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Developers excited to build Project Ara’s smartphone modules

Apr16
by on April 16, 2014 at 7:11 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Google, Insider, Mobile, Project Ara

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The Project Ara developers conference is Google’s smartphone-experiment show and tell. The search-giant turned hardware-vendor may want to get its new modular smartphone in the hands of the entire world, but it needs to get developers to build the tiny hardware plugins. Google told The Next Web that there were over 300 attendees and approximately 3,000 concurrent live stream viewers during the opening day of the conference – good start for something that won’t actually ship until sometime in 2015. Many in the audience seemed excited, or at least intrigued by the prospect of developing hardware for a new smartphone…

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WordPress 3.9 arrives with better media editing, gallery previews, audio and video playlists, and more

Apr16
by on April 16, 2014 at 7:00 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Design & Dev, Insider

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WordPress.org today announced the debut of WordPress 3.9, which adds a slew of “refinements” to the blog management tool. You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download (it’s 6.0MB). Dubbed “Smith” in honor of African-American jazz musician Jimmy Smith, WordPress 3.9 is supposed to give users a better understanding of how their content will look once it is published. The team has put together a video to show it off: The new features are as follows: Improved visual editing: The new visual editor has improved speed, accessibility, and mobile support. You can paste into it from your word processor…

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WhatsApp, Instagram and the new rules of marketing for the networked age

Apr16
by on April 16, 2014 at 6:52 pm
Posted In: Analysis and Opinion, Around the Web, Design & Dev, Entrepreneur

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Sangeet Paul Choudary is the author of the blog Platform Thinking. Patrick Vlaskovits is a NYT bestseller author and CEO of Superpowered. Welcome to the age of the zero-dollar marketing startup. WhatsApp, and earlier Instagram, have officially become a permanent part of startup lore for having built multi-billion dollar businesses without (reportedly) spending a dime on marketing. Meanwhile, Airbnb has grown from a hipster community of mattress-renters to the world’s largest provider of accommodations without spending even a fraction of what traditional hotel chains spend in marketing. Marketing is dead! Or that’s what many would have you believe. A great product sells…

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Samsung’s Gear 2 smartwatches didn’t live up to expectations, but Gear Fit is a useful fitness band

Apr16
by on April 16, 2014 at 6:38 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Gadgets, Product Reviews, smartwatch, wearable devices

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Samsung has rolled out a bumper crop of wearable devices in conjunction with its latest flagship, the Galaxy S5 — two Gear smartwatches and the Gear Fit fitness band. As someone who has never worn a wearable device up till now, I’ve realized that the tricky part about wearables is that they have to be relevant enough to a user’s daily life. After all, why pay a couple of hundred dollars for a device that draws out certain functions of your phone if you still have to bring your phone around? We put Samsung’s newest crop of wearable devices through…

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Tech blog Stratechery goes freemium as Ben Thompson strikes it out as an indie writer

Apr16
by on April 16, 2014 at 6:28 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Asia, Insider

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Ben Thompson, the Taiwan-based American writer behind popular tech blog Stratechery, has quit his day job to become a full-time blogger. Aside from leaving Automattic, the company behind WordPress where he was employed, Thompson is super-charging his site with a new freemium business model and a podcast. Thompson will continue to post two “fairly long” articles a week — which will be sponsored, in a similar way to Apple blogger John Gruber’s Daring Fireball site — but he is also launching an ambitious three-tier membership system to turn his passion into his living. Readers can pay $5 per month (or…

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