What better way to come off the long weekend than with a bunch of Apple rumors? It looks like the iPad 3 may be getting a bit of junk in the trunk, while the iPhone 5 could be another fall release for Apple.

The Chinese tech blog M.I.C. Gadget has received an early production version of the iPad 3′s rear case from “reliable sources,” which shows that the new tablet will have even more tapered edges than the iPad 2 and will also be around 1-1.5mm thicker.

Apple was likely forced to increase the iPad 3′s thickness to fit in some new hardware, like the higher resolution Retina Display (which was semi-confirmed by counting pixels on an early production display), improved camera, and possible inclusion of LTE 4G technology. The iPad 3 is rumored to sport a new quad-core A6 processor from Apple, though a recent posting on a Chinese forum says otherwise, thanks to a picture of a purported iPad 3 logic board with an “A5X” chip. Judging by Apple’s naming conventions, the A5X (if it exists) is most likely a slightly faster version of the dual-core A5 on the iPad 2.

According to the most recent rumors, the iPad 3 is expected to launch on March 7.

As for the iPhone 5, it seems that Apple may be settling on fall as its new season for iPhone releases, according to the Japanese tech blog Macotakara. The site, which has been accurate in the past about Apple rumors, also cites “reliable sources” for its information. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the iPhone 5 does land during the fall, because it wouldn’t make much sense for Apple to cut into the iPhone 4S’ life cycle. People are still hot for the iPhone 4S, and Apple will want to milk that demand for all it’s worth.

Via ZDNet; Image via M.I.C. Gadget

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Barnes & Noble is launching a new 8GB Nook tablet at a $199 price point to better compete against Amazon’s popular Kindle Fire Tablet, the company confirmed today.

Since the Kindle Fire’s November launch at a $199 price, the $249 Nook Color has had a hard time attracting customers who were in the market to buy the cheapest tablet, as my colleague Sean Ludwig previously pointed out. The current Nook Color is also dropping in price to $169, which makes it the cheapest available tablet option for most people.

Unlike the current Nook Color model, the new $199 Nook will have 8GB less storage, which makes sense since the majority of digital media (e-books, e-magazines, games, music, and other media) on a tablet is increasingly moving to the cloud. The new Nook also has a microSD slot on the Nook Tablet that can significantly increase the storage capacity if needed.

I’m guessing that since Barnes & Noble is reporting fourth quarter revenue increases to both digital and physical sides of the business, that the company is seeking to continue its strategy of making the Nook a loss leader to boost sales everywhere else.

Nook Tablet photo: Barnes & Noble

Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat

Version 2.0 of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS is available for owners of the tablet as of today, Research In Motion announced. The update will finally add a native e-mail application to the tablet, among other new features, ten months after the tablet’s initial release.

The BlackBerry PlayBook was derided upon its release for its lack of e-mail and calendar apps without an accompanying BlackBerry smartphone to feed it that information. The new version of the OS gives users a unified inbox that can not only handle e-mail, but also messages in Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

That social network integration extends to the Calendar and Contacts apps, which can be automatically populated with content pulled from the services above. One of the most popular apps from RIM, BlackBerry Messenger, remains absent from the company’s tablet.

The PlayBook went through rounds of price cuts and deals from retailers last fall, and received a flat price cut following the release of the Kindle Fire. The base 16GB WiFi model now retails for around $200.

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If you run multiple cloud providers in your shop and are looking at ways to connect them with virtual networks, then vCider with its Virtual Private Cloud v2 release has something you should take a closer look at. The service can help you create private links between the different providers, just like you can use ordinary VPNs to connect external networks to be virtually inside your data center.

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For example, let’s say you want to use Rackspace’s Mongo DB service but want to use Amazon for storage. vCider will put encrypted tunnels between the two IaaS providers and give you private IP addresses for your traffic to traverse. One customer, a biochemical library, is running a Cassandra database in Holland and using AWS in the US for storage and has connected the two locations. They claim the latencies are small and network performance isn’t an issue. Using vCider means you don’t have to deploy OpenVPN or other equivalent solutions too, which in some cases provides a big boost in performance. The customer cited above saw a six percent improvement by forgoing OpenVPN.

New to the v2 version is a virtual network switch that can cloak your network access, so only traffic from the encrypted tunnel is allowed into your servers.

vCider is available now for any cloud-based instance of modern Linux kernels v2.6 and above. It is not yet available for any Windows instances. You can deploy up to eight systems free of charge, and prices start at $100 per month for up to 16 systems in a virtual private cloud. You can get more information on vCider here.

