By Jacob Kleinman


Back in January, Yahoo acquired Aviate, an Android launcher still in beta testing. Now, more than six months later Aviate is ready for the masses, offering a unique and simple way to organize your Android device.

If you've played around with Android before, you already know that the ability to install third-party launchers is one of the operating system's biggest advantages over the competition. There are launchers such as Nova and Apex, which let you clear away the bloatware and customize everything. There are even launchers designed to imitate iOS or Windows Phone. Aviate takes a different tactic, promising to simplify your homescreen and push information and apps to you right when you need them.

Yahoo's new launcher starts with a classic homescreen and a row of frequently used apps at the bottom. Swipe up from the bottom, however, and you'll find a favorite contacts menu for quickly reaching out to friends, family and co-workers. Another Aviate trick for simplifying your phone is to group all your apps into small sections named "Work," "Social," "Going Somewhere," "Entertainment" and "Music," which you can browse from a single screen. If you need to see your entire list of apps, just swipe to the right from there.

Aviate also promises to push out notifications based on context, similar to Google Now. In the morning, you'll get an automatic weather report for the day, and while you're in transit it will tell you how long the commute should take based on traffic and other data. Yahoo's Android launcher can even track your sleep habits.

If you download Aviate you'll put your phone in Yahoo's control. You can still customize a lot of what you see, but at the end of the day Yahoo is calling the shots. If you're okay with that go ahead and download the launcher, but if you'd rather have full control over your phone there are plenty of other options out there.


Source Yahoo, Google Play

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By Jim Edwards


Apple is set to release iPhone 6, its latest update to the iPhone juggernaut, in the fall. While iPhone 6 sales are expected to be huge for various reasons, there is a broader question facing Apple: Is it boxed in as a brand and a platform that merely serves the richest 15% of the world, while everyone else uses Android?

And if that is the case, can a mobile device that serves such a small minority of the planet stay relevant in the years to come? To put it in its bluntest terms, what is the point of launching the new Candy Crush Saga on a platform that hardly anyone — in a global sense — uses?

The question is not merely academic. In Q4 2013, according to research firm IDC, Google’s Android mobile operating system had a 78% share of all users globally. Apple’s iOS had just 18%. Now, IDC predicts that in 2014 Android will claim 80.2% of users and only 14.8% will be on Apple’s iOS system. Mobile app revenue is growing faster on Android than Apple, also, according to Distimo. It’s the same situation — Android growing faster — in mobile ads, according to Opera Mediaworks.

This is what the history of mobile phone sales looks like, according to IDC:


Apple is holding on to a sizeable chunk of the market. But Android is eating the rest. The quality of Android phones is getting better and better, IDC says, and that offers a long-term challenge to Apple.

Here is IDC’s forecast for the future:


In IDC’s forecast for 2018, note that Android actually loses market share and sinks to 77.6% of the market. But that occurs after Android adds about 404 million phones, while Apple adds only 63 million — and its share sinks to 13.7%. Apple doesn’t gain share — it merely loses it to Microsoft’s Windows, a humbling irony, at least in the IDC scenario.

Two factors are driving this.

Smartphone growth is in the East, not the West:


In IDC’s forecast, the major growth geographies for phones are China and Asia. That’s a problem for Apple because Android dominates China and Asia, according to Distimo. For a long time, that was because Apple’s strategy in the East — low distribution and high pricing — was feeble. That may be about to change. Apple had a big launch in China with wireless carrier China Mobile in January. Apple offers the old-model iPhone 4S in some developing countries as an entry-level phone. Analysts are now expecting growth for Apple in China.

But will it be enough?

Not if pricing is a factor. Android is driving the market into ever lower prices:


Note that the average Android price is heading toward $200 and the average iPhone price is heading toward $600. Apple is asking the question, do you want to pay three times as much for our phones? Thus far, 80% of the market has answered “no.”

Branding and quality are important, of course. Apple usually wins there. And Apple’s business model is to only do the most profitable thing, not the most widespread thing. So loss of share may not bother Apple CEO Tim Cook. It may, in fact, be good for both margins and shareholders.

But the history of computing has one iron-cast lesson for us all: Devices get cheaper over time, and better over time. The high-priced seller usually loses. This is why nobody uses $8.8 million Cray computers anymore.

Cray Inc. — which was the ne plus ultra brand of computing in the late 1960s and early 1970s — is still in business, to its credit. Perhaps Cook ought to visit the company’s Seattle HQ and ask how that high-priced niche worked out for them.

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By Dean Takahashi

No new consoles debuted at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). But we saw plenty of new technology that reminds us that the hardware that hosts games could, until recently, be described as a supercomputer. For sure, we always get excited about games, but it's a sure bet that your favorite title has some really cool tech behind it. And some new technologies may even enable a whole new generation of games.

E3 did have some no-shows. Valve's Steam OS and the Steam Machines from its partners were missing in action because of delays that pushed the products into 2015.

Here's GamesBeat's perspective on the best new technology demos that we saw at E3 2014. For the sake of comparison, here's our list from last year.

1. Square Enix Project Flare. Any description of Project Flare has to start with If it works . That's because the cloud-gaming 2.0? technology, first described in November, is still in the tech demo stage. But Square Enix chairman Yoichi Wada has a team of 20 working on enabling a gaming revolution, putting a web-connected supercomputer at the hands of gamers. It could make possible virtual game worlds that have 17 times the playable area of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the 2012 award-winning fantasy title. By using a more efficient blend of web-connected data centers and software designed for the cloud, Square Enix believes it can replace consoles with virtual supercomputers. You can log into huge game worlds, play both single-player and multiplayer experiences in the same space, and see huge numbers of game characters all governed by individual artificial intelligence.

A single game map could cover an area of 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers, with dozens of players hosted on a single graphics processing unit (GPU) in the cloud. And the cloud could support vast numbers of players because it can have vast numbers of GPUs in a server farm. Square Enix says the worlds can be massive and would require no loading times. Everything in the world will be calculated, rendered, and deformable. But a single player will receive a stream of video that shows only what the player's camera view can see. Networking, patching, hacking, and pirating will be gone. You ll be able to fly like Superman through a world filled with huge numbers of objects such as trees, mountains, and rivers. It sounds too good to be true. But if it works . Dean Takahashi.

2. Oculus VR showed some real games in development from its partners. The company has shown off a lot of progress since it first debuted at E3 two years ago. Now the company has a lot more credibility, as it is about to be acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. Last year, the company showed off its 1080p Oculus Rift virtual reality headset development kit. In January, it took the wraps off version two of that development kit. That version went a long way toward eliminating motion sickness, as it had positional tracking and it deleted the blurry frames that made us nauseous. This time, Oculus VR showed off demos such as Playful Corp. s Lucky's Tale, a platform game in three dimensions; Alien: Isolation, a virtual reality version of Sega's upcoming console game based on the Alien franchise; and a demo dubbed Superhot by the Superhot Team where you could freeze the action in a 3D game in order to dodge bullets.

