Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer dances at tearful send-off - BBC News

27 September 2013 Last updated at 09:54 ET

Departing Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has hosted his last company meeting - bidding a tearful farewell to employees he has worked with for 33 years.

The 57-year-old danced to Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', and declared that the company would "change the world again".

More than 13,000 Microsoft employees had queued to be a part of the annual company-wide event.

The firm has not yet announced a replacement chief executive.

Mr Ballmer will retire within the next year and will leave the company in a strategically precarious position as it looks to claw back lost ground in the mobile sector.

While at the helm, he became known for his vigorous and enthusiastic presentations in which he would routinely declare his love for Microsoft and its products.

Dirty Dancing

Microsoft staff took to social media to share details of Mr Ballmer's last appearance as boss at the event described as being more like a "rock concert".

It was held at the 17,000-capacity Key Arena in Seattle, a venue usually used for basketball and ice hockey.

Steve Ballmer at Microsoft corporate event in 2000: "I love this company"

Service engineer Bob Ulrich posted a picture on Twitter of the snaking queue outside the building.

He added: "Must be the year to go to the @Microsoft company meeting. Insane line."

Charles Naut, a project manager at the company, posted an image of the "very moving" speech on Instagram - it showed Mr Ballmer ending his talk by saying, "I've had the time of my life!" as the famous Dirty Dancing song was played out in the arena.

Too slow

The Verge reported that Mr Ballmer had tears streaming down his face as he made his last remarks, telling employees: "We have unbelievable potential in front of us, we have an unbelievable destiny. Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future.

"We're going to think big, we're going to bet big."

He took aim at some of the company's rivals, calling Apple "fashionable" and Amazon "cheap". He said Google was focused on "knowing more", while Microsoft was about "doing more".

But it is those rivals that piled the pressure on Mr Ballmer to depart. In one recent meeting with Wall Street investors and analysts, he admitted the company had been too slow expanding into the smartphone market.

"I regret that there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows that we weren't able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone," Mr Ballmer said.

"That is the thing I regret the most. It would have been better for Windows and our success in other foreign factors."

Goldfinger 2: Asian Site Leaks Rumored Gold - TechCrunch

It's not that much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that Apple might unveil gold, or "space gray," iPads in the upcoming month(s). That's why it's quite interesting that Chinese tech site DoNews has posted photos of a champagne iPad mini 2, complete with TouchID sensor.

Not enough evidence? Sonny Dickson, the same fellow who released the most accurate pre-release photos of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, has today tweeted out his own information regarding the inevitable iPad mini launch, as well as a photo of an unassembled iPad mini 2 in "space grey."

From the unconfirmed photos, as well as Dickson's predictions, it seems that there are quite a few similarities between the latest flagship iPhone and the forthcoming iPad mini. As you can see in the images above and below, the next-gen iPad minis will allegedly come in champagne gold and the same space grey we've seen with the iPhone 5s.

Dickson also tweeted, without revealing photos, that the iPad mini will be available in silver as well. Furthermore, we may see a TouchID fingerprint scanner on the Apple tablets, also shown in images.

No word yet on whether or not the iPad mini will sport a high-res Retina display.


As with any Apple leak, these images are far from confirmed, but Dickson has a solid track record and the details seem to make sense in terms of Apple's evolution. After the iPhone 5 came out in the anodized aluminum black "slate", so too did the iPad mini.

Dickson also mentioned that, according to his sources, the iPad mini 2 would include Apple's new A7 64-bit chip, the M7 motion coprocessor we're seeing in the iPhone 5s, along with 1GB of RAM. As for the 9.7-inch iPad 5, Dickson's sources revealed that it will pack 2GB of RAM under the hood, presumably sporting the same specs as little brother.

Again, we haven't even received an invitation to the iPad/iPad mini launch event (expected to go down sometime in October), so it's far too early to tell the legitimacy of these claims and/or photos.

Still, these aren't too far outside the realm of possibility.

[via PhoneArena]

• APPLE

Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple's product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the...

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Best Free iPhone apps for traders and investors - MarketWatch (blog)

• Commentary

• By Cody Willard

One of the most popular articles I've ever written on Marketwatch.com was called "Best iPhone and Android Apps for Investors" from back in 2010, when the word "apps" was still new lexicon for anybody who wasn't a computer nerd. And I remain an app addict, telling myself and my wife that I'm doing research when I'm on an app. And truly I am.

