Computers

Oppo is suspected of shrinking their flagship phone to the Find 5 Mini.

The Evil Within will be one of the biggest games of 2014.

Amid the furore over the PRISM data-leaking saga in the US, President Barack Obama has insisted that Americans aren’t getting “the complete story” on the program – which reportedly enables the US government to tap directly into the central servers of US-based Internet companies. Obama told Charlie Rose in a PBS interview that the debate has become cloudy, given that there are tradeoffs in any given program that the US takes on for security purposes. “To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom; I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports,” he said. The gist of the interview has been covered due to the release of a partial transcript by Buzzfeed several hours ago, but one thing notable in the aired interview is that Obama noted the US has to “make decisions about how much classified information and how much covert activity we are willing to tolerate as a society.” Obama said that because the NSA programs are classified – as they are set up to track down suspected terrorists by culling US phone records and mining data from the servers of major Internet companies – “the public may not fully” understand how they work. The president emphasized that they have put in place a whole system of checks and balances, and that NSA cannot listen to US citizens’ phone calls and emails, by law and by rule, unless an agency such as the FBI goes to a court and obtains a warrant. There has been “no evidence” that the program has been abused so far, he added. “What I’ve asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program,” the president said. “And they are in that process of doing so now so that everything that I’m describing to you today – people, the public, newspapers, etc., can look at. Because frankly, if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story.” Following the news of PRISM, all of the major tech companies involved have denied involvement – and spoke up on the number of requests made by the US government for data. Earlier today, Yahoo disclosed that it received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests for user data from US law enforcement agencies between December 2012 and May 2013, while Apple revealed yesterday that the firm received 4,000-5,000 requests in the same period of time. Microsoft revealed Friday that it received 6,000-7,000 requests implicating 31,000-32,000 accounts in the last six months, and hours earlier Facebook revealed its FISA numbers, claiming that up to 19,000 user accounts were queried by the US government. In the Charlie Rose interview, Obama also said the case of whistleblower Edward Snowden has been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation, as well as possible extradition. You can find our full PRISM coverage here Image Credit: Paul Faith via WPA Pool/Getty Images

Advanced Micro Devices is building its future server strategy around chips used in smartphones and tablets. The company said its first ARM server processors -- which will be released in the second half of next year -- will be faster and more powerful than its existing low-power x86 server processors.read more

Amplify, the new education venture at News Corp., is getting into the gaming business.  On Tuesday, the company rolled out more than 30 digital games designed to help middle school students improve their language arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills. The games won’t be made widely available to districts until the spring of 2014, but they’re being piloted now in a few schools across the country. Naturally, the games can be played on Amplify’s own branded tablet – the 10-inch Asus device running the Jellybean Android operating system, which it launched at SXSWedu earlier this year. But the games will also run on other major mobile operating systems, including iOS. Schools can buy them as part of a broader Amplify curriculum or separately, the company said. In pitching its tablet, Amplify talked up the benefits of giving schools an entire learning package of hardware and software (each Amplify tablet is specially optimized at the manufacturer level for use in schools and comes pre-loaded with learning tools and content). But the company also sees an opportunity in offering schools just a tablet-based curriculum, of which the new video games are a part. The games, which include an English language game world called Lexica, an arcade-style game called Food Web and a real-time strategy game called TyrAnt, were designed to hold students’ attention as much as for learning. The hope is that students will be hooked enough to play the games outside of the classroom and extend learning time, the company said. “We’re not designing homework here,” Joel Klein, Amplify’s CEO and the former New York City Schools Chancellor, said in a statement. “These games will improve learning not because kids have to play them in school, but because they want to play them in their own free time.” It remains to be seen just how effective these games will be in boosting students’ skills, but interest in educational games, generally, is growing. Earlier this year, New Schools Venture Fund and social gaming company Zynga announced an accelerator for educational gaming startups. And, last year, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put their weight behind a project at Electronic Arts called the Games, Learning and Assessment (GLASS) Lab. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game marketSocial 2013: The enterprise strikes backSocial third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Coinciding with Intel's launch of Haswell, NVIDIA updated their mobile GPUs with a bomb of a part: a fully enabled GK104. Today we have MSI's flagship gaming notebook, the GT70 Dragon Edition, featuring three SSDs in RAID 0, a Haswell quad core, and a GeForce GTX 780M.

Venture capital firm Accel Partners is doubling down on its big data investments, announcing on Monday evening that it’s launching its second $100 million fund dedicated to analytic software and applications. The aptly named Big Data Fund 2 follows on the firm’s initial Big Data Fund that it announced in November 2011. Since then, Accel has put a name on the types of companies it’s seeking to fund with the new allocation — namely, those selling what it calls “data-driven software.” That’s a fancy way of saying that it’s not looking to fund infrastructure-level software such as Hadoop or NoSQL databases, but rather software that leverages these technologies and others in order to make analytics simpler. It wants to fund startups targeting business users rather than data scientists. Accel Partner Ping Li (second from right) at Structure 2011. (c) Pinar Ozger This type of company isn’t too difficult to come by anymore. Just about everywhere you look, someone is trying to put a big data spin on an old problem or invent some new methods for doing business intelligence. Accel has recently funded a number of them including RelateIQ, Opower, Sumo Logic  and Causata. Among the non-Accel-funded startups GigaOM has covered in just the past few months are Ayasdi, Wise.io, Spinnakr, Statwing and BloomReach. All this interest in data-driven software is no doubt inspired by the proven utility and wildly successful initial public offerings by enterprise data software companies such as Splunk and Tableau. Entrepreneurs can see the value in rethinking legacy business software or processes for the era of big data and cloud computing, and investors have dollar signs in their eyes as they try to get a piece of the most-promising companies. As with all trends, much of this startup and investing activity will prove to be overkill, but there’s no denying the promise that the right products have for everyone involved. Businesses really are hurting for better ways to make sense of all the data they’re generating and being exposed to, and they’ll pay handsomely to software vendors that can solve the problem. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.A near-term outlook for big dataBig data budgets on the riseWill Hadoop Vendors Profit from Banks’ Big Data Woes?

