A prominent Wall Street hedge fund manager is calling for Sony to spin off some of its holdings in order to focus on its core electronics business. Daniel S. Loeb, whose Third Point fund owns one of the largest stakes in the company at 6.5 percent, is pushing for Sony to sell off part of Sony Entertainment, the company’s movie and music business, as well as Sony’s 60 percent stake in Sony Financial, including its profitable insurance business. Loeb personally delivered the advice to Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai in the form of a letter, reports The New York Times.

Loeb is known for making waves, blowing the whistle on former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s false claims to having earned a computer science degree, and luring Yahoo CEO Marissa...

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The Guardian this week published a fascinating in-depth report on the village of Newtok — a remote Alaskan community that, because of climate change, will likely be underwater within the next few years. Experts say it could be just four years before rising sea levels swallow Newtok, and although the community has already agreed to relocate to higher ground, a shortage of money and resources has precluded them from taking action. Meanwhile, erratic climate and weather patterns have convinced locals of the threat that global warming poses. "It's changing a lot," Newtok resident Nathan Tom said. "It's real, global warming, it's real."

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There’s consolidation afoot in the peer-to-peer car rental space. San Francisco-based RelayRides, which launched about five years ago and is now available nationwide, has gobbled up fledgling competitor Wheelz. That includes all the assets, IP, and about 10 employees from Wheelz, which launched about a year-and-a-half ago.

The acquisition was announced as RelayRides is seeing record growth in its peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace. It now has cars in more than 1,500 cities across the U.S. since launching nationally a year ago. Over that time, it’s also seen rental reservation hours and active listings both increase more than 500 percent.

But RelayRides believes that it can accelerate that growth by bringing on the assets and the technical expertise of the Wheelz team. Unlike RelayRides, which enables car owners to list their cars and hand off keys, Wheelz requires that they install a piece of hardware into their cars. Its proprietary DriveBox technology would then enable renters to unlock the vehicles and get access to them without having to meet owners to hand off keys.

On the one hand, that gave users more instant access to Wheelz’s inventory of cars. On the other hand, it slowed down the startup’s ability to expand into new markets. At the time of the acquisition, Wheelz was available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and on some university campuses in California.

For Wheelz, the combination with RelayRides will enable it to bring its technology and user experience to more renters around the country. According to RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad, Wheelz has been working on lower-cost hardware that would make DriveBox technology more widely available to RelayRides listers.

That will enable RelayRides to better reach its most passionate users. Haddad, who was formerly an executive at eBay and Shopping.com, compared RelayRides’ dependence on so-called “super users” to his days at eBay, where about 5 percent of users made up about half of all revenues.

In the same way, RelayRides will be able to leverage Wheelz hardware to facilitate rentals from its own super users. By looking at its inventory of cars and seeing which car owners are most active, RelayRides will be able to pick which are likely to make the most out of that hardware investment. Wheelz founder and CEO Jeff Miller also said there could be an opportunity to have car owners pay for their own equipment.

Either way, the idea is to make car sharing a more seamless experience for both car owners and renters. Installing Wheelz hardware is one way that RelayRides does this. Another way that it’s simplified the rental process is through a partnership with GM and OnStar to let renters gain access to cars by connecting with the automaker’s on-board computer and unlock doors, control and track the vehicles that have been rented.

Over the next several years, Miller expects more OEMs to provide access through OnStar-like integrations. In the meantime, though, the Wheelz hardware will make car sharing a lot more accessible to users who don’t have cars produced by GM or other manufacturers with similar technology.

Wheelz had raised $13.7 million ahead of its launch in San Francisco and L.A. last year. RelayRides, meanwhile, has raised a total of $13 million since being founded in 2008.

While they wouldn’t really disclose the terms of the deal, executives said that Wheelz investors — such as Zipcar and Fontinalis Partners — would become shareholders in the combined entity. As part of the acquisition, RelayRides receive all assets and IP from Wheelz, and 10 employees will be joining the team. Wheelz founder Miller will remain on through the transition, and afterward will serve as an advisor and shareholder in the combined company.

According to NASA, which announced the safe arrival on its Google+, Expedition 35′s crew landed in a remote area located outside of the tongue-twister of a city, Dzhezkazgan, after having spent nearly half a year on the International Space Station. The crew, listed from left to right in the image above, is: Commander Chris Hadfield from Canada, Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko from Russia, and Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn of NASA.

Hadfield, in particular, has become quite the popular individual, having actively engaged with an on-Earth audience multiple times from his position above, such as back in April when he answered a question on camera about what happens when wringing a wet washcloth. Just watching the process of spraying the water into the cloth is fascinating enough, not to mention seeing the water cling to the cloth and run down his hands.

While that demonstration, along with the others, his social media presence, Reddit AMA, and more have all been entertaining, we’d argue nothing tops his final stand yesterday when he bade farewell to the ISS by singing David Bowie’s Space Oddity. The video shows some candid shots of our blue planet out the windows, as well as a what it looks like to wield a guitar in a gravity-free environment.

On May 10, two astronauts aboard the ISS were forced to take a spacewalk to repair an ammonia coolant leak that had developed in the space station, a particularly dangerous reality given that the station is powered by the coolant. Fortunately, all ended well, with Tom Marhsburn and Chris Cassidy replacing a pump controller over the course of 5.5 hours.

SOURCE: NASA (G+)

One of the most nervewracking and tedious parts of developing a Web site is making sure that it is safe from data theft and other security breaches. Taipei-based startup Lucent Sky‘s mission is to make cyber security easier for developers. The company says its software CLEAR is the first commercially available program for automatic application vulnerability mitigation.

