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There is a ton of valuable news and information on the internet. Unfortunately, this information is scattered across the web, which makes for a frustrating experience. Sure, you can utilize an RSS service such as Feedly to aggregate your news in one place, but that is not a visually attractive option. The solution to this dilemma for many is an app called Flipboard.

If you aren't familiar, Flipboard is a news and social media aggregation app which formats your desired information in a magazine-like format. This makes it ideal for use on a tablet. It is widely popular on Android and iOS. Sadly, to the dismay of many, this app was not available for Windows 8.1 -- until today.

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There's nothing stopping tablet owners from making use of mobile websites, but apps are where it is at. Gmail has a perfectly serviceable website, but the app does make many tasks easier to perform. Today, Google takes the lid off a completely redesigned version of its iPad app which has been designed to make it easier to do more, whether you choose to work in landscape or portrait mode.

Despite the fact that this release is, based on version number at least, a small move forward -- this is version 2.7182 -- there are a lot of changes, some cosmetic, some functional. Landscape mode benefits from the addition of a new navigation bar that can be used to switch between accounts and categories. This is essentially an iPad friendly version of the tabbed inbox that has been introduced online.

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Google continues to push forward its mapping program, earlier today unveiling its Street View team's trip around the city of Venice, Italy. While that may be fun and display pretty scenery, the latest update the company announces takes a more serious note. Cataloging the systematic destruction of our planet's forests.

"In a collaboration led by Dr. Matthew Hansen at the University of Maryland, we’ve built the first detailed maps of the world’s forests, from 2000-2012, documenting and quantifying forest landscape changes such as fires, tornadoes, disease and logging", says Rebecca Moore and Matt Hancher, of the Google Earth Engine team.

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There is nothing wrong with Google scanning millions of book and making that text available as snippets in search results. This is the ruling made today by a judge in New York, bringing to an end an eight year legal battle between Google and The Authors Guild in conjunction with several specific authors. Starting back in 2004, Google has scanned more than twenty million books -- and permission was not obtained from the copyright holder in many cases.

A class action lawsuit was launched against Google back in 2005, but in New York, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin has ruled that there is no copyright infringement and that Google's book scanning qualifies as fair use. Among the named writers were former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, The Trouble with Thirteen author Betty Miles, and legal author Joseph Goulden.

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The Kindle has been big news recently, with Amazon rolling out a new version of its Fire HD, as well as 7 and 8.9-inch versions of a brand new Kindle Fire HDX, the latest iteration of its Android tablet. Not stopping there, the retailer introduced a case known as the Origami, but now has taken it one step further, with a personalized version of your own choosing.

"Customers can now design their own Amazon Origami covers and a variety of other covers and skins for Kindle by uploading photographs from their own library, choosing from a variety of Amazon designs made exclusively for Amazon Origami covers, or choosing from a library of hundreds of images, logos, designs and patterns—including popular comic, movie and television show graphics from Peanuts, National Geographic, Breaking Bad, Star Trek, and more", states Amazon.

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Alex Thuring has released DVDStyler 2.6, the latest revision of his open-source video DVD authoring tool for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Previous editions have been able to create video slideshows from your chosen images. DVDStyler improves on this by adding support for a few transitions -- fade in/ out, and four wipes -- as well as allowing you to loop your slideshow audio.

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It's only been a week since its IPO, but Twitter's development is not going to end there. Previously only available to US businesses -- or those willing to grovel -- Twitter's ad platform is now being made available to small to medium sized business in the UK, Ireland and Canada.

It's a simple idea: put some money up front and this will be used to fund Promoted tweets that will reach a wider audience or even target specific types of users.

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While the subject of global warming is divisive and controversial, it is hard to argue with treating the Earth nicely. Everyone should recycle when they can and make sure not to litter. Unfortunately, in today's world of constant device upgrades, the tech-community is filling landfills with obsolete hardware faster than ever.

Today, Google announces that it is helping the environment by investing in solar energy. Hopefully, these solar panels are not at risk of overheating like the HP Chromebook 11 power adapters.

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Don't panic, Redmond isn't after your credit card details -- well, no more than usual. Microsoft has announced the opening of a new Cybercrime Center to combine its legal and technical expertise with cutting-edge tools and technology in the fight against crime on the internet. The center will tackle a wide range of crimes including malware, botnets, intellectual property theft and online child exploitation.

"The Microsoft Cybercrime Center is where our experts come together with customers and partners to focus on one thing: keeping people safe online," says David Finn, associate general counsel of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit. "By combining sophisticated tools and technology with the right skills and new perspectives, we can make the Internet safer for everyone".

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I own an iPad, and despite not rushing to buy a Surface, I actually quite like Microsoft's slate. A couple of days a week I work on my iPad (mostly remote accessing my PC via Parallels Access) and it's not a great experience. I know I'd get a lot more done if I was using a Surface Pro 2 instead, but Apple's tablet is far better in other areas, so for me it wins on balance.

Yesterday, on the Surface blog there was an article headed "What's new in Surface Pro 2". It was a detailed look at what Microsoft has done to improve the latest generation of its slate and I found it fascinating. Partly because it was an interesting read, but also because it was the sort of thing Apple would never do.

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If you’d like to do something different with your digital photos then most image editors provide at least some artistic effects you can try. They’re not always that interesting, though, and after you’ve tried ten "Oil Painting" filters which don’t produce anything vaguely painting-like, it’s tempting to just give up. But wait: there is another option.

AndreaMosaic is a free tool for creating photo mosaics, pictures which are themselves built up of other images (check the program samples page if you’ve not seen these before). The technique only takes a few minutes to master, but delivers pictures with an appealing, abstracted look, which look great on anything from a Facebook thumbnail to an A3 page (or even larger printed formats).

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Millennials are more heavily distracted when watching video and as a result adverts need to work harder to get through to them. This is among the findings of research by YuMe, a digital brand advertising specialist, and IPG Media Lab.

Focusing on millennials (those born between the early 1980s and the turn of the century) the first phase of the study looked at the tablet video viewing experience compared to TV, PC and mobile. The second phase analyzed media consumption and multi-tasking habits in an attempt to understand which device is most effective at achieving brand recall within the demographic.

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Google continues to expand its Street View imagery to new areas, ranging from the Great Barrier Reef to the Grand Canyon and countless locations in between. This time, the intrepid team has invaded the canals of Venice, Italy. The romantic city can now be viewed by armchair travelers everywhere, no gondola required.

The city presented a new challenge for the Google team -- "It was impossible for us to collect images of Venice with a Street View car or trike -- blame the picturesque canals and narrow cobbled walkways -- but our team of backpackers took to the streets to give Google Maps a truly Shakespearean backdrop", says Daniele Rizzetto, Street View Operations Manager.

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RITLabs has announced the release of The Bat! 6.0, a major update of its flagship email client. Top of the "New Features" list is full Unicode support, which means users should now be able to work with multiple languages simultaneously.

The program now adds support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), allowing it to correctly recognize domain names containing Arabic, Chinese, Russian and other characters.

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Because NoSQL databases are less restrictive than the more conventional relational model, offering simpler design and improved scaling, they're popular for handling big data and real-time web applications. However, this comes at the price of higher maintenance demands.

The latest release of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 3.2 addresses this with the addition of automated management services, allowing companies to concentrate on generating revenue rather than maintaining the database. This makes it the first NoSQL solution to have management taken care of by the database itself, bringing features that would previously only have been available in products like Oracle to the NoSQL market.

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