When Samsung unveiled its first 4K Ultra HD TV at CES this year, it said other sizes would follow, both larger and smaller than the initial 85-inch version. Now it’s apparently ready to fulfill part of that promise, announcing in Korea that 65- and 55-inch models will launch next month. Of course our next question is how these smaller models will compare to the $ 39,999 MSRP 85S9 UHD TV in price. Hopefully they’ll follow the path blazed by Sony, which recently introduced models at that size with pricing well below the $ 10,000 benchmark, although we expect Seiki’s 50-incher will still hold the crown for value pricing. The press release mentions they will feature Samsung’s upgradeable Smart TV platform and the “micro dimming ultimate” LED lighting of their larger cousin, but the odd “Timeless Gallery” frame / stand (pictured above on the 85-incher) was not listed.
Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment, HD, Samsung
Source: Korea Newswire
Today Today at BlackBerry Live, CEO Thorsten Heins announced BBM will launch this summer on Android and iOS. The messaging app will launch globally this summer. “It is a state of confidence,” Heins explained. “The BB10 platform is so strong and the response has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become an independent mobile messaging platform.” Developing…
Warby Parker, like so many other lifestyle/tech hybrid companies, faced the problem many small companies see while trying to launch a real brand: how do you make the story resonate?
Samsung is working on a dust-proof and water-proof Galaxy S4, which will essentially resemble the S4 but with environmental superpowers, says the Wall Street Journal. The paper also reported that Samsung is launching its next-generation Galaxy tablet in June, as well as a compact S4 at “just” 4.3-inches in size (this still seems large to me, but maybe I’m just old). Samsung has always been keen on capitalizing on flagship branding by diversifying its line with a variety of offshoot devices, so the news should come as no surprise.
EE, the U.K.’s first and still only 4G network operator, has broken out 4G-specific customer numbers for the first time — confirming that after five months of 4G trading it has hit a total of 318,000 4G-specific customers. The carrier has previously reported total postpaid 3G and 4G additions for its Q4 quarter, when it said it saw 201,000 net gains in the quarter.
There are a plethora of options for mobile app crash testing, like Crashlytics, Crittercism and Bugsense. But what about before the day of the big launch? A startup out of India’s GSF Accelerator called Little Eye Labs is looking to handle crash testing before developers go into post-production. They just launched an app and crash testing service within the last few weeks. “We want to catch the bugs before the app reaches the app store,” said co-founder Kumar Rangarajan. The company has built a way for developers to monitor an app’s performance on a single or a handful of devices for how it consumes memory, power and wireless data during a test-run. Basically you either plug the phone into your computer and watch how it performs, or you can disconnect it, and observe how the app performs for a 30-minute run on these metrics through their software. Other competing products like Crashlytics instead look at crash reporting for when a developer’s app is already released, out in the wild and being used on perhaps thousands or millions of devices simultaneously. Little Eye records what’s happening live on the screen as it monitors other less visible stats like data and memory usage. Once the test run is over, it shows charts and a side-by-side video recording that can tell developer what happened while an app was running. “When doing app testing, you need a lot of context around what a user was doing at certain points,” he said. “You can actually deploy this in your lab, run multiple apps on a series of devices. Our main value proposition is that context; it’s the whole video aspect of it.” Rangarajan said the closest comparable service out there is Android’s Dalvik Debug Monitor Server, which comes as a tool for developers using the platform. “It’s very rudimentary, but what we do is more visual, advanced and easy-to-use,” Rangarajan said. Rangarajan and his co-founders previously worked on developer tools at Rational Software, which is a company that IBM acquired for $ 2.1 billion back in 2003. They have a freemium model, naturally. A full annual subscription is about $ 500 per developer, and the monthly costs are roughly $ 50 per developer.
Today, over five million businesses are now using Google Apps to help their employees collaborate and connect via the cloud. In just a few years, the adoption of Google’s productivity suite has skyrocketed and, while small businesses have long been its core customer, adoption up the chain is increasing as well. At the same time, as the Google Apps ecosystem continues to expand and evolve, with new services emerging around Chromebooks, Vault, Drive and Android, it can be tough for businesses to keep up with all the new tools, tweaks and iterations.
