Joining the race to build the next generation of “smart” watches, Sony Electronics earlier today announced its latest entrant at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai.

Sony’s Smart Watch 2, like the company’s previous watch, is meant to interact with and display notifications from a smartphone, alerting wearers to phone calls, messages and email. It will also work with social media and fitness apps to provide updates from those arenas.

But the new device has a larger, higher-resolution touchscreen than its predecessor. In addition to Bluetooth connectivity, it will offer one-tap pairing through NFC (most of Sony’s high-end hardware, like the Xperia Z and the Xperia Tablet Z, includes NFC, so it’s not a huge surprise that the company would incorporate this technology). Sony promises the watch will have extended Android compatibility, working with devices beyond Sony’s Xperia smartphone line, and longer-lasting battery life of three to four days with typical usage.

Lastly! If you have a newer Walkman — yes, they still exist — the new Sony watch will act as a remote for that device.

Sony in recent days has been hinting at its plans for a new, connected wearable device, tweeting “tick-tock” from the official Sony Xperia account, along with an image of a watch.

The product’s name might lead consumers to believe that this is Sony’s second smart-watch product, but it’s actually the Japanese electronic giant’s third in the category. Sony’s first smart watch came out in 2007, and about a year ago, Sony introduced another — which I found to be less than intuitive in my review of the device.

Smart watches in recent months have become a hot, though still a rather elusive, topic in consumer technology. Tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft and Samsung are reported to be working on smart, wearable devices that would possibly sync up with users’ smartphones to receive notifications and offer app-like functions from the wrist.

As I mentioned, this type of wearable has been attempted before — by companies like Microsoft and Sony — with modest or minimal success. Device-makers still grapple with battery-life limitations in such a small form factor, and weigh different approaches to the same device: Whether it should be a complement to the smartphone, its own two-way communicator, a health monitor or all of the above.

For now, Sony is categorizing this as a “global” announcement, which means we still don’t know when this watch will come to the U.S. market. Sony also isn’t naming its price.

We do know, however, the smart watch will be available around the world starting in September of this year.

It looks like it may be back to the drawing board for Google on the European competitive front: hundreds of publishers and publishing trade associations today are coming out in force to ask the European Commission and its Vice President Joaquín Almunia to “reject outright” Google’s draft remedies, which Google suggested to rebalance competition in search and other online products where it is dominant in the region. The move, by the European Publishers’ Council, comes on the same day that other would-be Google competitors, including online mapping and travel companies, as well as the Fairsearch consortium, are also expected to call for much deeper scrutiny of Google and rejection of its proposals.

Google originally published its draft remedies on April 25, which included suggestions for how it would offer competitors some concessions such as labelling Google’s own links more clearly (a more detailed list of the remedies Google proposed is below). Google competitors were already stirring with negative responses early on, but Almunia, who oversees antitrust and other competition issues, gave them had until June 27 to respond formally. What’s coming out today appears to be a concerted effort to coordinate those negative reponses — claiming Google’s suggestions do not go far enough — for maximum effect.

We will be listening into the Fairsearch-led press conference later today and will update the post with more as we learn it.

The EPC includes big names like the FT, News International, Guardian Media Group, Axel Springer, Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier, but also more regional players. Among those coming out against Google, for example, is Dr. Hubert Burda, president of the German magazine publishers’ association VDZ. He echoes the basic line that Google needs to go back to the drawing board.

“If Google does not come up with fundamentally improved proposals very soon, we call on the Commission to use its full legal powers, including an immediate Statement of Objections with effective remedies,” he said in a statement. “Fair and non-discriminatory search with equal criteria for all websites is an essential prerequisite for the prosperous development of the European media and technology sector.”

