WILL DR. DRE REALLY BE HIP HOP'S FIRST BILLIONAIRE

The music mogul and Beats co-founder said as much in a video posted on Facebook that went viral Friday.
"The first billionaire in hip hop, right here from the motherf----n West Coast," Dre says.
But estimating Dre's net worth is difficult, given that Beats is privately held. Beats did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Related: Dr. Dre says he's the first hip hop billionaire
Dre -- whose given name is Andre Young -- founded Beats along with music producer Jimmy Iovine. According to various reports, he holds a stake of between 20% and 25% following a $500 million investment last year from private equity firm The Carlyle Group (CG), which was said to have valued the company at around $1 billion.
Forbes pegged Dr. Dre's net worth last month at $550 million. Let's assume he does own 25% of Beats. That stake would have been worth $250 million before the Apple deal chatter, leaving Dre with about $300 million from other investments and ventures, such as his music career.

APPLE MACBOOK AIR 13-inch 2014

Apple doesn't mess with success. While that statement could easily apply to any of the products coming out of Cupertino these days, it's especially true of the MacBook Air, which hasn't seen a significant design change in years. While the ultrabook market has become quite popular, the 13-inch MacBook Air has continued to be one of the best thin-and-light laptops around, and this year's model ($1,099, as tested) gets a hardware update that keeps it at the front of the pack, making it our Editors' Choice for mainstream ultraportable laptops.

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NAMCO BANDAI RELEASES FREE TO PLAY SOULCALIBUR GAME ON IPHONE AND IPAD

Namco Bandai’s free-to-play take on its popular one-on-one brawler Soulcalibur has just hit the App Store.
Titled SOULCALIBUR Unbreakable Soul, this mobile iteration of the series builds on its outlandish story mode, sending you on a quest to find the fragments of the evil Soul Edge. Before getting to the action, however, you are be treated to a tutorial of every system the game has to offer.
While Unbreakable Soul’s gameplay may look familiar at first glance, its combat is based around queuing up moves. Cards at the bottom of the screen trigger attacks. Match three or more of the same cards together and you'll get a combo.
As a free-to-play game, there are plenty of opportunities to spend cash on new characters, weapons, and items to buff your team. All purchases are made in Gems, which can set you back anything from 69p / 99c for 100, to £34.99 / $49.99 for 5000.
Soulcalibur Unbreakable Soul is free to download from the App Store now.

IS CHINESE PHONE TAKING OVER THE UNIVERSE?

If you saw Huawei’s charismatic CEO on stage in Paris this week, unveiling a premium-looking LTE phone, you’ll have been left in no doubt as to the scale of the man’s ambition. No matter how much American intelligence committees like to defame his company, Richard Yu refuses to be taken any less seriously on the world stage than Apple or Samsung, paying for splashy launch events from a $300 million total marketing budget.
Now, I’ve only spent a couple of days with the new Ascend P7 handset, but I’d say there’s risk that Huawei is starting to believe its own rhetoric before it has even had a chance to come true.
For a start, the Chinese manufacturer has somehow forgotten that it needs to undercut rival products if it’s going to entice consumers to switch to a less well-known brand. The P7 is priced at 440 euros ($620 in a raw dollar conversion), making it significantly more expensive than the LG-built Nexus 5, which — thanks to Google's GOOGL +1.18% deliberate indifference towards making a profit — costs just 350 euros (or $350 in the States). But more to the point, even you were able to import the P7 from Asia at a much lower price, the Nexus 5 would still be a much better phone.
Okay, the Ascend P7 has a lovely glass-and-metal build, an usually high-res front-facing camera and ultra-skinny bezels that make the phone feel tiny despite its 5-inch 1080p display. However, it possesses an in-house “Kirin 910″ processor that can sometimes be temperamental: it’s okay for daily use, and it excels at basic gaming, but it struggles badly when pushed to the limit — just try to play Android’s big new strategy game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and you’ll see what I mean. By contrast, the aging Nexus 5 still boasts an excellent processor, the Snapdragon 800, which rarely gets flustered.
And whereas the Nexus 5 runs clean Android, the P7 suffers from having Huawei’s own, clunky software skin (excuse me, “Emotion UI”) plastered over the top. This interface tries to offer a simpler option for new smartphone users, for example by scrapping the app drawer and displaying all apps on the home screen(s) instead, but I think it’ll ultimately hold these customers back and cause them frustration. For Android veterans, meanwhile, the combination of the slap-dash software and the scarily iPhone 4-like hardware design may actually make them feel like they’re carrying some sort of naughty Chinese knock-off. (Definitely a situation that calls for a replacement skin, like Nova Launcher, to be installed at the earliest opportunity).
These are two fundamental, product-based reasons to avoid the Ascend P7, before you even get to the deeper questions of whether Western consumers will be swayed by the bad publicity over Huawei’s alleged (and unproven) links to the Chinese Communist Party, or whether Huawei is being unfairly prevented from establishing a foothold in America (where the P7 won’t even by available, except as a haphazard import).
It’s a shame, really, because Huawei is part of a confident cluster of Chinese companies (including MediaTek, Oppo and of course Motorola’s new owner, Lenovo) that genuinely are able to offer better value to Western consumers, without the need for American or Korean middle-men, so long as they can get their products and pricing just right.

