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Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer predicted in January that Apple will generate the same amount of revenue this past quarter—the company releases its financials today—as it did a year ago. Analysts agree with him. Apple generated more revenue than ever in the the first fiscal quarter of 2014, which includes the 2013 holiday season. But it’s entirely possible that fiscal 2014 (which runs through September) will be the first time since Steve Jobs returned to Apple and turned the company around that revenue will not grow from one fiscal year to the next.

It is, literally, the end of an era—financially, the biggest bull run of any technology company in history, from $13.931 billion in revenue in 2005 to $170.910 billion in 2013. In 2011 Apple was briefly the most valuable public company in the world. That valuation was a bet by the markets that Apple would continue to grow, and it has—until now.

What’s interesting here isn’t that Apple has plateaued—the markets already knocked $45 billion off of Apple’s valuation when the company announced its revenue projections for this past quarter three months ago—but why.

iPhones, steady as she goes

The first place to look would be how many iPhones Apple is selling, since they represented 56% of Apple’s revenue in the first quarter of this fiscal year. But iPhone sales are expected to be flat, as sales through China’s biggest mobile carrier, China Mobile, fail to do much to the overall iPhone story.

The iPhone story is straightforward: people buy iPhones and, subject to the whims of mobile carriers, upgrade them on a regular basis. It’s a fantastic business for Apple to be in, selling devices that cost on average $637 each and are re-purchased by consumers every two years or so, like clockwork.

It’s also important to note that Apple predicts it will miss out on $8 billion in revenue across all of 2014 because the company is now giving away its operating system (OS X) and productivity software (iLife, iWork.)

The iPad as a failed opportunity for growth

Some analysts are predicting that Apple will sell fewer iPads this past quarter than it did a year ago. For a mature product with a predictable pool of buyers—cars, vacuum cleaners, iPhones—this wouldn’t mean much. But considering the iPad is the most recent device Apple invented, defining an entire category and inspiring dozens of copycats, it’s bad news—and not the first time we’ve heard it.

If iPhones are doing what we expect iPhones to do—continuing to be consumed regularly by a market that seems at this point to be more or less saturated—then the story of Apple’s revenue plateau is the story of missed opportunities in the one device that many expected to be Apple’s next big growth opportunity—the iPad.

The iPad isn’t insignificant. It’s about 20% of Apple’s revenue. But it could be more. The iPad was supposed to replace the PC, after all. Indeed, that could be its problem.

If iPads are PC replacements, demand for them is equally soft

.@asymco @gassee posit: slow iPad sales are worse news for the PC market: implies phones can take the greater share of PC use cases—
Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) April 21, 2014

A notion that until recently seemed to be churlishly anti-Apple—that in contrast to phones and PCs people don’t really need tablets—is now virtually mainstream. Smartphones are replacing everything, including tablets.

How is this possible, when tablets came second?

One possibility is that the novelty of tablets, or at least Apple’s models, has worn off. Tablets were supposed to be magic, and the wealthy bought them expecting something as transformative as the iPhone. But the main use case for many tablets is probably as personal internet-connected TVs, not bicycles for the mind. If what we’re really doing with tablets is simply asking them to play HD video without it stuttering, you certainly don’t need to pay a premium for Apple’s iPad to get a satisfying user experience.

Tablets that are mainly used for browsing the web and watching videos don’t need to be re-purchased nearly as often as phones that are getting lost, stolen, broken, or simply radically more useful as time goes by and the number of apps and use cases for them multiplies. That puts tablets on a replacement cycle more like PCs—every five years or so—than phones, which is another reason you’re not seeing sales on the same order as phones.

It’s not that people aren’t buying tablets. But the adoption rate is nothing like what we’ve seen in smartphones.

And overwhelmingly, the tablets that people are buying are the cheaper models—witness the success of UK grocery giant Tesco’s branded tablet, 500,000 of which have been sold in the past seven months. If a cheap tablet is the only computing device to which you have access, it can be transformative, which is another reason global demand for tablets—but not Apple’s iPads—continues to expand.

On any timescale relevant to investors, there will never be another iPhone

The story of Apple’s growth is the story of the phenomenal success of the iPhone. There is no other category of electronics with as much potential demand as there is for smartphones. Many analysts are saying the rumored iWatch or some combination of wearable computers could be Apple’s next iPhone-scale blockbuster, but that’s ridiculous, notes MacWorld’s Jason Snell:

IDC reported that in 2013, one billion smartphones were shipped, up 38% from the previous year. That’s a fast-growing market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, on Thursday IDC predicted that the wearables market will reach 112 million units in 2018.

In other words, in four years the wearables market might grow to be one-tenth the size of today’s smartphone market—in units shipped. Presumably the average selling price of wearable items will be a fraction of that of smartphones, meaning the dollar value of the wearables market is even more minuscule compared to the smartphone market.

