Google Capital invests $50 million in real estate platform, Auction.com
The old saying about real estate is that the three most important things are location, location and location. In other words, if you buy a beautiful home next to a garbage dump or angry neighbors, you will be miserable. When it comes time to sell, you will be hindered by the horrible surroundings.
Well, it seems that Auction.com was in the right location at the right time today, as Google Capital invests $50 million dollars in the real estate website. If you aren't familiar, that is a Google-backed growth equity fund.
Time for honesty -- Samsung seems to have stopped fiddling with benchmark figures
Benchmarks are important. With so much choice in the world of computers, smartphones and tablets, a key factor for potential buyers to bear in mind is raw performance. A few months back benchmarking stalwarts Futuremark took the unusual step of delisting a number of handsets produced by HTC and Samsung after tests appeared to show that the phone artificially boosted performance when they detected benchmarking software was running. Now it looks as though this apparent cheating has come to an end.
Back in October, results published on Anantech showed how a number of popular phones seemed to be cheating the system, giving consumers a false representation of real-world handset performance. Now, according to new tests carried out by Ars Technica it would appear that handsets are behaving in a far more reasonable fashion after being updated to KitKat.
Listen up Android tablet users -- Pandora has an update for you
Pandora has been rolling out new features for mobile customers, including a sleep timer and alarm clock. Both of these enhancements are handy for a device that many of us leave on the nightstand at bedtime, but that doesn’t always mean a phone.
Now the streaming service is expanding its offering, heading for Android tablets with these features that were previously only available to phone customers.
Americans like it for free but Europeans still prefer to pay for protection
Independent testing group AV-Comparatives has released its 2014 Internet Security Survey.
The survey asked 5,845 users from around the world their views on security and reveals that when it comes to antivirus protection Americans like to get it for free whilst Europeans prefer to pay.
Kaspersky 2015 Technical Previews now available
Kaspersky Lab has announced the first public betas of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2015 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2015.
There are no details on new features, as we write, but the most obvious change so far is the simplified, subdued interface. Plain buttons highlight four key task areas -- "Scan", "Updater", "Reports" and "Virtual Keyboard", for Anti-Virus 2015 -- and clicking any of these causes a new task pane to fade into view.
XP upgrades will slow the PC's decline, not spark a recovery
According to International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, global PC shipments fell by 9.8 percent in 2013, the most severe contraction on record, but the future looks slightly brighter going forward. And by "slightly brighter" I mean things thankfully shouldn’t be anywhere near as bad as they were last year.
IDC had been anticipating a decline of 10.1 percent by the end of 2013, so the actual results were slightly more positive than had been expected in mature markets (which includes the US, Western Europe, Japan, and Canada). Part of the reason for this is, IDC believes, down to short-term factors like the rise in people purchasing XP replacements, but it doesn’t expect this bump to last for very long. XP still accounts for a third of the desktop OS market share, and there’s currently no signs of a trickle of users migrating to Windows 8.1, let alone the flood of users Microsoft would like to see.
Spanning improves Google Apps Backup
We all know that backups are important and these days that applies to data stored on cloud services just as much as desktop PCs.
Cloud backup provider Spanning Cloud Apps has announced a major update to its Spanning Backup for Google Apps, offering improved reporting and proactive notifications.
XBMC 13 Beta 1 released, adds limited 3D support, hardware decoding to Android devices
Team XBMC has unveiled the first public beta of XBMC 13.0, its open-source, cross-platform media server and center. Version 13.0, codenamed "Gotham", ships after more than a year of development, and is packed full of new and improved features.
Chief among these are limited support for stereoscopic 3D rendering, improved touchscreen and UPnP capabilities, Android hardware decoding and what Team XBMC terms "dramatic" audio engine enhancements.
Find out who’s stealing your web content with Plagiarism Detector
The web is an amazing tool for research, with a vast amount of information available on just about any topic you can imagine. Unfortunately, some people don’t just learn from others: they’ll directly copy vast amounts of content from a web resource, and try to pass it off as their own.
This can be an issue if you’ve created web content, and others are stealing it. Or you might like to know if a document submitted to you is original, or partly "recycled". Either way, Plagiarism Detector ($30) can help.
Evernote for Windows Desktop builds in annotation tools, improves sync performance
Evernote Corporation has released Evernote 5.2 for Windows Desktop, the latest build of its cloud-based note-taking tool that’s also available on Mac and other platforms.
There are two improvements of note in version 5.2: image annotation, whereby users can now annotate images from within Evernote itself, while Evernote for Business users show now enjoy vastly improved sync performance.
Dell adds new training products to build security awareness
It's often the case that the weakest link in any system's security is the person sitting in front of the screen.
As companies recognize this they're tending to invest more in training so that they can avoid threats rather than have to clean up after them. In a recent worldwide survey by Dell, 67 percent of security decision makers say they have increased funds for education.
Jelly Bean, KitKat continue their rise in Android distribution
Google's Android distribution charts give us a fresh look at adoption trends with each monthly update. In early-March, we see Jelly Bean and KitKat continuing their rise in popularity, while older iterations of the popular open source operating system are on their descending path.
Based on the number of devices accessing the Play store in the seven days ending March 3, KitKat is running on 2.5 percent of monitored Android handsets. Its distribution share is 38.88 percent higher compared to the previous month, when it accounted for 1.8 percent. KitKat will see a stronger uptake once smartphones like the new Samsung Galaxy S4 are released, and vendors upgrade their existing devices to the latest Android iteration.
BlackBerry brings OneDrive to BB 10 smartphones
After being forced to drop the SkyDrive name following a legal dispute with UK broadband provider Sky, Microsoft relaunched its cloud storage service, last month, under a new, yet somewhat familiar moniker, OneDrive. Rebranded apps quickly hit Android, iOS, OS X and Windows Phone, adding new features in the process.
With the OneDrive roll-out almost complete, BlackBerry (yes, that is right) just introduced the cloud storage service on its own platform, BlackBerry 10. The move effectively gives Microsoft access to more potential customers, and allows OneDrive to better rival the availability of other market competitors, like Box.
Windows Phone finally gets Facebook Messenger, 'app gap' slowly closing
Windows Phone head Joe Belfiore spoke last year of the Windows Phone app gap, claiming that it would end before the start of 2014. Unfortunately for the platform, that has not turned out to be accurate as there are still lots of great titles that are either missing from Store or offered in a half-baked version on the tiled operating system. The good news is the app gap is actually closing, albeit slowly (and not anytime soon).
Microsoft revealed at MWC 2014 Facebook Messenger will launch on Windows Phone, and the app is finally available in Store today. This is one of the most important wins for the platform, as the service is hugely popular in many markets.
Chromium browser succesfully ported to Ubuntu's Mir display server
When Canonical decided to shun the Wayland display server for its own, called Mir, the Linux community was up in arms. Many people felt that Canonical was not being a team player. While I understand that point of view, the company is well within its right to go in a different direction with Ubuntu. After all, open-source and free software is about choice -- not falling in line.
Unfortunately, getting things up and running on Mir will take time. Today however, a major milestone has been achieved -- the Chromium browser has been ported to Mir.
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