Brendan Iribe, chief executive of Oculus VR, acknowledged in an interview that Oculus needs to deliver on its roadmap and get a real product out the door. He also said the company is working on new input systems that work well with the visuals as well as sound. Overall, Oculus wants to ship a full platform for virtual reality, rather than just a headset. It's a long way before that happens, but based on the progress that we ve seen, we re excited that it will . The next version of Oculus Rift should get rid of the screen door graphics, where a grid appears across all of the imagery, Iribe said. And with the full backing of Facebook to take care of the bills, we can expect that it will happen on a large scale for the mainstream consumer market. It's another if it works situation, but we re reasonably confident based on the track record that Oculus is serious. Dean Takahashi

3. Sony's Project Morpheus. Sony's virtual reality headset is running a little behind of Oculus Rift, in terms of the quality of its demos. But Sony executives say they ve been working on the tech for the new medium of virtual reality for four years. With their current development kit, they can show off virtual reality demos with a 1080p high-definition display and a 90-degree field of view.

Sony unveiled Project Morpheus at the Game Developers Conference in March with a couple of demos that included a shark attack scene, where you stand inside a steel cage and get lowered into an ocean and surrounded by water. Then a Great White shark swims around and shows its teeth at you.

Sony showed a couple of more demos at E3. I got to try out a Luge demonstration, where I lay comfortably on a bean bag. I put the Morpheus headset over my glasses and strapped it tight. Then I looked at my legs and feet, which seemed like they were extending into the screen. The luge started moving down the hill on a curvy mountain highway. I passed cars and had to dodge them by maneuvering the luge back and forth with my head. If I moved to the right, the luge moved with me. It was a little mis-calibrated, but it worked reasonably well. I smashed into an occasional car coming in the other direction. With demos like these, Sony has the right idea. As they are experiences that you can t get on a traditional console. Dean Takahashi

4. Alienware Alpha. The gaming division of Dell, Alienware, was all set to take E3 by storm with a Steam Machine dubbed the Alienware Alpha. But when Valve delayed the launch of the Steam OS and the Steam Controller until 2015, Alienware pivoted to adopt the Windows operating system with an Xbox 360 wireless controller. The result is a sleek and menacing looking gamer PC for the living room. The box is small and light, with a slightly higher price tag than it would have if it were a Steam Machine (since Microsoft charges more for the OS). It will cost $549 when it debuts this fall.

Players will still be able to use the Big Picture mode of Valve's Steam software to run PC games on a television. Big Picture works with 240 such titles already. The only drawback now is that you won t be able to play those games with a Steam Controller. There are also 450 titles with partial gamepad support. The machine will have a Intel Core i3 Haswell -based processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, and a custom-built Nvidia Maxwell GPU with 2GB of dedicated video memory.

Alienware will outfit the box with its own graphical user interface (GUI) that turns a PC menu into something that can be navigated from 10 feet away. And Alienware still says it will launch a Steam version of the box by next year. Dean Takahashi

5. Just Dance Now. Ubisoft's new version of its Just Dance franchise is the first one designed for mobile users. One of its coolest features is that you can pack as many as 20,000 dancers into a single dance match. Through a combination of mobile tech and cloud gaming, Just Dance Now can get a bunch of people playing at the same time, in real-time, all scoring together in a giant competition. The game is run on web-connected servers in a data center and the video is streamed to a screen such as your television or laptop. You use your smartphone, with sensors such as accelerometers and gyros for detecting motion, to capture your moves. Those are the same motion sensors that are used in Nintendo's Wii video game console that debuted in 2006. Since that time, Just Dance has sold more than 50 million units.

Ubisoft's Massive division worked on the technology, dubbed Blue Star, so that it consumes very little actual mobile bandwidth. It works across multiple devices and is latency free, according to Jason Altman, executive producer at Ubisoft. Two years in the making, Just Dance Now will be available later this year on both Android and iOS smartphones, as well as other platforms. Ubisoft is also working on Just Dance 2015 for the consoles, but Just Dance Now is a way for the company to attack the growing market of mobile users who probably wouldn t pay $60 for a game. Altman said Ubisoft hasn t decided upon an exact business model yet, but you can bet it will be inexpensive. With the virtually unlimited number of users per session, Altman said you can expect event-based competitions, such as getting everybody at a concert to dance in the same Just Dance Now game. That would be something to see. Dean Takahashi.

6. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. If you watch the video for this game, you ll see that about 2 minutes and 20 seconds into it, it switches over from a pre-canned computer-animated movie to live gameplay. You ll see flickering flames, dust motes, smoke, cracked building floors, and lots of things moving on the screen at the same time. When the player emerges from the building to see the full destruction of the city around him, it's an impressive site, and it all remains inside the game engine. The movement between cinematics and gameplay is seamless. While players have become accustomed to this level of visual quality in console games, the Call of Duty demo shows you what it really looks like on a next-generation video game console.

Microsoft showed off the game running at a full 60 frames per second on the Xbox One, but the game will also come out this fall on the Sony PlayStation 4 and the PC. Perhaps the most impressive scene in the demo is when the drone swarm arrives. This sea of drones all fly together like a bunch of flying sardines swimming in a school. It takes a lot of horsepower to show off something like this, and the next-gen consoles are clearly capable of some pretty impressive stuff. Sledgehammer Games, the developer of the title, has been working on it for almost three years. Now we can see how Call of Duty, the familiar first-person shooter that comes every year in the modern combat genre, is ready to raise the bar again. On top of that, the demo scene is really quite dramatic and emotional. And the sound is really good too. Kudos to Activision for recognizing that cool visual technologies are really at their best when they come with a gripping story and sound effects too. Dean Takahashi

7. SteelSeries Sentry Eye Tracker. Game peripheral maker SteelSeries teamed up with eye-tracking technology firm Tobii to create the Sentry Eye Tracker, which lets a player control a computer game with their eye movements. If you glance at a target, a game's crosshairs will move to that target and you ll be able to destroy that target much more quickly, at least theoretically, than a player with a game controller. The system takes your reaction time of thinking of something in your brain and sending signals down to your fingers to move a reticle toward a target. It could result in an unfair advantage for people who are in competitive game matches.

The system has already caught the eye of professional gamers. Sony is also working on eye-tracking technology in its Magic Lab research and development laboratory, and it recently showed off a demo that showed how you could quickly target enemies in the Infamous: Second Son game. Both technologies rely upon infrared cameras that track your eye and measure when it moves. SteelSeries is the first to test the waters on this front, but we re looking forward to whether this can enhance the controller or mouse input systems that have been with us forever. Dean Takahashi

8. No Man's Sky. Hello Games showed off a new demo of its infinitely replayable, procedurally generated galaxy exploration game. This sci-fi game is about exploration and survival in a universe that has no end. Every atom, leaf, fish, plant, shark, and everything else you see in the video is generated by the developers algorithms.

Procedural technology has been used before, but certainly not on this scale. It's pretty mind-boggling, and reminds me of Electronic Arts Spore game. But it is safe to say there isn t much competition for No Man's Sky. You could spend all of your time in this game scanning and uploading creatures, plants, and other things that you discover. There is a real game in here, but we haven t heard all that much about it yet. It doesn t have a lot of narrative, but there's a lore and a purpose to the game.