As we reported before, here are the proposals as Google has made them to date:

• label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,
• clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and
• display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users;
• offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,
• offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,
• provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,
• no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and
• no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

It looks like the approach that competitors are taking is to take each of these suggestions, line by line, and show how they are not feasible. For example, on the suggestion on opting out from specialized searches (number three in the list below), the publishers’ group responds: “In other words, ‘if you don’t want us to steal your content, you need to make sure we can’t find it.’ An opt out from a 90% dominant player means of course that you become invisible to readers and is no option at all.”

We are reaching out to all the parties, including Google, for further comment.

Facebook has been quietly working on a service, internally called Reader, that displays content from Facebook users and publishers in a new visual format tailored for mobile devices. The project, which the company has been developing for more than a year, is designed to showcase news content in particular. Recent versions of Reader resemble Flipboard, a smartphone and tablet app that aggregates stories from multiple sources and lets users swipe to flip through articles, said people with knowledge of the project.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Obama government has long offered FISA courts as the proof that whatever NSA has been doing is legal. However, the procedures observed by the FISA courts have just been made public, showing that these procedures have gaping loopholes. For instance, if a U.S. user browses on Tor, he is no longer considered a U.S. citizen and thus, information about him will be retained.

According to the procedures defined by FISA courts, the NSA is not allowed to retain information on any U.S. citizen. However, that is an empty statement. There are a bulk load of ‘exceptions’ which virtually apply to every other user and using those exceptions, NSA can effectively retain information on most U.S. citizens.

One example is that of Tor. According to the top secret rules that NSA observes, it treats any anonymous user as a non-U.S. citizen. For instance, if you are sending an encrypted email or make use of an anonymity tool such as Tor, the NSA would automatically register you as a non-U.S. citizen and will have all the freedom of gathering your data and information about you.

In other words, if you try to keep your online communications anonymous, that only highlights you on the NSA radar and you can expect to be more actively monitored as a result.

Not only that, if the communications of a U.S. citizen indicate that they are important for national security, these communications can be accessed and stored by NSA for years. Naturally, who gets to define ‘national security’ is ambiguous and under the cover of such terms, NSA effectively targets non-US as well as US citizens without any repercussions whatsoever.

At E3 last week, Microsoft packed a basketball arena full of journalists and fans to talk about its next-gen console, the Xbox One. So, today’s announcement that the company is reversing its DRM policies for the One was a bit puzzling. Why couldn’t it say this then?

Apparently, it was a very recent decision. Xbox Chief Product Officer Mark Whitten toldAllThingsD that the company had been listening to consumer feedback since the product’s unveiling in May, but that the E3 presentation was “the first time we had a chance to really lay out our program.”

“E3 was the first time when we felt like we’d had a chance to tell our complete story and have people see what they liked and what they didn’t like,” Whitten said.

Put another way: Despite all the non-gaming home media features baked into the Xbox One, Microsoft knows that gamers still butter its bread. That E3 presentation was actuallyless “complete” than the unveiling event because it was all about games, games, games.

Microsoft catered to gamers and ignored big features like the bundled Kinect and TV integration in its onstage E3 presentation, but the fans were still angry. Today’s announcement doesn’t make Redmond look good in the short term, but it cuts its losses before those fans have a chance to sway publishers’ minds or avoid the Xbox One on store shelves.

In other words, if this policy change had to happen at some point, it’s probably smarter for Microsoft to pull the trigger and take the hit now, rather than endangering the One’s launch by dawdling as the anti-DRM winds consistently blew in its face.

Whitten promised that both new DRM policies — the removal of online “check-ins” every 24 hours and the restrictions on physical disc sharing — will not change again. However, third-party developers will still have to choose for themselves if and how much their games will require constant Internet connectivity.

Interestingly, an anonymous (and unverified) forum post, allegedly by an Xbox engineer, predicted a policy change last week. Mandatory online check-ins, the supposed engineer wrote, were “the PoR (plan of record), but I expect it to change after the e3 clusterfuck.”

Microsoft previously declined to comment on the post.

