Despite its oddball proportions the Samsung Galaxy Note phoneblet has manged to be quite popular among those with big hands (and pockets). The first million mark was passed in just two months after the launch of the device and now two months later since that event, the Galaxy Note has crossed the 2 million mark. Of course, these are not the actual sales but merely the number of devices...

Sprint, Boost and Virgin customers heading to the Android Market might notice something new called Wireless Accessibility (really just a rebranding of Mobile Accessibility). The app, designed by Code Factory, normally costs $99, but Sprint has struck a deal to offer it for free to its postpaid subscribers. The software delivers a simplified interface and provides audio prompts in synthesized Spanish and English to aid in navigation. The ability to have the phone announce what your finger is hovering over is particularly useful for the blind and those with poor eyesight who face even more obstacles in a world increasingly dominated by touchscreens. Check out the complete PR after the break and hit up the source to download Wireless Accessibility now.

Continue reading Sprint and Code Factory team up to deliver free Android accessibility app

Sprint and Code Factory team up to deliver free Android accessibility app originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Withings Baby Monitor has already been available in the UK for sometime now and recently made a splash over at the FCC. Now the iOS accessory is finally for sale here in the good ol' US-of-A, for the rather staggering price of $299. That's right, this sensor-packed web cam probably costs more than your handset. Then again, that $20 set of audio-only monitors you picked up at Walmart can't keep you abreast of the temperature and humidity in your child's sleeping quarters or let you watch your newborn sleep with the aid of a night vision mode. You can get the associated WithBaby app for free in the iTunes App Store now. The only question is, whether or not you love your baby enough to spend $300 on an iPhone accessory. We won't judge you either way. Check out the PR after the break.

Continue reading Withings Baby Monitor makes its official, expensive US debut

Withings Baby Monitor makes its official, expensive US debut originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you've been looking for an excuse to start using Chrome, Eric Schmidt is here to remind you, "it's free." Well, free, fast, secure and of course, on Android. After a quick demo of new Android Chrome app, Schmidt took the stage at Mobile World Congress to dream up a future of holographic projectors, driverless cars and a (Android powered) smartphone in every pocket. In short, Google's head honcho has technological expectations that make Back to the Future part II look modest. See the optimistic spiel for yourself up top, or hit the source link below to watch it on YouTube.

Eric Schmidt yaks it up at MWC, talks about the future like it's 1955 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dan Frommer tells you the only five things that matter at Mobile World Congress. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

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The Only 5 Things That Matter at Mobile World Congress

Beyond the distractions of tons of people, hundreds of booths and great panels, Dan Frommer reminds us that there are five things that we can't miss at this year's Mobile World Congress. One of those is that the show itself is amazing, but beyond that, there are some significant lessons to learn about Google, Apple, Samsung and telecoms. Read "The Only 5 Things That Matter at Mobile World Congress" to stay up to date on this year's upcoming mobile trends.

From our readers:

rawryree - That's the sad part. Until WebOS and Tizen get their act together, even the open source realm is pretty much monopolized by Android, allowing mediocrity to reign. The only reason Android is flourishing right now is that it's the only alternative to Apple.

(Yeah, there's Windows Phone 7, but it's not going Open Source any time soon so they're relegated to the third-party status like BlackBerry OS.)

More Must Read Stories:

Company Reactions to Facebook Timeline for Brands

This morning Facebook launched Timeline For Brands, which will give brand pages the same look, feel and functionality as the personal page Timelines the social network has been rolling out since September. (more)

FBI Searches Social Media for Insider Trading

The FBI launched Perfect Hedge Investigations, an effort to root out insider trading that includes monitoring of social networks.

The emphasis on social media and online communications platforms like Skype accents how complex law enforcement is becoming in the connected era: a simple phone tap or document subpoena is no longer enough to catch Gordon Gecko-like figures in an age where people have dozens of options for sending information to associates. (more)

WordPress For Musicians: CASH Music Wants to Open Source the Industry

We hear a lot about how dramatically the music industry is changing. And indeed, there are plenty of positive trends amidst the disruption. Music creation is easier than ever. So is music discovery. Streaming services offer a new model for the consumption of music on any device, in any location. Whether from within a startup or at Music Hack Day, developers are building new things everyday that will help shape the future of music. (more)

Marketing Your App: Find Market Weaknesses and Exploit Them

There are more smartphones in the hands of consumers than ever. The natural consequence of smartphone penetration is that more users are downloading more apps. It comes down to simple economic theory: as volume increases the cost of acquiring loyal users goes down. (more)

Art of Entrepreneurship: Who to Listen to and Why

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of customer development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why. (more)

How to Enhance Your Community Using Twitter, a New O'Reilly Book

Are you seemingly stuck with trying to suss out what to do with Twitter? Don't know how to get started? Does 140 characters seem daunting? Then you might want to take a look at a new O'Reilly book called Tweetsmart. (more)

Strata 2012: 3 Essential Skills of a Data Driven CEO

At the Strata Jumpstart session on Tuesday, Diego Saenz of Data Driven CEO made the case for three skills that are must haves for CEOs to become "data driven."