What about iTunes and AppleTV? Unlike Amazon, which sells hardware in order to sell software and content, for Apple it’s the reverse. In fiscal 2013 Apple made $16 billion from iTunes, but growth in this stream of revenue is slowing. Apple TV, meanwhile, is a supporting technology—it remains, as Jobs once put it, “a hobby.” As Rene Ritchie put it at iMore:

The truth is Apple makes two kinds of products. They make the flagship products that support their business, like the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and iPod. And they make the supporting products that increase the value of their flagship products, like the Apple TV.
The Apple TV is a great product and could, if rumors of a hardware update and Game Store prove true, become a really great one. But it won’t be a hundred million unit selling, multi-billion dollar profit making one any time soon.

This is what a mature market for (very) personal computers looks like

Apple makes premium electronics, mostly computers we carry in our pockets that are connected to the cloud through a system of cellular base towers that might as well be magic. That market is now, apparently, saturated. Millions of people are coming online every day, and they might aspire to own an iPhone, but it’s lower-priced Android handsets that they can afford and end up purchasing. Comparisons of Apple’s market share to that of Android smartphones elide the fact that the overwhelming majority of Android smartphones are much cheaper than the iPhone—at this point, costing less than half as much.

That price gap isn’t just Apple’s margin—Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone costs almost as much as the average iPhone, factoring out any operator device subsidy to the consumer. Most Android phones and tablets are essentially different devices than Apple’s, suited to different sorts of tasks or to doing the same tasks in a way that annoys some people (i.e. Apple fans) and not others.

What we’ll be looking at, in the numbers Apple will release Wednesday, is the holding pattern of a hulking technological Colossus. Apple’s immediate prospects for growth are dim not only because of the law of large numbers, but also because the world presently has just about as much Apple as it can take.

Apple can still build on top of its current base

The second half of fiscal 2014 is very likely to be when Apple gives investors and fans reasons to be excited again. Rumored launches include a larger iPad and iPhone, as well as the iWatch. But none of these are going to be category-busting devices on the scale of Apple’s current businesses. Assuming Apple keeps its iPhone customers loyal by more or less keeping pace with developments in Android—not a foregone conclusion—these new devices mean there’s still potential for incremental growth in Apple’s revenue. But that’s it.

From the perspective of the markets, it seems Apple has become a company like those it not so long ago sought to disrupt—Microsoft, Intel, IBM. Buying back shares, paying dividends: this is what you do for shareholders when you can’t promise them the kind of growth that was once seemingly inevitable.

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Businesses on Facebook are being forced to reevaluate their social media marketing strategies as their posts continue to reach fewer and fewer users. For a brand that’s looking to ensure that its posts get the most engagement possible, new data shows that Friday is the day when users are most likely to Like, comment or share posts that come from brand Pages.
Adobe tracked more than 226 billion post impressions by 300 brands on Facebook in the first quarter of 2014 for its Social Intelligence Report. Fridays earn about 15.7 percent of each week’s total posts impressions, with Thursday being the next most active day with a 14.5 percent share. Users also engage with brands more actively on Fridays by a small amount. Posts from the Pages tracked had a 3.3. percent engagement rate on Friday (meaning that 3.3 percent of the users that saw a given post interacted with it in some way), compared to 3.2 percent on Thursdays and less on other days. Combined, these figures show that Fridays are a competitive time to post but also a time when users are more active on the social network.
“Maybe it’s just that Friday afternoon is just not a time when anyone wants to start a new work project, so they just get on social media,” says Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst on Adobe’s Digital Index team. “You’re starting to think about your weekend and communicate with your friends and family.”
Whether the data reported by Adobe applies to all types of pages is unclear. The company mostly tracks social activity for extremely large businesses, including two-thirds of the top 50 companies in the Fortune 500. But Gaffney thinks the findings are likely relevant to a broad swath of the marketing community. “This is not a census of all things Facebook,” she says, “but we believe it’s still representative of what the reality for marketers is.”

There are more dramatic day-to-day trends when it comes to video. About one-fourth of all video plays for Pages occur on Fridays, according to Adobe’s data. Video plays are rapidly increasing on Facebook because of the introduction of new auto-play videos at the end of 2013. The auto-play feature has helped the engagement rate for videos rise from 2.4 percent to 3 percent over the last year. Text posts, meanwhile, have continued to decline in effectiveness, with only 0.6 percent of users that see them interacting with those posts in some way. Images are currently the most effective posts, with a 4.4 percent engagement rate (though that’s down from five percent a year ago).
Adobe data also show that posts perform the worst on Sundays. 13.4 percent of post impressions occur on that day and the engagement rate is 3 percent. Just 6.4 percent of video plays occur on Sunday.
This data doesn’t necessarily mean that brands should start spamming users’ feeds on Fridays. A glut of posts leads to greater competition to earn a spot in users’ News Feeds and a decline in organic reach. However, the data do show that users are on Facebook in big numbers on Fridays and they’re a bit more receptive to brand messages then. Smart content, particularly tailored toward weekend activities, can have an opportunity to score big.

