Blog

Reports of an 80,000 BlackBerry order from the U.S. Department of Defense made the rounds earlier this week, driving up BlackBerry(s bbry) shares by 34 percent. Good news for the beleaguered handset maker, no? There’s only one problem. The DoD made no such purchase. Instead, the figure was assumed to be a new order when the DoD actually referenced the 80,000 BlackBerry handsets it already supports, according to a DoD statement provided to The Verge on Thursday. In BlackBerry’s defense, it didn’t put out a press release on the alleged large handset order. The company did recently announce the sale of 1,000 handsets to DATEV in Europe.

A startup with ambitious plans to build large battery banks next to solar and wind farms across the world, has now run out of cash and has filed for bankruptcy. Xtreme Power, founded in 2006 and based in Kyle, Texas, is also using the bankruptcy filing as an attempt to sell the company.

According to the bankruptcy filing, Xtreme Power has just $34,000 in cash in the bank at this point, and $10 million in debts. Some of the creditors listed include Arnel Investments, Spring Ventures in San Francisco, Horizon Batteries, which holds the license for the batteries Xtreme Power used, and the Department of Energy, which gave Xtreme Power a grant from the 1603 cash grant program. The company was funded by Sail Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners, among other investors.

At one point a couple years ago Xtreme Power told us it had been seeking financing

Maybe it’s because my head’s in the cloud so much, but I view IBM’s planned divestiture of its server business as a direct response to the growing threat it sees from Amazon(s amzn). Simplistic, yes, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

Here’s how AWS drove (or at the very least helped drive) IBM(s ibm) to act:

1. In the past 3 years AWS emerged, like an aircraft carrier out of the fog, as a prodigious competitor to IBM in IT services. The fact that AWS won the CIA cloud contract over IBM despite quoting a higher price, crystallized that for anyone who had doubts
2. Buying trends among Amazon and its webscale cousins Facebook(s fb), Google(s goog), Yahoo(s yhoo) pulled the rug out from under brand-name X86 server makers. These companies thirst for simple, cheap hardware and increasingly they either design their own boxes to be built by white-box providers like Quanta…

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is planning to release two new iPhones this year, each with a display bigger than the 4-inch iPhone 5s.

From the report, which cites people familiar with the matter:

“The people said Apple plans an iPhone model with a screen larger than 4½ inches measured diagonally, and a second version with a display bigger than 5 inches.”

This rumor isn’t anything new. We’ve been hearing about a bigger iPhone since as early as last summer. What surprises me is just how persistent the rumor continue to be.

The report also mentions that both new phones will feature the same aluminum design as the iPhone 5s. Apparently Apple is planning to scrap the plastic body used for the iPhone 5c in any upcoming phone designs, which would back up rumors of weaker than expected iPhone 5c sales. Finally, the report says that the…

America’s false sense of reality is really put under a microscope here.

Moments after Richard Sherman caused a game-winning interception that sent his team to the Super Bowl he did something as equally amazing…He broke the internet! Memes! Vines! Facebook posts! Tweets! Everywhere you looked Richard Sherman’s Predator-like face was all over the internet. Thankfully, social media outlets are composed of educated, level-headed, understanding, non-racist individuals so nothing got out of hand.

Wait. My mistake. Social media has turned into the wild west. Anything goes on the inter-web. You can let go of your brooding racism. There’s no need for you to bite your jealous tongue. Who cares if you are uninformed about a situation or individual? You post your bias-opinion as fast as possible. Hurry! The faster you make a snarky joke or start a race debate the better you will feel about yourself. It is a beautiful age…