Computerworld
Windows 8 App Store Gets Gaming Launch Titles
PC Magazine
By Will Greenwald Microsoft is renewing its focus on PC games with game downloads available on the Windows 8 app store. The Verge has confirmed that 11 titles will be available in the store when Windows 8 launches, as part of an ecosystem Microsoft is ...
Windows 8: Your Chance To Preview Coming Soon?InformationWeek
Designing Windows 8, or how to redesign a religionmsnbc.com
Has Microsoft finally killed off Windows 8 Start button?Register
Computerworld -CNET -The Seattle Times
all 119 news articles »

Telegraph.co.uk
Nikon's latest camera is made for videographers, and it shows
Washington Post
After months of rumors and years of waiting, Nikon has finally announced the D800, the latest addition to the company's DSLR lineup. After some flood-induced delays, the new full-frame camera will be available in March for $2999.95, and it's full of ...
Nikon D800 combines medium format quality, HD filmmaking in one DSLRArs Technica
Nikon Unveils D800, the World's Highest Resolution DSLR CameraMashable
Nikon announces 36-megapixel cameraTelegraph.co.uk
msnbc.com -SlashGear -Popular Photography Magazine
all 120 news articles »

TIME
Head-Mounted Android: Google Reportedly Preps Connected Glasses
TIME
By Doug Aamoth | @daamoth | February 7, 2012 | + Behold the future! Take a pile of smartphone parts and stuff them into a pair of somewhat bulky glasses. That's the idea behind a project Google is reportedly working on right now.
Google's Terminator-Style Goggles Might Include Phone, Launch This SpringPCWorld (blog)
Google goggles with Terminator HUD 'coming soon'Register
Rumor: Google Goggles with Heads Up Display May Arrive SoonPC Magazine
CNET -SlashGear -CNET UK
all 37 news articles »

IBNLive.com
Symantec offered hackers $50k to delete stolen code in alleged "sting"
Ars Technica
By Sean Gallagher | Published February 7, 2012 10:19 AM But the point of contact for the hacker group involved in the code exposure claimed in an e-mail conversation with Reuters that they never intended to take money from Symantec, ...
Hackers leak Symantec source code after failed $50000 extortion stingVentureBeat
Symantec pcAnywhere Code Leaked After $50000 Payoff Deal CollapseseWeek
Symantec Tried to Buy Back Stolen Source Code for $50000, Says It was a Sting ...Maximum PC
BGR -ZDNet -Reuters
all 105 news articles »

BBC News
Wolfram Alpha unveils premium 'Pro' analysis service
BBC News
Wolfram Alpha is about to allow users to analyse and manipulate their own data - including pictures and sounds. The service is part of a new "pro" version of the data search and analysis engine to be launched on Wednesday.
Wolfram Alpha Learns Image, Data TricksInformationWeek
Siri accounts for 1/4 of Wolfram Alpha queries as search engine goes 'Pro'Apple Insider
Apple's Siri Makes a Quarter of Wolfram Alpha's SearchesThe Mac Observer
New York Times -The Verge -Macgasm
all 22 news articles »

Fox News
Need a new job? There may be an app for that
Fox News
Looking for a promising career in a lousy economy? A new study suggests you're apt to find it in apps - the services and tools built to run on smartphones, computer tablets and Facebook's online social network. The demand for applications for ...
Apps have created 466000 US jobs (study)ZDNet (blog)
Looking for work? There may be an app for thatChicago Sun-Times
Mobile apps credited for creating nearly 500000 U.S. jobsFiercemobilecontent
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
all 348 news articles »

Globe and Mail
Report: Apple 'iTV' prototypes at TV makers' labs
Washington Post
Tornoto's Globe and Mail reports that two major Canadian television makers — Rogers and Bell Canda Enterprises — have Apple interactive television prototypes in their laboratories and are talking with Apple about becoming launch partners.
Rogers, BCE in talks with Apple over iTV -reportReuters
More Apple TV rumors: Wave controls, exclusive showsSan Jose Business Journal
'Apple HDTV' imagined in Best Buy survey: 42-inch model for $1499The Verge
Bloomberg -PC Magazine
all 106 news articles »

Telegraph.co.uk
3D printer builds new jaw bone for transplant
Telegraph.co.uk
An 83-year-old woman has become the first person to have a 3D printer-created jaw fitted. The artificial jaw bone was created using a 3D printer. The implant was made from titanium powder, heated and built up layer by layer.
Transplant jaw made by 3D printerBBC News
Woman receives world's first 3D printed jawboneTG Daily
Woman Receives 3D Printer-Created Transplant JawPC Magazine
ZME Science -Register -Mashable
all 85 news articles »

