Competing with popular apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, MessageMe offers iOS and Android applications that let you share rich messages and content with family and friends. On top of standard text, you can also send images, YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, and more. Ten days after launch, MessageMe users were uploading two images per second. Today, they are uploading eight images per second. More than 1,500 notifications are sent to Message users each second.

“At MessageMe, our ambition lies in the goal to change the way people communicate around the world, and the mediums through which they connect,” the company said in a blog post today. “From a text message, to a song clip, to those personal moments with your best friends, we’ve built a product which is now used by more than five million people to communicate one day to the next.”

MessageMe only launched its apps in early March but already has attracted $11.9 million in funding. Investors include big names like Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, and SVAngel.

Next up, the company says it has “groundbreaking additions in the pipeline.” We’ll see if it can deliver on that promise.

Samsung may have impressed several million with the new Galaxy S4. Meanwhile, the company is also going to take care of Galaxy S III owners with a new Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update. This update will also bundle a few software features present in the Galaxy S4 Smartphone.

The lockscreen will be updated and will get two unlock modes – Ripple and Light. The ripple effect will be improved compared to the current version. Even the personal message box on the homescreen will be available wherein users will be able to set a custom text with a coloured background.

Adapt Display and Professional Photo are the new Screen modes that will be added to the existing modes. The settings app will have a tabbed user interface, just like the one in Galaxy S4.

The voice-driven digital assistant system has also been updated with the new S-Voice. Apart from that, the update will also bring new voice control that will let the user control several parts of the smartphone interface. The Gallery mode will have a white background. Many more features have been packaged in the leaked build.

From this build we assume that the final build could arrive in a couple of weeks, though Samsung’s plans are unknown.

According to SourceFire’s “25 Years of Vulnerabilities” study released in early March, which analyzed vulnerabilities from the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) data and National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the majority of mobile phone vulnerabilities have been found in Apple’s iPhone. The database provides 25 years of information on vulnerabilities to assess, spanning from 1988.

210 vulnerabilities were found in Apple’s smartphone, giving iOS 81 percent of the mobile phone vulnerability market share. This is more than the total number of vulnerabilities in Android-based, Windows-based and BlackBerry-based smartphones combined, at 19 percent.

In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Yves Younan, senior research engineer at SourceFire’s Vulnerabilities Research Team and author of the report, pointed out the finding was “surprising”. It was also “interesting” as Apple has had significant CVE growth year over year, despite the operating system implementing more security features in subsequent iterations, he added.

Even though Android devices have topped the mobile phone operating system market share, iPhones are still popular among consumers, which is why cybercriminals are driven to find loopholes in the Apple’s operating system, Younan explained.

With Android devices, cybercriminals see less reason to look for vulnerabilities to penetrate smartphones, he added. Android’s open platform already easily opens up for third party and malicious apps to be easily created for users to download, he explained.

On the other hand, this cannot be done with the iOS store due to Apple’s strict control of apps that are published. This is why cybercriminals are driven to find loopholes in the software system of Apple instead, he added.

As for Windows, the low number of vulnerabilities could be due to the fact it is not a popular operating system yet, Younan pointed out, but declined to comment on vulnerabilities in the BlackBerry operating system.

Enterprises must prepare for, tackle vulnerabilities

It was also found in the report the overall number of vulnerabilities with a high severity rating increased significantly until 2007, when it reached a high of 3,159. Since then, it tapered off and fell to 1760, despite more vulnerabilities being discovered in 2012.

What the study shows is vulnerabilities are here to stay, Younan noted.

Moving forward, enterprises must look at how to deal with them, and mitigate having a cyberattacker exploit the vulnerability, by installing mitigation on operating systems or using security products, he said.

“Enterprises should also plan for potential compromises including how they will rebuild and ensure the integrity of the data,” Younan added.

The company is constantly working on Blackberry mobile development by adding and enhancing it’s  features and services. According to the chief executive Thorsten Heins, Blackberry is planning to make a messaging app for multiple platforms across the globe. This free BBM messaging app will initially available for Android and IOS platforms soon in this summer. Initially BBM will offer only messaging services for mobile platforms but soon it will allow sharing voice and screen.

He added that BBM will support the Android devices with ICE cream sandwich and the above versions and IOS-6 for iphones. This app is free for all and will cover all the other mobile platforms soon as a premier messaging app around the globe.

BBM channel is a unique feature of Blackberry which can be use as a social network for users. Unlike other mobile messaging services BBM allows the users to create their social channels to receive regular updates from their networks. Mr. Heins mentioned that BBM channel feature is just like Facebook page where users can directly engage with commercial brands.

The Company is also launching low-cost Q5 Blackberry devices for the selected market very soon. Blackberry low cost Q5 devices are based on RIM platform, targeted to make their place again in the smartphone market. The new device has a physical keyboard launched with blackberry 10 to attract the targeted markets of Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Blackberry has not reviled the price of the device but it is expected to come on July colored White, Black, Pink and Red.

