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Apple forced to lengthen warranties to two years on its products, in accordance to EU consumer protection regulations.

What can we expect the IoT landscape to look like, and how will its impact be felt? And is the attention being given by governments, manufacturers, and industry players merited, or is this just a fad? In this paper we look at the trends leading the growth of the internet of things, its components, and its characteristics. We examine the scale of the different opportunities and early examples of use cases. Finally, we look at potential inhibitors to adoption and potential challenges, notably around security, privacy, and system failure. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionCloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyondThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Update: Both EA and AMD have issued statements on the exclusivity, and it appears it isn't actually exclusive. The two companies are collaborating on day-one support for Battlefield 4, but it's a non-exclusive partnership so products from NVIDIA will be supported. EA issued the following statement: DICE has a partnership with AMD specifically for Battlefield 4 on PC to showcase and optimize the game for AMD hardware. This does not exclude DICE from working with other partners to ensure players have a great experience across a wide set of PCs for all their titles. While AMD issued this statement: It makes sense that game developers would focus on AMD hardware with AMD hardware being the backbone of the next console generation. At this time, though, our relationship with DICE and EA is exclusively focused on Battlefield 4 and its performance optimizations for AMD CPUs, GPUs and APUs. Additionally, the AMD Gaming Evolved program undertakes no efforts to prevent our competition from optimizing for games before their release. So there you have it. AMD and EA are working together to better optimize Battlefield 4, but it isn't an exclusive thing. NVIDIA can still work on its graphics drivers on its own, just it sounds like it'll be relying on NVIDIA engineers only. In a rather stunning turn of events, EA has announced a partnership with AMD where all Frostbite 3 games ship optimized for Radeon graphics cards and AMD CPUs. Starting with Battlefield 4, all upcoming Frostbite 3 games get an exclusive optimization to perform the best on AMD hardware as soon as the game launches. NVIDIA, meanwhile, will have to wait until the Frostbite 3-powered games are available before it can work on driver optimizations. It's a very bold move, but one that potentially shows a tipping of the scales in AMD's favor. Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, and others have received AMD optimizations, while NVIDIA has had to wait until the game is readily available. NVIDIA's performance in Tomb Raider was especially bad, which prompted the company to launch a beta driver tuned just for the game. Given AMD's hold on the next-gen console market, and now EA Frostbite 3 games, it'll be interesting to see if there's any kind of a counter from NVIDIA. However, based on NVIDIA's E3 press conference, it doesn't sound too concerned with the next-gen consoles. The company is dedicated to PC gaming, and considering the large amount of games shown during its E3 press conference, it doesn't sound like NVIDIA has much to worry about. Still, the inability to have NVIDIA day-one drivers for Frostbite 3 games is something to keep an eye on.Comment on this article (6)

Lucy Koh uncaged! Wowza. Her honor just went on a rant against the imperfect patent exam/re-exam/do-over system. [At Silicon Valley Four Seasons for patent troll panel: Judge Koh, Cisco GC Mark Chandler, Peter Detkin of Intellectual Ventures.] - Ginny LaRoe, Twitter

Design-focused e-commerce service Fab.com is now valued at more than $1 billion after it announced a $150 million Series D round of investment led by Chinese Internet giant Tencent. The Wall Street Journal reports that Fab.com — which has 14 million registered members and is two-years-old — has taken funding from a number of other investors, although neither it nor Tencent will confirm how much the Chinese firm contributed. The deal is significant because Fab.com is still to reach profitability, although sales are tipped to more than double this year. Last year, the Manhattan-based start up booked $120 million in revenue, and it estimates that the figure will increase to $250 million in 2013 — though that will not make it profitable. CEO Jason Goldberg told the Journal that the firm could take on as much as $100 million in further investment “over the next few months”. This newly confirmed round will be used to build out Fab.com’s digital stores, develop exclusive products and further its international footprint. Given that Tencent is now a shareholder, China would be a logical future step and Fab.com says it will look for ways to work with the company. That’s similar to its intention to focus on India after taking funding from Times Internet back in December 2012. Tencent is conducting final in-house tests before it introduces payments to its WeChat mobile messaging service — which has clocked more than 300 million downloads and has 195 monthly active users — while it its QQ instant messaging service boasts some 800 million users. Both of these services could provide an interesting avenue through which Fab.com could explore the Chinese market. As for Tencent itself, the investment isn’t just about bringing Fab.com to China, the move will help the Beijing-headquartered firm learn more about global e-commerce models. WeChat has developed into its primary service, and, in a show of its prominence, it is even stealing market share from China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo service, another massive Internet service in the country. Yet, despite its popularity, Tencent has not begun drawing revenue from the chat app. Japan’s Line and Korea’s Kakao Talk are both seeing success in the early stages of monetizing their mobile messaging services thanks to virtual content like stickers (rich emoticons sold in packs for $1/2) and gaming platforms. Tencent’s alliance with Fab.com hints that the company — which is an investor in Kakao — might be aiming to do more than that by facilitating sales direct to users. Already mobile messaging services are being used in Asia to conduct ‘social commerce’ sales — unofficially at this point — which suggests that Tencent may just be on to something with a potential model for WeChat. Thanks to its vast income and capital at its disposal — Tencent posted revenue of $2.16 billion ($645 million in profit) for Q1 2013 — the company is the comfortable position of being able to scrutinize and evaluate business models before introducing them. Tencent has stepped up its rivalry to China’s established e-commerce leader Alibaba in recent times, and partners like Fab.com may help it eke out market share. Fab.com has raised more than $150 million from investors. Its recent series C round saw Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, Japan’s Docomo Capital, Atomico and others put in $105 million. Much of that was spent on internationalizing the service, which is available in more than 25 countries, with Asia a region that it is keen to expand into. The Series D round also includes investor from Japanese retail conglomerate Itochu, suggesting that — like China and India — Japan will be a focus for Fab.com in Asia in the near future. Also read: Smash-hit Chinese chat app WeChat’s long march to profitability Headline via Thinkstock