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The first astronauts who set foot on the moon were quarantined for three weeks when they returned to Earth. Scientists weren't sure what kinds of lunar germs they might have brought back with them.
That level of caution may sound absurd today, but a new study shows trips to outer space can still mess with astronauts on a physiological level.
New research from Johns Hopkins finds that long-term deep space missions can alter brain proteins and cause cognitive deficits like lapses in attention and slower reaction times. Researchers came to this conclusion by exposing rats to high-energy particles that simulate the conditions that astronauts would experience in deep space, then running them through a series of test that mimic the fitness assessments that astronauts, pilots, and soldiers are required to take.
But the strange thing scientists found is that deep-space conditions don't affect everyone the same way. About half of the rats tested emerged from the test entirely unaffected. The others began showing symptoms about seven weeks after exposure to space-like conditions. And once impairments appeared, they never went away. (Some rats showed improvement over time, however, raising the question of whether recovery is possible.)
The difference comes down to an individual's resilience after exposure to radiation. In space, astronauts who leave their space vehicles for space walks or other work are exposed to radiation from the sun's subatomic particles, solar flares, cosmic rays, etc. Even landing on the moon is a risk, since it doesn't have the kind of planet-wide magnetic field that protects us on Earth. (Mars, too, is a higher radiation environment than back home.)
If the findings translate to humans, scientists believe they might be able to identify a biological marker that would help determine how an individual astronaut's brain might respond to a deep-space mission before she rockets into the stars.
The idea would be to help at-risk astronauts better protect themselves in space, says Catherine Davis, the study's lead author. “As with other areas of personalized medicine, we would seek to create individual treatment and prevention plans for astronauts we believe would be more susceptible to cognitive deficits from radiation exposure,” she said in a statement. That might mean wearing an additional radiation shield, or limiting the duration of space walks.
Scientists say the astronauts who are in space right now are less at-risk for the brain deficits revealed in the study because the International Space Station is close enough to the Earth's magnetic field that they're somewhat protected.
But identifying what makes someone more likely to be adversely affected by radiation exposure in space could help non-astronauts, too. People on Earth are routinely exposed to radiation—in some work environments and for some medical treatments, for instance—and understanding how radiation might affect someone before they’re exposed could help mitigate the associated risks.
Elsewhere, scientists are already exploring how deep-space missions can affect other parts of the body and whether trips to space may increase cancer risks.

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Google has turned its Google Maps Street View into a time machine to let users travel back in time and see how places have changed.
The new feature will let users track changes in landscape, buildings, roads and entire neighbourhoods from around the world since the Street View mapping program began in 2007.
Users can now click on a new clock icon that will appear in the corner of the screen when using Street View on Google Maps on a desktop or laptop computer, firing up scrollbar-controlled time machine, changing the year and even season of the area or building they are currently looking at to see how it has changed over time.

'A time traveller like Doc Brown'

"If you've ever dreamt of being a time traveller like Doc Brown, now's your chance," said Google Street View product manager Vinay Shet in a blog post. "We've gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world."
Google's Street View uses car-mounted cameras to capture street-level photos of the world, stitching the images together into a virtual representation of the real world overlaid on Google's maps. Google's cars have driven across most of the world, but this is the first time the search giant has made more than one version of the resulting images available to the public.
"Now with Street View, you can see a landmark's growth from the ground up, like the Freedom Tower in New York city or the 2014 World Cup stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil," said Shet.

'A digital timeline of recent history'

"This new feature can also serve as a digital timeline of recent history, like the reconstruction after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan. You can even experience different seasons and see what it would be like to cruise Italian roadways in both summer and winter," he said.
Street View has primarily been used as a way of visualising directions to help users find and identify locations they are looking for, but the service has become increasingly popular among "armchair explorers", who have used Street View to discover far away parts of the world without ever leaving home.
Google has been adding tourism and beauty hotspots to the service for some time, as well as the insides of some public places like train stations, airports and brick and mortar stores allowing users to view the inside of buildings too.
Google recently announced that it was to begin using a new algorithm that can read the house numbers in images on the service, and then correlate these with real addresses in order to improve the accuracy of addresses supplied in Google searches.

