required, and any files you’ve transferred to the on-device, local storage area remain available for use even after you remove the drive — again, with no wireless or Internet connection required.

The app is a simple, gray screen with four large, circular buttons. One displays files on the drive, a second one the files in local storage, a third offers quick access to the photo library on the iOS device and the last allows you to back up your contacts to the iStick or restore them from the iStick.

Three of the four buttons worked fine in my tests. The fourth, the Contacts backup feature, isn’t yet working, according to Sanho, but the company promises it will be working by the time the product ships.

By pressing the button representing the drive, I was able to play music and videos, display photos and view documents — right from the drive, and with little delay. Or, by tapping an icon, I could move one or more of the files on the drive into the local file storage area on the iPhone or iPad itself.

I could imagine popping the little iStick into my briefcase before a flight, loaded with movies, songs and work documents, and then using them right from the thumb drive during a flight, even without Wi-Fi, and without taking up space on my iPhone or iPad.

So, what about other bugs, and why is the process more cumbersome than laptop-to-laptop USB drive transfers?

Well, in the pre-production models I tested, the app had the wrong name. It’s called i-USBKey, and is intended to work with a companion device the company is marketing in Europe under the brand of its distributor there, called Bidul. The European product, however, won’t work with newer iOS devices using the Lightning connector, only older models that used the former 30-pin connector.

The apps are otherwise identical, and Sanho says the naming will be corrected by the time iStick ships. The i-USBKey app still worked fine with the iStick.

The cumbersome part comes in when you want to use a file transferred to the iStick local storage area with another app on your iOS device, and it’s due to the way iOS manages files, not an issue with the iStick itself. Unlike on a computer, iOS devices don’t have a visible, system-wide file system. Instead, files that can be used by an app can only be fully used, beyond just viewing them, via that app.

Apple gets around this using a function called “Open in…,” which offers a list of compatible apps when you press an icon in an open file. So, for instance, in my tests, I was only able to edit a Word document transferred from the iStick by pressing an iOS sharing icon at the upper right and then moving it to Word for iPad or another word processor, like Apple’s Pages.

Still, I found iStick to be a useful, if pricey, accessory for my iPad and iPhone, and one many users would value.

Box pledges to make it easier to use its file-sync technology with Microsoft Office with a new service called Box for Office 365, due in beta this fall. Also, Box announced unlimited storage for customers that sign up for its Business plan pricing tier. Previously, only customers that enrolled in Box’s Enterprise plan had access to unlimited storage while Business customers had to pony up 15 dollars a month for 1,000 gigabytes.

While Box already had an add-on for Microsoft Office that let users open a document in a Microsoft program like Word or Excel and save it directly to Box, Box for Office 365 supposedly takes those integrations further, said Heidi Williams, Box’s Senior Director of Platform Engineering. Box will now be featured more prominently within Office than ever before and users will be able to access their recent files stored in Box directly through Office as opposed to within the Box app.

Box will also have an enhanced integration with Outlook as part of Box for Office 365, explained Williams. In the past, a user would have to proactively choose to either upload or share a file in Box when sending emails in Outlook; now with Box for Office 365, users will receive a prompt asking them whether or not they want to send their attachments via Box.

Box and Microsoft began talking about the integration around six months ago, said Williams, who acknowledged that while the two companies compete with each other in some areas like storage (Microsoft recently announced its own standalone business plan for its cloud storage service OneDrive), Box is happy to partner with Microsoft in this case. Williams said that Box and Microsoft will work on expanding their partnership and offer more integration between their two products.

“We are excited to see where we can take it next,” said Williams

Regarding Box’s news of unlimited storage, Box’s spokesperson Michael Moeschler said that the ongoing cloud storage wars were not the reason Box removed the storage cap for Business plan users, but was instead a response to customer demand.

“When you no longer have to worry about storage, you can just get back to work,” said Williams.

Last week’s news of Amazon’s Zocalo document collaboration tool definitely caused  file-sync and sharing companies to take notice (not to mention Google and Microsoft). It’s probably not that much of a coincidence that we are seeing Box and Dropbox announce new features and capabilities as a way to gain back some momentum. Just last week, Dropbox announced that it now has the ability to stream, which supposedly boosts the company’s syncing times up to twice as fast.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock user Palto.

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It's that time of year again. Bill Gates just released a list of six "deeply informative and beautifully written" books he thinks should make your summer reading list.

"I learned a lot from these books, and I hope you enjoy them," he says in a video about the selections. 