While world of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games has ballooned in the last few years, the content available to people who’d rather not play a character from Western-inspired troops beating the crap out of some vague Eastern enemy has been somewhat limited. Culture is important, right? Which is why ‘
Twitter Music will reportedly launch on Friday, reports AllThingsD citing sources familiar with the matter. Earlier today, music discovery service We Are Hunted confirmed that it had been acquired by Twitter, while Ryan Seacrest tweeted that he’d been playing around with Twitter’s new music app. AllThingsD says that Twitter’s standalone music app will suggest tracks based on data gleaned from users’ accounts, including the accounts that they follow. The app will allow users to listen to music using third-party services like iTunes and Soundcloud, or watch music videos provided by Vevo. Its acquisition of We Are Hunted and upcoming music app are the latest signs, along with Vine and its own photo filters, that Twitter is building itself out as an all-inclusive media platform. We’ve contacted Twitter for more information. A launch this weekend would coincide with the massive Coachella Music Festival outside of Los Angeles, CA. The festival carries heavy sponsorships and in the past Facebook has shown off check-in kiosks and other technology companies have attempted product launches there. Our writer Josh Constine has attended the last nine Coachellas and will be there this weekend. He’s not sure the launch of a music discovery app would work so well at the intense festival. Constine explains “Twitter launching a music app at Coachella is risky. The festival is chaotic, there’s poor mobile signal, people try to conserve battery life, and there’s a ton of distraction. Amongst the seven stages and wild crowds of 75,000 attendees, it may be difficult to find time to download and use a music discovery app. There would be no way to hear new music or watch music videos with all the noise there. The festival could be useful for raising awareness of the app, and if it was more of a music moment capturing and sharing app similar to Soundtracking it could see use at Coachellla. But the festival is so overwhelming, inebriating, and exhausting that people might forget about Twitter music app posters seen between sets and might fail to download the app.” We’ll be on the ground at Coachella tomorrow to let you know if Twitter tries anything.
It’s been a long time coming, but Verizon Wireless customers should soon have another high-end Windows Phone 8 device to lust after. After the handset was spotted both in both the FCC’s and Verizon’s systems, noted leaker 
Bufferbox, the Y Combinator company based in Canada that aimed to fix all of the issues that we have with receiving packages, has started to tease out a Bay Area, California launch. The company was acquired for a rumored $ 25M by Google back in November, with little or no discussion about the future plans for the product. It’s clear that this will be a huge part of Google’s recently announced Shopping Express service. We know that the package delivery system here in the United States is broken, and the government-funded postal service is pulling back on things like…delivering on the weekend. Google is clearly getting into the space in a big way, and the tease on Bufferbox’s homepage says it all: Right now, all you can do is give them your email address to “pre-register,” which gives Google a pretty good idea of the demand for the service. We’ve reached out to Google for more details, and will update if we do hear something more. This is definitely a space that we’re tracking closely, as another Y Combinator company doing something similar, Swapbox, recently launched in the Bay Area. Instead of shipping something to your address, it goes to your Bufferbox, so that you can pick it up whenever you like. Right now, when you have something shipped to you and miss the delivery person, you’re pretty much screwed and have to wait for them to come back, or worse, go pick up the item yourself at a factory. If your package does get delivered, it just sits on your doorstep, being gawked at by your neighbors. This is a bit similar to the notion of having a PO Box, but it isn’t a box or address that is static, you can get deliveries to any of the locations that you want. Additionally, these things should be available in the open, so you can get your packages at any time of the day or night, rather than before the post office closes. As we know, testing things out in the Bay Area is something that every company out here likes to do, including Google. This could be a booming business for the Mountain View company, as this is something that both consumers and small businesses would use repeatedly. It’s also a service that could be integrated into all of its current offerings. Imagine getting shipping notifications dropped into Gmail or
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