Gresso unleashes $30,000 limited edition white iPhone 4

Bank-breaker

The Gresso company, famed for its outlandish mobile customisations, has gone and released a $30,000 diamond encrusted mobile phone.

The iPhone 4 Lady Blanche diamonds also has a younger sister, covered in Swarovski crystals and priced in at $7000.?

Both feature three, independently timed Swiss clocks on the back, showing New York, Paris and Moscow. Alongside these are pearl dials with a choice of either diamonds (the more expensive version) or crystals. Naturally things are hand made using a clever floating diamonds technique that allows for a "unique dazzling".?

Using only odd numbers of diamonds or crystals coupled with clever jewellery work means that especially bright tracks of light are created, making things shinier than shiny.?As if there wasn't enough diamond action already, the entire back of the phone uses solid diamond-coated mineral glass.?

Current release date details remain pretty vague, with things only confirmed as coming out this year. Keep checking the Gresso website if you are interested. Careful though, a few distractions or accidental purchases could easily see you bankrupting yourself in an instant.?

We definitely like the idea of a bit of mobile bling, personally though we prefer something along the lines of the vajazzled Virgin Media TiVo box.?

Tags: Gresso iPhone 4 Phones Apple ios Apple iPhone 4 Mobile phones

Gresso unleashes $30,000 limited edition white iPhone 4 originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:17:00 +0100

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Links 16/7/2011: PCLinuxOS Reviews, Kororaa 15 Coming

Links for the day

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TechBytes Episode 55: Google?s Growth, Sabayon Linux 6, and Sony-Microsoft

Tim and Roy do the first show where an outline of topics was prepared in advance by both sides

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EA buying PopCap today for up to $1.3 billion

Seattle's PopCap Games was acquired by Electronic Arts for up to $1.3 billion, including $650 million cash up front.

PopCap's breakout hit "Bejeweled" established the modern casual games industry that's centered in Seattle starting in 2000. The studio went on to produce a series of blockbuster games that have been played by more than 1 billion people, making it one of the most successful and respected studios in the games industry.

Executives at the companies said Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts will continue to invest in PopCap and grow the company, which now employs 500 people, mostly in Belltown.

"Quite frankly they are the Pixar of the space," said Barry Cottle, executive vice president of EA Interactive.

"Our goal right here is they keep doing what they do, that they do so extremely well, and there's just some natural synergies we can bring to the table that we can expand and make these guys bigger and stronger and more powerful."

The deal gives EA an especially strong presence on Facebook, where the combined company trails only Zynga, and on Apple platforms where EA and PopCap accounted for six of the top 10 selling games last year.

PopCap was considering going public this fall but employees and founders were wary of how that would change the company's culture, said John Vechey, one of three developers who started the company in 2000.

"The IPO was fraught with risk, it was scary, people were going to start thinking about the stock price all the time. Most employees were worried about that internally," he said.

"Now, instead of getting a couple hundred million in the bank for us to spend, we get world-class publishing" on platforms including mobile devices and social networks, he said.

"I think for us it accelerates what we were going to do by many years - we're going to be seven years faster to achieving world gameplay domination," he said.

Vechey said the deal was "a highly competitive process" with multiple companies interested in PopCap.

EA is paying $650 million in cash plus $100 million in common stock that's going to the PopCap founders and its chief executive, Dave Roberts.

Additional payouts of up to $550 million will be made if PopCap achieves profit goals over the next two years, although the maximum payout would require the company to increase its profits by ten times over the next two years.

PopCap sales cross $100 million last year and it netted about $15 million. (Its growth is shown on the chart below, presented by EA.) To start getting bonus payouts from EA, it needs to grow profits to at least $110 million. To get the full $550 million, it needs to increase earnings before taxes and interest to $343 million over the next two years.

EA expects the deal to add at least 10 cents per share to its fiscal 2013 results, boosting its overall earnings per share by more than 10 percent, according to Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown.

Last year EA's digital business had $833 million in sales, while PopCap did just over $100 million, 80 pecent of which was digital content.

"It adds 10 percent to our digital business right off the bat," Brown said.

EA stock fell about 3 percent to $23.40 in after-hours trading, after the deal was announced at 1 p.m.

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Harry Potter fans rejoice as Virgin Media TiVo gets dedicated app

Contentexplodius!

Virgin Media has joined forces with Warner Brothers to celebrate the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 with a dedicated app for its TiVo platform.

Subscribers to the service will now find a new "Harry Potter" application icon on the Apps & Games menu screen which opens up to a massive selection of themed content and information, all streamed via the 'net. Trailers, interviews and behind the scenes footage are all available on demand, and you can also browse information about each major cast member and character.

In addition, each of the previous seven movies (from Philosopher's Stone up to Deathly Hallows - Part 1) are represented by icons on a selection bar at the bottom, although you will have to quit the application if you want to watch them on Virgin Media's Film Flex service (as prompted by the app) or, in the case of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, on Sky Movies (which you will need a Sky movie package subscription for).

The other feature of the Harry Potter TiVo app is access to the official Twitter feed for the new movie, which updates regularly in real time.

For HP fans, it's all great stuff. And, represents a good sign for TiVo owners that VM is finally adding new apps to the platform.

Tags: Virgin Media Home Cinema Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 Harry Potter Virgin Media TiVo box Virgin Media TV powered by TiVo

             

Harry Potter fans rejoice as Virgin Media TiVo gets dedicated app originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:09:00 +0100

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Next Tuesday 16 bulletins addressing 34 vulnerabilities!

Advance Notification Service information on 16 bulletins (nine Critical in severity, seven Important) addressing 34 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, .NET, SQL, Visual Studios, Silverlight and ISA. All bulletins will be released on Tuesday, June 14, at approximately 10am PDT. Come back to this blog on Tuesday for our official risk and impact analysis, along with deployment guidance and a video overview of the release.

One of the issues we start to address in this release is ?cookiejacking,? which allows an attacker to steal cookies from a user?s computer and access websites the user has logged into. The Internet Explorer bulletin will address one of the known vectors to the cookie folder. Given the prevalence of other types of social engineering methods in use by criminals, which provide access to much more than cookies, we believe this issue poses lower risk to customers. Further, based on a signature that has been released to millions of Microsoft Security Essentials and Forefront customers, the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) has not detected attempts to use this technique.

 

June Advance Notification Service

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400 Million Windows 7 Licenses Sold

Today during the Day 1 keynote of our annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Steve Ballmer revealed that Windows 7 has officially sold 400 million licenses to-date. Our previous statement of 7 copies of Windows 7 sold a second continues to hold true. We continue to see excellent momentum for Windows 7 as well as Internet Explorer 9. According to Net Applications as of June 2011, Windows 7 is now running on 27.13% of all PCs worldwide. And of PCs running Windows 7 in the U.S., Internet Explorer 9 is now the most popular modern browser. Internet Explorer 9 is running on 17% of Windows 7 PCs worldwide.

Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Windows and Windows Live Tami Reller joined Steve Ballmer today during the Worldwide Partner Conference keynote where she highlighted that Windows 7 is the path to Windows 8 and that we believe that in the future, we will see enterprise environments running a combination of Windows 8 devices and apps alongside Windows 7 PCs and apps. For more on Windows 8, I suggest reading this article from Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President of Windows Program Management titled Previewing Windows 8 from June.

However this was only a small part of announcements we?re making from the Worldwide Partner Conference. Check out this blog post from Erwin Visser from the Windows for your Business Blog for more!

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