Here's what made the cut:

1. "Business Adventures" by John Brooks

This is Gates' favorite business book of all-time. Although the collection of 12 "New Yorker" articles has been out-of-print since 1971, Gates says its lessons are as applicable now as ever.

"Even though Brooks wrote more than four decades ago," Gates writes, "He offers sharp insights into timeless fundamentals of business, like the challenge of building a large organization, hiring people with the right skills, and listening to customers’ feedback."

2. "Stress Test," by Timothy F. Geithner

Geithner, a former United States Treasury Secretary, lays out the arguement that financial crises are inevitable. He writes the government has unique powers to reduce (though not extinguish) the problem, but there's a lot of hard choices involved.

"Geithner paints a compelling human portrait of what it was like to be fighting a global financial meltdown while at the same time fighting critics inside and outside the Administration as well as his own severe guilt over his near-total absence from his family," Gates says. "The politics of fighting financial crises will always be ugly. But it helps if the public knows a little more about the subject."

3. "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism," by Doris Kearns Goodwin

"I’m especially interested in the central question that Goodwin raises: How does social change happen?" Gates writes. "Can it be driven by a single inspirational leader, or do other factors have to lay the groundwork first?"

Although Goodwin's book tackles events of the early 1900s, Gates says it's quite relevant today and brilliantly written. 

4. "The Rosie Project: A Novel," by Graeme Simsion

This book is more of a "beach read" than any of the other suggestions.

Gates calls this novel about a genetics professor with Asperger’s Syndrome who goes looking for a wife a funny and profound book. Its message is about being comfortable with who you are and what you're good at, and he says that he would laugh out loud when Melinda would read him passages. He started it at 11 pm one night and stayed up until 3 in the morning finishing it. 

"I'm sending copies to several friends, he says. 

5. "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History," by Elizabeth Kolbert

"Natural scientists posit that there have been five extinction events in the Earth’s history (think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs), and Kolbert makes a compelling case that human activity is leading to the sixth," Gates writes.

He describes "The Sixth Extinction" as a sobering read, but says Kolbert isn't "beating you over the head" with facts, and that it's quite readable. 

6. "Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve Our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System," by Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Ezekiel Emanuel helped design the Affordable Care Act, and explains why the old system needed reform.

"There's no other book that takes the current situation and really educates you about how complex our health care system is and then lays out why they made certain approaches," Gates says. 

Check out the fun video that Gates included with his list of books:

SEE ALSO: Bill And Melinda Gates Reveal The Crucial Traits Required For Innovation

Join the conversation about this story »

Earlier this week, tucked into commentary in a fairly dismal earnings preview, Samsung said that “the demand for 5- to 6-inch smartphones cannibalized the demand for 7- to 8-inch tablets.” Samsung sells a lot of 5- to 6-inch smartphones, and fewer 7- to 8-inch tablets. So is this a lame excuse for what looks to be a down quarter for the Korean conglomerate, or is it a leading indicator that the small tablet market might be in trouble?

According to a report published earlier this week by research firm NPD Display Search, yes, 7- to 8-inch tablets are losing out to handsets. In 2013, smaller tablets made up 58 percent of the market. They’re cheaper, and for a lot of people, they strike the right balance between weight and screen size. But the report noted that small tablet share will likely decline in the future, due to competition from 5.5-inch and larger smartphones. Taking up the relinquished market share should be tablets between 8 and 11 inches, which the report estimates will be more common in 2018. Big tablet and PC hybrids like the Surface Pro 3 will also have a small chunk of the market by 2018.

It seems as if Samsung has finally figured out what observers have been predicting for years: bigger smartphones offer a tablet-like experience with the benefits of cellular voice capabilities. I predict phones will continue to grow in size — once manufacturers and consumers give up on pocketability, there’s really no limit to how big phones can get. There are already 7-inch devices for sale in markets like Korea. And as more smartphones are sold to first-time customers in emerging markets, those devices will be their owners’ first and most likely only computers. They’ll want a big screen for watching video, plus cellular connectivity for keeping in touch.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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Microsoft

For years, Microsoft has supported its older MapPoint technology in addition to its online Bing Maps product, but that duality is coming to an end.

The company has posted a notice to its website that it plans to end work on MapPoint technologies, though online support will run through at least July 2015. MapPoint formed the heart of a number of products, most notably Streets & Trips. It is also available as a $299 software tool that integrates with Office, allowing companies to merge business and mapping data.

“The retirement of these products will not affect software already installed,” Microsoft said. “Current users may continue to use Microsoft AutoRoute, Microsoft Streets & Trips and Microsoft MapPoint to plan their travel adventures.”

Microsoft declined to comment beyond the posting on its website.

