Google has purchased the social sat-nav company Waze for a reported $1 billion. The app available on iOS and Android provides free sat-nav and real time traffic updates based on other users driving times. The company was founded in 2008 by Uri Levine and others in the upcoming tech capital of Israel.
Facebook adds Free Calls to Messenger App in UK
Facebook has updated it's Messenger App in the UK to now all 'Free Calls', as has been the case in the US and Canada for a few months. This is quite a significant update and gives massive contribution not only to other VoIP providers such as Skype but also to network providers.
Why pay for minutes (and texts) when you can do it for virtually free over the internet. This also starts the debate about whether your phone even needs a phone number.
Does this spell the start of the end for mobile phone numbers? Comment below.
Facebook Redesign
Facebook have released details of a newly redesigned News Feed and Profile Pages. 'Goodbye Clutter' is the tagline and that's exactly what it does. The new design moves all the content in to just two columns rather than the current three and makes content much clearer with larger images. The new News Feed is being slowly rolled out to all users over the next few months.
How It Started - Site Review
Ever wondered how the world's most famous companies started out? I have. Now there's an amazing website where you can find out, it's called How It Started. The website features a whole range of companies from Mashable to Hooters and just about everything in between.
The site is a pleasure to use with each company featured in a colourful grid style on the homepage. You can filter companies by type to narrow down to your area of interest or simply browse them all. Once you click on a company their page opens with a brief description and a large video that details how they got started. You can then flick through the companies until you get to another that you find interesting.
It's not just businesses on there either though. There's a whole host of celebrities and public figures too, including Wretch 32 and Tim Lovejoy.
There's another cool section to the website and that's 'How do they make money?'. This part shows how different companies actually make money (if they do actually make money). It shows whether they're profitable and how they make their profit - advertising, freemium, subscribers etc.
The site's got a good blog with lots of posts about entrepreneurship, music and productivity.
Although the site doesn't quite seem 100% complete and a lot of the content isn't their own there is still a tonne of information on there and they seem to be growing quite quickly.
Take a look and see what you think, comment below with your opinions.
Samsung Galaxy S4
At 11pm last night through a very weird and cringe worthy presentation Samsung announced the details of their new flagship handset - the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Samsung have introduced a range of new features to the 5-inch smartphone, most notably a massively upgraded camera. The handset will feature a 13 mega pixel rear camera and a 2 mega pixel front-facing camera while the camera software gets a major upgrade with some brilliant new features.Dual recording, where both the front and rear cameras are used at the same time so that the person taking the picture can also be in the picture and the same when video calling or recording video looks like a particularly useful new feature.
The screen also gets an upgrade and is now a full 5-inches on the diagonal as well as being Full HD AMOLED with 441 PPI (Pixels Per Inch). The S4 will feature 2GB RAM along with 16GB storage - 32 and 64GB version will also be available.
To power all of this new tech Samsung have stuck in a 2,600 mAh battery although they haven't said how long it will stay charged.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec&w=560&h=315]
Hands free seems to be the way Samsung have gone with this new phone. They've introduced air gesture, smart pause and smart scroll. Air gesture allows the user to control certain aspects of the S4 without touching the screen but rather waving above it while smart pause stops video on the screen when the user looks away. Smart scroll - a much rumoured function - isn't exactly what people thought. The user can tilt their phone up or down to scroll rather than using their fingers. Although I can see a few problems with this already.
Despite all this new technology Samsung have managed to make the Galaxy S4 much thinner and lighter than the previous version and it now comes in at just 7.9mm thick (almost as thin as the iPhone 5) and weighs just 130 grams (slightly lighter than the S3).
The handset will be released at the end of April in 155 countries, on both 4G LTE and 3G networks.
There's a few things that weren't revealed though. The price is yet to be confirmed, there was no mention of the processor and no mention of battery life - something that will definitely be on people's minds.
Interestingly Samsung made absolutely no mention of Android or Google with much of the OS and built in apps being Samsung branded - something that smartphone companies have been trying to do for a while.
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S4 stands to be a best selling handset and will most definitely be the most successful Android based handset. There's nothing revolutionary in there, it's more of an upgrade of the S3 rather than a new handset but still a great phone.