MOBILE MANAGEMENT: TECHNIEL'S EXPERT GUIDE

More and more executives and CIOs have realized that mobile has moved beyond a messaging platform to a multifaceted platform for application, Web, and messaging usage -- which means they're bringing in new generations of devices from Apple, Google's partners, and others. And now iPads are charging into businesses, with interest now rising in Android tablets.
For IT, that means a whole new world to manage. Different devices have very different capabilities for security and remote management, and the email platform you use also affects how you can secure and manage the mobile devices you let into your organization. Even though Apple has added significant management capabilities to its iOS, IT can't just say thanks and call it a day -- there's significant work to be done in determining the appropriate security and management policies, then figuring out how to deploy and enforce them in the new heterogenous world of mobile devices.
"Mobile Device Management Deep Dive" PDF special report that explains the innate security capabilities of the key mobile platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone ), surveys the major mobile device management vendors' main areas of focus, explains the notions of applications management, and explains how to embrace the "bring your own device" movement without compromising enterprise needs, and provides a set of recommended policies to use as a starting point for creating your own

SAMSUNG REORGANIZES AFTER GALAXY S5 DESIGN GETS SLAMMED

Samsung has appointed a new head of its design team less than a month after the Galaxy S5 went on sale, a change that hints the company has finally taken years of negative feedback to heart.   The hardware on Samsung's Galaxy S line of smartphones has helped make the company the largest manufacturer in the world, but the design and extensive use of plastic has come under fire again and again.
"A key element is that the design of the Galaxy S5 falls short. It's plastic, looks like every other Samsung handset and doesn't feel premium," PC Advisor said when it reviewed the Galaxy S5 a couple of weeks ago.     On Thursday, Samsung said vice president Min-hyouk Lee had been promoted to head of design team within the Mobile Communications Business unit. It's a change that will allow his predecessor, Dong-Hoon Chang, to focus more on his role as head of the design strategy team, which is responsible for long-term design strategy across all of the Samsung Electronics' businesses.
On the surface it might not seem like a big change, but because of Samsung's highly centralized structure it means more than a similar shuffle at another company would, according to Nick Spencer, senior practice director at ABI Research.
"The interesting thing about Samsung is that while the company is a huge conglomerate, it is still family run, in a way. These kinds of changes are made centrally, and when they make them it is a big deal," Spencer said.
The change signals that Samsung has finally taken some of the negative feedback directed at the Galaxy S family onboard.
"The design has been consistently commented on for the last two or three years, especially the lack of high-end materials. The Galaxy S family is still successful, so Samsung must be doing something right. But the fact is that the design doesn't have a quality feel," Spencer said.
Samsung's new design head needs to develop a more distinct design language and pick better materials, according to Spencer.
Expensive smartphones used to be differentiated with bigger screen sizes, but these days a growing number vendors are offering more affordable models with 5-inch or bigger screens. Now, new smartphones like the HTC One M8 and Huawei's Ascend P7, which was introduced on Wednesday, are getting better materials to make them worth the extra investment.
The P7 is approximately €150 (US$200) cheaper than the Galaxy S5 without a contract in Europe, but still has a more premium look, which doesn't reflect well on Samsung.
Samsung is still the largest smartphone manufacturer by a wide margin, but the company isn't invincible. During the first quarter its market share fell year-on-year, while competitors such as Huawei Technologies and Lenovo increased their shares, according to reports from multiple market research companies.

THREE BEST HOAXES OF ALL TIME

                                                                           

                                                                             THE THREE BEST HOAXES OF ALL TIME



The art of the hoax is woefully underappreciated. Properly executed hoaxes can be creative, cautionary, and (ideally) funny. The Digital Age has muddied the waters, though. Online scams, viral marketing, and even late-night TV gags have blurred the distinctions between hoaxes, pranks, stunts, and outright criminal fraud – so blurred them, in fact, that one might need an expert to distinguish them from one another. Luckily, one such expert exists: Alex Boese, author and curator of The Museum of Hoaxes.According to Boese, a hoax is "a deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public."

                                                                             THE MECHANICAL TURK

The concept of automatons (mechanical men, basically) was hugely fashionable among the nerdy hipster set in the 18th century. In 1770, Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled his Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton that the inventor claimed could think, plan, reason, and defeat all comers in the sacred game of chess. For more than 50 years, The Turk toured Europe and America, baffling chess professionals and VIPs like Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon I. But the Mechanical Turk was no Deep Blue, the IBM computer that would defeat world champion Garry Kasparov some 200 years later. The ruse was eventually revealed by a subsequent owner: The Turk used old stage magic tricks and a sliding seat to conceal the human chess player hidden within.

                                                                               KEELY'S ETHERIC ENGINE

History is packed with hustlers and con men who have pitched dubious alternative energy schemes, often perpetual motion machines based on dubious pseudo-science. One of the most audacious was proposed by John Keely, an American inventor -- we use the term lightly -- who debuted his "hydro-pneumatic multiplicator" in 1874. Keely fooled scientists, journalists, and a long list of wealthy patrons until his death in 1898. The following year, a newspaper investigation found that his laboratory was rigged with an ingenious system of concealed belts and tubes, powered by a secret air compression motor hidden two stories below.