The demo got a lot of air time at Sony's E3 press conference, and it raised a lot of eyebrows. It is particularly impressive because the game is being made by an indie team with just four people. Their previous game was Joe Danger, and it's safe to say this is something completely different. The release date hasn t been determined, but you can expect it on Sony's platform. Dean Takahashi

9. Control VR. This virtual-reality tech fills in a crucial blank in the VR gaming experience: full upper-body motion tracking. It accomplishes this by placing 19 half-inch rotational sensors (similar to the ones in our smartphones) across our fingers, hands, forearms, and chest. The result? Games and other applications using Control VR can now track precise movements that aren t possible with just a VR headset, like making hand gestures or high-fiving another player. I tried on the prototype with an Oculus Rift in a small but busy E3 booth. Though crude and simple, the demo two players were astronauts exploring the moon was effective: I opened and closed my hands many times without the system losing track of them, I waved at the other player before pushing him aside, and I poked at little buttons on my in-game wristband to shoot ping-pong balls. I can t wait to see what game developers do with this. Giancarlo Valdes

10. Tom Clancy's The Division. Ubisoft's The Division arrives next year on next-generation consoles and the PC as yet another post-apocalyptic world. But this one looks really beautiful, if that is the right word for a landscape with fires, smoke, debris, and dead bodies.

The game won t run on older generation consoles because it takes advantage of the Snowdrop game engine, which Ubisoft's Massive game studio has developed over the years to bring to life a full virtual world.

You can pull out to view a whole map of New York City and then drill down on particular sections where you want to concentrate your squad. In a demo of the the game, Ubisoft's developers showed that you can approach a tactical battle in multiple ways. You can, for instance, go directly after another squad. But you ll find that there's another enemy squad nearby that can help it out and pin you down. You can take out that first squad at the outset, and then turn to the second one. But the response will never be exactly the same. So the Snowdrop engine enables fluid tactical situations that will change, depending on the choices the player makes. All the while, everything looks, uh, beautiful. Dean Takahashi.

GamesBeat 2014 VentureBeat's sixth annual event on disruption in the video game market is coming up on Sept 15-16 in San Francisco. Purchase one of the first 50 tickets and save $400! Oculus VR was founded by Palmer Luckey, self-described virtual reality enthusiast and hardware geek. The company launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund development of their first product, the Oculus Rift, a ground-breaking vir... read more

Brendan Iribe is co-founder, president and CEO of Scaleform Corporation where he oversees product development, marketing and sales, and business development, and has established the company as the leading user interface technology prov... read more

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By Julie Bort


While Amazon has introduced a lot of cool gadgetry for consumers with its new Fire smartphone, it certainly didn't ignore business users.

Amazon has a surprisingly robust list of features for work, including some things that will make enterprise IT professionals happy.

1. Microsoft Outlook email, calendar, contacts. The Fire can link to a corporate Microsoft Exchange email system using Microsoft's ActiveSync tool. Not only will that sync your data, but it also makes sure the phone meets corporate security policies. IT should be pleased.

2. View Microsoft Office Files. The phone includes an OfficeSuite Viewer app so you can look at files like spreadsheets or PowerPoints, if not create them, right on your Amazon Fire.

3. Encryption. Fire can be set up to encrypt the data on the phone so that if it gets lost, hacked or stolen, no one can read your files.


4. Support for enterprise security software known as Mobile Device Management. This is super important to IT professionals. With mobile device management (MDM), IT can locate phones, remotely wipe them, add corporate apps and enforce security policies, such as passwords.

5. Files from the corporate network. Amazon promises that you can access your corporate network on your Fire phone via your user name and password.

6. Coming soon: support for the secure corporate network or VPN (virtual private network). Some companies require extra passwords and security to access files and apps. Amazon says it's working on baking this feature into Fire. In the meantime, it is offering a selection of VPN apps from its app store.

7. Easier corporate passwords, also coming. That's a feature known as "single sign-on" where you use one password to access all things on the corporate network that requires a password. Amazon says this is also coming soon to Fire.

8. Enterprise app store. Amazon offers something called "Whispercast" as a tool businesses can use to manage the Fire phone, Kindle Fire tablet and other Kindle devices. They can use this to add and remove books, files, and apps like a private app store.

9. Apps. Most importantly, Amazon says it's working on getting popular business apps into its app store. This includes apps to take notes, scan documents, prepare invoices, and remote desktop from your tablet. Free apps like Skype and GoToMeeting are available, too.

More From Business Insider
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• How Amazon's New Fire Phone Stacks Up Against The Competition

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By Joseph Pisani, The Associated Press - The Canadian Press


NEW YORK, N.Y. - A picture is worth thousands of dollars for Limelight Extensions.

Phones start ringing at the Farmington Hills, Michigan, salon each time co-owner Miranda Jade Plater posts pictures on photo-sharing app Instagram. Would-be customers call to book appointments or ask questions about hair extensions she posts.

Colorful styles get the most attention. Palmer still gets calls about a photo of herself that she uploaded two months ago. In it, she's wearing long, black curly hair extensions with the ends dyed bright orange. That photo alone has generated about $10,000 in sales.

"Without Instagram I couldn't tell you where we would be right now," she says.

Instagram is an increasingly important part of small businesses' social media strategies. It's helping them drive sales, gain customers and develop their brand. The app is especially helpful to restaurants, bakeries, clothing stores, hair salons and other businesses that sell items that photograph well.

The app, which was founded in 2010 and was bought by social media company Facebook Inc. in 2012, reaches more than 200 million users worldwide. Owners say it's easy to use and like that they can automatically post their Instagram photos on their businesses' other social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter.

PAYING FOR ATTENTION

To boost Limelight Extensions' followers, Palmer pays local models and reality show stars to promote the company on their accounts. Payment is either a percentage of sales, a flat rate or free hair. In return, they post photos of themselves wearing the extensions with a link back to Limelight Extensions' Instagram account. The company has more than 27,000 followers.

Yumbox is trying a similar strategy. The Doylestown, Pennsylvania-based company makes colorful lunch boxes with portioned sections meant to teach kids balanced eating. It recently paid a well-followed health food blogger to post a photo of a food-filled Yumbox. The post spiked traffic to its website and doubled its Instagram followers to nearly 5,000.

Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter allow small businesses to pay to promote their posts and gain followers. Instagram, which declined to comment for this story, doesn't do that yet. On its website, it says it is working on offering advertising to more of its users.

REACHING OUT TO CUSTOMERS

There are cheaper ways to build followers. Yumbox reposts customer photos. Devitt and co-owner Maia Neumann scour Instagram for photos others have posted using Yumbox as a hashtag. (A hashtag is a word or sentence that begins with the pound sign (#), such as #yumbox. Using a hashtag, which is clickable, makes it easier for users to find all the pictures about one topic.)

Devitt says reposting encourages more people to share photos of their own Yumbox, getting the boxes in front of even more eyes.

Women's clothing shop and online store UOI Boutique broadcasts its customers' Instagram photos on its website. When someone uploads a picture of a skirt or top or necklace on Instagram with the hashtag #uoionline, it automatically shows up on uoionline.com. The Sterling, Illinois, company also asks its 25 workers to take at least one photo with their smartphone during their shifts. The best are uploaded to UOI Boutique's Instagram account.