• Google Russia claims Crimea for the federation, while Google Ukraine shows its independence

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Here’s the thing about Taka Torimoto: He’s more likely to remember his smartphone than his billfold. And that spells opportunity for a whole raft of new players in the lucrative payments industry.
A 41-year-old technical consultant with an engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, Torimoto has paid for fast food with the tap of his phone and sent money just as you would attachments in emails. His father digitally sends the grandkids cash for Christmas. No more checks.
Torimoto’s voice rises with excitement as he talks about the new possibilities. “Payments is one area that is going in so many different directions.”
For the first time since the advent of credit cards, there are new ways to pay that don’t involve cash, check or plastic. Most are built on top of the existing payments system, but — courtesy of that hand-held computer in our pockets and purses — offer new vistas for both consumers and tech entrepreneurs.
“It’s clear that the mobile phone is the device that people are going to be using in the future to pay,” said David S. Evans, chairman of the Global Economics Group. “It’s not going to be a plastic card.”
By 2017, Forrester Research estimates, Americans will spend roughly $90 billion using a smartphone or other handheld device, a more than seven-fold increase from the amount spent in 2012. The firm’s figures include mobile remote commerce; mobile peer to peer payments and remittances; and mobile proximity payments.
Even if its estimate is too optimistic — as projections in this arena have tended to be — the pace at which startups are emerging is already head-spinning: Stripe, PayNearMe and WePay, among more than a thousand others, fueled by billions of dollars in venture capital.
For consumers, mobile payments mean greater convenience and better security. For merchants and banks, they present new opportunities to track you and target sales pitches and rewards to you. And they give tech entrepreneurs a low-cost entry point into the multi-billion dollar payments pipeline.
So why aren’t already living in a post-plastic world?
In part, because everyone involved in the chain — merchants, card issuers, traditional processors, tech innovators and consumers — is looking to maximize how much money they keep at the end of the day. Sometimes, the interests of two or more players align, but often they don’t.
Sorting it out — via market forces and regulation — is likely to make for a period that’s exciting, bewildering, messy and frustrating. And right now, we’re at an inflection point, where what emerged as a handful of novelties is becoming a new way of doing business.
That’s evident in the changes the incumbents are making. Banks, payment networks such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Amex, and the tech companies that serve them, such as FIS and Fiserv, are scrambling to keep up.
“In 2014, you’ll see larger payments entities scramble to accelerate the pace of their innovation to catch up to these smaller and more nimble competitors,” PayPal President David Marcus predicted in a blog post.
“Meanwhile, smaller players will scramble to achieve the scale and experience needed to compete in a global business,” he wrote. “As a result, billions of dollars will be at play in the payment industry, and 2014 will be a year of game-changing disruption.”
Last year, PayPal launched 58 new products, partly because of new threats, according to a recent New York Times report.
And earlier this year the e-commerce arm of eBay announced PayPal Beacon, a Bluetooth device that reads payment information from a smartphone. With that device, someone like a restaurant server would no longer have to take your card away from the table to complete a transaction.
That’s in addition to a partnership with Discover, which lets folks use PayPal in the checkout line at some of the nation’s largest merchants. PayPal has also recently acquired progressive payment processor Braintree, which has regulatory approval to move money nationwide.
It’s marketing its services to mobile-based innovators such as Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit, which facilitate transactions between individual sellers and buyers of, respectively, rides, lodging and doers of household errands and other tasks.
And we haven’t even talked yet about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which operate in a parallel payments universe, completely outside the existing system.
To be sure, some of the innovations won’t stick.
“Innovation and disruption is an inherently inefficient and lofty process,” said Matt Harris, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures. He harkens back to the first wave of dot-coms, with its rash of failures.
“We are at that now, at least in consumer financial services,” he said.
But some of the experiments will succeed, and at least a few will change the landscape for all of us.
The practice of paying others is at the psychological core of who we are. It lets us buy, sell and, most importantly, earn through our labor. It allows us to say thank you in a tangible way.
Effectively, anything can be a form of payment as long as it is widely distributed, safe, accepted by both buyer and seller, and regulated by a system of rules. Over time, forms of payment have included cattle, wampum, notes issued by individual banks (which were IOUs for gold and silver held in their vaults), and currency backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States.
The current system, in which we carry plastic cards that identify us and vouchsafe our ability to pay the debts we incur to the people who accept them as payment, evolved in the 1950s and ’60s.
To understand who all is in the chain, first you have to get hold of the process. Here’s how it works:
You swipe your card, say, at your favorite deli counter. Several different things happen almost simultaneously.
First, a card reader, the black box in front of the cashier, scans the magnetic stripe on the back of your card. That information is transmitted through an acquiring processor, such as First Data or Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), which sends your personal details to the payment network whose logo is on the card — say, Visa or MasterCard.
That company forwards the information to the issuer, such as your bank, which makes sure you have enough money. If you do, the issuer sends an authorization code back down the food chain to the merchant in milliseconds.
The money doesn’t move quite as fast; it’s transmitted to the merchant in a settlement process that happens overnight.
For performing its role in the dance, each intermediary receives a small cut.
Last year, issuers, which tend to receive the largest cut, earned an estimated $230 billion in transaction-specific revenues globally, according to a report from the Boston Consulting Group.
As a part of that, merchants pay anywhere from 2 percent to 3 percent of the sales price to accept a credit card, and 21 cents plus 0.05 percent of the transaction value to accept debit cards, a rate that’s gone down because of action by Congress.
Innovators want to step inside that system. In return for adding something of value, such as a more seamless experience, they want to receive something of value, either an added fee or information about your buying habits that they can parlay into money.
Take Atlanta-based Sionic Mobile, which asks merchants to pay a 1 percent transaction fee when customers pay with ION Rewards. Today, shoppers can earn and spend those loyalty rewards at roughly 25,000 stores nationwide. The rewards program gives them an incentive to do more of their shopping at those stores.
Some merchants (think: Starbucks) have jumped directly into the fray, developing apps that generate codes you can scan at the point of sale to complete a purchase.
Torimoto is in that mix, an avatar of what’s to come. He’s a former employee of Alpharetta, Ga.-based CorFire, which helped Google create its first iteration of Wallet and Dunkin Donuts build payments into its mobile app.
As for his own usage of Wallet, arguably the farthest mobile payments have crept in the real world, he’s barely touched it — except of course for that one time in a McDonald’s a year or so ago just to see if it worked.
Most merchants don’t yet have the technology to let him tap his phone rather than swipe a card; others, even some of the big-boxes, are reportedly turning the capability off.
And the points you get on your credit card don’t necessarily get passed through in the same way. Yet.
This year, in Torimoto’s view, won’t be one of breakthroughs. But he does expect spurts of innovation cropping up across the payments horizon.
“Everything, I feel like everything, right now, is almost like a hack job,” he said.
But each successful hack accelerates the pace of change. It’s just a matter of time.