Much of Saenz's talk focused on one specific data-driven CEO: Robert McDonald of Procter and Gamble (P&G). (more)

RSA 2012: Former McAfee CTO Demonstrates Remote Access Exploits on WebKit

The company is called CrowdStrike (not "CloudStrike"), and most folks attending the NSA session featuring the company Wednesday morning had never heard of it. That wasn't why they were there. The man behind CrowdStrike is George Kurtz, the former chief technology officer of McAfee, and the man widely credited with bringing that company into the realm of seriousness. (more)

Why Video Games Are Good for Your Kids

In addition to understanding the many real concerns that today's parents have with video games, it's also worth considering the benefits and positive aspects that contemporary interactive entertainment choices provide. (more)

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All sorts of Android manufacturers have had to answer for the locked bootloaders in their devices, and now we've gotten a bit of insight into Verizon's view of the subject. It seems Big Red has responded to a formal complaint one customer filed with the FCC for the carrier's policy of allowing handsets with locked bootloaders on its network. Apparently, open bootloaders would allow users to make changes to their phones and use software that "could negatively impact how the phone connects with the network" and "the wireless experience for other customers." So, there you have it folks, Verizon encourages OEMs to lock down handsets to provide you with a better experience and top-notch customer service. Head on down to the source link to get a gander at the letter, and feel free to sound off on Verizon's consumer-friendly stance in the comments below.

Verizon lets loose its stance on locked bootloaders in letter to the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Joshua Schachter and his team of star developers at TastyLabs have begun work on a second project, an endorsement and people search engine called Skills.to. The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills.

The site is just beginning. "We have a lot to do, lots of ideas here and lots of places we can go next," Schachter told me by Twitter DM today. What's the core idea behind the site? "Search engine for people by property of the person," he says. "Portable reputation someday." There's certainly something refreshingly Delicious-like about it, the way you can navigate around the site by clicking any link and navigating by a few simple properties.

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Things like this have been tried before, from WeFollow to Endor.se to other related efforts (disclosure: I may just be building something related myself).

The TastyLabs team, which is full of rock-stars beyond just Schachter, first built a social-help site called Jig last Summer. That site works well and is fun to use, but it's not clear how much traction it's seen yet. That service launched an iPhone app earlier this month, a welcome move since Jig is particularly conducive to mobile use.

Schachter is best-known for building archetypal social bookmarking site Delicious, which he sold to Yahoo who didn't know how to love it. The site has since been sold again to a team led by the founders of YouTube, who may be even worse still at loving it. Delicious offered something simple on the surface - the ability to save links you wanted to read later - but surfaced far more interesting information when analyzed in aggregate.

That potential was never really realized but it's the same kind of thinking behind Jig, and I presume behind Skills.to. These are services that offer a clear and simple value proposition to the end user, but that can offer even more derivative value once patterns of use are analyzed and used as a platform to reform the user experience.

Lots of people have tried to create a discovery-through-endorsement website, but I'd be willing to bet that the TastyLabs team is going to bring some extra special insight and creativity to this seemingly simple space.

The portable identity angle that Schachter mentions could be the first example of that dynamic: imagine taking your Skills.to endorsements with you to sites around the web. That could prove useful in all kinds of circumstances - from establishing credibility to targeting content to powering recommended social and content connections.

Disclosure #2: Upon announcing internally that I was going to write about this, RWW Community Manager Robyn Tippins also disclosed that she has done some marketing consulting for TastyLabs. Lucky them, their team of smart people goes on and on.

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It's a couple of months since we spotted paperwork for a mysterious "PTK-450" device at the FCC and now Wacom has finally revealed the gadget that goes with the label. The Intuos5 tablet is available to purchase immediately in Small (4 x 6 inches), Medium (6 x 8) and Large (13 x 8) sizes, priced at

Two weeks ago, a security researcher set off an intentional firestorm over the discovery of data that seemed to indicate a flaw in the way cryptographic systems using "multiple secrets" (more than one key) protect a session. Since the report of that discovery was published, experts have claimed its author may have reached an unsubstantiated conclusion.