HASHTAG EVERYTHING

The right hashtag can attract customers from far away. Brooke Sacco, the owner of Behind The Moon, a shop that sells used and new kids clothing in Hammonton, New Jersey uploaded a photo of a pair of outfits with the hashtag of the clothing's brand name. A potential customer in Dallas was searching for that brand on Instagram and asked Sacco to send the $7 dress and romper to Texas. It was the first time Sacco had shipped clothing to customers since she opened the store in April.

She tries to post six photos a day, complete with hashtags.

"It's free advertising," Sacco says.

BUILDING A BRAND

But it's not just about posting pictures of products. Dyer and Jenkins, an online seller of men's clothing, reinforces that its jeans and T-shirts are made in America through Instagram. Owner Josey Orr posts three photos a day to the Los Angeles company's Instagram account and has a rule: 20 per cent of the photos are of Dyer and Jenkins clothing and 80 per cent are photos of weathered American flags, classic cars or West Coast highways. The account has more nearly 11,000 followers. (As a comparison, big clothing brands such as J. Crew has more than 500,000 followers and Urban Outfitters has nearly 1.5 million.)

"It's more about the brand and less about selling products," says Orr.

That's also true for Hawaiian hot sauce maker Adoboloco. "We use Instagram to show what we're doing in our lives and outside of the business," says owner Tim Parsons.

He posts photos from the Hawaiian farm where some of the chili peppers used in the sauces are grown. There are also lots of pictures of Maui's sandy beaches and french fries, eggs and other meals drenched with Adoboloco's hot sauce.

Why does Instagram resonate with potential customers? A photo can say more about a business than words. "People process photos faster," says Jesse Redniss, chief strategy officer at Spredfast, which works with brands to build their social media presence.

"Storytelling is paramount for a business to get people to care about who they are," says Redniss. "People are always entranced with a story. It's how people become interested in a brand."

PHOTOGRAPHIC MARKDOWN

Another way to spur sales is to offer discounts. A week before Mother's Day, Las Vegas bakery Peridot Sweets sent a photo of a white Mother's Day cake with a sugary peony flower on top to its nearly 1,800 Instagram followers. The caption offered the cake for $40 a $30 discount.

Owner Tiffany Jones says she sold seven of the cakes to people who saw the photo on Instagram. The photo also automatically posted to the company's Facebook page. She sold six more cakes to Facebook fans.

"It's visual," says Jones about Instagram. "It's perfect for what we do."

ONLINE:

Adoboloco's Instagram account: http://instagram.com/adoboloco

Behind The Moon: http://instagram.com/behindthemoonshop

Dyer And Jenkins: http://instagram.com/dyerandjenkins

Limelight Extensions: http://instagram.com/limelightextensions

Peridot Sweets: http://instagram.com/peridotsweets

UOI Boutique: http://instagram.com/uoionline

Yumbox: http://instagram.com/yumboxlunch

Follow Joseph Pisani at https://twitter.com/josephpisani

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By Derrik J. Lang, The Associated Press - The Canadian Press

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - Game makers at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo went for the jugular.

That's not just a metaphor about the competitive spirit of the video game industry at its annual trade show this past week. There were also actual depictions of throats being ripped out — as well as spleens, spines, hearts and testicles — in some of the goriest scenes ever shown off at E3.

Developers of such titles as "Bloodborne," "Let It Die," "Mortal Kombat X," "Dead Island 2" and "Dying Light" weren't shy about harnessing the high-powered graphical capabilities of the latest generation of consoles to portray more realistic decapitations, dismemberments and other grisliness.

Why the apparent boost in high-definition gross-outs?

"I think in the early years of a console launch, you have the so-called early adopters and hardcore fan base," said Shawn Layden, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, which launched the PlayStation 4 last November. "I think they look for the latest gaming experience that takes them to another level from where they've been before, and a lot of our publishing partners are pursuing the new, most impactful experience for gamers."

The parade of carnage kicked off Monday at Microsoft's presentation when the creators of "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" demonstrated a level in which a character's arm is ripped off while attempting to sabotage an enemy aircraft in South Korea. Michael Condrey, co-founder of "Advanced Warfare" developer Sledgehammer Games, later maintained the amputation wasn't only intended to shock.

"We know that war is terrifying," said Condrey. "The military advisers that we work with talk about the horrors of war. 'Call of Duty' isn't just about gratuitous violence. The scene that you saw in Seoul at the Microsoft press conference, that's an impactful story moment. The loss of the arm is really part of the narrative. We showed that for a particular storytelling reason."

Other slaughter on display at E3 included a first-person perspective of a decapitation in a demo of the French Revolution-set "Assassin's Creed: Unity" and several bone-crushing new moves in "Mortal Kombat X," like extreme close-ups of characters snapping their opponents' spines and manhandling their genitals.

"It seems, as time goes on, video games continue to become more violent, realistic and graphic," said Brad J. Bushman, a communication and psychology professor at Ohio State University. "This is a disturbing trend. Unfortunately, I see no signs that it will stop. The research evidence clearly indicates that violent video games increase aggression in players, and can make them numb to the pain and suffering of others."

But it wasn't merely blood and guts on display at E3 this year. The virtual horse that players will mount in the open-world action sequel "Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" has been programmed to spontaneously defecate. And in a creepy abandoned mental institution from the Victorian-era thriller "The Order: 1886," there's not just blood smeared across the walls.

Game makers defend that gore aids the narrative, yet many believe a little goes a long way.

"For us, it's more impactful if it's done tastefully," said "The Order" game director Dana Jan. "If you just throw blood all over the place, it's meaningless. ... We have to look at what we think is disturbing or scary and figure out how to do that masterfully without going too over the top."

E3 wasn't completely consumed with bloodshed. This year's show featured a plethora of non-bloody, artsy games that attracted an unprecedented amount of attention. Still, the biggest games at E3 are usually the most hardcore

While violence has long been part of gaming history, and these gory titles are destined to be restricted to adult buyers by the industry's rating board, such footage received visceral reactions from even the most seasoned gamers this year.

"E3 2014, taken as a whole, doesn't feel as obsessed with violence as past shows," wrote Chris Plante, co-founder at the gaming site Polygon. That was before he cut the show's most graphic violence into a one-minute video. "The supercut is dense with blood, organs and unrecognizable viscera," Plante wrote. "It's strange how these things can wash over you but make an impact when taken together. These conferences can be a bit desensitizing."

AP Entertainment Writer Ryan Pearson contributed to this report.
Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang.

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By Elizabeth Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal


"How can I tell if someone is lying to me online, or in a text or an email?"

Readers have been asking me about this issue a lot lately. In an age of online dating and constant emails, texts and social media, people write to tell me about communications that feel incomplete, disconnected or just a little off. Their gut is telling them something is wrong.

With so much room for ambiguity and misinterpretation, it's hard to tell what is fact and what is fiction. This can happen when we are flirting with a stranger on an online dating site, as well as when we are messaging with a work manager or planning a family party with a sibling.

Experts say the vast majority of our interpersonal communication involves body language—gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice. Take these intangibles away, as we do with digital messages, and we are left with far fewer clues as to what is really going on.

