Posts in January 13, 2014

Google is acquiring Nest, the smart-home appliance maker that is behind the Nest Thermostat and the Nest Protect smoke detector, for a reported $3.2 billion in cash.


iPod co-creator Tony Fadell is the co-founder of the company alongside another former Apple employee, Matt Rogers. Nest tweeted that it will operate independent of Google.

Big news! @Google acquiring Nest to help fulfill our goal of reinventing unloved home products. Nest will stay Nest. http://t.co/0L8hNBhmYc

— Nest (@nest) January 13, 2014

Larry Page, CEO of Google, said: "Nest's founders, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, have built a tremendous team that we are excited to welcome into the Google family. They're already delivering amazing products you can buy right now--thermostats that save energy and smoke/CO alarms that can help keep your family safe. We are excited to bring great experiences to more homes in more countries and fulfill their dreams!"

According to Re/code, Nest has raised more than $80 million in venture funding and was scheduled to close another $150 million round soon.


Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• SimCity Getting Offline Mode Nearly a Year After Launch
• Griffin and ShopKeep POS Announce 'ShopKeep -- For more information read the original article here.

Back in 2010, Apple signed an exclusive agreement with Caltech spinoff Liquidmetal Technologies, providing Apple with the rights to use Liquidmetal's advanced metal alloys for consumer electronics purposes. Liquidmetal's amorphous metal alloys or bulk metallic glasses posses a number of characteristic properties such as high strength and corrosion resistance while remaining relatively light and able to be cast into a variety of forms.

Apple quietly tested Liquidmetal's alloys in the SIM card eject tool for the iPhone 3G, but the materials have otherwise not been confirmed to have appeared in any other Apple products, as one of alloys' inventors noted in 2012 that their use as major design materials was still several years in the future.

Evidence of Apple's continued interest with Liquidmetal alloys has surfaced a number of times over the past several years, including in a granted patent from July covering a process for mass producing thin sheets of the Liquidmetal alloys and a series of technical patent applications published in November describing methods of working with the alloys to create products.

A number of patent applications addressing additional innovations with Liquidmetal alloys have been published since that time, -- For more information read the original article here.

Accessory-maker Griffin and ShopKeep have announced ShopKeep Mobile, a new point-of-sale case for the iPod touch. The case uses Griffin's Olli hardware platform, but is specifically design to be used with ShopKeep's POS app. Built into the Mobile are a credit card reader and a barcode scanner; the unit can also connect to receipt printers....






-- For more information read the original article here.

Facebook has acquired a social networking startup backed by the creators of Twitter. The nine-person team behind Branch Media, creators of the Branch conversation service and the iOS link-sharing app Potluck, has confirmed the acquisition and will form a new Facebook Conversations group, though the entire team will remain in New York City instead of relocating to Facebook's headquarters in California....






-- For more information read the original article here.