Autor: Renata Nunes Rodrigues Gama

If you’ve been following the news about the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and the resulting standoff between police and crowds of protesters and mourners, you know that Twitter has played a key role in spreading the news of the unrest (along with YouTube, Instagram and other social platforms). Twitter’s head of data science Simon Rogers pulled all of the geo-tagged tweets that mentioned Ferguson and used the CartoDB tool to create an interactive map that shows how awareness of the violence in Ferguson spread throughout the network.

In this video I demonstrate the setup and UI of Windows Whistler build 2416 – the second post-Beta 1 build of Whistler – which would eventually evolve into Windows XP. This build was first released to testers on 16th January 2001 and was one of four post-Beta 1, pre-Beta 2 builds.

Research firm IDC released its quarterly smartphone sales data on Thursday, estimating that Android and iOS phones combined for 96.4 percent of the phones shipped last quarter. That leaves just a meager 3.3 percent of the market for Microsoft’s Windows Phones as well as handsets that run BlackBerry or some other software. Windows Phone is the clear third horse in this race but even so, it’s market share declined by nearly 10 percent in the past year.

That’s a bit concerning since the smartphone market as a whole continues to grow. Unfortunately for [company]Microsoft[/company], it’s growing its market share slower than the overall market is expanding. [company]Apple[/company] lost share as well — dropping to 11.7 percent share in the second quarter of this year compared to 13 percent a year ago. There’s a difference though: Apple’s sales actually increased from the year ago period while Microsoft’s fell, based on IDC’s data…

To this point, the 50 Cent-sponsored SMS Audio could have charitably been described as an also-ran in the branded headphones space that Beats Electronics defined. But a new pair of earbuds with built-in biometric sensors could be changing the company’s fortunes.

SMS Audio, in cooperation with [company]Intel[/company], announced the BioSport In-Ear Headphones on Thursday. It’s a product that marks one of the first times a sensor-based wearable device has been distributed and designed with the same brand-first approach that made Beats into a billion dollar company.

The SMS BioSport earbuds not only pump music but also can track physical activity with an optical light sensor built into the earbud. The earbuds can monitor heart rate, sending that data to the Runkeeper phone app, with potentially more supported apps in the future.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the BioSport earbuds are the commercial version of the prototype smart earbuds Intel debuted at CES. The optical sensor technology used…

Apple’s trademarked iBeacon protocol was developed for iOS devices, but it actually works equally well with Android devices running the appropriate software. In fact, according to a new study by marketing firm Aislelabs, Android phones may prove to be superior devices for searching and connecting to iBeacons, at least as far as battery life is concerned.

A few months ago, marketing firm Aislelabs published a study examining the effects of iBeacons on battery drain with Android handsets. This new report examines the differences between iBeacon-driven battery drain on iOS and Android.

Any device with Bluetooth Low Energy support can theoretically connect to a beacon using a variety of protocols, such as the open-source Altbeacon, but most beacons currently conform to Apple’s proprietary iBeacon specification, which was described in developer tools that were released with iOS 7. Android developers were able to adapt Apple’s protocol to develop apps and libraries for other platforms.

The Aislelabs…