Technology & Business
White Nexus 4 and Android 4.3 launching June 10
The white Nexus 4 has the same properties of a unicorn, beautiful yet impossible to find. Fear not friend, if the rumors are true then the elusive white Nexus 4 will grace the Google Play store on June 10th (according to Android and Me). Expect Android 4.3 to also drop at the same time but don't expect major changes.
A cleaner, faster and more personalized Google Maps is coming
Although Google has kept most of its secrets close to the chest, it seems an updated Google Maps may be announced today at Google IO 2013 based on a discovery by DroidLife. They discovered a special landing page that says "tailored map for every search" Based on the screenshots they provided, it looks much more like a mobile influenced design with WebGL overviews (taken from Google Earth), built in Flight Search and a feature to compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map.
Best Business Card OCR App For The IPhone
As a leader in a multinational organization, I meet dozens of people every week and need a way to easily (and reliably) capture their contact information and make it available anytime/anywhere I need it. There are dozens of Business Card OCR apps in the Apple itunes AppStore but most have one fatal flaw, they rely on technology to recognize the information on the business card which means you will have to manually correct all of the transcription errors. Human transcription is better Enter the wonderful world of manually transcribed business cards provided for free by CardMunch.
Blackberry Chat (BBM) coming to IOS and Android
This is not a joke. Blackberry has confirmed that it will be opening its venerable messaging platform (BBM) to IOS and Android users. The ETA is sometime "this summer" conditional on approval from Google and Apple. It will launch as a FREE app on each of the appstores. They will bring straight one-on-one and group messaging at first but plan to introduce more advanced functionality is subsequent releases (voice, screen sharing, etc). Thorsten Heins, Blackberry CEO, said he is "
Google consolidating all your storage into one 15GB chunck
Until recently, each Google service had it's own distinct Google Storage and unused space couldn't be shared between services. As an example, you have 10GB of GMAIL storage but only 5GB for Google Drive. If you want to use 10GB for Drive and 5GB for GMAIL you couldn't.... until now. The sultant of search has informed its citizens that it will henceforth consolidate all storage into one giant shareable pool of 15 GB. This means you can use any of that storage with any Google service you want (no more artificial storage walls or barriers.
PicShop HD for IOS – Photo Editor - Free today on itunes
PicShop HD is a universal IOS app (works on iPhone, Ipad mini and iPad) and allows you to easily perform basic editing on the go. It includes basic photo improvement tools, frames, stickers and of course filters. You can save your masterpiece in the camera roll or upload it to Facebook or Twitter. Normally PicShop HD is $4.99 but you can get it free on the itunes store today.
Nokia teases upcoming Lumia “more than your eyes can see”
Nokia has started teasing the public about its upcoming Nokia device that will be announced tomorrow morning (May 14) at 5am ET. The video shows the device's camera, its "dual" flash and teasing "more than your eyes can see". Most expect Nokia to release the much rumored Lumia "Catwalk". The "Catwalk" is a rumored codename for a device that is expected to have a 1.5GHz Snapdragon dual-core processor, 4.5" octaOLED display, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and a 8.
Websites can now save directly to your Google Drive
If I want to save a web hosted file on Google drive, I have to download it to my PC then upload it to Google Drive. Google has now released a simple code snippet developers can add to their sites which will allow users to download files directly to their Google Drive (called "Save to Drive"). Read the Google blog post here.
Boston switches from Microsoft to Google services
Google has been on the offensive trying to convince customers to move from Microsoft to it's cloud services. Over the year, we have heard many high profile switches and now the city of Boston is jumping ship (and taking its 20,000 users with it). The city estimates that switching from Exchange to Google Gmail will save it $280,000 per year It’s not just the gee whiz factor: It’s also a matter of money. It will cost Boston around $800,000 to move over to Gmail, Google Docs for word processing, and Google’s cloud service for storing documents.