Computers

According to a report from DisplayBank, shipments of touchscreen equipped notebooks increased by 51.8% in Q1 2013 to 4.57 million units.

Devices built around Apple's iOS operating system have been approved by the U.S. Department of Defense for use on its networks, as the department moves to support multivendor mobile devices and operating systems.The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which certifies commercial technology for defense use, said Friday it had approved the Apple iOS 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)."Approval of the STIG means that government-issued iOS 6 mobile devices are approved for use when connecting to DOD networks within current mobility pilots or the future mobile device management framework," the agency said in a statement.The department earlier this month cleared BlackBerry 10 smartphones and PlayBook tablets with its enterprise mobility management platform BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 to be used on its networks. It also approved Samsung Electronics' Knox, a new Android-based platform designed by the company to enhance security of the current open source Android.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Following up our Dota 2 performance analysis, we benchmark the most-played PC game in the world, League Of Legends, and find out just how much graphics and CPU performance it requires for high-resolution, high-detail play, even across three screens.

ZTE, the Chinese firm that makes telecom equipment and mobile devices, is stepping up its presence in India after announcing that it will begin to sell its smartphones direct to consumers in the country for the first time. The company has inked a deal with Pune-based Calyx Telecommunications, which will distribute the ZTE devices and manage marketing and sales efforts across the country. ZTE itself will cover product and post-sales services. ZTE provides devices for a number of local budget players in India, but it will kick off direct sales of its own range, initially with five smartphones priced between Rs. 5,799 ($105) to Rs. 14,999 ($270). The smartphones will be available in major cities by October, and there are also plans to introduce tablet PCs. India is a huge country with plenty of distribution challenges for international firms; ZTE is initially focusing on 60 towns across five states: viz Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The company says that sales in India — where it has some 1,500 staff — account for 10 percent of its global revenues. With this sales push, it is aiming to sell one million smartphones in the first year and claim third place in India’s fast-growing smartphone space. Figures from Cybermedia Research estimate that 15 million smartphones were shipped in India during 2012. While feature phones remain dominant — accounting for 206.4 million shipments in 2012 — smartphones shipments grew 75 percent year-on-year during the second half of last year, demonstrating a growing demand for more sophisticated devices. Cybermedia ranks Samsung (41 percent), Nokia (13 percent) and Sony (8 percent) as Indian’s top smartphone makers in 2012, and it will be interesting to see whether ZTE can make an impact on that list this year. Direct to consumer sales are common in India, and Samsung and BlackBerry have each boosted their consumer presence in the country during the past year. Even Apple, which does not have any of its own-brand retail stores in India, is increasing its efforts in India, with the firm reportedly aiming to triple the number of licensed reseller stores there to 200 by 2015. Headline image via AFP / Getty Images

