Computers

The official spec sheet of the GTX 780 has surfaced; it has already been announced in mainland China.

Today Appcelerator announced a new analytics platform for its service that helps developers create applications in native code. Its products can take code written in Java, for example, and produce the same application prepped, and natively-built for the iOS platform. The company vends a software as a service version of its conversion tools to large companies that contains and analytics component. Appcelerator declined to be more specific, but did inform TNW that its number of paying customers is in the thousands, and that the cost of SasS offering is not minor. According to the firm, there are, at its most recent count, 134,567,882 devices that run applications that are powered by its technology. Put quickly, Appcelerator wants to “democratize development and help companies build rich native experiences,” according to its CEO Jeff Haynie. Regarding potential performance issues that might arise from the translation of an app into native code, the company dismissed them as diminutive, and therefore negligible. Today’s update to its enterprise-facing platform includes real-time analytics. Reporting on the performance of mobile applications has heretofore been a somewhat stodgy affair for many, akin to Google Analytics before it released a real-time product; batch data that is a day late is no way to track your product, whatever it is. Essentially a real-time dashboard, Appcelerator’s new analytics service will include location information, automated testing, real-time notifications of app failures, and batch testing of devices. Again turning to the Google Analytics comparison, you can, as part of the Appcelerator analytics suite, write additional logic, allowing for your app to track occurrences that are critical to your own metrics. For companies that have dozens, or perhaps hundreds of mobile applications, they can now have a unified view into their performance. Now, data eye candy: Taking its analytics service into the now isn’t the only improvement Appcelerator added to its platform today. A new profiler allows for cross-OS profiling, and a method to watch an application change ‘live’ as you code on it; this lowers development and testing time requirements. Intelligence Appcelerator’s changes to its enterprise service will bring its customers more data, more quickly. Can they use that information; are they equipped to accept the information, and use it to make business decisions? According to the firm its clients are intelligent and sufficiently prepared, with business-to-consumer firms able to improve performance the closer they get to their users. That said, Appcelerator intends to help its customers by scoring their application. A score based on code quality will be served. I would not want to be the first developer to turn in an app to their boss only to have it receive the lowest marks. In time, the scoring function will improve; for now it remains somewhat nascent. Appcelerator isn’t a company that you see on magazine covers, but I would bet your house that some of its clients have built apps that have enjoyed large sums of media spotlight. Here’s why you care: The better companies understand their applications, the better the apps you use on a daily basis will be. And that’s a global good. Top Image Credit: Cite Conference

What social networks are teens flocking to these days? That’s the billion dollar question as we see companies like Yahoo snapping up Tumblr in an effort to keep a younger audience. But teens are a tough audience to predict, and trends can change dramatically even in a single year. About 24 percent of teens who go online were using Twitter at the end of 2012, marking a dramatic increase from the 16 percent who were on Twitter in 2011. The new findings on teen social media use and attitudes toward online privacy come from a new report from the Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy,” that’s set to release on Tuesday. Here’s how things changed in just a year: Apart from the raw numbers, Pew conducted focus groups with teens across the country to get feedback on how they use different sites. Here are the five most important trends you should know about teens and social media: 1. Teens are outpacing the grown-ups on Twitter The rise in Twitter use among teens is particularly interesting since adult adoption hovers around 16 percent, according to the latest Pew report on adult social media use. Numbers among online teens are even stronger for African-Americans, 39 percent of whom are on the service (compared to 23 percent of white teens). Teens have shown a remarkable adoption of the service since 2009, when Pew first asked about the site, when only 9 percent reported using it. 2. Public is the new private on Twitter The majority of teen Facebook users have their accounts set to private, but not so on Twitter. Some 64 percent of teens have Twitter accounts set to public so anyone can read their tweets, with 24 percent setting their accounts to private. Perhaps of most concern, 12 percent reported they didn’t know whether their tweets were public or private. 3. Teens are tired of Facebook, but they’re still using it The media has been reporting teens abandoning Facebook for years now, but the Pew report finds that like a lot of adults, teens are frusterated by Facebook but stay on the platform because of the integral social role it still plays. The report explains: They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they say is portrayed frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm.” Yet 94 percent of them still use the site. 4. Tumblr numbers still aren’t very high Yahoo might have liked the younger audience on Tumblr when it decided to acquire the site, but teen use of Tumblr is still pretty low. Only five percent reported using the site in 2012, although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, a decent jump. 5. The subtweet goes mainstream You heard it here first: 58 percent of teens are making inside inside jokes or sharing “cloaked messages” on social media. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedStartup growth and the new recruiting ecosystemFlash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest

