It replaced Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company for a while until their places were interchanged due to the day’s trading. In valuation terms, Apple is way ahead of tech giants like Microsoft and Google.

Microsoft is valued at $249 billion, while Google is at a much lower $146 billion. That means if the valuations of Microsoft and Google were combined it would be $395 billion. That is still below Apple’s $413 billion.

Apple’s Incredible Year

• Apple has continued its good performance from last year, when it overtook Microsoft in terms of profitability.
• More than just the market valuation, Apple also has cash reserves of almost a $100 billion. That means if tomorrow the Apple board decides it could buy out Dell and HP together and still have some money left.
• It also has enough money to completely buy out the social network Facebook. As Facebook has not had a IPO, its market value cannot be easily calculated but it is estimated to be valued around $90 billion.

Less is more

• The most amazing part of Apple’s growth in the past 2 years has been that it does not have a host of products and services. Products like iPhone, iPod, iPads and their App store is what is driving all this revenues.
• Also considering it sells devices which are considered expensive and a bit of a luxury, it still has grown despite the economic recession in the US and Europe. It seems Apple is recession proof.

It seems Steve Job’s philosophy of concentrating on a handful of products instead of several, has paid off BIG. Also with iPhone 5 and iPad 3 expected in the year 2012, it could mean there is no stopping Apple at least for the next couple of years.

Source: Nasdaq

-- This Post Apple Is More Valuable Than Microsoft and Google Put Together! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Windows Phone design brings ‘something different‘ factor on the table.

That said, Windows Phone bounds users to 10 color variation, limiting options to tweak the metro UI of the device. But thanks to chevronWP7 lab unlock and Windows Phone hacker team, it is now possible to create a custom theme for WP.

‘Themes for WP7‘ tool lets you deploy your own background theme onto device, provided you follow certain standards. Basically, all Windows Phone supports 480 x 800 resolution, which means that your background theme should be only 480 pixels wide.

Themes for WP

• Themes for WP7 works on all chevronWP7 unlocked Windows Phone, which was re-opened few hours back. You do not need to go through Interop unlock process in order to use this hack.
• For those who might not know, Inertop unlock gives you an access to device drivers which is only limited to Microsoft and OEMs. You need to follow the tutorials given at XDA forum to achieve this. There are loads of homebrew app available on XDA forum that needs an access to Interop codes.
• This tool also supports creation of live tile background. In simple terms, instead of applying the background image to all the tiles, you would be allowed to keep it limited to single or multiple tiles.
• Once again you’ve to take care of the dimensions of the background image. Users can use only 173 x 173 transparent PNG image as a tile background (any image editing tool will let you customize an image to this dimension). For this matter, Windows Phone Icon maker should suffice.

Note: Make sure Zune player is up and running, and your device is connected to the PC when you deploy the custom theme onto Windows Phone.

This video tutorial will walk you through the process of creating and deploying custom theme on Windows Phone.

Do drop in your comments.

-- This Post Use Custom Theme Tool on Your Windows Phone is Published on Devils Workshop .

You can see live demo here.  You can download it from here.

If you decide to use it on your Blogger.com blog, please read follow-up articles on customizations as well.

As Mukund developed this theme on his own, contact him only for support.

WordPress Theme

I saw some readers requesting WordPress version of DW theme as well. We will surely release current DW WordPress Theme for community once its get ported on our recently launched rtPanel wordpress theme framework.

Thanks Surun for the tip.

Link: Devils’ Workshop Blogger.com Template

-- This Post Download “Devils’ Workshop” Blogger Template is Published on Devils Workshop .

List of Free Applications:

According to BlackBerry following applications are now free to download but the availability depends upon your device, Operating System and your location.

• SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
• Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
• N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
• Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
• Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
• DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
• iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
• Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

Availability in India:

Unfortunately not all the applications are available in India and not even some of them.There’s just one application available for downloading that is “DriveSafe.ly Pro by iSpeech.org. Hopefully some better application we be available soon as DriveSafe.ly is a low rated application that’s not liked by many BlackBerry users including me.

Are these applications available for you to download in your region? Don’t forget to tell us.

(via RIM)

-- This Post Free Premium BlackBerry Apps in India and their Availability is Published on Devils Workshop .

Although it is still not commercially available in the markets, but research engineers at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, at an online news conference demonstrated this new storage technology.

How does it work?

The technology makes use of extremely tiny gold particles called “nanorods”. The date is stored in a 3D space using different colors and different polarizations of light — the two other “dimensions”, making it a 5D storage medium.

Richard Evans, an engineering professor, explains it better:

“Using three colors and three polarizations, you can get nine data sets written in the same exact spot.”

The new technology is backed by Samsung Electronics but it is expected to be commercially available only between five to ten years from now. That’s sad!

The next steps at the research lab:

• Testing the technology on an actual DVD-sized disc
• Develop an optical drive that should work with it
• Try different nanorod materials that should shall bring down the actual cost of the discs

Competition?

A new method of 3D storage that could support 500 GB of storage on a DVD-sized disc was recently announced by GE. We have already covered this news in a separate article. You may click here to read about it in detail.

In separate questions raised by the press, the research engineers clarified that both 3D and 5D storage technologies could be made backwards compatible with existing optical drive technology. This means consumers would be able to play back their CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray on the 3D and 5D drives.

The 3D and 5D technologies are definitely going to boost the storage capacities exponentially in the time to come.

-- This Post 10 terabytes on a single disc? No kidding! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Yahoo’s Search Monkey Project has completed a year now, a technology to make search results more elaborate and more useful. Search Monkey allowed programmers to write applications that can turn dry textual listings in search results into an elaborate display.