Now available in a hardware version for enterprise use and a developer edition through the company’s Web site, CLEAR helps ensure the security of Web sites by looking for weaknesses in its coding and then presenting developers with secured source code that is ready for deployment.

“The difference between what we do and what other Web securities tools do is that we work with source code. We upload it to a cloud or locally deployed server and scan it to automatically detect and mitigate vulnerabilities,” says Melinda Jacobs, Lucent Sky’s operations director. “A lot of other solutions do penetration testing so they don’t have access to the backend of the Web site.”

The hardware version of Lucent Sky CLEAR Enterprise Edition can automatically secure Web applications at a rate of up to 200 vulnerabilities per second. The developer edition of Lucent Sky CLEAR, which is available for sale to developers working individually or within organizations, checks for cross-site scripting and privacy violations, which Lucent Sky says accounts for 90 percent of flaws in most Web sites.

The company was founded in January 2012 by Jim Liu and Scott Wu, both of whom previously worked as cyber security consultants. Liu began developing CLEAR when he repeatedly encountered the same vulnerabilities in clients’ Web sites. Originally meant to help Liu speed up the process of identifying flaws in source code, Lucent Sky CLEAR was made available for sale in March 2012. Lucent Sky has since worked with clients including departments of Taiwan’s military and government, a Fortune Global 500 company and several firms within the financial industry.

“We found it to be particularly useful for banks because they have a large amount of data that is rapidly updating and there are a lot of consumer security concerns with online banking that make it a good fit for automatic vulnerability mitigation software like CLEAR,” says Jacobs.

The company received seed funding from Startup Labs and Yushan Ventures and is currently raising its Series A.

Google didn’t have much of anything else to say on the matter, simply repeating the same rhetoric it gives every time about the actual roll out in the city not coming for awhile while it plans, engineers, and establishes its network in the city. There’s no reason to believe the pricing or service will be different than other locations where it is available and is slated for availability in the future.

On May 8, Google made a similar announcement, revealing that Grandview, Missouri had been added to the list where its service was approved and would be added at a future date. The same goes for Swanee, Kansas, which was announced on May 3, adding it to the list that already included Mission Woods, Olathe, and Westwood/Westwood Hills.

Such announcements have been slightly smoother rolling than the revelation that Google Fiber was heading for Provo, Utah, revealed back in April. Unlike other areas set to get the service, Google will be using an established fiber network rather than installing its own. The deal was set to go through for an initial purchase price of $1, which eventually was okay’d alongside a variety of other requirements.

While Google’s service has been getting a lot of attention, it isn’t the only gigabit Internet offering out there. In Japan, for example, Sony is offering residents in Tokyo 2Gbps service for the equivalent of about $50 monthly. ISPs in the US have been ramping up their offerings as a response to Fiber, such as Vermont’s gigabit service priced at $35 monthly.

SOURCE: Google Fiber Blog

Holy crap. You know in Grand Theft Auto when you're trying to destroy everything—cars, homes, the entire street—in your way while racking up as many police officers on your tail just for giggles? That actually happened in real life. A 51-year-old man went on a ridiculous rampage on his bulldozer destroying four homes, smashing cars and cutting power to thousands of people.

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The key play came with 23 seconds left in OT and the Grizzlies leading 100-97. OKC had the ball and needed either a three-pointer or a quick score.

Derek Fisher — the veteran who has played in countless playoffs games over the last decade — was in-bounding the ball. Instead of simply finding a guard in the backcourt, Fisher tried a risky pass to Kevin Martin on the low block.

Martin didn't came as far toward the perimeter as Fisher expected, Fisher threw the pass anyway, and Memphis guard Tony Allen took one step into the passing lane and grabbed the game-winning steal.

Massive error for Fisher, massive loss for OKC:

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Relations between those who build mobile apps and their customers are getting a leg up today with Google’s announcement that all developers will now be able to reply to user reviews in the Play store. The company made the announcement on the Android Developers blog, discussing best practices like identifying and prioritizing bugs based on user impact and getting ideas for new improvements and features. The ability to respond to user reviews first started rolling out nearly a year ago, but now appears to finally be complete, following a false start in January.

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The game first came out in 1976, offering players a blue paddle and gray ball with which they would slowly destroy multiple brick layers. Such is the same in Google’s version of the game, with one small difference (playing it on a modern device aside) – the bricks are especially small thumbnail versions of the Google Image results that show up upon searching for “Atari Breakout,” the same search that pulls up the game. If it doesn’t show up for you immediately, be patient – it will.

Not surprisingly, you get a chance to pit your brick-shattering skills against other Google users, with a Google+ “Share Your Score” link being offered at the end of your game. There’s audio just like you’d find with the original game, as well as the ability to pause, which helps guarantee that your procrastination will hit a whole new score of its own.

This nicely augments the Pong game iOS users were blessed with back on November 29 via Atari, which released the free app as a way to celebrate its fourth decade. Of course, quite a few Pong games were already available for iOS users, but none had the honor of being titled “official.” That release was in addition to a contest for an Xbox 360 with an integrated LCD made to look like an Atari console.

This isn’t the first time Google has recreated a classic game online. Back in 2010, for example, the Internet giant celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pacman with an in-logo game complete with a two-player mode, audio, and all the little yellow dots you could eat. Even better, the game featured a “coin slot” via a transformation of the I’m Feeling Lucky button into an Insert Coin button.

SOURCE: Tech Radar