More than three months after About.me ‘bought itself back’ from AOL, spinning itself out as an independent company once again, the San Francisco-based startup is now ramping things up a notch by introducing personalized domain names for its online identity platform. The service constitutes part of its new freemium business model, which sees About.me move away from a completely free offering to a 3-tiered subscription level. Existing users can continue to use the free About.me incarnation as normal, but there’s now an option to upgrade for $4 a month, which lets them use their own domain name. In real terms, this means you can use, say ‘mydomain.com’, and have your About.me profile appear directly on it. For those who don’t already own their own domain, About.me is also partnering with NameCheap.com to guide users through the buying and setting-up process. It’s worth adding here that if you use your own domain name, you will of course need to find your own host – this is where NameCheap.com comes in to play. Upgrading to $4/month also lets you remove the About.me branding from the top of your page, if you choose to remain on the hosted About.me/username domain. Furthermore, you can now gain access to Google Analytics which will let you glean specific data relating to traffic that arrives on your site, which will be open to both hosted and personalized domain-using customers. An additional $9/month subscription level will be introduced in the next few months, which essentially buys you prominence across the About.me network, including in the Directory and through search. This will be powered by Wefollow’s technology, which About.me acquired earlier this month – Wefollow was founded as a Twitter directory back in 2009, by JeffHodsdon and Kevin Rose while they were still at Digg. The story so far About.me was co-founded by Ryan Freitas [see customized About.me domain here], Tony Conrad and Tim Young in October 2009, before launching to the public in December the following year. It was swiftly acquired by AOL for what was thought to be tens of millions of dollars. Then, almost exactly two years later, About.me announced it was becoming a startup again. While full details of the buyout weren’t revealed, Freitas and Conrad said that it was financially backed by the management team and a group of investors “who have backed companies such as WordPress and Google.” AOL retained an 8% stake in About.me. About.me has launched a slew of new features in recent times, including a WordPress widget to display a user’s profile in their blog’s sidebar, while last month YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud embeds were enabled. Personal branding Customized domains have been a long-time coming, and today’s news positions it alongside the likes of Tumblr or WordPress, which offer both fully-hosted, branded blogging services, as well as customized domains. “At About.me, we’re constantly seeking feedback from our users and customized domain names has been the most requested feature for quite some time,” explains co-founder Freitas. About.me, of course, is different to the aforementioned blogging platforms, but this latest move hints at the direction it’s heading. As things stand, About.me still serves as a fairly straight-forward online profile portal, but it wouldn’t be at all surprising if we started seeing a far richer offering, with dedicated ‘sections’ for portfolios, videos and so on, though Freitas remained tight-lipped on what, if anything, we can expect to see moving forward. “We’re taking a close look at our product pipeline in order to deliver on the desktop and mobile features that matter most to our users,” he says. From a free-to-premium conversion perspective, what will About.me classify as ‘successful’? “We have internal targets that are in line with what typically happens in other web services, anything between 2%-5

New smartphone modem can jump from LTE to LTE-Advanced with just a software upgrade.

Google announced this week that it will retire Google Checkout in November to make way for the updated Google Wallet.

The information-processing demands of many of today’s businesses have long outgrown legacy RDBMS software from Oracle, IBM, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. In many cases DBAs are still stitching these systems together, adding another table and another join until eventually they hit a wall and realize relational databases were simply not designed for today’s big data challenges. The web giants Amazon, Facebook and Google were the first to struggle with the scale of big data, and now mainstream enterprises are feeling the pain. IT leaders at these companies are no longer asking the question of whether they should have a NoSQL strategy but rather when it will roll out and which NoSQL technologies to use. Those are still tough questions today, as there are countless different flavors of NoSQL targeting different use cases. Our experts will discuss these topics: What are the inhibitors to enterprise adoption? What are the different NoSQL technologies, and which use cases are they designed for? (Sessions stores versus analytics) What lessons can we learn from early adopters of NoSQL? What role does the cloud play as NoSQL and MongoDB in particular are offered by many cloud service providers? Our panel includes: Paul Miller, founder, The Cloud of Data Ron Bodkin, GigaOM Research analyst and founder and CEO, Think Big Analytics Dave Feinleib, GigaOM Research analyst and founder, BigDataLandscape.com, Speechpad Matt Asay, VP of Corporate Strategy, 10Gen Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor 10gen for “Considerations for rolling out a NoSQL strategy in the enterprise,” a free analyst webinar on Tuesday, June 4, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. PT.