CEO Satya Nadella did indicate in yesterday’s mammoth missive to staff that the company would be re-evaluating products and processes that don’t make sense for the company’s future.

MapPoint’s origins date back to Britain in 1988 as part of a product launched by a company called NextBase. Microsoft acquired NextBase in 1994 and moved the team to the U.S. The product was really from a different era, when maps were stored on floppy disks, CD-ROMs and hard drives.

Clearly, maps have moved increasingly online, with Google Maps, Bing and Nokia’s Here among the leading players.

Joshua Slot, 26, is the first person to die in a Tesla, we learn via The Verge.

Slot had stolen the car from a Tesla service center and was evading police in a chase through Los Angeles, California at speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour. After pursuing officers struck a median with their car and had to be taken to the hospital, Slot kept up the speed and got into the accident that would claim his life.

The Tesla (a Model S) hit three other cars before pretty much coming apart in two. The front half, pictured above, came to rest in the street and caught fire. The rear half, pictured below, collided with a a synagogue.

Slot was ejected from the car and believed to be dead on the scene, though he was resuscitated on the way to the hospital and died from his injuries later. His is the first publicly reported death of someone driving a Tesla.

Join the conversation about this story »

Aerial photo-sharing website Dronestagram announced the winners of its 2014 Drone Photo Contest.

The winning photographs show a stunning birds-eye view of an eagle's flight in an Indonesian national park, a beautiful waterfall in Tamul, Mexico, a quaint village commune in France, and a fireworks celebration far above a Bulgarian football stadium.

Prizes ranged from new GoPro cameras and drones all the way up to a publishing opportunity in National Geographic's French edition.

3rd Prize Winner of Popular Vote: This photo of a fireworks display above a Bulgarian football stadium was taken during the 100th anniversary of a popular match.

2nd Price Winner of Popular Vote: This drone photo captures the lovely commune of Sanary Sur Mer in southeastern France.

1st Price Winner of Popular Vote: This aerial view of a 105 foot waterfall was taken with a Go Pro Hero 3 camera in Tamul, Mexico.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Microsoft is about to release a new kind of search tool that it's been working on for years: Delve.

Delve is central to CEO Satya Nadella's new vision to turn Microsoft into a "productivity and platform company."

That means less focus on devices, more focus on what people do with the devices.

He describes a world where your phone/tablet/PC/TV knows you, understands you, and caters to your needs even before you issue a command. (We're reminded of that scene in the movie "Her" where Samantha, the smart operating system, organizes Theodore's email and later submits a collection of his work to a book publisher, unbeknownst to him.)

Nadella named a number of Microsoft technologies that will bring this vision to life. Here's what he said in his memo:

As a result, people will meet and collaborate more easily and effectively. They will express ideas in new ways. They will experience the magic of ambient intelligence with Delve and Cortana. They will ask questions naturally and have them answered with insight from Power Q&A. They will conquer language barriers and change the world with Skype translator.

Cortana is Microsoft's answer to Siri and is part of the latest version of Windows Phone.

Skype translator is a real-time translation tool for Skype users expected to be available before the end of the year. Speak and it will translate.

Power Q&A is an add-on cloud service for Office 365 customers, the version of Microsoft Office that runs in the cloud. It's a data analysis tool. You type in a question and it searches through corporate documents stored in SharePoint and Excel and gives you an answer, maybe complete with chart. (This kind of natural language analysis is the next-generation tech for "business intelligence" software, the kind of software used to predict things like quarterly sales, etc.)

But Delve could be one of the most interesting of all. Delve, previously code-named Oslo, is Microsoft's version of Google search. The company has been working on it for years. It doesn't search the Web, it searches your emails, social networks, and corporate documents stored in Office 365.

Delve uses "machine learning" and artificial intelligence to show you the documents,  messages, and people you don't know you need to see. Microsoft describes it as:

Delve highlights key information of interest to you, based on what you are working on and the actions of people in your network.

It's like Google Now or Cortana, but for your work life.

Although Microsoft has been showing Delve off since March, it will be formally announced at Microsoft's 2014 Worldwide Partner Conference next week in Washington, D.C. and available to Office 365 customers later this year, Microsoft says.

If Delve proves a hit with businesses users, organizing people's work lives, it will go a long way toward validating Nadella's vision.

Here's a glance at a Delve search page:

Here's the full demo of Delve that Microsoft did in March. Skip to 4:05 to go straight to the demo.