In the office and elsewhere, many relationships begin on email and remain that way for years. So it's critical to have tools to help evaluate whether the person on the other end of a digital communication might be lying.

Research shows people tend to be suspicious of information they receive online but override their suspicions and trust the information anyway. Experts call this our "truth bias."

We often have powerful emotional reasons to believe what someone is telling us. We really want to believe the message from the cutie on the dating site is real. Ditto the text saying our spouse is working late.

A few years ago, Brian Bohne, of Lauderdale by the Sea, Fla., was contacted through an online dating site by an attractive woman in Russia. Almost immediately, she asked to communicate via email.

From the start, Mr. Bohne had suspicions—her messages appeared to be written with the help of translation software—but he decided to play along.

He says he found her story of longing to get out of her small town believable. He was surprised that she wrote for months, professing her love without asking for money.

"Waking up in the morning to an email love letter can be exciting and flattering," says Mr. Bohne, a 51-year-old retired Army veteran. He found himself thinking, "What if?"

After four months, the woman said she wanted to visit and was going to apply for a passport. Then she contacted him to say if he didn't wire her $1,000, she was going to be in "big trouble." Mr. Bohne googled the email address she had provided—and found it on websites warning about so-called bride scams. He didn't wire the money.

It is possible to catch people lying because they often are bad at it, says Tyler Cohen Wood, an intelligence officer and cyber branch chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Science and Technology Directorate, and author of a 2014 book titled "Catching the Catfishers: Disarm the Online Pretenders, Predators and Perpetrators Who Are Out to Ruin Your Life." (Her views on the subject are her own and not those of her employer, she emphasizes.)

"The majority of people prefer to tell the truth," says Ms. Cohen Wood. "That's why when they are lying, the truth is going to leak out."

There will be clues. To identify them, Ms. Cohen Woods suggests using a modified version of a law-enforcement technique known as statement analysis, which is a way to look for deception by analyzing a person's words.

To begin with, pay attention to a person's use of emphatic language. It doesn't necessarily mean he or she is lying, but rather that he or she really wants you to believe what is being said. This is also the case when a person keeps saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways. "They wouldn't repeat it if it wasn't important to them," Ms. Cohen Wood says.

Look for language that distances the writer from the intended reader. In person, someone may unconsciously distance himself by crossing his arms in front of him. In writing, he can achieve this same effect by omitting personal pronouns and references to himself from a story.

Say he receives a text that says, "Hey I had a great time last night, did you?" He might reply, "Last night was fun."

Another technique to watch out for is the unanswered question. You ask, and the other person hedges or changes the subject. Most likely, the person doesn't like saying no, or doesn't want to hurt your feelings. But he or she also may also be keeping something from you.

"This is all very subtle," says Ms. Cohen Wood. "And it depends on the context." It helps to know a person's baseline behavior—certain words, phrases and punctuation he or she uses often, and the amount of time he or she tends to take when replying. Pay attention when any of this deviates from the norm. Did someone who is usually chatty and full of details suddenly become curt or vague? Did a quiet person turn into a chatter box?

Noncommittal statements are red flags—"pretty sure," "probably," "must have" and, my least favorite, "maybe." ("Did you let the client know, Jim?" "We covered a lot of ground. I must have mentioned it.") "These words leave the person an out," Ms. Cohen Wood says.

Qualifying statements, what I call "tee-ups," are another potential tell. Ms. Cohen Wood says these expressions—"to be honest," "there is nothing to worry about," "I hate to tell you this"—often signal that the person is uncomfortable with his or her next statement.

Another sign of lying is "tense hopping." Someone describing an event that happened in the past usually uses the past tense. But if midway through the story the person starts fabricating, that material plays out in his or her head and leads to a switch to the present tense.

Ms. Cohen Wood advises people who meet someone online to consider a few protective steps. They can apply in other situations, too.

First and foremost, if an email or text exchange feels off, ask the person if he or she would mind switching immediately to phone or Skype. A slightly more skeptical request is to ask for a real-time photo stamped with the time and date.

Ask questions. Pay attention to vague answers, slip-ups and inconsistencies. Don't brush it off if a person tells you he or she is an only child and then mentions a sibling.

One red flag may be a misunderstanding or an honest mistake, Ms. Cohen Wood says. "But if they meet multiple things on the checklist, then you have a problem," she says.

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By Dan Tynan, Tech Columnist

One day about four years ago, I came home from work and heard utter mayhem coming from my son's room: Russian voices, screeching tires, gunshots. I bolted up the stairs and threw open his door.

I found him parked in front of his Xbox, playing Grand Theft Auto IV. I watched his avatar lead police on a high-speed chase through the absurdly empty streets of Liberty City. He crashed a car into a light pole, hopped out of his car, and began emptying a .45 Magnum at the cops.


This game was most definitely not on the family approved-to-play list. My first instinct was to grab the Xbox and throw it out the window. My wife persuaded me to conserve my moral outrage for those moments when he did something dangerous or stupid in the real world, not in a virtual one.

Still, for a little while I felt like the world's worst parent. Then I sat down and watched him play, and I also watched the story on the Xbox unfold before him. I realized that GTA is a dystopian satire not all that different from movies like A Clockwork Orange, which thoroughly outraged parents when I was his age.

The idea that playing video games makes kids violent and antisocial is often accepted as a sobering fact of modern life. Whether it's true is less clear — some studies say yes, others say nyet. In the real world, watching Clockwork did not make me into a droogie. And playing GTA did not turn my son into a murderous thug. He's a great kid.

But let's assume the fear has some truth, that violent media contributes to violent behavior. If so — if games teach kids to shoot first and to drive as if cars are weapons — can't games also be used to impart positive life skills like empathy or compassion? Can video games boost a child's emotional quotient (EQ)?

Some people think they can. One of them is Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, most famous for creating the most popular sports simulation game of all time, John Madden Football. Now he's trying to prove it via a fantasy adventure game called IF… aimed at tweens.

You the dog, man
Just as Madden Football is based on actual NFL playbooks, IF… is based on decades of research in social emotional learning (SEL). The game takes place in a land called Greenberry populated by dogs, cats, and magical Pokemon-like characters known as Vim. Long ago, the dogs and cats were driven apart by conflict, and Greenberry fell into ruin.

Guided by the Yoda-like YouDog, players must learn how to tame the Vim, resolve the conflicts, and bring Greenberry back to harmony. Along the way they're presented with questions and a choice of answers measuring their degree of empathy and other SEL attributes.

You’ve got three choices. Pick the wrong answer, and you’ll get a lesson in sensitivity from YouDog.

Each chapter teaches 20 distinct SEL skills, such as listening, managing emotions, or expressing gratitude. As each chapter is completed, parents get a report detailing how well their child did. The first chapter of the book-like adventure is available for free in the iTunes Store. New chapters will start to become available in June for around $5 apiece.

To be frank, this is not the most exciting game your child will ever play. The first chapter is didactic, slow, and unlikely to lure anyone away from Minecraft, Runescape, or Club Penguin. (I'm told things get livelier in Chapter 2.) But Hawkins says the rewards are more subtle and long lasting.

"This game is not about advancing in levels; it's about teaching compassion," he said. "You're like the Jimmy Stewart character in It's a Wonderful Life. You see how the town ends up in tatters without you, and it's up to you to make it right."

