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Samsung Electronics has released its Q1 2013 numbers and as it predicted a few weeks ago, business continues to boom. Operating profits are 8.78 trillion won as predicted, while net profit is up to 7.15 trillion won ($6.4 billion), up sharply from the same quarter last year when its net profit was 5.50 trillion won. Last year at this time we were still anticipating details on the Galaxy S III, but this time around Samsung is on the eve of its worldwide launch for the Galaxy S 4, which should push sales... read more

As the executive chairman of one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, Eric Schmidt seems well-placed to do some crystal ball gazing. So what does he think will be major trends in the future? Self-driving cars, Google Glass and mobile operating systems named after desserts? Not quite. In the run up to the launch of his new book ‘The New Digital Age’, co-authored by Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, the two Googlers gave CNN a few predictions about what would be big news in the world of tech for... read more

Google has a long history of doling out easter eggs to amuse and delight the public, so naturally it decided to sneak one in the Explorer Edition of Glass as well. New Glass Explorer Jay Lee discovered that when you select View Licenses under Settings and Device Info, then tap the touchpad nine times (an audible beep increasing in pitch will follow each tap), you'll be able to see the entire Project Glass team in a panoramic shot. Mike LeBeau from the Glass team confirmed that he snuck that easter egg... read more

Hot on the heels of its Mobile Developer Conference, Facebook today announced its intentions to buy cloud-based app development service Parse, a company with which the site has collaborated in the past. According to a post on Facebook's Developers blog, the purchase will go a ways toward helping devs, "rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices." The acquisition will bring a number of cloud-based tools like data storage, user management and notifications to Facebook developers. For each... read more

For now I don’t agree with their stance, since the only other alternative to DRM would be plug-ins. That would only lead to device incompatibility and less consumer device freedom. According to CNet: The Free Software Foundation, never a friend to digital rights management, has taken issue with its arrival in the Web standards world. In a letter from the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and other allied groups yesterday, the group called on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to keep... read more

Well that was quick. After just two minutes, tickets for Apple's upcoming annual developers conference in San Francisco are gone. The show took two whole hours to sell out last year. Apple caught many developers by surprise last April when it began selling tickets immediately upon announcing the conference at 5:30 a.m. PT. This time around the company gave developers a little more than a day of advanced notice. Apple's WWDC, or "dub-dub" as it's often referred to casually, is a mecca for Apple's... read more

Between July and December 2012, the company received 2,285 government requests to remove over 24,000 pieces of content from its search. A look at Google's takedown requests. (Credit: Google) Requests by international governments to remove content from Google's services have hit an all-time high, according to the company. During the period of July and December 2012, Google received 2,285 government requests for the removal of content on its services. In total, 24,179 pieces of content were asked to be... read more

And this is the processor I’ve been waiting for with the Microsoft Surface… Only time will tell! From Engadget: We've just spotted a familiar friend at Intel's Innovation Future Showcase in London -- its Haswell-powered North Cape laptop / tablet hybrid. As a quick reminder, alongside that fourth-generation Intel Core processor there's a 13-inch 1080p display that detaches from the keyboard, and now we've been given a few important updates on the reference device, battery performance on Haswell and how... read more

Very interesting piece on GigaOM about crowdsourcing the finding of criminals: Crowdsourcing as a method of locating important people or information has become a familiar accompaniment to the aftermath of disasters. But are people really effective at locating a target, or do they just throw out blanket broadcasts? How quickly can people mobilize their social networks? The answers to these questions have become even more relevant with the fervor displayed on Reddit during the search for the Boston bombing... read more

A judge in Texas denied a request by the Federal Bureau of Investigation this week for what he describes as a warrant to remotely “hack a computer suspected of criminal use,” raising questions about the legal requirements for the government to use computer hacking techniques in investigations. The case offers a rare look at the use of so-called “offensive” computer security tools by the U.S. government. Most past such legal requests by government investigators appear to have been sealed, as have been the... read more