SEE ALSO: 22 of the most powerful women engineers in the world

Join the conversation about this story »

Amazon has made its name in ecommerce and cloud but its next frontier may be productivity applications and in the process, they may disrupt the entire enterprise software and cloud market. Zocalo is a new service from the company which allows the sharing of numerous document types with full version reviewed support and the ability to store files in specific geographical locations for compliance reasons. It works across devices (pretty much all of them), continents (files can be stored in the US and Europe (Ireleand) as of today) and can communicate with Active Directory if required. File transfers are encrypted and documents can be shared internally and externally.

The service is designed for workgroup communications and document preparation. Commenters on a document have their own color codes and users can quickly access the comments and the area of the document they correspond to.

Zocalo was designed to work smoothly with the Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop solution. Each WorkSpaces user has access to 50 GB of Zocalo storage, the Zocalo web application, the tablet apps, and document review at no additional charge. The Zocalo administrator can upgrade these users to 200 GB of storage for just $2 per user per month.

If you don't use Amazon WorkSpaces, Zocalo is priced at $5 per user per month, including 200 GB of storage for each user. Additional storage is billed on a per-GB, per-month basis using a tiered pricing model. See the Zocalo Pricing page for more info.

The competition here is SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, Huddle and a slew of other cloud vendors. Moreover, Amazon could be gearing up to take on Google and Microsoft in the office productivity solutions space. If this is the case and I believe it is, areas of strength in which Oracle and SAP play, won’t be spared. It's too soon to say that Amazon will be successful selling productivity solutions to corporations but they do have a way of proving their detractors wrong in market after market. A limited preview is available now.

Here are some screenshots of Zocalo in action:

Tags: amazon, box, cloud, dropbox, microsoft, oracle, zocalo Related tags: productivity solutions, amazon workspaces, ocalo, amazon, document, storage

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Sponsored by Apex Technology Services, a leading IT Services company

Microsoft wants you to work. Your life is just an afterthought.

In an email to Microsoft employees today, CEO Satya Nadella outlined the core of the company’s strategy and vision and focus for the coming years. Nadella underscored his message to the world from earlier this year that Microsoft is a company focused on “ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence” in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Today, Nadella took those vague basic concepts a step further.

Microsoft provides computers, software and operating systems so you can get your shit done.

Nadella stated:

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

Productivity is the name of the game throughout Nadella’s 3,186-word statement, with the rest of your life somehow tacked on as an afterthought to everything else Microsoft is doing. The word “productivity” shows up in Nadella’s message 20 times; variations of the word “work” make 27 appearances. He says that Microsoft must be a company hyper-focused on its customers. But the tenor and tone of the missive makes one thing abundantly clear.

You and I are not the customers he is thinking about.

Here Comes The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

Nadella’s pitch is not to the average consumer, the normal person working an everyday job that uses a computer and a smartphone to get things done. No, we are just a consequence. Nadella is really pitching the IT departments of the world, the decision makers who ostensibly choose the devices we will use to be productive.

Nadella seems to forget that the biggest that the biggest trend in the employee/gadget realm over the last seven years has been “bring your own device.” Over that time, many—OK, the vast majority—of those devices have not come from Microsoft.

We will deliver digital work and life experiences that are reinvented for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. First and foremost, these experiences will shine for productivity. As a result, people will meet and collaborate more easily and effectively.

It's hard to say that Nadella’s focus on productivity is a winning message in the mobile-first world he keeps talking about. In his vision, people are apparently employees first and people second. Throughout Nadella’s statement, the notion of your personal life always comes second after the notion of productivity. A division of Microsoft is even called “Digital Work & Life Experiences”—and the order in which those terms appear is no accident.

Nadella states:

We think about productivity for people, teams and the business processes of entire organizations as one interconnected digital substrate. We also think about interconnected platforms for individuals, IT and developers. This comprehensive view enables us to solve the more complex, nuanced and real-world day-to-day challenges in an increasingly digital world. It also opens the door to massive growth opportunity – technology spend as a total percentage of GDP will grow with the digitization of nearly everything in life and work.

Microsoft biggest competitors on the device, operating system, cloud and services fronts are Apple and Google. Nadella doesn’t mention either by name, but the insistence on work and productivity is Microsoft’s way of setting itself apart from Apple and Google’s finely tuned machines.

See also: The New "One Microsoft" Is—Finally—Poised For The Future

The difference is that Apple and Google focus on people—Apple more so than Google. Through Mac OS X and iOS, Apple provides quality products first; if people want to take them to work and be productive with them, that's their prerogative. 