I  remain so bullish about the app world that I recently acquired Scutify.com that had my favorite iPhone app – Scutify iPhone app at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scutify/id673974489 (currently at #9 in the finance app category at the Apple App Store).

Back in 2010, there had been several hundred million smartphones out there that people wanted apps for. Fast forward to today, and there will be more than one billion smartphones sold this year alone, and units sold in the last quarter of this year will likely top the total number of smartphones in the market back in 2010.

I was adamant back in 2010 that this smartphone/app explosion was going to lead us into an "App Revolution Stock Bubble," and, boy, are we in one now. I don't know when the app bubble will pop or how big it will be by the time it's over, but the fact is that it certainly isn't over yet. Meanwhile, no matter what happens to the valuations and business models of the smartphone and app world in the next few years, there will still be billions of people downloading hundreds of billions of apps and opening those apps trillions upon trillions of times every year.

Full disclosure ahead of time, I would have put the Scutify iPhone App at #1 as well as the Marketwatch iPhone app in my top five.

Read on and download these apps to help you become more informed by (and more addicted to) your iPhone than you ever thought possible. And tell your spouse that you, too, are doing research for work when you're on one of them. It'll be true.

Scutify - Real-time tweet feeds for each symbol, quotes, newsfeeds, and my personal favorite part of the app — the "Latest Scuttles" which longer and better versions of market- and stock-related tweets.

And then -

Bloomberg — Bloomberg has built its brand on technology, and the Bloomberg app is reliable, though not as deep and easy to surf as I might like. Regardless, it's one of the main apps I open to read as I sip coffee in the morning.

TD Ameritrade Mobile – I use several different trading platforms, and this is my favorite broker app to trade on. It's quick, intuitive and unlike some of the other broker apps, doesn't try to be a Bloomberg Terminal in a box, when it never will be.

Yahoo! Finance — I stopped using this app as much after I downloaded the aforementioned Scutify app, but Yahoo! Finance remains a must-visit resource, and the app is pretty darn functional too. They need an update though.

StockTouch — Beautiful visuals of charts and stock quotes, but a bit lacking in depth of information under those visuals. I find I use the app mainly on extreme up or an extreme down day in the stock market to see if there are any major stocks out there going against the trend.

CNBC — I  sure feel like a sell-out citing the CNBC app, given that I was a mortal enemy of theirs while I was an anchor at Fox Business, but it's a good app and I take pride in trying to be objective, so what the heck.

Cody Willard writes Revolution Investing for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com, which is not affiliated with MarketWatch. At time of publication, Cody was net long Apple and Google. Follow Cody on Twitter at twitter.com/codywillard.

BBM for Android and iPhone Not Launching This Week - Tom's Hardware Guide

It's been a bit of a bumpy road to BBM on all platforms.

Poor BlackBerry. Though the company announced major layoffs on Friday afternoon, things were supposed to look up on the weekend with the release of BBM for iOS and Android. Though the iOS roll-out started as planned, it was soon halted, and the Android roll-out never got off the ground at all. BlackBerry said that an unreleased version of the BBM for Android app that leaked early "caused issues" and that it would keep users posted on a release.

Unfortunately, it seems that release won't be anytime soon. Andrew Bocking, head of BBM at BlackBerry, has said he doesn't anticipate launching BBM for Android this week. Bocking says that the unreleased version of BBM for Android was an older version and that it contained an issue that resulted in higher than normal data traffic for each active user. This in turn impacted the system after one million people downloaded the unofficial app. The Saturday version addressed these issues, but BlackBerry wouldn't be able to block the users of the unreleased version if the new, official release was launched.

Bocking says there's a team working on blocking the unreleased version when the official BBM for Android app goes live and reinforcing the system so that something like this doesn't happen again in the future. The moral of the story is that good things come to those who wait. And we're going to be waiting a while. Unfortunately, Bocking didn't mention how or why this affects the launch of the BBM for iPhone application, just that it had to be paused as a result of the issue with Android, so it looks like iPhone users are going to be waiting too.

Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

'You want gold iPhone? I get you gold iPhone,' says Conan's Raffi - CNET

Raffi promises you a deal on a gold iPhone through a somewhat convoluted URL.

(Credit: Conan/YouTube/screenshot by CNET)

Can't find the golden iPhone? Don't worry. Raffi can get you a deal, at least if you're willing to go along with a sketch aired Wednesday night on Conan O'Brien's late-night talk show.

