We have covered Moves a few times here on BGR. The sleek and smart iPhone app counts your steps each day using the iPhone 5s's in-built M7 motion co-processor, and it collects and presents that data in a great-looking minimalistic interface. Not long ago, the company behind Moves was acquired by Facebook. On the plus side, Facebook instantly made the app free following the acquisition. But as many had feared, the company also changed the app's privacy policy.
Life is filled with little mysteries, one of which is why we're more likely to yawn when others around us . However, new research from the University of Vienna suggests that group yawning is actually a survival mechanism that has the side effect of cooling off our brains, which in turn makes us more alert and less likely to doze off.
Google is steadily working to turn Google Now into the most useful personal assistant in the mobile market. On Monday, Google announced on Google Plus that the latest update to its Google Search app will keep track of the products you search for online and then alert you when you pass by a store that might carry that product.
Should it stay or should it go? When it comes to Microsoft's Xbox business, that recurring question continues to haunt Microsoft executives. Investors have been making the case for breaking off the company's Xbox division for some time now, and Xbox gamers continue to become enraged whenever the idea is mentioned. Now, Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates has weighed in.
Don't worry if you're not online. Before setting off on your next vacation, hike, or roadtrip, search for an area and tap on its place info sheet, then when available, you can select "Save map to use offline," and give your map a custom name, like "Toronto Vacation." To find your offline maps, sign-in, tap the profile icon next to the search box in the top right corner, and scroll to see "Toronto Vacation" and other saved maps.
Here's a painfully ironic twist of fate if you happen to work for a particular Cupertino, California-based consumer tech giant: Google, maker of iOS's top mobile platform rival, is the top publisher in the iOS App Store by download volume, when excluding games. The news comes from App Annie, which recently released its March data.
“The damages were based on the fact that both sides presented their view of what a reasonable amount of, I guess, compensation would be,” he said. “We didn’t really feel either one was what we felt was a fair and just compensation.”
"If you really feel that Google is the cause behind this, as I think everybody has observed, then don't beat around the bush," said Mr. Dunham, whose job at IBM was to oversee developers expected to file patents. "Let the courts decide. But a more direct approach may be something to think about."
Some time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, there were no smartphones to help teens and tweens take selfies on the go. Instead, if you wanted a selfie, you had to find an establishment with a photo booth, drop in a few quarters, and then sit down and make funny faces to create a sequence of four photos. Now, the magic of that simpler time has been recaptured by an iPhone app called Pocketbooth — minus the need to actually go anywhere, of course.
Apple's next-generation iPhone 6 is widely expected to launch sometime in September this year, perhaps around the same time the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c launched in 2013. But you don't have to wait that long to own an iPhone 6 of your very own... sort of.
If you find that your monthly phone and cable bills have been eating into a bigger chunk of your budget, you aren't alone — in fact, you're perfectly normal. In an article on upcoming cable and telecom mergers, The Wall Street Journal cites data from the U.S. Department of Labor showing that average household spending on phone, pay TV and Internet rose to $2,237 per year in 2012, a 20% increase from 2007. In contrast, overall household spending rose by just 3.6% over the same period.
Providing users who aren't overly concerned with privacy an option to forgo certain protections in favor of convenience is a good thing. Enabling those less secure conveniences by default, however, is not a good thing.
Level 3, a tier 1 Internet service provider based in Colorado, has called out Comcast, Charter, Time Warner Cable and other top U.S. ISPs for "deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers."
‘Moves’ iPhone app changes privacy policy after being acquired by Facebook