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Google has given refunds to people who downloaded Virus Shield, a top selling Android app that didn't work, according to Michael Crider of Android Police.
Users are getting a full refund as well as an extra $5 credit to the Google Play Store for Android apps.
Around 10,000 people downloaded the $3.99 app before Google finally took it down.
Virus Shield promised it could protect your Android phone from harmful spyware, but never actually scanned your phone for malware. Instead, it just showed a green check mark saying the scan was finished.
Google's refund is coming two weeks after the app was pulled from the store.
Users have a 15 minute window  to get all of their money back after they download something from Google Play. Once that window is closed, customers are stuck with the app.
The Google Play Store has been plagued with harmful apps lately. Last week, a security firm discovered that Google let in a malicious app  which could manipulate app icons and take people to phishing sites.
Here's the email Android owners who downloaded Virus Shield received from Google:
"Hello,
We're reaching out to you because you recently purchased the “Virus Shield” app on Google Play.
This app made the false claim that it provided one-click virus protection; in reality, it did not.
Google Play's policies strictly prohibit false claims like these, and in light of this, we're refunding you for your "Virus Shield" purchase. You should see funds returned to your account within the next 14 days.
Additionally we'd like to offer you $5 promotional credit1, which can be used to purchase digital content on Google Play such as apps, games, books, music and movies.
Your credit redemption code is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Click or tap here to redeem. For help redeeming, please visit our Help Center.
We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused; rest assured that we're always working to make Google Play better for our users.
Thank you,
Google Play Support"

