Woot introduces 32GB HP TouchPad for $200

Missed out on the original HP TouchPad firesale? The ill-fated tablet gained a second lease on life once hackers started going to work on it and produced Ice Cream Sandwich ROMs. Fear not, you’ve got another chance to snag one: Woot is offering a refurbished 32GB HP Touchpad for $200. It’s one day only, and the deal is sure to catch fire, so you’ll have to move quickly.

In a perfect world they’d be selling new models, but even the refurbished price is a good deal. Taking a look at eBay, models seem to sell from around $300, so the Woot offer is worth a look. The tablet may be running webOS, but you can quickly put Android on there thanks to the efforts of those on xda-developers.
 
You may not be getting a Retina display, but the hardware is still pretty decent by today’s standards: a 9.7-inch 1024×768 IPS display, dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera. Head on over to Woot to secure the deal, and then mull over what you’ll do with the tablet while you’re waiting for it to ship.
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Facebook sued for $15bn over privacy

 Facebook opened the markets this morning starting off with a value of $42 a share, but the world keeps on turning. Bloomberg is reporting the Facebook is being sued for $15 billion over a claim that privacy was violated by tracking internet usage. The lawsuit has been filed in California, and combined 21 individual cases that were spread out across the United States.

 
Stewarts Law, one of the firms leading the case, says that Facebook illegally tracked users activity even after they had logged out of the social networking service. “This is not just a damages action, but a groundbreaking digital-privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications,” says David Straite, a partner at Stewarts Law.
 
It’s not the first time that Facebook has been the subject of privacy concerns. A German privacy watchdog believes that Facebook falls foul of German law, saying that it forces responsibility onto users rather as opposed to looking out for their best interests. Face-tagging in photos was the main cause for concern, especially for those who don’t have a Facebook account and wouldn’t want to be tagged.
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Telltale’s Walking Dead game sells one million copies

In less than a month’s time, a game based on a niche comic book franchise that was turned into a successful TV show has been able to become its own breakout success. The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day has been downloaded a million times between the Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Steam. It’s hopefully a good sign as future episodes of the game are released. The full game is set to be split up into five episodes, each of which will be sold on the digital download platforms for $4.99. Or, if you have a strong feeling that you’ll want to buy all five, you can buy the entire series upfront for $19.99, saving you an eventual $5 or so compared to buying each episode individually. Even though it’s a zombie game, though, don’t expect a hack-and-slash adventure. Instead, this game will be heavily driven by story and dialogue, and making decisions within the game. “Your decisions or actions might have an effect in the episode you’re playing or might affect the entire season. You could answer a question in a certain way and have a character become suspicious of your motives, or you could be forced to choose who to save when two people are in mortal peril but only one can be yanked back from the zombie horde.

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iPhone 5 Prodcution have started.

With the Summer season upon us, it’s the mobile world that we once again look to for the most surprises, especially from Apple with it’s upcoming iPhone 5, it being a “full refresh” season for the smartphone maker. Apple has for the past several years created a complete refresh of an iPhone, then an “S” version, then a complete refresh once more, this resulting in last year’s iPhone 4S and this year’s big jump into the future: the iPhone 5. What we’re hearing this week is that the production of this next-level smartphone will start with its displays, with orders already placed, so says the WSJ, for a 4-inch screen which will start to roll out this June.
  This release for Apple will undoubtedly be a big one, with the time since a full-on refresh of their software and hardware in the mobile realm having been over a year ago with the iPhone 4. The iPad 3 was just about as close as we’ve gotten to a whole new generation of mobile devices with a new Retina-quality display and 4G LTE connectivity, elements we’ve either already got or can expect to be in play with the iPhone 5 come this autumn. This release brings on the sixth generation of the iPhone and could also be coming with the same naming convention of the 3rd generation iPad, that being the complete drop of any extra numbers or letters. No more S for you!

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Experience White House at your Home


WASHINGTON
: First Lady Michelle Obama said that Google is opening doors to the White House on the Internet by letting users pay virtual visits to all the public rooms.The US president’s home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is part of a Google Art Project that lets online visitors step into museums, galleries and other famous spaces and look around as though they were there. "The White House isn’t simply a home to first families or a meeting space for world leaders, it’s also known as ‘The People’s House,’ a place that should be open to everyone," Michelle Obama said in a video message. "Thousands of people have walked these halls and gazed at the artwork. They’ve examined the portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy," she said.They’ve imagined the history that’s unfolded here. And now you can do all of that without leaving your home."