You'll need a Pi (of course), an Ethernet cable, a Wi-Fi adapter with an antenna, an SD card loaded with the Raspbian operating system, and a power supply. You can buy all these from Adafruit in the company's Onion Pi Pack, but the components are pretty standard and could be obtained from many other sources. A portion of sales through Adafruit will go to the Tor Foundation. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is excited about the project, saying it could let users "Foil the NSA and Prism with a Tor proxy." Using Tor routes your Internet traffic through several relays in an attempt to hide your location and identity. "Using it is easy-as-pie," Adafruit wrote. "First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider [sic] in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the Micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network." - Jon Brodkin, ars technica

If you have been on the internet in the past couple of years, you're likely quite aware that the Raspberry Pi is a cheap, tiny, machine of barely adequate power and wonders. One problem you may have encounter with the Pi is that, though cheap and easily obtainable, you have no idea what to do with it once you get it, or don't have the time or gumption to create something useful. If you fall into the latter camp, the folks over at Adafruit have created just the mini-project for you: Onion Pi, a Raspberry Pi turned into a Tor proxy and access point. - Geek.com

Kivra, the Swedish company that really wants you to get rid of your old fashioned postal mailbox, has just acquired its local competitor Brevo. While Kivra wants to be the go-to digital mailbox service in Sweden (and beyond) it wasn’t the first – Brevo beat it to the punch by launching in March 2011. However, Kivra’s service followed in its footsteps in January this year, leading to the plucky Swedish startup acquiring its rival. “The merger of Kivra and Brevo gives us over half a million users and more senders will be added to our service. This will clearly have a positive impact on the market,” said Stefan Krook CEO of Kivra. “This agreement is a milestone in the continuous development of a digital postal mail market in Sweden.” Indeed, once the merger is complete there will be a userbase of more than half a million people all receiving digital mail in their mailboxes instead of traditional paper ‘snail mail’. This digitization of “window envelopes” equates to an annual saving of around 350,000 trees in Sweden alone, Kivra said. For now, however, the two services will remain separate with integration of Brevo’s list of senders to begin “in the fall”. Brevo’s users aren’t expected to be transferred across to the Kivra platform until the first half of next year, Kivra said. While financial details of the deal are unknown, Kivra secured $2 million in funding at the end of last year which must have gone some way to growing the service rapidly enough to acquire its key competitor in the market. Unlike email, Kivra is intended to be a secure place to store important documents that would normally be sent out on paper. To use the service, users simply create an account and receive a secure code for access which they then use online or on the iOS app. While the digital mailbox service currently only operates in Sweden, it has expressed intentions for expansion in the future. A number of other digital secure mailbox services already operate in other parts of the world, such as Zumbox and Doxo in the US and e-boks in Denmark, which could well make Kivra’s expansion ambitions all the harder. Image Credit - AFP/Getty Images ? Kivra

Citing the NSA telephone dragnet, a federal judge ordered the United States government to deliver telephone records demanded by a man on trial for an armored car robbery in which a Brink's employee was killed.... In light of the recently revealed National Security Agency surveillance program, Brown's attorneys challenged the government's claim that it has no access to records of Brown's phone calls. Prosecutors claimed they were missing records of calls to and from two of Brown's telephones before Sept. 1, 2010. They claimed Brown's service provider, MetroPCS, no longer had the records. - Courthouse News