As Google Reader’s death nears — seriously, July 1 is really soon – RSS reader Feedly is stepping up its game. Feedly, which hit 12 million users at the end of May (up from 4 million in March), announced Wednesday that it is now an independently operating cloud product — i.e., it’s no longer relying on Google Reader’s backend. (If you’re already using Feedly, here’s how to be prepared for the company to roll your account over to the new cloud.)

Feedly has also launched a web-only version, which it says was the top user-requested feature. Feedly already had Chrome and Safari apps, but this means that users of other browsers, like Internet Explorer, can access the service.

Finally, the fact that Feedly’s now operating in its own cloud means that developers can build apps for it. In its blog post, the company announced the first Feedly apps — including an IFTTT (if this then that) Feedly channel that lets you “connect your feedly account to 63 other services (including Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail, Pocket, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.),” social media management platform Sprout Social and RSS readers for various platforms from companies like Nextgen Reader, gNewsReader, Press and Newsify.

Meanwhile, we’re planning a guide to Google Reader alternatives to help you prepare for the switch, if you haven’t switched over to a new service already. If you were a die-hard Google Reader user, what product are you using now — or are you clinging to Google Reader until the bitter end? Let us know in the comments.

Google has added support for 18 new languages to its Google Drive web app suite. Besides Drive itself, this includes Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.

The newly supported languages are Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Chinese (Hong Kong), Estonian, French (Canada), Galician, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Malaysian, Nepali, Persian, Sinhalese, Spanish (Latin America), Swahili, Urdu and Zulu.

With these 18 languages, Google Drive now supports 65 languages in total.

To switch to a different language in Drive, users must click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, select "settings" and choose a new language under "general." To change the language in Google Drive for mobile, they must open their device's language settings.

Turns out that Microsoft’s Windows in the Classroom Surface Experience Project, a 10,000 Surface RT giveaway targeted at educators, was just the beginning of the company’s efforts to push its new tablet into the education market. The company is now offering significant discounts on Surface RT to schools around the world.

On Monday Microsoft said it would cut the price of the 32GB Surface RT in half for any school that purchases the tablet between June 17 and August 31, 2013. So for the next few months, K-12 and higher education institutions can purchase the $499 Surface RT for just $199, the $599 Surface RT with Touch Cover for $249, and the $629 Surface RT with Type Cover for $289. With no minimum order requirement, that’s a potentially compelling promotion for a tablet that ships with Office — particularly for schools dealing with death-by-a-thousand-cuts budget crisis.

According to Microsoft, the rationale for the discount is its “long tradition of offering special pricing to education customers,” and a “mission in education … to help schools, students and educators realize their full potential.”

But more practically, it’s an easy way to juice sales and whittle down inventory of a tablet that’s been slow to gain traction in the consumer market. According to research firm IDC, Microsoft shipped about 900,000 Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets in the first quarter of this year.

That’s a piddling amount. And if Microsoft’s first Surface RT production runs were as large as rumors say — three million to five million in the fourth quarter — then the company may be sitting on some serious inventory. That alone may be enough to justify offering a fire-sale discount like this to the education market, particularly if there are some next-generation Surface tablets in the pipeline.

But there’s likely another rationale at work here as well. To compete with a products like the iPad, Surface needs evangelists, people who will use it daily. People who will travel with it, take it to cafes and parks. People who will bring it out into the world. And the education market is potentially a wellspring of such folk.

If Microsoft’s new education promotion works as intended, we’ll see more Surface units in the wild. And that’s important. Because it’s hard to accept Surface as an alternative to the iPad or Galaxy Tab if you don’t see other people using it. Microsoft’s new Surface ads poking fun at Siri and the iPad are great. But they’re sticks and rags in a world in which you board a flight from San Francisco to New York and there are dozens of passengers with their faces obscured by iPads and Kindles and nary a Surface in site.

Marketing only goes so far. Microsoft desperately needs to put Surface in more hands. Maybe this new initiative will help it to do that.