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Apple surprised the tech world Thursday when it announced its new operating system, Mountain Lion. The system incorporates several of iOS’s most notable features. Here’s a quick rundown of the top Mountain Lion features for the Mac, many aimed at users who have more than one Apple product:

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Kiip is announcing today that it has hired Zynga’s ad boss Manny Anekal as chief operating officer.

San Francisco-based Kiip is a fast-growing startup that offers real-world prizes as rewards in mobile games. Hiring Anekal from recently-public Zynga will add some cachet and some executive firepower for the company, which is headed by 20-year-old entrepreneur Brian Wong.

I can imagine that a lot of business people might not take a company with a 20-year-old CEO seriously. But Wong has built a track record for his company, launched numerous products, created several key partnerships, and has raised money. If the company needs some extra cred because Wong isn’t old enough or lacks experience, then Anekal can bring that to the company as its global chief operating officer.

“Kiip is undeniably one of the world’s most innovative companies with a great story to tell — they’re also sitting at the epicenter of three burgeoning markets: mobile, gaming, and advertising,” Anekal said. “They’ve taken an angle that I’ve never seen any company tackle with such prowess, and the growth opportunity they sit on is absolutely massive. I’m excited to help them take this to the next level.”

San Francisco-based Kiip was founded in September 2010 by Wong, Courtney Guertin, and Amadeus Demarzi.

Kiip offers rewards at the moment when you achieve something in a mobile game, such as getting past a level or a boss. Wong calls this “moments based” advertising, or catching a consumer when he or she is having a great time with a game. It recently also started offering Swarms, or mobile game tournaments with big-ticket rewards.

Anekal will be responsible for managing the growth and operations of the rewards network. Anekal led the brand integration and ad efforts with top-tier consumer brands in titles such as FarmVille and CityVille. Anekal has a decade of experience with the development of games and online advertising products. He was global director of brand advertising at Zynga, the social game giant, and he led global ad operations at Electronic Arts. He also had a similar position at in-game ad startup Massive, which was acquired by Microsoft.

Regarding the age question, Wong said in an email to VentureBeat, “I’ve been very fortunate and I’m able to have conversations with the right people who I can respect and they reciprocate. I think the amount of progress we’ve made and the partnerships and brands we’ve struck deals with are indicative of that. I think brands and agencies are looking for the younger generation to propel them to areas they would have never considered. Manny will certainly help, but he’s joked that he’s always felt like the young one too. This industry is also very young.”

Kiip is backed by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, True Ventures, Verizon Ventures, and Crosslink Capital.

Filed under: games, media, mobile, social

Vox Media, the Washington, D.C. online media start-up that recently launched a new tech site called The Verge in the fall, is debuting an early version of its expected videogames offering later today.

The site, temporarily called Vox Games, will begin daily publishing today as a section on The Verge, to be followed later by a standalone site under a new brand name.

The company said that “our goal here is to create the premier destination and media outlet for video games news, reviews, video and entertainment.”

As with The Verge, the Vox Games staff is made up of well-known editorial personnel from other prominent sites. It is headed up by former Joystiq Editor in Chief Chris Grant.

Other staffers are former editors in chief of top videogames sites, including Brian Crecente (Kotaku) and Russ Pitts (Escapist).

When the troubled IT giant Hewlett-Packard reports its quarterly results tomorrow, most analysts expect it to come through and meet — and perhaps even beat — some already diminished expectations.

Yet HP is facing a significant problem in a key market: Printing. HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, or IPG, accounts for roughly 20 percent of HP’s revenue, making it a bigger business by revenue than the enterprise and server, storage and networking businesses.

As it does with most printer vendors, the business model of IPG works like this: HP sells a printer, more often than not at a loss, then makes up for the loss by selling the customer ink and other supplies over the next several years of the printer’s useful life.

In this business, HP is the king. In a survey of the state of the printing market issued last week, the market research firm IDC pegged HP’s overall share at north of 41 percent. In 2011, by IDC’s reckoning, HP sold more than twice the number of printers as its nearest rival Canon, and more than the combined unit sales of its nearest three rivals — Canon, Epson and Samsung.

So what’s the problem? The printing business is on the wane. For all of 2011, combined sales grew by 0.7 percent, according to IDC, and what little growth there was didn’t go to HP. IDC says HP’s printer shipments declined by 0.7 percent last year, while Canon, Samsung and Brother all saw their shipments grow.

And sales in key market geographies make the picture look even worse. In the U.S., for example, IDC says the market for printers in 2011 contracted by 9 percent, while HP’s unit sales plummeted by more than 12 percent. On a unit basis, IDC says, HP sold fewer than 4.2 million printers to U.S. customers, compared to 4.8 million in 2010.