That's been a fantastically successful strategy for Apple, one that played a huge role as it clawed itself back from the brink of death in the mid-to-late 1990s. Now enough people have carried iPhones and iPads into the workplace that IT departments have been forced to adapt to employees rather than the other way around. Google has also had this same effect through pure volume: it ships so many Android devices that people across the globe are bound to use them for work.

Microsoft doesn’t have the benefit of Google’s volume—at least outside of largely desktop-bound Windows systems—or Apple’s style. Hence Nadella has to focus on selling his company's core products and services inside-out from the model its rivals have perfected. In other words, as far as Microsoft is concerned, you work all the time. Its job is just to make it easier for you to work.

Microsoft: Same As It Ever Was

The work/life balance message has always been at the heart of the difference between Apple and Microsoft. In the 1980s and 1990s—when IT departments held all the power of which device people used—this was a winning message for Microsoft. But that world is mostly gone. Apple has proven that it can win by putting people and experiences first and force the IT department to adapt.

Google's take on this dichotomy is a little different, as befits the fact that it's fundamentally an advertising company. Google just wants as many people  on the Web as possible; everything it does serves that purpose, especially Android. Google doesn’t necessarily serve people or employees first—it serves the Web, which ties everything together (including, of course, its advertisers).

Nadella, in noting how Microsoft’s employee culture needs to change, hammers the company’s focus:

We have clarity in purpose to empower every individual and organization to do more and achieve more. We have the right capabilities to reinvent productivity and platforms for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. Now, we must build the right culture to take advantage of our huge opportunity.

Microsoft may have a new CEO, a new culture and a new worldview on software development and distribution. But at heart, it's still really the same old company.

Lead image by Owen Thomas for ReadWrite

Fer Gregory / Shutterstock

The expiration of an operating system born shortly after the dotcom crash and before Barack Obama was in the White House was the main reason why PC makers fired off press releases this morning proclaiming the return of the PC era.

Don’t celebrate just yet.

In a word not seen associated with the PC sector in two years, market research firm Gartner said it saw “growth” in the personal computer market in the second quarter. This was cheered by the markets — reflected in the stock prices of Microsoft, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Seagate and Western Digital — more used to phrases like “the worst year since records have been kept” to describe the state of affairs.

But what drove the meager 0.1 percent growth in global consumer and business PC shipments between April and the end of June could be short lived. Microsoft’s decision to end enterprise support for Windows XP on April 8 drove businesses and professionals to replace old machines or risk catastrophic failure.

Evidence suggests this refresh cycle won’t last long. The earnings results last week of Synnex, a big distributor of PCs and tech products to large businesses, called the the XP expiration a “tailwind” in its earnings report last week. But when pressed by analysts on a conference call, its CEO conceded that it’s now “expected to subside.”

There may be some reprieve next year as a result of Microsoft’s announcement that it would cut off “mainstream support” for Windows 7 — the one that followed the one that followed XP (remember Vista?) — early next year, though “extended support will go on into 2020.” (ZDNet breaks downs the nuances nicely here.)

A glance at the global picture also foreshadows another ominous trend coming later this year. Though most regions saw upticks of seven percent to nine percent, one in particular, the Asia-Pacific region, registered a decline of nearly nine percent in shipments. The reason for the decline? Big smartphones. The atrociously named phablets, hybrids of phones and tablets, are eating into the low-end notebook market.

Expect this to continue as the arms race for bigger phone screens continues unabated.

While subscriptions grow at a compound annual rate of 2.5 percent (tablets will be key), TIA also predicts 6.9 percent compound annual revenue growth to 2017.

For startups, Kickstarter can be the key to success: It exposes your name and your product, and it lets you raise money from anyone in exchange for incentives. 

The crowdfunding platform puts the power in the hands (and the pockets) of the people, essentially democratizing the fundraising process and allowing startups to have a more direct line of communication with their customers. Kickstarter has raised $1,200,690,155 to successfully fund 65,076 projects since its launch in 2009.

We've compiled a list of the highest-funded projects in Kickstarter's five-year history, explaining who they are, what they made, and how successful they've been since making it big with their crowdfunded projects.

The Micro, a 3-D printer small enough for your desktop

Goal: $50,000

Raised: $3,401,361

The Micro is a 3-D printer that promises easy use for the average person who might not be used to 3-D printing in their home. You just plug in the printer, download or create a model of whatever you want to make, hit print, and watch your creations take shape. The Micro was fully funded in May — it blew past its goal in 11 minutes — and could start shipping out orders to its backers as soon as August.

