An email from the Samsung store at Westfield Stratford City, London has just arrived in our inbox, with details of the Galaxy S IIIlaunch event on the evening of next Tuesday, May 29. As we've already reported, Samsung's kicking things off a little early for pre-order customers at its branded store at the London shopping center. Invites are being sent out for 5pm, with the first sales taking place an hour later at 6, assuming you've pre-ordered your S III.

And to sweeten the deal, the first 50 Galaxy S III's sold at the Samsung store will win free tickets to this summer's London games. Being the official phone of the Olympics, it's not surprising to see a little cross-promotion from Samsung. (Earlier in the week we reported on limited "Olympic editions" of the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Y being sold through O2 UK.)

AndroidCentral has the details HERE!

RIM may have wowed the audience at BlackBerry world earlier last month but the company has yet to release any product that has succeeded to take ground over the last year. 

It was rumored that RIM had been in talks with providers about licensing the technology behind BBM to other platforms -- including Android and iOS -- perhaps as a way to ensure the companys continued relevance, even if their device sales are waning, by keeping consumers locked into their platform. The new project was branded "SMS 2.0" internally, but it was killed as fast as it was created.

Today, the WSJ is reporting that RIM has decided not to pursue licensing BBM and the project was killed as soon as new CEO, Thorsten Heins, was appointed. "It was not up for discussion," one person familiar with the matter said. The WSJ points out that the move is a "big shift" from a few months ago when the company was scrambling to keep BBM relevant.

Read the WSJ article HERE!

Is Facebook about to make yet another major acquisition? That's the report from Pocket-Link.com, who claims via unnamed sources that Facebook is looking to purchase Opera Software, the makers of the long running Opera web browser. Details are few, but the story claims that Facebook wants to compete in the web browser space that already has Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla among its participants.

The Opera web browser has always been well behind, at least in terms of market share, in the PC web browser market. Both Net Applications and StatsCounter show that Opera is fifth in use on the PC behind Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. However, Opera has found some traction in the mobile web browser space. Facebook is all about mobility now, and it could see buying Opera Software as a short cut towards making a browser that could compete in the smartphone and tablet space.

Facebook has also been on a buying spree in the past few weeks, either acquiring the teams behind app companies or, in the case of Instagram, offering to buy the entire company for $1 billion.

Pocket-Lint has the article HERE!

Microsoft is increasingly warming to open source. Not only is the company increasingly publishing open-source projects of its own, it’s also developing major parts of its web/cloud infrastructure in the open and is also supporting a variety of external open-source projects. This is great news, but it’s taken a long time and a considerable amount of hard work and damage-repair to make it happen.

Microsoft’s stance on open source began to thaw during the 2000’s as the company grew-up and learned more about open source and how it can significantly benefit all of us.

I thought it would be constructive to share examples that illustrate that Microsoft (and its ecosystem) are serious about mending fences, supporting external open-source projects and opening up development teams and projects. Here’s my top 10 list:

Get the list HERE!

If given Sophie's Choice, I bet most of us smartphone owners would rather lose our wallets than our mobile devices. After all, we carry far more sensitive information—private text messages, photos, contacts, passwords—in these pocket PCs than we do in our wallets, and none of it is insured the way a good old-fashioned credit card is. Furthermore, a savvy attacker doesn't even need physical access to your device to leech information.

Fortunately, there are plenty of good free or low-cost apps offering protection from attackers, pick pocketers, snooping partners, and yes, even from yourself.

Mobile security threats aren't the same as they are on the PC. For one, malware – viruses, spyware, Trojans –is a pretty tiny threat. According to mobile security vendor Lookout, less than five percent of Android owners have ever been infected, and that rate is even smaller in the U.S. since most Android malware targets Russian and Chinese users.

PC Mag has the details HERE!

Looking to install unofficial third-party apps on your newly updated iDevice? You're in luck. The Chronic Dev Team this week released a new untethered jailbreak for devices running iOS 5.1.1.

"After copious amounts of work and many sleepless nights Absinthe 2.0 is finally here to jailbreak your device," the group announced in a Friday blog post.

The developers said the jailbreak, dubbed Absinthe 2.0, was a "large collaborative effort between Chronic-Dev Team and iPhone Dev Teams (Jailbreak Dream Team)."

Why jailbreak a device? As most people are aware, Apple is very particular about the apps that it allows in its App Store. Only Apple-approved apps will run on iOS devices, but there are some apps that tech-savvy iPhone users still want. By jailbreaking your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can get around Apple's restrictions and install whatever app you like. Beware, however. Most jailbreaks void any warranties you might have on your device, so Apple won't help you if you turn your phone or tablet into a brick.

That being said, the dev team said Absinthe 2.0 will work on all iOS devices running 5.1.1, except for the handful of iPad 2s running the 32nm A5 processor. They insisted that it's one of the "easiest jailbreaks to use (so easy your grandma could do it)."

Read the full story HERE!

It turns out that consumers like the idea of watching TV shows with no other ads. And, surprise, the television networks are less than thrilled.

On Friday, news was continuing to emerge about a flurry of lawsuits between Dish Network, which last week released a tool to let its DVR customers do exactly that, and the major television networks.

It's a battle over a new technology tool. But, in some ways, it's a microcosm of the fight for the future of television and how we watch it.

"With Dish's aggressive move to please the end customer rather than advertisers, it's clear that in the fight for TV revenue the gloves have finally come off," James L. McQuivey, an analyst for Forrester Research, told The New York Times. "The fact that Dish would be willing to anger some of its most important content partners just goes to show how desperate these times we live in really are."

Two weeks ago, Dish rolled out Auto Hop, a feature for its DISH DVR that lets users who subscribe automatically skip ads while watching recorded shows.

CNN has the details HERE!

Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Visual Studio 11 is an improvement in many ways over Visual Studio 2010. Its C++ compiler, for example, is a great deal more standards-compliant, especially with the new C++ 11 specification. It has powerful new optimization features, such as the ability to automatically use CPU features like SSE2 to accelerate mathematically intensive programs, and new language features to allow programs to be executed on the GPU.

ARS Technica has the details HERE!

Earlier this week I pointed out that we were probably going to be able to bring the tech podcast which, we thought was completely toast last week, back to some extent and you all would be able to listen to it. 

Well, I listed to the entire podcast and I truly recommend you just play it through some PC speakers and don't put headphones on. As I said that I'm not really sure what happened but we got this horrible clicking sound in the podcast and while Marcel got rid of 98% of it you can still hear it in the background to a certain extent which tells you how loud it was! Even after all of that cleaning,,, you can still hear it! 

So, I am going to link it up and, if you care to have a listen to it go ahead. After about an hour and 20 min. we start to lose it and the two boys go off like nobody's business. I laughed my ass off! 

Happy Friday folks! 

//Dig. 

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- DNS changer website - check to see if you have it!