A few weeks after Ken Lerer quit AOL-owned Huffington Post to work on his venture fund Lerer Ventures, I stopped by in his office to catch up and talk about the New York landscape. And during our conversation, he pointed out that New York is still a big media town, except different kind of media. If you stand on Broadway and look above the 34th street, you can see the media of the past. Look down the Broadway, you see the future. What he meant was that it was in Soho, Nomad and East Village (and Brooklyn) where companies like Foursquare, Tumblr and Thrillist made home. They were the new kind of media, one that married technology, social and content. Ken Lerer, Lerer Ventures & Huffington Post, Co-founder I was reminded of that conversation today, when the news emerged that Yahoo board had approved the $1.1 billion cash offer for Tumblr, the social sharing platform. It would be one of the biggest exits for a New York-based startup. Sure there have been other exits — Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, but that was a company that belonged to a different Internet era. There was AOL buying Huffington Post for $315 million, eBay bought Hunch for about $80 million, Skype took out GroupMe for about $85 million and more recently Salesforce ponying up $689 million for Buddy Media. But Yahoo snapping up Tumblr is a whole different league. The new New York Why? Because Tumblr, in many ways is a visible manifestation of this new New York, one where startups that combine technology with content (one of New York’s core industries) for a new world. It is a success story that matches the fable like qualities of Instagram-Facebook deal. Of course, a real comparison would have been Twitter and Tumblr — both companies were started around the same time, both are essentially content sharing and amplification systems and both have enjoyed a similar growth curve. Twitter has grown bigger with an eye on an IPO and Tumblr is now going to be part of Yahoo. But that is a comparison for another day, for New York community is clearly excited about this deal. A Silicon Alley insider who wished to remain anonymous put it best when he described this deal as sign that finally in New York people who build things are getting rich versus people (Wall Street) who take things. A bit hyperbolic, but the point is well made. I think this exit allows the young New York startup community to look up to David Karp in a manner folks here look up to Kevin Systrom of Instagram. BetaWorking John Borthwick, who is co-founder of New York-based Betaworks believes that it is an important turn of the cycle and the sale of a social media company of this helps solidify and legitimize the entire New York startup ecosystem. Borthwick’s incubator was a seed investor in Tumblr and that investment will pay handsomely. John Borthwick, co-founder, Betaworks & seed investor in Tumblr. Borthwick points out that the knock-on effects of this sale are going to help the new-tech centric New York gain momentum. Just as PayPal helped spawn a series of other companies, many in New York are optimistic that Huffington Post and Tumblr are going to result in many more startups. HuffPo’s progeny include Buzzfeed and Rebel Mouse, and Tumblr’s talent is likely to do more interesting things, he argued. Lerer, grand wizard of the New York tech scene believes that New York is no longer an after thought. “This is just beginning,” said Lerer who has invested in 150 companies (of which 80 percent are in New York.) And with content being central (something he shared in a conversation at Paidcontent Live), Lerer believes that New York will become a bustling startup city. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlookBig Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Yahoo Japan, the country's largest Web portal, said up to 22 million user IDs may have been leaked during a hack that was discovered last week.The company emphasized that the IDs are already public information, and no passwords or other private data were affected. Yahoo Japan IDs are used along with password to log in to the site, and are often displayed when users leave comments or use its shopping or auction services.Yahoo Japan said it discovered illicit access to its ID servers on Thursday evening, and upon further investigation found a file with 22 million user IDs on it. The company said it wasn't sure if the file had been transferred outside of the company, but couldn't deny the possibility.The website posted warnings of the possible breach on its login pages, and offered a service for users to check if their IDs were among those that were possibly leaked. Yahoo Japan said last year it had over 24 million active user IDs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pinterest plans to announce a new type of pin on Sunday that will highlight a large number of major U.S. retail brands, marking the company’s “first step” in integrating images with associated brands, and making it easier to click through links and purchase items. The move could be the start of a change in consumer perception of the site from a place for wishful thinking to a site where one can purchase those wishes. While this is just a first step, and the company said it is not currently making money from the integration, the power of the companies joining at launch suggests Pinterest could become on par with Facebook and Twitter when it comes to attracting sizable brand marketing budgets in the not-so-distant future. Pinterest is launching three distinct types of pins, with one type each for food, retail products, and movies. The new format will only work with items pinned from the launch partner sites, but the number of partners is wide-reaching, and will grow. If you click on a food pin, it will now include the ingredient list and relevant information below the photo, auto-generated from the original site. Product photos will show where you can find the item for sale, and the movie pins will show information about the movie such as its rating, cast and release date. The list of brands participating in the launch demonstrates the strong interest from U.S. retailers in getting on board with Pinterest. Some of the launch partners include: eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Sony, Target, Urban Outfitters, Wal-Mart, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Martha Stewart Living, Whole Foods, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Companies who want to be included in the program can apply on Pinterest’s website. A Pinterest representative sought to emphasize that the new pins are not a form of advertising, but are instead supposed to make pins more “actionable,” a term the company has been using for a while now, including in our interview with CEO Ben Silbermann just last week. “We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.” One major complaint with Pinterest, which has given an advantage to sites like Wanelo or Nasty Gal, is that users frequently share or re-pin the same photo thousands of times, but when you actually click the photo to see where it came from the link is broken. If more and more companies and popular blogs integrate their photos of inventory with Pinterest under the new pin structure, it could make items more trackable on the site — which would be handy for consumers and crucial if Pinterest wants to eventually profit from the traffic it generates. And it’s not an insignificant amount of web traffic. While Pinterest doesn’t officially release any stats, a recent ComScore report put the number of users at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is slightly less than the 16 percent on Twitter, and more than the 13 percent on Instagram — and far more than the 6 percent on Yahoo’s apparent new friend Tumblr. A company spokesperson said Pinterest is currently not profiting from the new integration with brands. But the strong interest on the part of the companies and the launch of a tech platform to support them paves the way for making money in the future. After all, Pinterest just raised $200 million in new funding — it has to be looking to make money at some point. It’s an inevitable move for Pinterest to accelerate its growth, as we noted in a story on the small team’s unique symbiosis between design and engineering. But the site needs to make sure it crafts a business model that fits with its content, much as Twitter has built up promoted tweets. Pinterest is still in the early days of that growth, but all sorts of e-commer

All your walk-through vid revenue are belong to us Nintendo has contacted fans that post walk-through videos of its games to YouTube, claiming all revenue from their efforts.…

As Josh Lamel noted the other day, end-users such as retailers, financial services, grocery stores, advertising, hotel industries, and even oil companies are coming out in droves to fight abusive patent troll tactics. The FTC has posted all 68 public comments submitted to its patent assertion entity workshop; a surprising number come from end-users. - David Balto, Patent Progress

These patents are required by manufactures to make such common household devices as personal computers, digital set-top boxes, DVD players, digital television sets, digital cameras video game systems and digital video recorders. Most of the MPEG-2 patents have expired, but they still remain bundled with the other essential patents. Instead of manufacturers being able to freely to use these expired patents without paying any royalty associated with them, Denver Colorado-based MPEG LA, the MPEG-2 administrator, continues to collect the full licensing fees from manufacturers who pass these fees along to - you guessed it - you, in the form of higher prices on these tech goods. - Steve Pociask, Daily Caller