Learning to cope
Though IF… is probably the most ambitious and well-funded attempt to employ gaming techniques to teach kids emotional skills, it's not the only one. The Social Express uses Pixar-like animation to teach kids age 5 and up how to read emotional clues and react to them appropriately.

The Social Express starts by teaching kids how to recognize their own emotions, and then how to apply coping skills.

Rather than embed lessons inside the plot of a role-playing game, The Social Express uses brief webisodes that target specific situations and model appropriate behavior, CEO Marc Zimmerman says.

Kids can apply those lessons to their own lives via a 99 cent Android or iOS app called My Digital Problem Solver. My DPS lets kids choose an image that shows how they feel at the moment (frustrated, scared, mad, or whatever) and then select a coping strategy like taking deep breaths or "positive self talk" to calm down.

In use by more than 100 school districts across the country, The Social Express is also available to families for $5 a month per child. Parents can track their child's progress through the lessons via a free mobile app.

IF….. and The Social Express are two examples of a small but growing genre of digital works that explore emotions besides fear and anger, which tend to dominate most video games, said Tanner Higgin, senior manager for education content at Common Sense Media.

"There's a wide range of feelings like loneliness, trepidation, and guilt that have remained largely untapped," he said. "Over the last few years we've started to see a lot more games that implicitly or explicitly build social skills and expand the emotional spectrum."

The play's the thing
Respecting other people's feelings, sharing, being empathetic — aren't these things kids should be learning from their parents, not from a screen? I asked Janice Toben, founder of the Institute for Social and Emotional Learning, who consulted on the curriculum baked into IF… .

Yes, she replied. But she added that many parents lack the ability to model those traits themselves, especially during emotionally charged encounters with their children. So, for example, instead of calmly explaining that a violent video game is detrimental to a child's emotional development, they are instead tempted to rip the cables from the Xbox and hurl it into the street.

"Parents want to be able to create a common vocabulary around things like calming down, listening to each other, and getting along, but not everyone knows how to do it," she said. "I think a game like IF… can help, if the parents are interested and involved."

Research has shown that playing games can sharpen a child's problem-solving skills (not to mention his aim and his reflexes). If games can boost his IQ, why not his EQ? At the very least it's worth a shot — metaphorically speaking, of course.

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By Brandon Bailey covers Google, Facebook and Yahoo for the San Jose Mercury News, reporting on the business and culture of the Internet.


Okay, all you Windows XP users – and, by now, you know who you are. The security threat to your computer could get uncomfortably real next week.

Microsoft is set to release its next series of routine security patches on Tuesday, and for the first time, it won't be releasing any patches for the 13-year-old operating system known as Windows XP, according to veteran security blogger Graham Cluley.

"In all probability," Cluley warned on his blog today, "there will be Windows vulnerabilities fixed on that day which will remain unpatched on the unloved Windows XP platform."

"And it would be no surprise at all if malicious hackers reverse-engineered Microsoft's fixes and explored how to exploit on Windows XP security flaws that are fixed on the likes of Windows 7."

It's not that XP users haven't been warned. As we've reported before, Microsoft has been telling everyone for months that, as of this spring, it would no longer issue security updates for the aging, but still widely used XP version of its flagship Windows operating system – even though XP is still running on tens of millions of personal computers around the world.

But Microsoft backtracked from its self-imposed April 8 deadline, when it responded last week to a new and dangerous vulnerability involving its Internet Explorer web browser. Microsoft distributed a set of software patches to fix that problem on May 1, and it deemed the threat so severe that it decided to include a patch for computers running Explorer on XP.

As a Microsoft security official noted, the company is still encouraging users to upgrade to a newer, more secure operating system. And now Cluley is arguing that it's time for Microsoft to show some tough love. Providing further patches for XP is only encouraging people to put off a needed upgrade, he writes.

"I'm not saying it's going to be pretty," Cluley added, but: "It's time for the world to get rid of Windows XP. And it's time for Microsoft to make an honest clean break and not release any more fixes for XP."

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By Alyssa Bereznak, Tech Columnist

Getting lost just got a little bit harder.

Google Maps is rolling out new features to its mobile Android and iOS apps that are meant to improve commuting by automobile, train, and even the Uber car service. The company announced the slew of updates meant to prevent "life's everyday hiccups" Tuesday morning in a blog post.

Here are five of its most notable features and how to use them:

1. When receiving driving instructions, the app will now tell you which lane to stay in or switch to.


One of the worst parts about early-day GPS was how little warning you got that it was time to exit. I can't count how many times I've been instructed by Maps to take a last-minute exit and missed it because it was too dangerous to swerve across three lanes in 45 seconds.

This new feature eliminates those frustrations and will make it both safer and easier to receive on-the-road instructions. There's no need to enable it. Simply search for directions from one location to the next, tap on the car icon, and the guiding slides will pop up.

On each leg of the trip, there will be a small white box in the upper-left corner of the screen, as you can see below.


It shows how many lanes are on the road, whether they're turn only, and — most importantly — which one you need to be in.

This may save all of us a little road rage.

2. You can save and search for certain areas of maps to access offline.


Technically you were able to do this prior to the update, but now the feature has been more prominently integrated into the design and made easier to use. You can also now label and store your maps in a designated location, so you can search for them while you're on the move.

To use this feature, search for a general location you plan to visit. It could be a entire city like "San Francisco," but it's probably better to choose a specific neighborhood of an area you're visiting.

Once the search loads, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to show the area's "location card."


From there, you'll see some basic info about the area, including the option to go straight into Street View. Beneath that you'll see a white box that says Save map to use offline. Tap it.


You'll be shown the map again. This time you can choose to pan around the area by dragging your finger on the screen, or zoom in and out by pinching. When you're all done, tap the Save button at the bottom.


From there, you can name the map or just go with Google's helpful automated suggestion. Then tap Save.


You may have to wait a few seconds for it to store the image, depending on how large the area is that you want saved.

If you want to access the map again, go to your main home screen, make sure your search bar is clear, and tap the person icon in the top right.


You'll see your Maps profile page, which includes your Home and Work locations, including locations you've saved, and recent searches. Scroll all the way down. At the very bottom you'll find your offline maps.


3. You can specify your departure and arrival times for public transit.


Anyone who regularly relies on a train or bus for transportation knows that service varies according to the time of day. Now you can search for specific arrival and departure times that fit your schedule. The app will take into account any timing factors and even let you know when the very last train or bus on a line is for that night.

To use it, search for public transportation directions as you usually would. When the routes come up, tap the small gray box at the top of the screen that says Depart at….


A box will pop up at the bottom of the page. From there you can choose the date and time. You can also specify if you want to depart or arrive at a certain time. Or simply pick Last to find out when the very final train on that route will come. Then press Done.


Notice that it'll specify the wait time between trains for the time of day you're searching.


Pretty helpful for any sort of late-night public transportation!

4. You can order an Uber ride from the app if that's your fastest option.


Sometimes the chance of catching a train is hopeless, there's not a cab to be seen, and you just need to get a car to pick you up. This is when the black-car service Uber can come in handy. In addition to being able to compare travel times among walking, transit, and cabbing, you can now see how long it'll take for an Uber to drive to the destination of your choice.

