Bang & Olufsen's 'affordable' V1 HDTV rumored to retail for $3,170 and up - The Verge

New details have emerged about Bang & Olufsen's forthcoming HDTV under its cost-friendly brand, B&O Play. According to Recordere, it is called the V1 and will debut at a press event on May 2nd. It will allegedly come in 32- and 40-inch varieties and sport integrated 5.1 surround sound audio, LED illumination and wireless networking. Although it is rumored to be more aggressively priced than the BeoVision 12 TV, which retails for $11,350, it is hardly what many would consider cheap. The 32-inch model, the V1-32, is expected to retail for €2,399 ($3,170), while the 40-inch model, the V1-40, will likely cost €2,899 ($3,831). Both will apparently come with Bang & Olufsen's overhauled TV software that will boast a redesigned user interface, DLNA media player, and support for photo and audio sharing from Android and iOS devices. With the announcement rumored to be taking place in less than two weeks, fans of Bang & Olufsen's premium design may not have to wait long to get their hands on the V1.

Gabe Newell: No One At Valve Met with Tim Cook Last Week

@tom - Last week the video game industry was buzzing about a rumored meeting between Valve boss Gabe Newell and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Speculation was rife as to what the two men could have been talking about but many thought it was something to do with Apple iTV.

"Valve and Apple are seemingly a good pair if they get all their ducks lined up in a row correctly which is why an Apple iTV packed with Valve's gaming hardware doesn't seem all that far-fetched,"our own Kevin Parrish wrote earlier week. "That's what Apple Tim Cook reportedly went to go see: progress on the console aspect that will rely on motion and touch-based controls."

However, as exciting as that prospect may seem, it looks like this meeting might never have taken place. Kotaku reports that Gabe Newell quashed the rumor in an interview with Seven Day Cooldown. Gabe said that when they heard the news, even they thought it was true, and it kicked off a flurry of emails asking who the CEO was coming to see.

"We actually, we all sent mail to each other, going, 'Who's Tim Cook meeting with? Is he meeting with you? I'm not meeting with Tim Cook.' So we're... it's one of those rumors that was stated so factually that we were actually confused," he told Seven Day Cooldown.

All is not lost, though. While Gabe confirmed that the meeting never took place, he also expressed a certain desire for such a meeting in the future.

"No one here was meeting with Tim Cook or with anybody at Apple that day. I wish we were! We have a long list of things we'd love to see Apple do to support games and gaming better. But no, we didn't meet with Tim Cook. He seems like a smart guy, but I've never actually met him."

No word on whether or not Newell discussed the rumors regarding a Valve console. Things came to a head late last week when a job posting for an Electronics Engineer popped up on Valve's website and many people thought that it could be connected to the Apple meeting. However, if Gabe is telling the truth, and Valve and Apple haven't met, that means this console has nothing to do with Cupertino. Interesting, eh?

Fake Instagram, Angry Birds Via Android - EEY

Think twice before downloading Instagram! It's because, an IT firm, Sophos, has discovered fake versions of the popular photo sharing app and Angry Birds online. It has detected malware, which is being distributed on a Russian website pretending to be an official Instagram website, as Andr/Boxer-F. Google Play, the Android market place is the official site for any such downloads. But, if the Android users download the app from an unapproved source, they may get their devices severely effected by the malware.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos, said, "Android malware is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Just last week, we saw a bogus edition of the Angry Birds Space game and it's quite likely that whoever is behind this latest malware are also using the names and images of other popular smartphone apps as bait." "Infected Androids are now effectively part of a botnet, under the control of malicious hackers. Android users need to be extremely careful when downloading applications from sites, especially when they're not official Android markets," he added.

"With help from Internet users, we were able to identify that the image comes from a Moscow wedding photograph, where this one person was dressed a lot more casually than other guests. The man's photo became widespread on Russian Internet forums, making him something of a celebrity. There's no reason to believe, however, that he has anything to do with the Android malware attack," said Cluely.

Instagram was recently acquired by the social networking website, Facebook, for a whopping $1 billion. But, cybercriminals don't seem to be at rest and they will keep faking people to earn handsome amount of money.

Verizon plans big Windows Phone push for the holidays - Yahoo

@yahootech-Verizon Wireless chief financial officer Fran Shammo said the company is looking to market a third mobile platform to help develop a strong competitor to Apple and Google. That operating system will be Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 8. “We’re really looking at the Windows Phone 8.0 platform because that’s a differentiator. We’re working with Microsoft on it,” Shammo said in an interview with Reuters following the company’s earnings call on Thursday. The carrier expects to have Windows Phone 8-powered handsets in time for the 2012 holiday shopping season. The executive suggested that Verizon could play a similar role in helping Microsoft’s platform to grow as it did with Google’s Android OS.

How to change the look of Gmail

Google execs, director Cameron in space venture - Yahoo

@yahootech - SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and billionaire co-founder Larry Page have teamed up with "Avatar" director James Cameron and other investors to back an ambitious space exploration and natural resources venture, details of which will be unveiled next week.

The fledgling company, called Planetary Resources, will be unveiled at a Tuesday news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, according to a press release issued this week.

Aside from naming some of the company's high-profile backers, the press release disclosed tantalizingly few details, saying only that the company will combine the sectors of "space exploration and natural resources" in a venture that could add "trillions of dollars to the global GDP." The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Planetary Resources will explore the feasibility of mining natural resources from asteroids, a decades-old concept.

"This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources,'" according to the press release.

Planetary Resource was co-founded by Eric Anderson, a former NASA Mars mission manager, and Peter Diamandis, the commercial space entrepreneur behind the X-Prize, a competition that offered $10 million to a group that launched a reusable manned spacecraft. Other notable investors includeCharles Simonyi, a former top executive at Microsoft, and K. Ram Shriram, a Google director.

The venture will be the latest foray into the far-flung for Cameron, who dived last month in a mini-submarine to the deepest spot in the Mariana Trench. The plot of his 2009 science fiction blockbuster film, "Avatar," concerned resource mining on alien planets.

Google dumps publisher payment platform - Yahoo

@yahootech-        The One Pass payment platform for Internet news websites was shut down as Google continued house cleaning launched when co-founder Larry Page took charge last year.

One Pass, which failed to catch on since it launched in February of 2011, was swept out with Google Talk free voice or text conversation Web applications for smartphones other than Android-powered handsets with the software built in.

"Over the last six months we've done a lot of spring cleaning -- although it's all happened out of season," cloud services directorMatthias Schwab said in a blog post at the California-based company's website, on Friday.

"Spring has now arrived and we're ready to close or combine another round of products."

One Pass let publishers set prices for online articles, with Google getting a 10 percent cut of revenue as opposed to the 30 percent bite that iPhone and iPad maker Apple takes out of transactions in gadget applications.

One Pass features, and users, were being shifted to a Google Consumer Surveys service, according to Schwab.

Page has made it a priority to get rid of products that are performing poorly so resources can be focused on more promising offerings.

The latest house cleaning included moving an online service providing maps to where flu vaccinations are available in the United States being moved to HealthMap Flu Vaccine Finder.

Support for Google Sync for Blackberry smartphones was eliminated.

A Patent Search homepage devoted to intellectual property registered with US regulators was being re-directed to the main query engine at google.com.

"The new experience loads twice as fast as the old Patent Search homepage, contributes to a unified search experience across Google, and sports Google Doodles as well," Schwab said.

"The team looks forward to including patents from other countries soon, and will be rolling out additional features to Patent Search on google.com in the future."