In any event, yesterday at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco, the man the report's very title praised for being "right" all along - cryptographic pioneer Whitfield "Whit" Diffie - told attendees that if a problem actually does exist, its solution may be deceptively simple.

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The problem, as the report "Ron was wrong, Whit was right" indicated, was that a substantial percentage of generated RSA keys contained common factors, thus rendering them ineffective or untrustworthy. "That seemed very serious to me, and sort of a phenomenon unique to RSA," Diffie told a packed keynote session. "And eventually I realized - and as I thought about it for a week, it's come to seem just as charming, but as a practical matter, much less serious than it did to start with, but something that probably does need a bit of addressing."

Diffie noted, with perhaps a hint of sarcasm, that the report's authors - who included Swiss professor Arjen K. Lenstra - avoided sensationalism by refraining from alleging that RSA keys had been "cracked." But he posited that what Lenstra's data could actually be indicating is a flaw in as few as one bad random number generators. "It seems unlikely that two independent prime random number generators are going to be producing the same 500-bit primes." He then expressed skepticism at the idea that one person's key could be compromised by someone else, simply by virtue of that person holding a key generated by a common factor - when that fact is not automatically made evident to either party.

"But the fact is, if you manufacture your key material correctly - that is to say, you're very careful about production testing of your own random numbers - this is simply not going to happen to you," he said. "If you adopt a random number generator that has whatever this fault is, you might get this effect."

To help improve the system, Diffie suggested it might be necessary to "out" the bad random number generators. "So my notion is, why don't we just publish hash codes for all of the primes selected to go into keys? As a matter of fact, you might publish hash codes for all of the keys that you've selected for any purpose... and then anytime you generate one, if you see that it's already in the database, you know two things immediately: One, you probably have the same random number generator they did. Two, it's no good."

At that point, Diffie turned to the fellow that Prof. Lenstra called "wrong," who was seated to his immediate left: Ron Rivest, the "R" in "RSA." "I think if I get a chance to referee the paper, I'll suggest a change of title," Rivest said. "You are often right, and I am sometimes wrong."

Switching back to serious mode, Rivest suggested that behind the firestorm in the report, there really wasn't much substance. He noted a much earlier work in 1996 by Adam Young and Moti Yung on cryptovirology - the intentional creation of deceptively secret and malicious software, often for extortion. A maliciously bad random prime number generator could theoretically be written, Rivest said, so that the public key may be computed in such a way to reveal the corresponding secret key to an adversary. "I don't think we've paid enough attention to that possibility," he remarked, noting the much more serious prospect for damage.

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It's easy to take jabs at Apple for sometimes being too "closed." From restrictions on mobile apps to the limited customizability of the iPad, it's a reputation that the company has earned even as it sells millions upon millions of devices. Even the original Macintosh infamously discouraged tinkerers by requiring specialized tools to physically open it up.

While it may frustrate many hobbyists and hackers, this approach is simply a cost of being one of Apple's millions of otherwise satisfied customers. It's rare that the company crosses over the line between closed and alarming. But that's exactly what just happened.

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The trouble started shortly after Seth Godin submitted his latest e-book to Apple's iBookstore. The marketing pundit and super-prolific author penned a book titled "Stop Stealing Dreams" and sent the finished copy along to Apple for approval. Much to his shock, the book was rejected.

The reason? An email from Apple identified "too many links to Amazon store" as the prime offense. Yes, simply linking to one of Apple's competitors is a bold and forbidden enough gesture to cause a book to get banned from its digital storefront.

As Godin himself outlines on PaidContent, this is pretty disturbing stuff. "What's inside the book shouldn't be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace," Godin writes. "If it's legal, they ought to let people read it if they choose to."

On the iPhone, Apple has certain obligations to the carriers and its own market dominance, which sometimes lead the company to forbid certain features from finding their way onto the iOS platform. In many cases, this is understandable.

But this is different from free mobile WiFi tethering or other app features that directly compete with Apple or the carriers. These are books. You know, the things that have historically been banned and burned when the powers that be don't appreciate their contents. Books contain ideas and information. You know, the stuff that's supposed to be much more fluid and accessible thanks to technology.

Of course, the book-burning analogy has its limitations. Anybody who really wants to read Godin's book can go get it from Amazon or in another format outside the iBookstore. But there's something unsettling about a dominant player in a information-centric marketplace such as this refusing to offer a piece of content strictly for competitive reasons. How would we feel if Barnes and Noble refused to carry a book about the history or corporate philosophy of Borders or Amazon? Or if they wouldn't order a book written by the CEO of a competitor, simply because doing so would inadvertently aid the enemy? Many people would rightly be freaked out by that.

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