This week social networking giant Facebook has announced the acquisition of Parse, a cloud-based platform providing tools for mobile app developers.

Facebook will,be buying the Parse business outright, but Parse will continue to operate and offer its services, which are currently used in over 60,000 applications.

The Parse business offers backend services, data storage, social integration tools and other features to make it easier for app to be built across different platforms that scale more efficiently. Facebook Director of Developer Products Doug Purdy explained in a blog post:

"We want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices ... Read more »

Yesterday Apple released its latest financial results, it also revealed details on how many device it sold, and Apple also announced that their App Store has hit a massive 45 billion downloads.

Back in January of this year Apple announced that they had hit 40 billion downloads, so that is an increase of 5 billion since January, they also revealed that they have now paid their iOS developers more than $9 billion.

We also get to here some information about Apple’s iCloud, which now has more than 300 million users, and increase of around 50 million from the previous financial quarter.

Source ... Read more »

In addition to the new Panasonic Lumix DMC-LF1 compact camera that launched this week, Panasonic has also launched their new Panasonic Lumix G6 micro four thirds camera.

The Panasonic Lumix G6 is fitted with a 16-megapixel sensor, capable of capturing images at 7fps in burst mode and provides a maximum sensitivity of ISO 25,600.

Other features of the Panasonic Lumix G6 include a a 1,440K-dot OLED LVF, 0.5 second startup time, and a 3-inch 1,036K-dot touchscreen, offering 180 degree swivel and 270 degrees of tilt to make sure it can always been seen.

The Panasonic Lumix G6 micro four thirds camera is also equipped with a new Venus image engine and full-area touch AF along with 10 ... Read more »

Google has purchased Wavii for a reported $30 million, Wavii is a natural language processing startup, and apparently both Apple and Google were looking to buy the company, but Google has managed to come to a deal with Wavii.

Wavii’s team, which is 25 strong will join Google, including the company’s founder Adrian Aoun, the team will be moving to join Google’s Knowledge Graph division in Seattle.

There are no details as yet on exactly what Google plans to do with Wavii, as soon as we get some more information we will let you guys know.

Source TechCrunch

A new titanium stylus in the form of the Ti-Click PRO and Ti-Click RTS has launched on Kickstarter this week and has already blasted its way through its initial $15,000 goal, raising $80,000+ in its first few days.

The Ti-Click pen stylus has been designed to accept over 35 different refills making sure its always easy to add extra ink to you pen when required. The Ti-Click pen stylus has been designed by Chadwick Parker & Joe Huang, watch the video after the jump to learn more.

The designers of the Ti-Click PRO and Ti-Click RTS pen stylus explain:

"This project started with a vision to create 2 truly amazing titanium click pens from the ground-up. It has been a big challenge and a project that w ... Read more »

Sony has unveiled a new compact camera its has created in the form of the Sony Cybershot HX50V, which is equipped with a 20.4 megapixel Exmor R CMOS image sensor, and is the worlds smallest and lightest camera with 30x optical zoom capability.

Sony has fitted their Cybershot HX50V camera with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities, allowing users to benefit from Sony’s PlayMemories Mobile application, which is available for both Android and iOS devices, and enables wireless transfer of photographs to the mobile devices.

The Sony Cybershot HX50V is also fitted with a powerful X-type lithium ion battery offering 400 photos from a single charge. Patrick Huang , director of the Cyber-shot digital camera busin ... Read more »

The new Stealth Nighthawk F-117A TV Dongle has been designed as an easy to use XBMC device, with the same soc as the Raspberry PI. Storage on the Stealth Nighthawk F-117A is provided by micro SD-Cards and can accommodate unto 32GB cards in size. Watch the video after the jump to see the Stealth Nighthawk F-117A in action.

If you have never heard of XBMC its an awesome piece of software which has been created as an open source cross-platform software media player and entertainment hub. For digital media for Home Theatre PCs and provides users with a 10-foot user interface designed to be a media player for the living-room, and which is controlled using a remote control.

"On Stealth Nighthawk F-117A you can attach your hard d ... Read more »

Apple’s iCloud service has been hit with a few problems over the last week or so, and again today users are having problems with iCloud, as it would appear that the service is currently down.

On attempting to log into your iCloud account from the web you are met with a ‘Connection Error’ message, meaning that people are unable to log into the web based version of iCloud.

We have just tested out iCloud email on an iPhone and ... Read more »

One of the cool things about the gadget market when it comes to Android-powered set-top boxes is that there is a product for just about every budget and every need. The new set top box that looks more like a set top disk than a box has turned up from the Chinese manufacturer called Smallart. The device itself is called the Uhost3.

Strangely, the manufacturer the device reportedly hasn’t decided which quad-core processor to use. Reports indicate that it’s a tossup between the Allwinner A31s and the Rockchip RK3188 at this point. The other hardware is confirmed including 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of integrated storage.

The set-top box features and HDMI output, dual USB ports, and ethernet port, and a microSD card slot for storage expansion. The dev ... Read more »

DirecTV is making searching for programming on its service a little easier this summer with the release their voice search feature for their smartphone app.

 
DirecTV’s voice search function is a step above the DVR’s ability to search for content on the service. Now you can just talk into your smartphone to find what you want to watch instead of typing text. The feature can recognize natural language commands instead of specific cue phrases, which works much better.

You can search for on-demand, pay-per-view and upcoming content while also filtering the results based on the actors, title and other variables. DirecTV users will love this.

Source ... Read more »