To use it, search for directions as usual. At the bottom of all your options, there'll be an one to Get an Uber. On the right of the box, you'll see the time it'll take for the Uber to get you to where you're going (no sign if this also incorporates the amount of time it takes for an Uber to reach you). The time will appear in green if it's faster that the route you searched for. It'll appear in orange if it's not as fast.


With a tap on the box, you'll be brought to your Uber app. Your current location will also be transferred.


5. You can search for businesses by filter.


Looking for a place to eat or drink on the go can be frustrating, because you're never sure about its pricing, whether it's disgusting, and if it's even open. Now you can search for locations around you with filters that include hours, rating, and price.

Just search for a "restaurant," "cafe," or whatever other thing you need to find near you. When the results populate the map, tap the three-lined symbol on the right of your search bar.


You'll be brought to a page of your search results. Tap Filter in the upper-right corner of the screen.


A page of controls will pop up, which allow you to look for businesses according to their rating and price. You can also choose options like Open now or From your circles, which mines suggestions from your Google+ friends' recommendations. When you're done adjusting the settings, tap Apply.


It's a cool feature, but it doesn't always have results to return.


This is particularly helpful if you just so happen to be out late and need to find the least-sketchy place nearby that serves tacos. Just sayin'.

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Modern PCs don't require as much maintenance as they once did. But showing your hard drive some love now and then can make a difference in its speed and efficiency, especially if it's fairly full. Here it is: the non-techie's guide to optimizing your system using Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter.

Disk Cleanup

As you use your computer, Windows litters your hard drive with temporary files. Programs, utilities, and websites scatter disposable files everywhere. If you could see your hard drive's surface, it would eventually look like the floor of a minivan whose owners eat a lot of fast food.

To run Windows' built-in housekeeper program, the quickest route is this: Open the Start screen. Type "disk cleanup" and select Settings under the search box. In the search results, click Free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files. (Disk Cleanup is also available in the Control Panel.)

The Disk Cleanup program dives right in. If you have more than one drive, it lets you choose the one you want to work on; then it goes to work, inspecting your drive and reporting on files you can safely remove.

Left to its own devices, it will clean up only your files. But if you'd like to clean up all the files on the computer, including Microsoft's own detritus, click Clean up system files. Authenticate if necessary.


The Disk Cleanup dialog box shown above appears when the inspection is over. Turn on the checkboxes of the file categories you'd like to have cleaned out, and then click OK to send them to the digital landfill. It's like getting a bigger hard drive for free.

Disk Defragmenter

When you save a new file, Windows records its information onto the hard drive in small pieces called blocks. On a new PC, Windows lays the blocks end to end on the hard drive's surface. Later, when you type more data into a document (thus enlarging it), the file no longer fits in the same space. Windows puts as much of the file in the original location as can fit, but it may have to store a few of its blocks in the next empty spot on the hard drive.

Ordinarily, you'll never even notice that your files are getting chopped up in this way, since they open promptly and seamlessly. Windows keeps track of where it has stored the various pieces and reconstitutes them when necessary.

As your drive fills up, though, the free space that's left is made up of smaller and smaller groups of blocks. Eventually, a new file may not fit in a single "parking place" on the hard drive's surface, since there are no free spaces left large enough to hold it. Windows may have to store a file in several different areas of the disk, or even hundreds.

When you try to open such a fragmented file, the drive heads (which read the disk) must scamper all over the disk surface, rounding up each block in turn, which is slower than reading contiguous blocks one after the other. Over time, this file fragmentation gets worse and worse. Eventually, you wind up griping to your buddies or spouse that you need a new computer, because this one seems to have gotten so slow.

The solution: Disk Defragmenter, a program that puts together pieces of files that have become fragmented on your drive. The "defragger" also rearranges the files on your drives to make the operating system and programs load more quickly. A freshly defragged PC feels faster and more responsive than a heavily fragmented one.

(UPDATE: This advice, and this program, applies to traditional spinning hard drives—not the solid-state drives [SSDs] on some high-end laptops. For much more on the "defragging SSDs" issue, here's a good primer.)

Windows' disk-defragging software runs automatically at regular intervals, in the tiny moments when you're not actually typing or clicking. It's like having someone take out your garbage for you whenever the can is full. Slow-PC syndrome should, therefore, be a much less frequent occurrence.

Even though Windows defrags your hard drive automatically in the background, though, you can still exert some control. For example, you can change the schedule, and you can trigger a defragmentation manually when you're feeling like a control freak.

Start by opening the Disk Defragmenter main screen. You can get there via the Control Panel, or from the Start screen. Type "disk defrag" and select Settings under the search box. In the search results, click Defragment and optimize your drives.


The Disk Defragmenter window opens (as shown above). From here you can either adjust the schedule or trigger defragmentation manually:

• Adjust the schedule. Click Configure schedule. Authenticate yourself if necessary. A screen appears, showing that Windows ordinarily defrags your disk late every Wednesday night (at 1 a.m., in fact). You can use the pop-up menus here to specify a Weekly, Daily, or Monthly schedule, complete with day-of-week and time-of-day options. Click OK, and then OK again.

• Manually. Click Defragment disk; the defragmenter does its work. Depending on the size of your hard disk, your processor speed, and the amount of fragmentation, it will take anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

Tip: During the defragmentation process, Windows picks up pieces of your files and temporarily sets them down in a different spot, like somebody trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle. If your hard drive is very full, defragmenting will take a lot longer than if you have some empty space available — and if there's not enough free disk space, Windows can't do the job completely. Before you run Disk Defragmenter, use Disk Cleanup and make as much free disk space as possible.

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After a recent rumor suggested that the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 may be delayed because Apple is facing supply issues related to the phone’s battery, a new report now says that Apple will only manufacture a limited run of the bigger model. G 4 Games has picked up reports from Chinese media via Weibo that say that Apple will only make 10 million iPhone 6 phablets at launch. These iPhones will have a 5.44-inch display covered by Sapphire glass, which may be the reason only a limited number of handsets will be mass-produced.

Apparently, the Sapphire crystal on the bigger iPhone is a lot more expensive to produce than glass, and will drive up the cost of the handset. In China, the 16GB 5.5-inch iPhone 6 could cost as much as 8,000 yuan (around $1,285) unlocked, with the Sapphire screen supposedly costing Apple 1,743 yuan (around $280).

Earlier this year, Gorilla Glass maker Corning bashed Sapphire glass, saying that its high price makes it a rather prohibitive material for mobile device makers.

Apple has its own Sapphire plant in Arizona, where it has started producing small quantities of such glass. Previous reports revealed that Apple will be able to produce between 100 million and 200 million Sapphire displays per year at its Arizona plant, although that may only happen once the plant is fully operational.

The new reports from China seem to somewhat confirm an earlier report from Ming-Chi Kuo. The analyst said that the iPhone 6 phablet would be launched only late in the last quarter of the year, revealing that only the 64GB version of the 5.5-inch device would actually have Sapphire glass. However, the new report from China doesn’t single out any iPhone 6 phablet version, when it comes to Sapphire display use.

In the future, Kuo said, Apple will equip all its iPhones with Sapphire glass.