The robots make snarky remarks and exaggerated reactions to encourage offenders to do something about their odour.

One of the robots resembles a woman’s head and ranks the operator’s breath, declaring an “emergency” if it falls into the worst category.

The female robot, Kaori-chan, has brown hair and blue eyes. When a person breathes in her face, she analyses and quantifies components in their breath, and evaluates the smell on a scale of one to four. If their breath smells good, Kaori-chan says, “It smells like citrus!”

The stinkier the breath, the harsher are Kaori-chan’s remarks, ranging from, “Yuck! You have bad breath!” to “No way! I can’t stand it!”

When Kaori-chan judges someone’s breath is in the worst category she shouts, “Emergency! There’s an emergency taking place! That’s beyond the limit of patience!”

The dog robot, Shuntaro-kun, can assess the smell of a person’s feet. With Beethoven’s “Symphony No 5″ as background music.

Shuntaro-kun sniffs the user’s feet and bobs his head and nestles up next to the person or barks or falls down and growls, according to the level of the odour. If Shuntaro-kun passes out, you know you really have smelly feet.

In order to evaluate the odours, CrazyLabo draws on a commercially available odour sensor that can monitor and quantify various airborne odorous components.

Shuntaro-kun can identify the type of the odour and assess its strength. It quantifies them and sends the data to an embedded computer. Kaori-chan can also quantify the strength of two odour components to judge levels of smell.

The company is also developing a new robot whose nose grows longer like Pinocchio when people tell lies. According to CrazyLabo, the new android monitors their brain waves to detect a lie.

It brings the now familiar S4 styling (just like its 8″ cousin) and comes in Wi-Fi and 3G versions, with the 3G one being fully voice call capable. It even adds a proximity sensor, you know, if you want to put up the tablet up to your head.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 is also noticeably more compact and lighter (188.0 x 111.1 x 9.9mm, 306g) than the Tab 2 7.0 (193.7 x 122.4 x 10.5 mm, 345g) and Tab 7.0 Plus (193.7 x 122.4 x 9.9 mm, 345g). The device sports a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, 8/16GB of internal storage memory (expandable to 64GB via memory cards), and a 3-megapixel camera on the back, coupled with a 1.3-megapixel one on the front.

The Wi-Fi version of the 7-inch Galaxy Tab 3 will be available globally in May, and the 3G version will come in June. Exact pricing and availability will vary by market and will be rolled out “gradually,” Samsung claims.

However, anyone has not done it with an official Twitter app for Google glasses. But, LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur has been testing out a third-party app called “GlassTweet” that offers users a rudimentary way to tweet photos but little else.

It is in fact an app produced by a third party .

Le Meur has tweeted a photograph taken in San Francisco using the hashtag “throughglass.”

It “GlassTweet” is “very simple, and it’s very limited. Basically, you take a picture. You take it with your voice, which is cool, especially when you’re driving.”

The app offers multiple ways to share a photo. First is Google+, which makes sense given Glass’ provenance. Twitter is second.

Though GlassTweet is a third-party app, there’s still reason to believe that Twitter has an official app in the works.

What Le Meur’s tweet showed is that Glass is ideal for tweeting photographs. But the question about such a device — and Twitter apps, whether official or third-party, for it — is whether it would be useful for more text-oriented purposes.

That’s the obvious challenge for Twitter, and others jumping on Glass. Taking a picture with Glass and tweeting it is a relatively simple function of setting the Twitter app up for the device. Twitter, however, has traditionally been a text input service, used with a keyboard, even if that keyboard is usually on a mobile device.

Now Twitter service is starting to branch out, and Glass could well present its users with new use cases, such as video “tweets” from Vine and audio tweets with a limited time span, a kind of parallel to the 140-character limit. Presumably, Glass could enable users to dictate tweets to Glass, but voice recognition has clear limitations, and plenty of inaccuracy. So it remains to be seen how such applications will play out on the device, and on other similar wearable computing equipment that is sure to come along.

Frustrated by the existing procedure, Pathmapp made the decision to create a resolution — 1 that would enable builders to take a look at distinct designs and drive them out in genuine time. Right after debuting at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last 12 months, nowadays, the startup is officially launching an A/B tests platform for native iOS applications that aims to permit mobile developers to optimize their applications and increase conversion without generating significant changes to their workflow — or to their customers’ activities.

According to Adam Ceresko, CEO and co-founder of Pathmapp, there is an urgent need in an optimization tool like this, because mobile analytics is among the fastest developing markets and the demand rate is high. In comparison to companies like Google, Flurry, and MixPanel, Pathmapp offers a combination of A/B testing and visual analytics. The application shows visual representations called Pathmapps and visual density maps (Heatmapps). In addition the application offers crash reporting, which can point out where a user clicked right before the application went down. Ceresko said they came up with the idea to create a mobile platform for visual A/B testing and analytics after the creation of APPEK for iOS, Facebook, and Android.

