Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right.
Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.
Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one's smartphone is a legal act isn't something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That's because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone.
Despite the company's official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that was released last Friday. But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.
Online backup vendor Mozy, part of EMC, announces this week the addition of file synchronization services called Stash to its lineup. The idea is to have agents on various endpoints that will automatically sync your files everywhere you have Mozy running, to make it easier to grab your files when you are away from your main desktop. The endpoints initially supported include all Windows from XP SP3 and Macs from OS 10.5 and iOS and Android phones, including the Kindle Fire.
When Apple unveiled plans last week to ramp up its efforts in the education space, the company's announcement was met with decidedly mixed reactions. While many welcomed Apple's foray into digital textbook publishing, others were less enthusiastic. The idea of delivering textbooks via tablets may have promise in theory, but Apple's initial execution doesn't look all that disruptive yet.
The latter part of the announcement covered the impressive expansion of iTunes U and the launch of iBooks Author, a DIY tool for publishing digital textbooks. If anything could pose a threat to the status quo in the textbook industry, it would be such an application. But wait. As it turned out, the so-called "Garage Band for e-books" wouldn't be quite as open and revolutionary as some thought.
People sure do love jailbreaking their iOS devices. In fact, after Friday's launch of the Absinthe A5 tool, jailbreaking iOS 5 on A5-powered devices was almost as popular as the iPhone 4S itself when it first launched.
Nearly 1 million people jailbroke their iPhone 4S or iPad 2 between Friday and Monday, according a blog post from the Chronic-Dev Team, who took the lead in developing the untethered solution for jailbreaking iOS 5 on Apple's newest gadgets.
Facebook is pushing Timeline out to all 800 million of its users. And there's no turning back to the "old" profile.
Users have seven days to clean up their profiles before their Timeline goes live, transforming the bulletin board-like profile into a visual scrapbook of their lives.
With Timeline, users have the option to add a second, bigger magazine-esque "cover photo" in addition to the profile photo. The profile photo has changed in size from a rectangle or square to a thumbnail that resembles a driver's license photo. Social apps, which automatically share a user's activity, are one of Timeline's key features.
Those old reruns of "The Wire" I've been working my way through, in which seemingly at least once a season Baltimore police used the latest GPS tracking gadgets to follow a bad guy, just wouldn't be the same had they been written after Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled that its unconstitutional for police to use GPS tracking devices without a search warrant.
Sort of.
In effect, the court ruled that it's okay for police to track every move you make. The only thing wrong they did in this particular case was commit common trespass when they applied a tracking device to a car. And future courts in future cases are free to rule differently.
A patsy is a person that is easily taken advantage of, the guy that gets set up to take the fall so the big wigs in power can extricate themselves from a situation free from blame. As you may have heard, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has named a new CEO today, Thorsten Heins. He takes over for co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis who are both moving to non-operational seats on RIM's board of directors. Poor Heins. This is a big break for a guy that started his career as an engineer. Yet, Balsillie and Lazaridis are setting Heins up to fail. RIM has a new patsy.
The fallout from last week's FBI raid and shutdown of MegaUpload isn't limited to founder Kim Dotcom and his associates. As intriguing as that story will be to follow, some of the more immediate side effects are being felt among other file-hosting services.
Some companies that are perceived, correctly or not, of having a similar model to MegaUpload's are now scrambling to prevent their own demise now that that the legitimacy of that model has been very publicly - and dramatically - challenged.
What do you get when you mix a train wreck ravaged by a tornado then washed away with the torrents of a tsunami? That would be BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Now the company has a new chief executive, as co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are turning over their tightly held reins of the once-powerful smartphone manufacturer to chief operating officer, Thorsten Heins.
Who is Thorsten Heins? He is a product designer and engineer that rose to be the COO under Balsillie and Lazaridis. Most people outside of the smartphone industry may not know of him for precisely that reason. RIM's co-CEOs have never been known to share the spotlight. Heins has said that he is willing to license RIM's QNX-based smartphone operating system and perform with "rigour and flawless execution." Execution of what, exactly?
