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This article (by Emily Price) details a few interesting facts surrounding the social media giant 'Facebook', particularly around gaming. We are all familiar with social games, such as Mafia Wars and Farmville, and Facebook has been recently seeing most of their income from in-game advertisements and in-app purchases. Facebook has seen a 13% growth in gaming users since September 2011 (226 million - 251 million.) Facebook now has over 900 million users, and over 500 million users are utilizing Facebook via a mobile platform. Facebook says that games grow on the network in five different ways: App Center, Notifications, News Feed, Timeline, and games users have Bookmarked. 8 out of the 10 top iOS games have Facebook integrated, and the top two categories of games users play on Facebook are 'Simulation' and 'Games and Puzzles.' This relates to Portable Computing because Facebook has recently taken large steps to improve the user's mobile experience, understanding that most of their core audience is on smart devices. This relates to eLifestyle because we see these social networks like Facebook integrating gaming into the user's social feed, allowing them to spend more time on the site. This relates to Economics because as games become cheaper and more accesible, we see that most of the gaming market is taken by mobile games; no longer do we have to go to an electronics boutique to purchase a $60 triple-A game, when we can buy the $0.99 version of said game or another digitally. Mobile games are the consumer conscious choice because you get the most "bang for your buck." This relates to ICS20 because although most of us say that our time on Facebook is deteriorating, we still are entrenched in the social gaming environment; this is demonstrated by Facebook's 65 million user growth in 2012 alone.

Many of us think of Apple as this giant in electronics. Over the past decade, Apple set the market for smartphones, ultrabooks, and tablets. However, in the past couple of years, Apple has begun to fall off. Rather than being the huge 'juggernaut,' Apple has become a follower, forced to play catch up to other companies including Google and Amazon. Evidence of this are tied to the recent releases of the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7. Apple's response was the iPad Mini, when they realized consumers enjoyed smaller tablets. Before that was the iPhone 5, in response to people wanting larger phone displays. Apple Maps is a blunder that both iOS 6 users and Apple pays for. Apple was slow on the draw to join in on changes to the market specifications. Having controlled the market for the past decade with the popularization of smartphones, tablets, and retina display, Apple was simply unprepared to react to these changes. Apple still has their innovation and secrets hidden in R&D, but the fact of the matter is their most recent releases contain ideas from other companies' progress. This relates to elifestyle because our generation uses these products in our daily lives. Most of us do not remember a time when electronics did not make up a substantial part of our lives; when Apple was not a prominent consumer electronics company. This reminds us that power does not last indefinitely; innovators become followers, and companies fall. The next big thing in electronics may not even exist yet. 

A few days ago i had posted a link that was talking about how a lot of people had started leaving instagram since facebook bought it, but now it seems it's doing the opposite. For the first time ever, instagram is at the top of the iOS free apps catalog. The article even states that people are starting to join instagram because of all the hype. IT seems that they want to see what instagram is about and if it's really as amazing as people claim it to be. In my opinion, i think the hype for instagram will eventually die down and be another one of those 'used to be apps' like temple run.

That's a damn impressive resolution, especially when you look at the current iPad's terrible pixel density and resolution. Although I am concerned about further fragmentation in Apple's App Store. Isn't the lack of fragmentation in apps one of the reasons you would use iOS devices instead of Android devices?

LG made the first 55-inch OLED TV which , and it will cost $8,000. The timing jibes with what we heard at CES, but it's the first solid word we've heard as to what the future of beautiful television is going to cost us. Eight thousand. That's a lot of money-more money than most people have to spend on a TV, by a longshot. But it could've been a lot worse! Samsung's current top of the line 55-inch LCD TV runs around half that-and it's using old, old technology. OLED will be out of reach for almost everyone, but, like everything else, it'll slide cheaper, and cheaper in a (relative) hurry. Especially when LG, Samsung, and the rest realize nobody can afford this. It realtes to the course because its technology.

You think your iPhone or Android phone is safe from hackers just because of a passcode lock? Well, the Swedish security firm Micro Systemation just developed a cracking program that is called "XRY" that can hack into any, I repeat, any passcode of any mobile device. It works by first jailbreaking the phone to expose security flaws in the OS, then proceeds to brute-force the default four-digit pin, which only has 10,000 possible combinations to begin with. This all happens in under two minutes. Once the device has been unlocked, they can get any information they want- from logs contacts and even DELETED items.

It's a shame that this only works by jailbreaking the phone... This could have been... Useful.

When the iOS is jailbroken, there is an app, "iSleepWell", that will temporarily shut you phone down. It helps save battery life, block notifications, incoming messages, calls, etc. This app is very convenient to have if you are an especially busy person. It is a fair app to buy, at 99cent download. When in the middle of a good conversation, just starting a movie, or even going to sleep, all you have to do is flip the phone to face down and it will temporarily shut down the phone. 