Watch out Google Chrome: there's another mobile-savvy Web browser coming to Android. In March Opera introduced the beta version of its revised mobile browser for Android devices, and now about two m...

Best Android phone: 12 - 6 Our verdict on the best Android phones - constantly updatedThere's one key way in which Android is massively different from its Apple-branded smartphone competition - the number of phones out there running Google's hot mobile OS.We're now seeing the latest wave of phones rocking up on Android Jelly Bean, while Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich gets swept under the carpet.Samsung makes loads of them. Sony's cut the Ericsson ties but still is cranking out the Google-branded handsets. Then you've got Android-powered phones from Acer, LG, Huawei, ZTE and many others, and while HTC has ceased the practice of releasing more phones than centipedes have shoes (they do wear them, you know) it's still one of the more prominent Android manufacturers. The many variations in screen size, processor power, software features and design makes finding the best Android phone for you extremely tough.Do you physically and emotionally need a QWERTY keyboard? Are you the sort of oddball who prefers the rough pressing needed to make resistive touchscreens work? If so, you won't find much luck here, as those technologies are sadly phased out of the Android world as buyers get enamoured by fancy, glossy capacitive touchscreens.Are you struggling to work out which are the best Android Widgets? Or even stuck wondering: "Actually, what IS Android?"To help find the best Android phone for you, we've rounded up the best Android handsets out there today, rating the phones on hardware performance, OS upgrade potential and, of course, how shiny and nice they are to have and boast about to work colleagues.So here they are - the best Android phones money can buy today. For many, many different reasons. 10. Sony Xperia TThis is James Bond's phone apparently. Well, he was seen using it in Skyfall, so that's good enough for us. It packs some lower specs than others on this list, but combines them in an attractive unit.The Xperia T heads back to the design language of the Xperia Arc, meaning it's got a lovely curved back that sits comfortably in the hand, and the large and expansive screen provides great video playback thanks to the Bravia Engine.FutTv : 13CpTLixf4v5KSony has produced another impressive smartphone that offers the functionality and performance we're looking for in a top-level handset.That being said, when compared with the earlier Sony Xperia S, or some of the other Android handsets, the difference is negligible - with the Xperia Z far, far superior.Quick verdictThe Sony Xperia T is a very, very good phone. Despite opting for a dual-core processor over a quad-core option, the Xperia T doesn't lag and navigating the interface is smooth and easy.Sony Xperia T reviewSee the best Sony Xperia T deals9. HTC One X+The biggest and most boastful of HTC's 2012 Android models, the One X arrived powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 chipset for the ultimate in portable kudos. And now HTC has taken that design, thrown out the bits that don't work and had another go... while adding a "+" on the end to show it's all new and shiny. Plus some red flashes for effect.It's addressed storage concerns with a boost to 64GB, improved the web browser efficiency and the always reliable HTC keyboard – although the battery is still a bit of a sore point, despite it being all "efficient-ized."FutTv : hwh9xL63FO5thThe design may not be any different, but we like that as the One X+ was already a handsome looking handset, with the unibody design exuding a premium air of superiority.The beefed up processor along with the Android 4.1 and Sense 4+ UI updates makes the One X+ an even slicker, smoother and more powerful customer than its older brother.Quick verdictHTC's latest version of its Sense interface is great here, with the display, fancy modern case construction and performance all combining to make a superb phone - and now we're looking at more storage and a better OS to play with too.HTC One X+ reviewCompare the best HTC One X+ deals8. L

Fans of Google Checkout (do they exist?) will be dismayed to hear that the service is finally being retired, with Google Wallet acting as its replacement.The news was announced on the Google Commerce blog, but little information was given as to why the transition was taking place.Justin Lawyer, Senior Product Manager of Google Wallet, said that Google Wallet is "a platform that enables merchants to meet the demands of a multi-screen world where consumers shop in-stores, at their desks and on their mobile devices."Out with the old, in with the fewThe announcement was also accompanied by some regurgitated Wallet updates including the Instant Buy API, which allows people to purchase items online in a few clicks, and the Wallet Objectives API, which allows merchants to engage their customers with offers.Merchants will be able to use Checkout until November 20 2013, after which all payments will be processed via Wallet.Google assures us that customers will experience no difference in service and should be able to make purchases just as they did with Checkout.