Fans of Coco first met iPhone salesman Raffi Jaharian a couple of weeks ago after Apple launched its two new iPhones. Sporting gold chains and gold rings and touting gold as "best, best, best," Raffi claimed that he was the man behind the gold iPhone.

In the latest sketch, Raffi is back and is now offering deals to iPhone customers eager to buy the hot-selling golden version. While a (faux) Apple exec says that more gold iPhones will be available in a few weeks, Raffi promises to deliver in a few days.

"You want iPhone gold? I get you iPhone gold," Raffi says. "Gold is best. iPhone gold faster, bigger, louder, quieter, smaller, sexier, wetter, taller. It's just best."

Another phony Apple exec advises people to just place their iPhone orders at a local Apple store and the phone will be shipped as soon as it's available. But Raffi has a different deal up his sleeve.

"Raffi got you. Here's what you do," says Raffi. "Go to your local Apple store. Not in front, but in back. Don't talk to Geniuses. Talk to one of my nephews. They all wear gold tanktops and gold sneakers. On eBay, they charge you triple. But for you, you only pay double."

And to counter the suggestion that customers go to Apple's online site to get an iPhone, Raffi has a slightly different Web site in mind -- ww.GiveMeGoldiPhoneNow/okIGotYou/ThanksRaffiYouTheMan_YouGotItManGoldIsBest.Yes#.

Fake iOS7 'waterproof' iPhone claims dupe some owners into destroying ... - Belfast Telegraph

A fake advert claiming that Apple users can make their iPhones waterproof by upgrading the device's software has reportedly tricked users into breaking their phones, writes By James Vincent

25 September 2013

The misleading rumour has circulated on social networks accompanied by a mocked-up advert that closely resembles Apple's official marketing.

"Update to iOS 7 and become waterproof" claims the ad (seen here) explaining that "In an emergency, a smart-switch will shut off the phone's power supply and corresponding components to prevent any damage to your iPhone's delicate circuitry."

Users who believed the advert reportedly upgraded their iPhones and dunked the devices to test the feature, only to find that they had broken the expensive gadgets.

Some have taken to Twitter to vent their displeasure at being tricked. One user wrote "Ok whoever said IOS7 is waterproof GO F*** YOURSELF".

The iOS 7 update was released by Apple last week and introduces many new features and a visual overhaul, but does not make iPhones waterproof.

The spoof advert reportedly originated on the notorious online forum 4chan, which regularly undertakes campaigns that hijack social media in order to trick the public.

One hoax from 2012  involved members of the forum hacking the official Twitter account of 'Entertainment Tonight' and broadcasting a message that popstar Justin Bieber has been diagnosed with cancer.

The message encouraged fans to shave their heads in support, with the the hashtag #BaldforBieber used to spread the hoax.

Video: Apple iPhone 5s unlocked by nipple 

 

Tweets about "#ios7 #waterproof"

Android 4.3 and Samsung Galaxy Gear compatibility coming to Galaxy S4 ... - Know Your Mobile

Android 4.3 is being prepped for the Samsung Galaxy S4, Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 and all three devices will be updated by the end of 2013. Part of the reason for the update, as well as ensuring the handsets have the latest software, is to introduce compatibility with the Galaxy Gear smartwatch.

Samsung representatives officially confirmed the plans to Korean news sources, the Galaxy S4 will reportedly be updated first with Samsung marketing president Lee Don-joo revealing Android 4.3 and Galaxy Gear compatibility would arrive "by next month", so expect a patch in early October.

At the same time, Samsung's reps said the Android 4.3 update and Galaxy Gear compatibility is currently in testing for the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 and these updates would arrive by the end of the December. A report from SamMobile suggested the Galaxy Mega range, including the UK-facing Galaxy Mega 6.3, is also in testing for the update.

The devices require Android 4.3 to enable Galaxy Gear smartwatch compatibility because the smartwatch uses Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (LE) technology, something which is introduced at the software level in Android 4.3, the latest available build of Google's smartphone platform. Of course, Android 4.4 KitKat has now been announced but it may take some time before Samsung issues another update.

As an interesting addition, Korea Times reports that a Samsung representative hinted the company is now looking at developing a follow-up Galaxy Gear model. The unnamed rep reportedly said, "We've acknowledged that our Gear lacks something special. With more investment for user interface and user experience, Samsung devices will be better in terms of customer satisfaction."