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If you missed your chance to buy Google Glass Tuesday, it's probably for the best, according to the product's earliest users.
Google opened the gates to its face-mounted computer for a 24-hour window last week, and an eager public snapped up every model. Hate it or love it, everyone is curious.
But the Google Glass "Explorers"—a select group who got the first few thousand models—have a message for people who want to join their tech-savvy in-crowd: Wait.
"There's no rush," said Explorer and developer of the GlassFit app Noble Ackerson, "[Future iterations are] probably going to be cheaper and a lot better than this beta product."
It's not that Glass isn't innovative or promising—it just delivers limited utility for its $1,500 price tag. "It continues to frustrate me because it's so unfinished," said technology blogger Robert Scoble. "It's a very expensive price for what it does right now."
Users complained that the dearth of applications—both from Google and third-party developers—means Glass just isn't all that useful yet. Some were frustrated about the recent decision to scrap the video-calling feature. A Google developer conference in June will showcase new software—and provide a test of Glass's mass market viability, Scoble said.
For now, the general consensus among the Explorers National Journal talked with is that Glass just isn't practical for the average use.
"When people are looking at buying Glass, they need to understand it's a concept," said Larry Domine, who teaches at Milwaukee Area Technical College. "It's really at the development stage." Added Larry Walsh, who runs the IT news and analysis site Channelnomics: "It's just not a very intuitive or usable device."
Ackerson, who just celebrated his one-year anniversary as an Explorer, believes Glass's acceptance will depend on its utility. "The general population won't get used to Glass until they find a use for it," he said.
And the slow rollout of Glass, says Ackerson, fuels an "aura of exclusivity" and "echo chamber" of criticism from people who haven't even worn the device. To help satiate the curiosity of the many who don't have a pair of Glass, he started the Society of Glass Enthusiasts, which now has over 3,000 members, to help educate the general public about the product.
On the other hand, Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Institute in Washington, believes that Google's gradual rollout is a smart move because it allows for a trial-and-error period with a small group of people enthusiastic about Glass's success.
Among the most common laments is Glass's battery life, which Google says is improved in its latest update. Users also said they hoped to see better apps for navigation, environment recognition, and communication. "A lot of things that I want to do are still apps that I have on my phone," Domine said.
"Google's been getting a pretty steady barrage of criticisms over Glass," Walsh said. "It's not about privacy; it's about functionality."
Even shooting hands-free photos and videos—one of Glass's main calling cards—has come with problems. Users reported accidentally taking photos by blinking, some of which ended up on Facebook. Scoble added that the tiny screen makes it difficult to review photos, and there's no way to upload them to services like Instagram.
So who should be using Glass? Explorers said the clientele falls into three categories: Developers or creatives with a business idea, technophiles (who probably already have a pair), and people with extra money to spend.
"It was the first-kid-on-the-block thing that got me," said Walsh. "My experience with it proved it not to be a good investment."
One Explorer who has put the technology to professional use is Dr. Rafael Grossman, who has performed surgery while wearing Glass and sees lots of possibility in the healthcare field. He was able to livestream an operation while his students watched. "If you could integrate Glass to the electronic health record, … I think that you prevent medical errors."
Still, Grossman said he uses his Glass only for professional purposes. "At that price tag, the regular user would not be making a wise decision," he said. "It's not ready to be everything you would want it to do."
One day, users said, Glass's performance will match its potential. Emergency responders could see real-time building layouts. Construction workers could read instructions without having to put down their tools. And a mother could teach her child to cook a family recipe from across the country.
Even today's Glass, Ackerson says, makes technology less intrusive by keeping his hands free and allowing him to see moments normally, not through the lens of a camera.

But for now, buyers should be prepared to spend a lot of money to help put a limited system through its paces.
And, of course, they should be prepared to deal with the social fallout that comes with it. Users should be prepared to be somewhat of a spectacle—and deal with a fair amount of derision. "There's a high probability of not getting laid if you're wearing it," Walsh said. "You're also buying into what is still now a social stigmatism."

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Rubin "Hurricane" Carter never surrendered hope of regaining his freedom, not even after he was convicted of a triple murder, then convicted again and abandoned by many prominent supporters.
For 19 long years, the prizefighter was locked in a prison cell far away from the spotlight and the adulation of the boxing ring. But when he at last won his biggest fight — for exoneration — he betrayed little bitterness. Instead, Carter dedicated much of his remaining life to helping other prisoners and exposing other injustices.
The middleweight title contender, whose murder convictions became an international symbol of racial injustice and inspired a Bob Dylan song and a Hollywood film, died Sunday. He was 76.
The New Jersey native, who had suffered from prostate cancer, died in his sleep at his home in Toronto, John Artis, his former co-defendant and longtime friend and caregiver, told The Canadian Press.
Carter "didn't have any bitterness or anger — he kind of got above it all. That was his great strength," said Thom Kidrin, who became friends with Carter after visiting him several times in prison.
The boxer, a former petty criminal, became an undersized 160-pound contender and earned his nickname largely on his ferocity and punching power.
Although never a world champion, Carter went 27-12-1 with 19 knockouts, memorably stopping two-division champ Emile Griffith in the first round in 1963. He also fought for a middleweight title in 1964, losing a unanimous decision to Joey Giardello.