A lot of people have been using instagram to take pictures and upload them. Instagram launched in October 2010, growing to 1 million users in the first 10 weeks of existence. It grew to 27 million users in the first year, according to stats from the Apple App Store. Today, Instagram has more than 30 million registered users, who upload more than 5 million photos per day. Now that Instagram is available on Android, which claims to have users that are twice as engaged as iOS users. It relates to the course because it shows how our culture gets influenced by the internet.

this article is about a company announced its AudiOffice product at the 2012 Mobile World Congress this week. It's a dock equipped with speakers for Apple's iPhone, iPod and iPad. It plays music, makes calls and allows users to video chat with others.Since apps such as Skype and FaceTime are often used for business communication to help with web connectivity and control costs, AudiOffice allows users to use these programs without having to go through your computer.Don't have an iOS device? You can still connect a mobile phone to the system via its internal Bluetooth radio.

I'm actually very surprised that Google was able to get away with having a 50 MB limit on apps for so long. iOS has a much bigger limit, if there even is one, which allows for apps with more resources. Before this change in policy that allows up to 4GB apps in the Android Market, users would essentially download a client app that would get the rest of the files from a server hosted by the app's developer. This can be very costly for some, and drive away development on Android, so it's a good thing Google upped their limit.

Wow, that was fast! Someone got to making a Windows 8 app that brings back the functions of the start menu. This would actually make me much more likely to upgrade to the OS, because the main problem I have with it is that the start menu is gone and instead replaced with a metro interface that does not transition well from the desktop. It's nice that there are people out there that actually take the time to tweak Windows to make it perform the way people prefer. Now if only Apple allowed for that kind of tweaking officially on OS X and iOS...

There is a now an IOS app that lets you fight in-justifiable parking tickets. This app is called fixed. Fixed is a service that will help you fight traffic tickets. You will be given a traffic ticket advocate to help fight for you, and give you your odds on winning your ticket. This service will charge you 25% the ticket if it becomes dismissed. I personally believe this app is genius. It is just another example of how simple applications will slowly help us in our every day lives.

The British company behind the personal assistant app Indigo for Android and iOS is looking into creating a more sophisticated voice-controlled personal assistant like Siri. The company's inspiration was the movie Her. A story about a lonely writer who falls in love with Samantha an extremely refined Siri. The new technology connects various systems within you home. You can search for a route to your friends house on your computer and get in you car and your phone will direct you there. Another thing is rather than filling out forms with your information you can just tell the voice controlled personal assistant your address and other information and it will put it into its memory. The new Siri will learn more about you as you search thing through it . If you look for restaurants in your area and you look at different sushi restaurants it will register that you like sushi restaurants. To tell you the truth i am very excited to see how this ends up and I will be happy to see its release.

This article is about how Apple plans to increase its music sales by bringing iTunes to Android and launching a paid music subscription service. Google has already brought their Google Play Music to iOS devices. Even though Apple takes up about 40% of the U.S. digital music market, it has declined in the double digits in the past few years. They plan to expand to Android and open its store to hundreds of millions of users. I don't think this will work good for Apple because there already so many other music services such as Spotify, Pandora, Beats Music and Google Play Music itself on Android, and most people these days just download their music online because they do not want to spend lots of money to buy a song or an album.

Wait, Newsstand? A special folder just for digital magazines and newspapers? Meh! Lets just go ahead and delete th… oh, you can't. It's okay, we'll just put it into another folder and… nope, you can't do that either. Well, you can - you're just not supposed to. The Internet Hivemind has found a way.

in the past few days since the unveiling of the iPhone 4S everyone seems to be talking about 1 thing. Siri. An apparently "old" voice recognition technology. of course all the trolls will be yelling old and this is copied, but infact apple has done an amazing job because it is so easy to use, and it is integrated in the iOS very well.

There is a certain joy in unboxing virtually any gadget for the first time, but Apple raised the event to an art form with its always stylish packaging. The Apple iPhone 4S box, though, doesn't mark any new style breakthroughs. Apple's signature white box is a doppelganger for the iPhone 4 packaging. Inside, the phone looks and feels like the previous iPhone 4. This gallery's comparison photos bear that out. Setup, though is a bit different, thanks to iOS 5. There's a large, gray-patterned "Welcome" screen and that motif carries through until you have the phone ready to go. Those of you who downloaded the mobile operating system on Oct. 12 and updated your older devices are probably already familiar with these screens.

So Basically, the iPhone's have a mapping system for all of your "GPS" apps, but people think that it's too good because they think it will stalk you better than ever before, which can be scary to people.

Musical snippet sharing app SoundTracking joins eight other featured apps in the Apple App Store today, highlighting its deep iOS 5 Twitter integration alongside those of Instagram and Flipboard.

When Microsoft launched Windows Phone last year, I was of the opinion that it was a platform that would never build steam. The entrenched players - iOS, RIM, and Android - already controlled the market, and the hiatus between the last Windows Mobile phone and the first Windows Phone was too long for even the most dedicated or curious customers to wait. According to buyers and reviews, the windows phone had everything pleasing about from display to run times and lets not forget the interface. The reason windows didnt sell so many of their phones was because the time between windows phone left a big gap and many people were just simply not interested