Reaper Miniatures Bones, an evolution of gaming miniatures

Goal: $30,000

Raised: $3,429,235

Funded in August 2012, Reaper Miniature Bones is a miniature set of plastic figurines, based in the science fiction and fantasy genre and used to play tabletop games. In 2013, Reaper Miniatures opened up a second crowdfunding campaign to raise money for even more of the mini figurines. Similar to its first project, it blew away its $30,000 goal with $3.2 million from 14,964 backers.

"Mighty No. 9," a classic Japanese side-scrolling game

Goal: $900,000

Raised: $3,845,170

"Mighty No. 9" raised almost $4 million from last year's Kickstarter, and exhausted all of its stretch goals, too. Led by "Mega Man" creator Keiji Inafune, "Mighty No. 9" is a side-scrolling Japanese game. This week, the company announced it would open a second round of funding to enhance the game with English voice acting, a feature that should be released next year, reports Polygon.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Earlier this week, Inbox, an email platform company, sprang onto the startup stage by announcing its new developer API and cloud service for building email apps.

Cloud storage startup Box announced that it snagged another huge customer on Wednesday. Toyota is choosing Box for its entire North America business units.

Box didn't comment on how big this deal was financially, merely saying that it covered thousands of employees. But this is Box’s first major corporate deal since raising $150 million at a $2.4 billion valuation earlier this week.

By using Box, Toyota employees will be able to access and share content across any device, Box says.

Today’s deal shows Box is snagging big corporate contracts. Just two months ago, Box announced a similar deal with General Electronics, which CEO Aaron Levie called a "tipping point" for the company. The GE deal will help it land more big customers, and encourage more developers to write apps for the Box platform, Levie told Forbes' Alex Konrad.

Box already claimed some big customers like eBay, Proctor & Gamble, and Schneider Electric. The company has 39,000 corporate clients in total and 27 million individual users, it says.

All of that could help the company encourage investors to bite when it goes public, which it will do soon. Box filed its pre-IPO paperwork in March, but hasn't pulled the trigger yet. Sources say it delayed its IPO, blaming a cooling market for cloud software companies. The company is still reportedly going to go public this year.

Investors may still have doubts about Box’s finances, because the company is burning through its cash at a high rate, which some estimate to be twice as large as its competitors'. But it's spending its money mostly on sales and marketing, and deals like this one seem to prove that this choice is paying off.

In fact, Box’s sales rose 94% last quarter to $45.3 million, compared to $23.4 million from the same quarter of last year. It reported a $38.5 million loss for that quarter.

Join the conversation about this story »

UPDATED: IDC figures aren't quite as hopeful as Gartner's latest pulse check on the PC industry.

"Are you happier without Facebook?" asks a new study called 99 Days of Freedom. 

99 Days of Freedom, created by ad agency Just, asks people to take a break from Facebook for 99 days. In return, the group says you'll save an average of 28 hours.

The purpose of this study is to figure out how life without Facebook affects your individual happiness. 

The experiment is a direct response to Facebook's psychological experiment unearthed last month, which revealed how Facebook's data scientists tweaked its Newsfeed algorithms for one week in 2012 to see how moods like happiness and depression can be transfered across the network.

Joining 99 Days of Freedom is pretty straightforward. All you do is change your profile photo to reflect that you're participating in the experiment. Next, you click "Create countdown." Once you share that on Facebook, the countdown will begin.

Throughout the three months, pariticpants will be asked to complete anonymous happiness surveys. 

"Our prediction is that the experiment will yield a lot of positive personal experiences and, 99 days from now, we’ll know whether that theory has legs," the group wrote in a press release.

Check out how to set it up below.

First, head on over to 99daysoffreedom.com. Click "Join the experiment."Step one is to change your avatar. Now it's time to create your countdown. Just type in your name and email address (optional).

Once you're ready for the countdown to officially begin, click "Share on Facebook."Here's what it looks like on Facebook. Now, all of your friends will know why you've seemingly fallen off of the digital map.

 

SEE ALSO:  Facebook Has Opened A Massive New Office In New York

Join the conversation about this story »

Samsung announced earnings Monday night and they were worse than anyone expected by a wide margin.

Operating income was 7.2 trillion won ($7.1 billion), a 24% drop on a year-over-year basis. Analysts were expecting 8 trillion won.

Sales were down to 52 trillion won, a 10% year-over-year drop. 

To put this in context, last year, when Apple's stock was battered and people were murmuring that it was doomed, it never posted negative sales growth. 

So, what's happening to Samsung? 

Basically, at the high end, it's struggling to take share from Apple and that market is quickly saturating. 

At the low and mid-end, its struggling to compete with Chinese phone makers who sell phones that are cheaper than Samsung, but otherwise are pretty much the exact same thing. 