AMD is debuting a new lineup of chips for servers, including its first ever ARM-based part. For AMD, which built its business around a license of Intel’s x86 architecture, building an ARM part is both a declaration of independence and a necessary step for the chipmaker struggling to reinvent itself. The chip firm is introducing three new parts for servers. One is a more muscular core combining AMD’s graphics processing prowess with a CPU core (what AMD calls an APU) that will be aimed at the traditional enterprise computing and high-performance-computing market. AMD dubs this chip Warsaw. The other two parts, Seattle and Berlin, are less powerful and designed more for webscale workloads that can be parallelized. Berlin is a smaller, X86 chip that uses an Atom-like core, while Seattle is the 64-bit ARM-based chip that could bring AMD out from Intel’s shadow. The Seattle chip will be in servers in the second half of 2014 and have eight and eventually 16 cores using the ARM Cortex A-57 design that can run at up to 2 GHz per core. Andrew Feldman (pictured above), the corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s server business unit, and a speaker at the GigaOM Structure event happening this week in San Francisco, says it’s clear that ARM will have a place in the data center, but he understands that he needs to make a case for AMD as a viable builder of ARM-based chips for that market. He thinks that AMD’s experience building server chips will help it, as will his experience building out networking fabrics at SeaMicro, the company AMD purchased last year as part of a bid to get into the more power-efficient and dense server architectures. Feldman and I have discussed the changes in the data center — from small workloads to the need for power efficiency — for the last three years. It’s nice to see this vision closer to playing out in the mass market. It’s too early to say how AMD will stack up against the myriad other vendors trying to build out ARM-based chips for the data center — or even how it will continue to stack up against Intel. But the new chips are a clear attempt to bring AMD into the new era of cloud computing. It’s a welcome step. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware designCloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyondInfrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

Nuance Communications today released an update to its Dragon Mobile Assistant app for Android. Users with supported devices will find that it now includes hands-free driver technology, voice notifications, and new customization options. Dubbed “Intelligent Driver Mode”, the updated version of Dragon helps users keep their eyes on the road when they’re driving and not on their phone. The company says that its app will know when the driver is in a moving vehicle and, when detected, will switch them to a hands-free mode. Of course, it’s going to be pretty difficult to tell whether someone is actually driving or just riding in the passenger seat. However, the intent is a good one and anything that helps minimize the amount of distractions can’t be bad, right? If you’re not familiar with the Dragon Mobile Assistant application, it’s a service that leverages Nuance’s voice recognition technology. The app was originally only available to those with Android 4.0 or newer installed, but last December, the company made it available to those with a minimum of 2.3 or higher. The increased reach not only enables it to further its reach, but perhaps is a move by Nuance to help protect drivers from unnecessary distractions. Yes, we’ve all done it — taken out our smartphones when there’s a ding, phone call, or need to send a note to our friend letting them know that we’re going to be late. Protection isn’t limited to just those with the latest technology and opening Dragon to more devices could help save lives. Nuance’s General Manager and Executive Vice President Michael Thompson said in a statement, “Dragon aspires to be an incredibly reliable and intuitive mobile personal assistant, not only responding to commands and providing relevant content, but also anticipating people’s needs in the moment — just like a true personal assistant.” In addition to driver mode, Dragon has also been updated to include voice notifications that will transcribe Facebook status updates, messages, incoming calls, and even calendar events. For those that love to customize these voice applications, Dragon users can tweak the command to activate the app. After all, it would be strange having to enable a voice service using your hands, right? Dragon can be set so that it will awaken by a simple command like “Hi Dragon”, “Hi dude”, “Turn on Dragon”, or whatever your heart’s content. Currently, Dragon is only available in English and only for those users in the US. ? Dragon Mobile Assistant for Android Photo credit: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

Why should booth babes get all the fun? At this year's E3, IndieCade and The Wise Guys devs decided they shouldn't. Heck, they're not a fan of booth babes in general, simply because of what they represent: systematic objectification of women. So what do they do? Rather than picket or do anything so conventional, the Wise Guys instead hired some studly booth bros this year. The booth bros were hanging out at IndieCade's booth this year, showcasing a physical trivia quiz called E3GoMania, by Wise Guys. The whole exercise was meant to bring attention to the issue of female objectification -- in a fun and interactive way. Definitely a worthy cause and a great exercise. Honestly, more companies should consider hiring proper male cosplayers/actors to advertise their games. Then again, I could be biased. The busty ladies being groped and hover-handed all week long might get a kick out of this, though. [image1 link=yes width=367 height=650]Comment on this article (0)