Slowing hardware sales are only the leading edge of the problem. Remember that HP takes a loss on every printer it sells and makes it up on much more profitable supplies. Here’s where the numbers start to look scary: As overall revenue in the IPG was essentially flat year on year in 2011 — sales were $25.78 billion in 2011 versus $25.76 billion in 2010 — sales of supplies declined.

That may not seem important, until you realize that sales of supplies account for more than two-thirds of IPG’s revenue: Printer supplies are a $17 billion annual business that had been growing until 2011 when sales headed south. Sales of ink cartridges tend to track sales of new printers on a six- to nine-month lag, but there’s also a long tail that feeds into the existing installed base. Printers can stay in service for years, gobbling up ink.

A decline in ink sales can have an outsized impact in IPG’s profitability: Operating margins in IPG declined from 17.1 percent in 2010 to 15.4 percent in 2011.

And if market trends weren’t enough to drag down HP’s printer business, there are economic ones, too. Canon manufactures key parts of HP’s LaserJet printers in Japan. That caused two significant problems: Logistics costs increased as a result of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last year. Meanwhile, the strength of the Japanese yen relative to the U.S. dollar is adding adding even more incremental costs.

The bottom line: Printing has long been one of HP’s long-term strengths. If people are printing less, they’re buying fewer printers. And if they’re buying fewer printers, they’re buying less ink. All of it is bad news for the world’s biggest printer company. We’ll see just how bad on Wednesday, when HP reports its latest results.

Microsoft is leveraging an outcry over Google’s approach to privacy to smear its rival in the press. It released a blog post yesterday that claimed to have fresh findings about how Google circumvents privacy protections in Internet Explorer to place cookies that track users across the web.

But Microsoft was playing dumb. It has known about this technique for two years, and failed to mention that many other major sites like Facebook, in which Microsoft is an investor, use the same techniques to get around IE’s default privacy settings.

Here is the setup from Microsoft’s blog post yesterday, written by Dean Hachamovitch a corporate Vice President at Internet Explorer. “When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too?”

That’s a question that Microsoft already knows the answer to. A study published way back in 2010 showed that more than a third of sites visited using Internet Explorer have a technical error that allows cookies to be installed. The study was big news, meriting a story in the New York Times.

The trick that Google, Facebook and many other are using to get around IE’s privacy settings involves a web standard know as P3P. In their recent blog post, Microsoft said they would be calling on Google to honor this protocol. But Facebook has made it perfectly clear that P3P isn’t some universally accepted technology. A blog post from technologist Nik Cubrilovic lays out the specifics. Attached to the piece of code that allows Facebook to get by IE’s privacy settings he found this statement:

“The organization that established P3P, the World Wide Web Consortium, suspended its work on this standard several years ago because most modern web browsers do not fully support P3P. As a result, the P3P standard is now out of date and does not reflect technologies that are currently in use on the web, so most websites currently do not have P3P policies.”

So to recap. Microsoft jumped on a story about how Google was getting around privacy protections in Safari to drum up outrage about a two year old violation they were already well aware of. What they neglected to mention is that plenty of other sites, including Facebook, in which Microsoft is a major investor, and partners with Bing over data in search, uses the exact same techniques and have more or less dismissed the standards Microsoft is calling on Google to honor.

This is playing politics with privacy concerns, plain and simple.

Filed under: security

A new accelerator coming soon to the Boston-Cambridge area will focus on the “things” part of the internet of things.

The accelerator, called Bolt, is the brainchild of Ben Einstein, who founded Brainstream Design, a product design company in Northhampton, Mass. Einstein is now scouting Boston-Cambridge locations for his new venture, according to The Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner. The idea behind Bolt is to help startups that want to build actual, physical devices, by providing funding, space and the physical machinery they need to do so.

Connected devices go way beyond iPads and smart phones. New devices help consumers monitor their health, even brush their teeth.  The advent of tiny, affordable sensors and near-ubiquitous connectivity means that more devices will be web-connected over time. As of last October, there were 9 billion connected devices, and by 2020, that number was expected to explode to 24 billion devices, according to the GSMA, the global mobile industry trade group.

That’s a big addressable market for Bolt’s prospective clients.

The production of physical devices has higher barriers to entry than say, creating software. To make a physical device, a company needs actual equipment– drill presses, saws,  or more-modern-day machinery computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) milling machines and 3-D printers. Bolt could help there by providing that infrastructure.

As Einstein told The Boston Globe:

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