But his boxing career came to an abrupt end when he was imprisoned for three 1966 murders committed at a tavern in Paterson, N.J. He was convicted in 1967 and again in 1976 before being freed in 1985, when his convictions were thrown out after years of appeals. He then became a prominent public advocate for the wrongfully convicted from his new home in Canada.
His ordeal and its racial overtones were publicized in Dylan's 1975 song "Hurricane," several books and a 1999 film starring Denzel Washington, who received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal.
In a statement issued Sunday, Washington praised Carter's "tireless fight to ensure justice for all."
Carter and Artis had been driving around Carter's hometown on the night that three white people were shot by two black men at the Lafayette Bar and Grill. They were convicted by an all-white jury largely on the testimony of two thieves who later recanted their stories.
Carter was granted a new trial and briefly freed in 1976, but he was sent back for nine more years after being convicted in a second trial.
"I wouldn't give up," Carter said in an interview in 2011 on PBS. "No matter that they sentenced me to three life terms in prison. I wouldn't give up. Just because a jury of 12 misinformed people ... found me guilty did not make me guilty. And because I was not guilty, I refused to act like a guilty person."
Dylan, a boxing aficionado, became aware of Carter's plight after reading the fighter's autobiography. He met Carter and co-wrote "Hurricane," which he performed on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975. The song concludes: "That's the story of the Hurricane/But it won't be over till they clear his name/And give him back the time he's done/Put him in a prison cell but one time he could-a been/The champion of the world."
Muhammad Ali and Coretta Scott King spoke out on Carter's behalf. Other celebrities also worked toward his release, joined by a network of friends and volunteers.
Carter eventually won his freedom from U.S. District Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who wrote that the boxer's prosecution had been "predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure."
Born on May 6, 1937, into a family of seven children, Carter struggled with a hereditary speech impediment and was sent to a juvenile reform center at 12 after an assault. He escaped and joined the Army in 1954 and learned to box while in West Germany.
After returning home, he committed a series of muggings and spent four years in various state prisons. Upon his release, he began his pro boxing career, winning 20 of his first 24 fights mostly by knockout.
At 5-foot-8, Carter was fairly short for a middleweight, but he was aggressive and threw waves of punches. His shaved head and menacing glower gave him an imposing ring presence but also contributed to a forbidding aura outside the ring. He was quoted as joking about killing police officers in a 1964 story in the Saturday Evening Post, which was later cited by Carter as a cause of his troubles with law enforcement.
Carter boxed regularly on television at Madison Square Garden and overseas in London, Paris and Johannesburg. Although his career appeared to be on a downswing before he was implicated in the murders, the 29-year-old fighter was hoping for a second middleweight title shot.
Carter defied his prison guards from the first day of his incarceration and spent time in solitary confinement because of it.
"When I walked into prison, I refused to wear their stripes," Carter said. "I refused to eat their food. I refused to work their jobs, and I would have refused to breathe the prison's air if I could have done so."
Carter eventually wrote and spoke eloquently about his plight, publishing his autobiography, "The Sixteenth Round," in 1974. Benefit concerts were held for his legal defense featuring Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Roberta Flack.
Although many of his celebrity friends abandoned the cause after his second conviction and an allegation of assault during his brief release, other advocates worked tirelessly on his behalf, culminating in Sarokin's ruling and two subsequent failed prosecutorial appeals to have the convictions reinstated. Each year on the anniversary Sarokin's decision, Carter called the judge to thank him.
After his release, Carter moved to Toronto, where he served as the executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted from 1993 to 2005. He received two honorary doctorates for his work.
Canadian director Norman Jewison made Carter's story into a biographical film. Washington worked closely with Carter to capture the boxer's transformation and redemption.
"He's all love," Washington said while onstage with Carter at the 2000 ceremony where he won a Golden Globe. "He lost about 7,300 days of his life, and he's love."
The makers of "The Hurricane," however, were widely criticized for factual inaccuracies and glossing over other parts of Carter's story, including his criminal past and a reputation for a violent temper. Giardello sued the film's producers for its depiction of a racist fix in his victory over Carter, who had long acknowledged that Giardello deserved the win.
Kidrin spoke with Carter on Wednesday.
"He said, 'You know, look, death's coming. I'm ready for it. But it's really going to have to take me because I'm positive to the end.'"
___
AP Sports Writer Rick Freeman and AP Drama Writer Mark Kennedy contributed to this report in New York.

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      India tops global remittances  

                 list; received $70 bn in 2013

 :                              WORLD BANK 

 APRIL 11 :- HAVING received $70 billion in 2013, India has topped the list of countries receiving remittance from overseas workers, the World Bank said on Friday.

the World Bank's latest issue of the Migration and Development Brief, said international migrants from developing countries are expected to send $436 billion in remittances to their home countries this year (2014)
   In 2014, remittance flows to developing countries will see an increase of  7.8 per cent over the 2013 volume of  $104 billion ,rising to $516 billion in 2016. Global remittances, including those to high-income countries, are estimated at $581 billion this year, from $542 billion in 2013, rising to $681 billion in 2016.
"Remittances have become a major component of the balance of payments of nations. India lead the chart of remittance flows, receiving $70 billion last year (2013), followed by China with $60 billion and Philippines with $25 billions ," said Kaushik Basu, senior vise president and chief economist of World Bank.