This trouble for Samsung is not surprising.

In February at Mobile World Congress, the big mobile industry conference in Barcelona, we saw this coming. When I walked around the showroom floor, I had two takeaways: Android is everywhere, and there is an army of low-cost smartphone makers selling phones that look just like Samsung phones. 

Here is what I wrote at the time:

On Android, it's just amazing to see all these no-name companies taking Android and making their own OSes. (Bigger companies, like Nokia and Yandex are doing the same thing.)

I can't help but think of Microsoft, and how it totally whiffed on mobile. Billions of people are going to be using Android in the future. 

As for Samsung ... Coming from the U.S. I expected to see a bunch of Apple knock offs. Apple is the leading company in the U.S. But so far, I've only seen a relative few Apple clones. It's the Samsung look that's all the rage for copying. 

Why so many Samsung knock offs? If I had to guess, I'd say that it's easier to replicate the Samsung design and still have a decent product than it is to replicate the iPhone design and still have a decent product. 

Seeing all of these phones that look just like Samsung phones boosted my respect for the company.

In a world of smartphones that all pretty much look the same, and are approaching feature parity, that all have the same software (Android) it's really impressive that Samsung has built a standout smartphone brand. 

All these phones are a little, scary though. The high end of the market seems to be saturating. Samsung has no desire to compete in the low-end. And even if it did, the low end is crowded with companies selling $100 smartphones that look just like Samsung's $500 phones. 

Looks and performance are two different things, of course. The phones on the floor worked well. The cameras weren't great, but overall they seemed fine enough. 

Here's a look at some of the phones that are copying Samsung:

This is the Grand S II from ZTE. That "S" looks a lot like the S in Samsung's S4 logo. The plastic backing on this phone also looks a lot like old Samsung plastic.

 

This is the S4 logo. See the similarity to the logo above? 

And here's the back of an older Samsung phone that looks like that ZTE phone.

This is a big phablet from a company we never heard of called Umeox. We couldn't get a price on this phone. If we had to guess it will sell for $150-$200. Take a look at how it copies the stitching that Samsung is doing with its Note III.

For comparison, this is the Note III, with its faux leather backing and stitching.

Umeox also did the Samsung phone cover thing where it has a window that shows the front of the phone. 

The S4 case with window.

This was at the booth of JZH, a company that's doing 1 million in sales on a monthly basis. (Or so it tells me.) Its phones sell mostly in South America and cost $50-$90. 

If that font looks familiar... it's because it's a straight rip from Samsung.

These are more phones from JHZ. As you can see, they look a lot like Samsung's phones.

This was Konka, a Shenzen-based company, taking Samsung's stitching backing style.

More from Konka. This is the generic look/design of a Samsung. It's also all over the place here at MWC.

We didn't see this phone on display from Konka. It's an attempt to copy Apple and Samsung.

In closing, here's the real thing. A Samsung tablet.

And the Samsung Galaxy Note III.

Join the conversation about this story »

We’re still a long way from replacing our traditional 2G networks with all-IP voice calling services, but mobile VoIP pioneer TextNow got a little closer this week. The virtual mobile carrier released an update to its Android phone software that allows calls to move between Wi-Fi and cellular data networks without dropping.

As anyone with a smartphone knows, LTE and 3G data coverage can be fickle, causing your phone to flip flop between multi-megabit speeds and the most constricted of connections as you move through the network. VoIP is particularly sensitive to those big peaks and dips in connection quality.

But by adding Wi-Fi to the mix, phones can select the best wireless network available in any given location, and hand-over between the cellular and Wi-Fi means the phone can move a call to the optimal network mid-conversation.

Canadian startup Enflick originally launched TextNow as an over-the-top messaging app, but it decided last year to separate itself from that crowded space by becoming a mobile virtual network operator. Instead of reselling Sprint’s 2G minutes and text messages like other MVNOs, Enflick decided to go all-data, offering IP telephony and SMS services over Sprint’s 3G and LTE networks.

To be honest, TextNow all-IP service isn’t nearly as reliable as a traditional mobile voice plan. When I tested out the service last year, I had a fairly good experience even when making calls over Sprint’s 3G data network. But there was a long delay in setting up calls, and I was testing under optimal conditions: stationary on my home Wi-Fi network or in a dense city network where Sprint’s data networks are most powerful.

