Hasta La Gadget!

Less than a decade ago, BlackBerry was considered to be the darlings of the mobile industry when it came to devices that were widely embraced by corporations and governments. This is thanks to BES which allowed IT admins to remotely control and monitor devices, as well as the fact that BlackBerry offered up encryption to help protect messages and emails, both sent and received. Unfortunately due to many contributing factors, BlackBerry did not survive the onslaught of iPhone and Android devices, leading to many companies and governments dropping their BlackBerry contracts in favor of BYOD policies. The latest is the US Air Force who has recently announced that they will be replacing 5,000 of its existing BlackBerry devices with iPhones.

According to Defense News, the Air Force will eventually require all mobile users to trade in their BlackBerry handsets for iPhones or other approved smartphones and tablets. In a statement made by Brig. Gen. Kevin Wooton, communications director for Air Force Space Command, “In order to keep costs down and save on network resources, BlackBerrys will be turned in and shut off once the user is transitioned to an iOS device.” It should be noted that this move will be done by the US Air Force and might not necessarily apply to the US military in general, so perhaps there might still be hope for BlackBerry in the remaining departments, unless they were to follow in the footsteps of the US Air Force.

USAF To Ditch BlackBerry For iPhones original content from Ubergizmo.

Time doesn’t stop for anybody. Seasons keep rolling one after the other. Weather could care less if you’re cold or hot or just right. And life eventually ends. This new stop motion music video directed by Toby and Pete for Chet Faker’s Talk Is Cheap examines all that in 3 minutes. It’s mesmerizing to see a year’s life wither down in such little time. Enjoy it.

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(Credit: CNET)

Remember when a shark swam through the streets of New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy? Actually, it didn’t. But wouldn’t it have been handy to have been able to check the veracity of those Garden State shark reports without going through the office of Gov. Chris Christie?

An international group of researchers funded by the EU is working on a lie detector for social media that could make it easier to separate online truth from lies and the lying liars who tell them (apologies to Al Franken).

Named Pheme after a Greek mythological figure who “pried into the affairs of mortals and gods, then repeated what she learned, starting off at first with just a dull whisper, but repeating it louder each time, until everyone knew,” the system will collate a variety of data to assess in real time how likely it really is that a baby mermaid was just born in the Philippines or snakes invaded a Pennsylvania casino.

Pheme will, for example, gauge the authority of sources such as… [Read more]

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Once upon a time, in the early days of smartphones (y’know, a few years ago), a company would do everything possible to make its app look as similar to its website as possible. Now everything is topsy-turvy. Today YouTube revealed that some of the website’s new look is going to be borrowed from its mobile app. Brave new world.

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This awesome OpenKnit machine can weave a sweater from a digital pattern in about an hour—that’s cool. I mean, look at it go! Even cooler is that you can actually construct this awesome OpenKnit machine yourself. Welcome to a brave new world of textile design.

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