IBNLive.com
Deleted Facebook Photos Still Accessible Online Years Later
PCWorld
By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, PCWorld Feb 7, 2012 6:08 AM Photos deleted from Facebook have remained on the social network's servers for nearly three years, according to an investigation by Ars Technica. Ars Technica looked into this situation almost ...
Are Your Facebook Photos Really Deleted?MyFox Tampa Bay
Are your deleted photos still on Facebook?msnbc.com (blog)
'Delete' doesn't work on Facebook picsWDIV Detroit
Toronto Star -RedOrbit
all 107 news articles »

BBC News
Antarctic lake success 'uncertain'
BBC News
It is not yet clear whether Russian scientists have succeeded in their quest to drill into Lake Vostok. National media on Monday reported a breakthrough into the lake, the largest of more than 300 bodies of liquid water buried under Antarctica's ice.
Russian team reaches Antarctica's buried Lake Vostok, say reportsCBS News
Russian scientists seeking Lake Vostok lost in frozen 'Land of the Lost'?Fox News
Russian Scientists Drill to Sub-Glacial Antarctic LakeRIA Novosti
Wired News -AFP -National Geographic
all 279 news articles »

Moneycontrol.com
Nokia posts 'major' Sym... er... smartphone OS update
Register
By Tony Smith • Get more from this author Nokia may be obsessed with Microsoft's Windows Phone OS, but that hasn't stopped it rolling out the latest version of its other OS, Belle, to a seven handsets. Step forward owners of Nokia N8, E7, E6, X7, ...
Nokia Lumia 900 Pre-Orders BeginInformationWeek
Symbian users can now update their phones to Nokia BelleIBNLive.com
Signs of Life in Nokia's Fourth QuarterToronto Star
ZDNet Asia -News24 -Moneycontrol.com
all 162 news articles »

Daily Mail
Google unleashes 'Solve for X' confabs to save the world
Register
By Brid-Aine Parnell • Get more from this author Internet giant Google is once more trying to save the world, this time with its TED-rip-off "Solve for X" project. These are efforts that take on global-scale problems, define radical solutions to those ...
Google wants to make sci-fi a reality with “Solve for X,” a conference for ...VentureBeat
Google unveils “Solve for X,” a secret project to solve the world's biggest ...Fox News
'Solve for X' to tackle world's biggest problemsTG Daily
RedOrbit -InformationWeek -PC Magazine
all 73 news articles »

Here’s a roundup of recent stories on TechCrunch Europe:

— Internet publishing company Populis is expanding its network operations to South America with the acquisition of Cidade Internet, a popular Brazilian Web portal. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

— Moscow-based Heverest.ru, an online retailer of sportswear, leisure and travel goods, has scored $4.3 million in financing from an unnamed “large” Russian investment fund and previous backer eVenture Capital Partners, bringing its total raised to $6.7 million.

— Fits.me, the Estonian “biorobotics virtual fitting room” startup for e-commerce clothing retailers and shoppers, has been around for a while. We first covered them in 2010 when they secured €1.3 million, taking their total cash to €2.6 million.

They’ve now taken another €1.5 million, taking their funding to €4.1 million. Fits.me lets customers “try on” clothing before buying from online clothes retailers.

— Berlin-based game deals provider HitFox has purchased Chili Entertainment, thus adding the latter’s game advertising network ad2games to its own game marketing portfolio. Chili Entertainment was previously majority-owned by Gameforge, but the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

— Israeli startup Appoxee has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from early-stage investment firm Cyhawk Ventures, and has opened its gates to all.

In this economic climate, many small businesses do not qualify for loans based on the standards imposed by banks and financial institutions. For fledgling businesses, the establishment doesn’t have enough cash flow, revenue or credit to qualify for a loan. Many times, entrepreneurs have to put up personal assets as collateral for loans, which can be problematic and risky. The fact is working capital is difficult to get from banks unless a business has perfect credit.

Capital Access Network (CAN), a company that gives small businesses access to credit and working capital and helps solve the problem outlines above, is announcing this morning that it has raised $30 million from Accel Partners. As part of the transaction, Accel partner, Kevin Efrusy will join Credit Access’s board of directors, and Accel vice president, John Locke, will join as an observer.