India had received $69 billion in remittance in 2012.
  Basu said there was no doubt that these flows act as an antidote to poverty and promote prosperity.

KAUSHIK BASU,World Bank Chief Economist

"Remittances have become a major component of the balance of payments of nations. India lead the chart of remittance flows, receiving $70 billion last year (2013), followed by China with $60 billion and Philippines with $25 billions ," 

            -KAUSHIK BASU

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INSPIRATIONAL...... 20 YEARS AFTER             GENOCIDE, VICTIM, ATTACKER NOW FRIENDS...

RWANDA :today, the country marks the 20th anniversary of the start of its bloody genocide in which over 1 million were killed.....

 nyamata, april 11 :He lost her baby daughter and her right hand to a manic killing spree. He  wielded the machete that took both.

Yet today ,despite coming from opposite sides of an unspeakable shared post, Alice Mukarurinda and Emmanuel Ndayisaba are friends. she is the treasurer and he the vice president of a group that build simple brick houses for genocide survivors.

Their story of ethenic violence, extreme guilt and , to some degree, reconciliation is the story of Rwanda today, 20 years after its hutu majority killed more than 1 million tutsis and moderate hutus.

"Whenever i i look at my arm I remember what happened ,"said Alice . As she speaks, Emmanuel - the man who killed her baby - sits close enough that his left hand and her right hand stumps sometimes touch.

On Monday april 6, Rwanda marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of 100 days of bloody mayhem.

For Alice, a Tutsi,the genocide began in 1992. hutu community leaders began importing machetes. houses were burned, cars taken, on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying Rwanda's president was shot down, Hutus started killing Tutsis  who ran for their lives and flooded Alice's village.

Three days later, local Hutu leaders took Emmanuel ,then 23, to a Tutsi home and ordered him to use a machete. Emmanuel had never killed before. But inside his house he murdered 14 people.

During one killing spree, Alice, who was in hiding, was found by Hutus including Emmanuel. he rained down machete blows on Alice's right arm, severing it just above the wrist. He sliced her face. She was bloodied, scarred, and missing a hand...

After the genocide, Emmanuel gnawed by guilt, began asking family members of his victim for forgiveness. He joined a group of genocide killers and survivors.

it was there he saw Alice. At first he avoided her. Eventually he kneeled before her and asked forgiveness. After two weeks of thought and discussions, she said yes.

  "We had attended workshops and training and our heart kind of free, and i found it easy to forgive." she says."the bible says you should forgive any you will also be forgiven"

"I've been asking myself why i acted like a fool, listening to such words, that this person is bad and that person is bad," Emmanuel says . 

"the same people that encouraged the genocide are the ones saying there was no genocide."  

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WASHINGTON : Scientists have developed a computer algorithm that predicts whether a photo will go viral on FaceBook by watching how fast it is shared. Stanford researchers said the clue to predicting witch of the many millions of photos on facebook will go viral lie in 'cascades', a term used to describe photos or videos being shared multiple times.
                                                                                 

-PTI

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2 ballistic missile destroyers to be deployed to counter N korea threat

{associated press, tokyo, april 6.} US DEFENCE secretary Chuck Hagel delivered a two-pronged warning to Asia Pacific nations  Sunday, announcing that the US will send two additional ballistic missile destroyers to japan to counter the North Korean threat, and saying China must better respect its neighbours.

IN usually forceful remarks about China, Hagel drew a direct link between Russia's takeover of Ukraine's Crimea region and the ongoing territorial disputes between China, Japan and others over remotes islands in the east China sea.

Hagel, who will travel to China later this week, called the Asian nations a "great power",and added,"with this power comes new and wider responsibilities as to how you use that power ,how you employ that military power."

He said he will talk to the Chinese about having respect for their neighbours, and said, "coercion, intimidation is a very deadly thing that lead only to conflict. All nations, all people deserve respect no matter how large or how small."

"I WILL BE TALKING WITH THE CHINESE ABOUT RESPECT FOR THEIR NEIGHBOURS. COERCION, INTIMIDATION IS A VERY DEADLY THING THAT LEADS ONLY TO CONFLICT. ALL NATIONS, ALL PEOPLE DESERVE RESPECT NO MATTER HOW LARGE OR HOW SMALL

 -Chuck Hagel,US Defence Secretary

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YES, you may not believe but it is very easy to hack your personal data.

                                Did you said how?

your data & personal password can be easily hacked by cheap keyloggers.




I will soon tell you that what is a key logger and how it can harm your computer. be updated..... 

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...DOWNLOAD LATEST IDM WITH CRACK...

DOWNLOAD IDM 6.19 MEDIAFIRE LINK GIVEN BELOW 

                                     

                       click here to download....

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