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Rob Walker | @YahooTechGoogle may have set out to "organize the world's information," but thanks to the creativity of a huge variety of artists, designers, hackers and other tinkerers it s become something else: an art museum hidden within a search engine. Because a slew of people have found clever ways to exploit or misuse Google s tools and algorithms and endless troves of data, Google has accidentally become a mother lode of artistic inspiration (and, often humorously, a passive artistic collaborator.) Google has proven such a muse that you could mount an amazing museum show of Google-derived works which is precisely what we ve done. Until we raise the capital to rent out a physical space, you ll have to settle for the virtual version of the Google-heim Art Museum that follows: The most comprehensive collection of Google arts we think you can stand, grouped by specific Google products and services. Enjoy, and please don't touch the artwork/your computer screen.

GOOGLE EARTHIn Juxtapose, Daniel Schwarz gathers Google satellite images of adjacent, remote patches of Earth at different times of year, and pairs them.

Meanwhile, Elena Radice seeks out joints on Google Maps where seasonal shifts are revealed inadvertently: One seasonal set of images abruptly bumps up against another. Her images are collected on the Tumblr Abstract Season Changes.

Onformative, a design studio, has collaborated with Christian Loclair to highlight another landscape feature visible via Google Earth: Google Faces.

From Google Faces. Do you see the face?The spooky video Algorithmic Architecture, by Charlie Behrens, takes viewers on a trip through Google Earth or rather through its many corners where images register improperly. The result is a smeary, blocky, disconcerting landscape, built out of sputtering algorithms.

Clement Valla curates on ongoing collection of charmingly surreal glitch scenes from Google Earth, in the series Postcards From Google Earth.

Peter Root uses Google Earth in his video Digital Detritus. But here it s a backdrop setting for what he calls digital installations wild, sci-fi, 3D-modelled shapes and structures hovering over and sprouting from Earth (or Google s rendition of it, anyway).

GOOGLE ART PROJECTPhil Thompson s Copyrights actually draws on Google s more official interaction with the art world: The Google Art Project, which documents various museums so they can be explored from afar via a Street View-like interface. But evidently there are copyright issues around certain images in certain museums. Thompson seeks those out and captures them with screenshots then he has the pixelated abstraction copied in the form of an oil painting (by companies that offer this service in China; who knew?). Thus a blocked digital image is converted back into a physical art work. GOOGLE STREET VIEWIn this truly lovely short video, The Theory (which openly credits its collaborator, attributing the piece to itself and Google Street View ), stop-motion animation and Street View are combined to show the story of a lonely desk toy who uses Google s tool to make a virtual cross-country road trip.

Two of the most celebrated examples of extracting art from Google data involve using Street View as something like street photography. Jon Rafman's 9-Eyes (a reference to the multi-direction cameras mounted on Google s Street View vehicles) plucks disturbing, funny, beautiful, or otherwise surprising images from the service and collects them on 9-Eyes.com.

From 9-eyes.com And Michael Wolf has created several series culled from captured Street View images, grouped into themes such Portrait (zooming in on faces blurred by Google s system) and Interface (which include Street View s interaction graphics).

by Michael Wolf.As part of an installation project titled Higher Definition earlier this year, Jeroen Nelemans mounted Street View iconography on Plexiglas in front of a home/gallery in Oak Park, Illinois, making the suburban dwelling look in the physical world as it would on a Google-mediated computer screen.

Paolo Cirio s Street Ghosts focuses on the random human beings captured by Street View s documentation, reproducing their semi-blurry forms as street art in the same real-world locations. From Paolo Cirio's Type an address into Street View Stereographic and it converts any Street View image [into] a stereographic projection resulting in a pleasingly insane visual.

GOOGLE GOGGLES

Google Goggles is an Android app designed to enable visual searching : Take a picture of a book or a landmark or whatever, and Goggles is supposed to spit back relevant information. Samuel J. Bland got interested in the similar images component of the results, particularly in cases when Googles didn t seem to comprehend what it was seeing. Bland s series Googlology paired images he submitted with a collage of images Goggles served up in response which weirdly mimic the original form, despite being non-sequiturs.

GOOGLE BOOKS

The Art of Google Books tracks unexpectedly compelling images squirreled away in the vast Google Books project often the result of some error or misstep in the digitization process.

GOOGLE MAPS (SATELLITE VIEW)For the series Satellite Collections, Jenny Odell selected specific categories of built-landscape features (swimming pools, nuclear cooling towers, stadiums, parking lots, etc.) and assembled them into fascinating collages. IMAGE SEARCH RESULTSDaniel Mercadante gathered up a massive trove of pictures of spherical objects, most from Google Image Search, and assembled them into the dazzling short super-super-supercut video, Ball.





Ben West and Felix Heyes used Google to search every word in the dictionary, grabbed the top Image result for each, and assembled a 1,240-page book (titled Google ) of the results.



Ken Goldman s series of Google Portraits render Google Image Search results pages in the form of watercolors. Dina Kelberman s I m Google was inspired by wandering through Google Image Search and YouTube, and recreates the journey of similar Web-culled visual leading to slightly similar visual, gradually evolving into completely different visuals infinitely in an endless-scroll Tumblr. (Endless scrolling is currently disabled, but a note on I m Google says it will be restored in a week or two. )

Phew! So, what did I miss? If there are other Google-derived or inspired art projects I should know about, speak up in the comments or tweet them @notrobwalker.

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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) Ecuador's foreign minister said Monday his country will act not on its interests but on its principles as it considers an asylum request from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, wanted for revealing classified U.S. secrets.

Speaking to reporters through a translator at a hotel in Hanoi, Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said the asylum request "has to do with freedom of expression and with the security of citizens around the world."

Patino spoke briefly to reporters on his way to a meeting with Vietnam's foreign minister. He did not say how long it would take Ecuador to decide.

Snowden was on a flight from Hong Kong that arrived in Moscow Sunday and was booked on a flight to Cuba Monday, the Russian news agencies ITAR-Tass and Interfax reported, citing unnamed airline officials.

"We know that he's currently in Moscow, and we are ... in touch with the highest authorities of Russia," Patino said.

Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said Snowden was bound for Ecuador "via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from WikiLeaks." The organization's founder Julian Assange, was granted asylum by Ecuador last year and has been staying at the country's embassy in the United Kingdom.

The Russian reports said a plane carrying Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday and he was booked on a flight to Cuba on Monday. The reports cited unnamed airline officials and said he intended to travel from Cuba to Caracas, Venezuela. There was also speculation that he might try to reach Ecuador.

Snowden had been in hiding in Hong Kong for several weeks after he revealed information on the highly classified spy programs.

Patino said Ecuador would not base its asylum decision on its potential to damage the country's relationship with the United States

"There are some governments that act more upon their own interests, but we do not," Patino said. "We act upon our principles."

He added, "We take care of the human rights of the people."

Patino was to hold a news conference Monday evening in Hanoi.

WikiLeaks said it was providing legal help to Snowden at his request and that he was being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from the group.

Assange has spent a year inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning about sex crime allegations. He told the Sydney Morning Herald that his organization is in a position to help Snowden because it has expertise in international asylum and extradition law.

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