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Google is the latest suitor to be reportedly circling around social sat-nav smartphone app Waze. Bloomberg reports ‘people familiar with the matter’ who say Mountain View is considering an acquisition, and that Waze is “fielding expressions of interest from multiple parties and is seeking more than $1 billion”. However sources contacted by TechCrunch have poured cold water on the Google rumour.

We’ve reached out to Google and Waze but at the time of writing neither company could be reached for comment.

Earlier this month we covered reports that Facebook was sniffing around the mapping and traffic service, with a view to ramping up its mobile efforts. Meanwhile Apple has also previously been linked with a Waze buy – having had its own highly public problems with maps. Google has also previously been rumoured to be interested, as has Microsoft. So that’s the full complement of tech giants all apparently eyeing up the same crowdsourced traffic startup.

Waze was founded in 2007 and has raised some $67 million in VC funding from backers including Kleiner Perkins, BlueRun Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, and Li Ka-shing, according to Crunchbase. In February it announced it had grown to 40 million registered users, some of whom it picked up during Apple’s mapgate troubles. Waze has offices in the U.S. and Israel — the latter being where its R&D is based.

A key blocker for any Waze acquisition has been apparent investor conflict over the terms of any deal, with questions about whether Waze would move  fully to the U.S. or keep R&D in Israel causing disagreements. There has also been investor conflict about whether to accept a lower, mostly cash offer or a higher offer comprised of more shares, according to our sources. Rumours of big tech suitors like Google sniffing around could also be a way for Waze investors to try to leverage more out of an acquisition — by making other suitors, such as Facebook (whose up to $1 billion interest in Waze we have previously confirmed), up their own offers.

Bloomberg’s sources claim Google and “other large tech companies” — but not Apple — have approached Waze about a possible acquisition since its talks with Facebook become public. However they also say none of the bidders is close to clinching a deal, and add that the talks may fall apart or Waze may walk away and seek more VC funding to continue expanding its mapping program. So really that’s saying everything is still to play for and any outcome is possible at this point.

To our ear, the most plausible-sounding scenario here is that investors are trying to leverage more out of a possible Facebook acquisition of Waze. Especially because multiple credible sources contacted by TechCrunch have told us that the Google acquisition rumour is not at all true.

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When Intel launched Haswell, it promised a generational leap in battery life, and now the chip giant's talking numbers to back that up. Architecture Group VP Rani Borkar said that laptops packing the chipset should get 50 percent more battery life than current Ivy Bridge models and go up to 20 times longer in standby or idle mode -- without any cost to performance. He said that lower power requirements will be one factor in the drop in consumption, but an all-new architecture including a power management chip will also help reduce the energy draw. We'll have to see whether that encouraging piece of news will help the moribund PC notebook market pick up lost ground to tablets, or whether companies will just keep blurring the line.

Filed under: Laptops, Intel

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Source: Computerworld

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It appears Yahoo-owned Flickr has suffered the first significant outage after its major revamp.

People online are reporting the site going down, with some tweets marked as early as 5:30PM PDT, says TNW. That was about six hours ago, at time of writing.

Flickr also tweeted its acknowledgement of the site going down, about two hours ago.

Experiencing slowness or having trouble accessing the site? We’re on it, and are working to fix the issue as quickly as possible. #badpanda

— Flickr (@Flickr) May 24, 2013

TNW reported the site flashing the #badpanda image when it went down, but I only managed to see it once. The site was otherwise completely unresponsive the other times I tried loading it.

Flickr’s revamp, launched just four days ago, overhauled the photo site’s interface with large, high-res photos. This pairs with a recent update of Flickr’s apps on both iOS and Android. Flickr has said that the updated iOS app yielded 25 percent more uploads.

The additional load placed on Flickr’s systems by all the high-res flood coming in is likely to have taken its servers down. Flickr has about 89 million users. The new revamp bumped up each user’s upload quota to a whopping 1Tb. Not everyone’s going to be rushing to reach the quota, but it’s undoubtedly revived a lot of interest from users who have fallen by the wayside in recent years.

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It's simple: the numbers don't lie. Clearly aware of the many, many hours viewers are squeezing out of their tablets, the BBC has, for the better, made its iPlayer for Android more friendly with 10-inch models. What this means is folks using the app will no longer have to rely on a shortcut to the website, with the BBC iPlayer now offering native support for those larger Android slates. The changelog also notes that there are some (undisclosed) tweaks to the UI on handsets and 7-inch tablets, but mum's the word on what the changes were exactly. Either way, we're sure owners of, say, a Nexus 10 will be happy to hear they'll now need less steps while trying to catch their favorite shows.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Tablets, Software

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Via: Android Police

Source: Google Play

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