Yahoo’s new vision revolves around more structured data.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy said:

“It’s time to kill the 10 blue links. We want to move away from document retrieval as center of search to divining the user’s intent.”

Yahoo’s projects are currently testing the ability to show up results that add in other types of data. For example:

• People who are expressing intent to visit a certain restaurant should be able to interpret from the Yahoo search’s most relevant content if that’s a good idea or not.
• A search for Beyonce brings up the popular singer’s home page, and also a list of albums and links to tracks hosted on Rhapsody, where searchers could play the track right from the search result.

Well, although none of these ideas seem to be quite novel, Yahoo still appears to be going uphill – slow but steady. Yahoo’s search rival Google seems to be moving in this direction as well. Only time will tell how effective Yahoo’s new strategies are and whether or not it can fetch Yahoo the No. 1 position by beating Google.

(Source: ZDNet)

-- This Post Yahoo Redefines Search – Focuses on intent, not results! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Spielberg stepped into the video game business after he realized that no video game really catered for his 7 children. Not just that, Spielberg says that he enjoys playing almost every game that comes out and is also a big fan of Nintendo’s Wii console for its motion-sensor controls that involves physical interactivity.

According to Spielberg:

“It’s been very, very good for a parent like me who wants our kids not to be couch potatoes, but to get up and move their bodies around more.”

Features of the game:

• The game has up to 4 players that face a range of challenges.
• There are a whooping 400 new levels in settings such as outer space and water.
• The players can create their own user-generated content and share this with others online.
• There are new characters, new tools, blox types(like virus and conveyor blox ) and blox shapes.

Till now video games have not really translated to the big screen, although Hollywood continues to try with new films like “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” by Disney Pictures.

Spielberg adds:

“So far, there hasn’t been a major success in the videogame industry based on a motion picture, nor has there been a very successful motion picture based on a videogame. There’s not been convergence, thus far. There will be. When it happens it will be dynamite.”

(Image Credits: techeblog)

(Source: Hollywood reporter)

-- This Post Steven Spielberg’s second video game “Bloom Blox Bash Party” coming soon! is Published on Devils Workshop .

GE has developed micro-holographic disc that supports 500 gigabytes of storage capacity in a standard DVD-size disc! This is equal to the capacity of 20 single-layer Blu-ray discs, 100 DVDs or the hard drive for a large desktop computer. The micro-holographic disc can be read with systems similar to today’s Blu-ray and DVD Players.

Says Brian Lawrence, head of GE’s Holographic Storage program:

“The day when you can store your entire high definition movie collection on one disc and support high resolution formats like 3D television is closer than you think.”

Optical storage formats vs. holographic storage

1. DVDs and Blu-ray discs store info only on the surface of the disc while the holographic storage technology uses the entire volume of the disc material. Multiple images can be placed in the same area, read by light at different angles.
2. While CDs and DVDs store information in a liner fashion, holographic information storage is parallel, resulting in faster data transfer rates.
3. GE’s holographic storage technology formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and BDs.

It has been over 6 years that GE has been working on holographic storage technology. GE says that their researchers also have been very focused on making the technology easily adaptable to existing optical storage formats and manufacturing techniques.

It is being said that since GE’s micro-holographic discs can be read and played using similar optics to those found in standard Blu-ray players, the technology will pave the way for cost-effective, robust and reliable holographic drives that could be in every home!

(Source: GE press release)

-- This Post GE introduces micro-holographic disc supporting 500 GB of storage capacity is Published on Devils Workshop .

Three months back they added advertising to their text messages and today are making $150,000 per month in revenue. Wow!

A user is limited to 100 characters, and each SMS is paid for by Advertising. The ad appears as text of 40 characters after the main message.

How does SMS GupShup work?

1. Create your group
2. Invite your friends to join it
3. Forward an SMS to your group
4. Any SMS you send to the group will be automatically forwarded to all those subscribed to it
5. You have the option to maintain your privacy by keeping your group and its messages “private”.
6. The SMS sent to non-private groups reflect on their website
7. Users can create polls, quizzes and also solicit ratings from the group members.

SMS GupShup now has 20 million users and is growing rapidly with thousands of groups like:

• Finance
• Entertainment
• Lifestyle
• Health
• Sports
• Technology, and so on!

How could you use this service?

Only via SMS!

CEO Beerud Sheth says that the service can only be accessed via SMS, which works just fine for India’s 400 million mobile phone users. Users sign up and use the service all via text messages. They never need to visit the website at all.

This service is a low cost way to keep in touch, that too, without an internet connection.

I’d say, “Great Going”!

Link: SMSGupShup

(Source: TechCrunch)

-- This Post SMS GupShup identified as India’s Twitter is Published on Devils Workshop .

Indian government is planning to roll out laptops for students just for 500 rupees ($10). According to reports, the laptop’s prototype will be launched by the Indian Human resource minister, Arjun Singh at Tirupati on 3rd of February. 

According to the reports published on periodicals and news papers, the technology for these low priced laptops has been developed by the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) and the Indian Institute of Technology (Chennai), but will be manufactured by some other private companies and will be rolled out in the Indian market within next six months. It has also been reported that the laptop will be supporting 2 GB of RAM.

So, this initiative would be really a boon for the Indian children having talent and potentiality to work with computer but could not do so because of financial constraints. Lets be optimist and hope to see these low priced laptops (worth $10) soon in the market.

[Via DNA India, TOI]

-- This Post Indian Students to get Laptops just for $10! is Published on Devils Workshop .