                       Google used Street View cameras in rooms to capture images in 360 degrees to provide a sense of being able to gaze around full circle, zooming in on pieces of art or other features.President Barack Obama and the First Lady have been known to unexpectedly drop in on groups touring the White House, which has logged about 2.5 million visitors during the past three years.The online opening of the White House came with word of the expansion of the Google Art Project, launched early last year, to include more than two dozen new partners.The website at GoogleArtProject.com was not live when the addition of the White House was announced.

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Google rival might come with new search engine

Social networking giant Facebook is reportedly planning to create a new search engine which would help people to navigate on the website better.A Bloomberg Businessweek report said the firm has deployed two-dozen Facebook engineers onto the ambitious project, which aims to improve the search engine currently available on the social network.According to the report, the project is led by former Google engineer Lars Rasmussen.The magazine’s unnamed sources said that the project is "to help users better sift through the volume of content that members create on the site, such as status updates, and the articles, videos, and other information across the Web that people "like" using Facebook’s omnipresent thumbs-up button". According to The Telegraph, Facebook has done very little to improve its search engine, which currently lets people find other users, brands, status updates and some wider web results, through a long-standing partnership with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.It has yet to properly focus its attention on the small search engine box situated at the top of each users’ page.Meanwhile, Facebook has declined to comment on the matter. 

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Google planning for low-cost tablet PC

 SAN FRANCISCO: Google is teaming with Asia-based hardware makers on a low-priced, 7-inch tablet computer to challenge offerings by Amazon.com and Apple, reports said on Thursday.Android software backed by the California internet giant will power hardware built by partners including Samsung and Asustek to compete with iPad and Kindle devices, according to Digitimes and the Wall Street Journal. An Asustek tablet could be released as early as May with a price of $199 to make it an option for shoppers considering the Kindle Fire made by Amazon.com, said Digitimes.Google putting its weight behind an economical tablet would likely put pressure on other gadget makers to lower prices. Google did not respond immediately to an AFP request for comment.

 
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Google will be soon in Online Market

SAN FRANCISCO: Google Inc is planning to open an online store to sell tablet PCs directly to consumers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.The online store would offer tablets made by Samsung Electronics Co and Asustek Computer Inc based on Google’s Android software, according to the report, which cited anonymous sources and which Reuters was not able to confirm. Google declined to comment.Google briefly sold a specially-designed Android smartphone – the Nexus One – directly to consumers in 2010, but closed the store after four months saying it had not lived up to expectations. 

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The War is on in Microsoft vs Google for cloud dominance

Google and Microsoft, two of the world’s largest technology firms, are raining blows on each other as they hard sell their so-called cloud services and vie for dominance in a market estimated to grow to $15-18 billion by 2020.Although these companies used to be thought of as being fundamentally different, similarities are beginning to show more prominently with both offering office productivity software, besides computer operating systems. While it may be too early to gauge business gains, the war of words has begun. Google is the largest cloud services company in India," claimed Rajan Anandan, Google’s India head since January 2011. "We have 2,00,000 businesses that use Google cloud solutions. We have orders of magnitude bigger than Microsoft," added Anandan, who used to head Microsoft in India before he took up the Google job. 

       Cloud computing is causing a fundamental shift in the way technology services are delivered. Unlike in the traditional model, software or hardware need not be on-premise but can bought as a service and can be paid for depending on usage, instead of a lumpsum upfront payment earlier.While Google proudly cites cloud sales successes, including to the Indian Youth Congress, IndiaMart, Indiainfoline, Flipkart and Sterlite Technologies, Microsoft boasts of logos such as Essar, Sporting Mindz, Idhasoft, and Gradatim.
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Android tablets to beat iPad in sales by 2015: IDC

SAN FRANCISCO: Tablet shipments will increase this year by a better-than-predicted 54 per cent as Amazon.com Inc’s lower-priced challenge to Apple Inc’s iPad stokes awareness of the devices, International Data Corp. said. 

 
IDC, a research company that tracks technology sales, boosted its estimate for global tablet shipments in 2012 by 21 per cent to 106.1 million after sales last year rose more than it anticipated. A total of 68.7 million units were sold in 2011, Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC said in a statement. 
 
Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which started shipping in November and costs less than half the price of Apple’s cheapest iPad, increased tablet adoption industrywide, said Tom Mainelli, a research director at IDC. Amazon shipped 4.7 million Kindle Fires in the fourth quarter, giving it 16.8 per cent of the market and putting it in the No. 2 spot behind Apple, IDC said. 
 
"Products across the pricing spectrum sold well," Mainelli said in the statement. "Amazon’s widely reported entry into the media tablet market with a $199, 7-inch product seemed to raise consumers’ awareness of the category worldwide." 
 
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, shipped 15.4 million units in the quarter, compared with 11.1 million in the previous three months, seeing its market share slip to 54.7 per cent from just more than 61 percent, according to IDC. 
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