But TextNow also doesn’t charge traditional mobile carrier prices. Its baseline plan costs $19 a month and includes 500 MB of data, 750 outgoing minutes and unlimited text messages and incoming calls. According to Enflick CEO Derek Ting, TextNow isn’t designed to replace the traditional Verizon or AT&T voice and data plan. Rather, it’s targeted at a youth market that wants a basic voice service to complement its usual SMS-heavy communications habits.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• Gigaom Research predictions for 2014
• What first-quarter 2014 meant for the mobile space
• What You Need to Know About the SoftBank-Sprint Merger

Chrome OS devices could soon be able to beam local media to any Chromecast streaming stick without the need to use any workarounds: Latest Chromium commits found by Chromestory.com suggest that the native Chrome OS video player is getting Chromecast support in the near future.

Chromium developers recently started to separate the Chrome OS video player from the Files app and turn it into a standalone app. At the time, it looked like this was primarily about making it easier to use the Files app, which is essentially the Chrome OS version of the Finder in OS X or File Explorer in Windows, and the video player at the same time; however, it now looks like the update could also bring casting to Chrome OS.

Currently, Chrome OS users have to load any media they want to cast into the Chrome browser and then use tab casting, which essentially mirrors the content of that browser tab. However, this process involves transcoding, which can degrade the quality if a video, and generally requires a pretty powerful computer to run smoothly.

In the case of Chromebooks, tab casting often leads to stuttering videos. Native casting should resolve these issues and make beaming videos from a Chromebook to a Chromecast streaming stick a lot more enjoyable.

However, it’s unclear when we will exactly see this feature come to Chrome OS. The commit found by Chromestory only refers to setting a flag for Chromecast support, with a developer writing that “the implementation will be committed later.”

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How mobile will disrupt the living room in 2014
• How the customer experience can help businesses build applications
• Why unsanctioned file-sharing still exists in the workplace and what managers can do

Inbox, the product from former Dropbox employees and MIT students, launched today, TechCrunch reports, and did so very quietly for a product gunning to go up against Google's Gmail.

Last month at its annual I/O event, Google launched the Gmail API, which helps developers build apps that work with Gmail.

Inbox works similarly, except it connects with all email providers, from AOL to Outlook, the company wrote in a press release. It allows developers to build tools to help users with email, like apps to autosend emails or time-delay messages. One unique feature is for a developer to access data in a user's mailbox. "For example, you could use Inbox to build an app showing detail from all the flight confirmation messages a user received last year," the startup's site explains.

"Email is the database of your life. It's the digital home for your conversations, memories,
and identity," Inbox cofounder and CEO Michael Grinich said in the press release.

Grinich worked as an engineer at Dropbox and a designer at Nest. Last winter he formed Inbox with Christine Spang, formerly an engineer at Ksplice. The open-source app was always meant to work with a variety of email clients, and soon will even function with enterprise software, like Microsoft Exchange, its website says. But being the Gmail API of everything of course isn't easy.

"Storing the world's email data for secure and fast access is a monumental task," said Spang. "We're solving this from the ground up."

The ground is pretty low. The company's website drives home the fact that email itself is more than 30 years old. With technology from three decades all at some point working with the web's most prevalent platform, of course things can get a little messy. 

Still, Inbox is here and Grinich and Spang say it's here to stay. The two used some precious web real estate to throw out a diss at the internet giant, which notoriously shuts down pet projects.

"Inbox is an email company. Google is an advertising company. This product is our focus, and will not be 'discontinued' unexpectedly," Inbox's website says, or rather, burns.

SEE ALSO: YouTube's revenue revealed — and it's much worse than expected

Join the conversation about this story »

Approximately 20 criminals disguised as Samsung employees invaded Samsung's Brazil factory in Campinas, São Paulo, stealing an estimated R$80 million, or USD $36 million, in devices.

The heist took place during the factory's night shift, with some 200 Samsung employees still in the factory while criminals loaded up seven trucks with Samsung tablets, notebooks, and smartphones, according to ZDNet.

"Some employees were held hostage by the criminals while the majority continued to work, but had the batteries of their mobile phones taken to prevent them from calling the police," ZDNet reports.

Though the criminals were armed with submachine guns, no injuries have been reported and the criminals have been described by Samsung employees as "not violent at any point."

Police are currently investigating the robbery, which is thought to be an inside job due to the criminals' ease of entry and interior knowledge of the factory.

"We are very concerned about this incident," Samsung said in a statement. "Fortunately, nobody was hurt. We are fully cooperating with the ongoing police investigation, and we will do our best to avoid it happening again."

SEE ALSO: The 'Netflix of pirated movies' will soon work with Google Chromecast

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IDC reported that cloud software spending---software as a service primarily with a bit of platform as a service---accounted for 86 percent of the cloud revenue pie.