Born of the founders’ expertise building cell application agency, APPEK, merely put, Pathmapp lets iOS builders create and deploy A/B tests in true time across their native applications with out possessing to resubmit the adjustments to the Application Retailer. Of training course, even though Pathmapp co-founder Adam Ceresko admits this might not seem like an earth-shakingly novel principle many thanks to the fact that organizations like Google and Optimizely have produced A/B testing for the internet obtainable for many years, he believes that no 1 has however adequately tackled this dilemma on cell.

“As cellular builders, we noticed this massive hole in the marketplace,” claims Pathmapp CTO Andrew Herman. “Similar systems have existed on the internet for a long time, but have been sorely lacking in the cell space since the first iPhone debuted in 2007.”

Since debuting at Disrupt last 12 months, Pathmapp has been working an prolonged non-public beta, which came to a near in March. Nowadays marks the commencing of the official general public rollout of Pathmapp’s A/B screening system, but Ceresko tells us that it will be a rolling launch, as the startup ideas to proceed adding new functions and tweaking based on consumer suggestions more than the up coming couple of weeks. The large-picture aim, he suggests, is to make Pathmapp completely “independent of the web.”

At launch, Pathmapp involves a amount of new functions that weren’t existing in the beta product that the organization debuted at Disrupt, main of which is support for dwell configuration. In other terms, application developers can now use Pathmapp to dynamically modify the styles served to consumers in real time. This signifies that developers can modify the interface of their applications with no working an A/B test, bringing assist to these who just want to tweak their layout.

In conditions of pricing, Pathmapp offers all end users a free of charge, 15-day demo, after which Pathmapp commences at $ 19/month in its “Scout tier,” which is created to accomodate apps of all dimensions, ranging from modest to company. These who are searching for higher assist and flexibility can improve to the startup’s “Pathfinder tier” at $ 79/thirty day period or “Trailblazer” at $ 399/thirty day period.

Pathmapp is developing a fairly simple, easy-to-use solution for app developers hung up on A/B testing for iOS. All they have to do is drop Pathmapp’s SDK into their apps, and they can begin building interfaces right in Xcode, managing the whole process and doing live configurations through their web dashboard.

Here are the two awesome science projects:

Lending a hand for a fraction of the cost:

7-year-old Easton LaChappelle has created a mind-controlled prosthetic arm for the low price of $250, thanks to parts cheaply replicated from a 3D printer. The Neurosky can measure different levels of concentration, as well as eye blinks. Two eye blinks, for instance, prime the arm for contraction, and the level of concentration controls the degree of contraction. The software is smart enough to learn a user’s daily patterns and make certain movements easier at specific times, such as eating lunch around noon.

So how Easton got such an idea? He was inspired to take his efforts to the next level when he met a girl with an $80,000 prosthetic arm at a science and engineering festival. With that encounter, he decided that he could find a cheaper way to build a more functional limb at a fraction of the cost. Generating most of the parts through a 3D printer, Easton was able to assemble a fully operational arm at a price of only $250. He is now working on controlling the hand through a headset to further improve its utility for people with limited limb mobility.

Using the cloud to combat cancer:

A self-described teen who never grew out of the “why” phase, Brittany Wenger, a high school Senior from Sarasota, Florida, recently took home the Grand Prize at the Google Science Fair for developing a computer program that improves cancer detection.

Inspired by her cousin’s battle with breast cancer, Brittany spent over 1,000 hours researching and creating the Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer, a service that combines multiple data from a single less invasive procedure to improve cancer detection.  Originally conceived with the goal of helping hospitals to diagnose and treat more women earlier, the service has already run 7.6 million trials, with 99.11 percent sensitivity. Though science has been her passion since first starting a science club in the third grade, Brittany has managed to master other talents as well as a varsity soccer player and mentor to students in her community.

Key trends  are as follows
Over the past quarter, Google Play has achieved higher growth rates than the iOS App Store for both downloads and revenues. While Google Play reached close to 90% of the iOS App Store downloads in Q1 2013, the iOS App Store maintained its strong lead in monetization, earning about 2.6x the app revenue of Google Play. In comparison, the multiple was roughly 4x for Q4 2012 overall.

Within the two app stores, several countries stood out for driving growth from Q4 2012 to Q1 2013:

• United States was responsible for much of the growth in iOS revenues, while China proved to be an up-and-coming revenue contributor and also led the growth in iOS downloads
• Russia was a key factor in Google Play downloads growth
• Japan and South Korea continued to drive notable revenue growth for Google Play

Across all the countries mentioned above, Games remained the leading growth driver, even more so for revenue. By Q1 2013, the category had grown to cover approximately 70% of revenue in the iOS App Store and 80% in Google Play.

There were a few other top-ranking categories, however, whose gains pushed them higher in the category rankings:

• Photo and Video apps grew to become the third largest in iOS downloads
• Education apps increased in iOS revenue to become the fourth largest worldwide
• Social grew in Google Play downloads to enter the Top 5 category rankings