CAN constitutes the largest, non-bank alternative capital provider to small businesses in the US. The company uses its own real-time platform and risk scoring models to provide capital to small and medium-sized businesses in the US and Latin America and has funded over $2 billion in capital to SMB’s under the brands NewLogic Business Loans and AdvanceMe. This represents roughly 100,000 distinct small business finance transactions. This year alone, CAN will fund over $600 million in loans to small businesses.

CAN uses a variety of data points to deem a business worthy of credit or capital apart from the traditional criteria. CAN’s proprietary underwriting algorithms will churn through its vast data stacks of historical merchant demographic, firmographic, psychographic and social and behavioral profiles seeking and seasoning new behavioral and synthetic risk indicators and recombining those indicators into new risk scorecards.

For example, CAN will look at frequency of sales (not just how much), inventory access, eBay seller rating, tax returns and other information. In terms of interest, the company uses a more unorthodox, merchant-friendly way of collecting money on top of a loan. If an online violin store needs $30,000 in working capital to purchase inventory, CAN will loan the money, but the borrower will need to pay back $35,000 to CAN over 12 months.

Typically, CAN will give merchants and businesses anywhere from $2,500 to $250,000 in working capital. Customers range from medical practices, to shoe stores to auto repair shops to clothing, accessory and home product online retailers.

CAN CEO, Glenn Goldman, tells me that the extra amount the borrower has to pay to CAN depends on risk of the loan, how long it will take for the loan to be paid back, the amount of capital lent and other factors. But he says many times, the amount CAN charges is less than any interest rate from a bank. And 75 percent of customers renew their funding. In some cases, repayment can be fairly simple. Goldman points to the example of one online merchant who chose to automatically forward a small percentage of sales from its payment processor directly to CAN to repay the loan every month. If sales were lower than usual that month, CAN would lower the amount needed to pay.

And Goldman explains that behavioral risk scoring, rather than just examining a small business owner’s FICO score, allows the company to ‘yes’ to a higher percentage of SMBs than traditional sources while mitigating losses.

For Accel, the investment marks the continuation of a thesis of investing aggressively behind companies that are enabling small businesses to grow faster, says Efrusy. He cites investments in Groupon, Etsy, 99 Designs, Braintee, DropBox as just a few of the Accel-backed companies that are helping are “giving small businesses tools to thrive.”

“From our work with small businesses, it’s clear that one of the most pressing issues for merchants is access to credit and working capital,” Efrusy said. “Especially today, banks are unable to play effectively in this market. Large institutions cannot reach, evaluate, or serve small businesses efficiently. Many newcomers to the finance space are constrained by limited access to and very high-cost capital combined with high portfolio losses given unseasoned risk scoring models. Capital Access Network has by far the strongest team, scale, and data-driven approach to this market.”

Goldman says the new funding will be partly used for boosting and redesigning the online merchant experience on CAN. By April, the lender will feature new user interfaces, merchant portals and online approvals.

As Efrusy explains, there’s a huge amount of disruption taking place in the online lending space, and CAN is in a great position to help small businesses grow with working capital. Kabbage is another startup that is also looking to provide capital to online merchants, and ZestCash is doing something similar on the consumer end of the spectrum.

EFYTimes
Facebook's Zuckerberg may face $2 billion tax hit
CNN
By Stacy Cowley @CNNMoneyTech February 7, 2012: 5:37 AM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Facebook's upcoming IPO will make founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire -- but it will also stick him with an eye-popping tax bill that could reach as high as $2 ...
Young CEOs: Are They Up to the Job?Wall Street Journal
Joanna Weiss Facebook angst for the millionsBoston Globe
From dorm room to NASDAQ: Facebook's meteoric ascentGMA News
Huffington Post -Stockton Record -Times of India
all 21 news articles »

PhysOrg.com
Haptic cube lets you feel tomorrow's temps
PhysOrg.com
(PhysOrg.com) -- Will it be an invention joining a storage room of other inventions? Or kicked further up to gadget boutiques for the very rich? Or a popular gadget for many worldwide? Whatever its destiny, the device concept of a haptic weather cube ...
Cryoscope forecasts the weather in the easiest way possibleSlashGear
Cryoscope Will Let You Feel The Weather Tomorrow, Literally (Video)Mobile Magazine
Cryoscope gadget simulates tomorrow's weather today (video)Engadget
Ubergizmo -Gizmodo -Gizmag
all 9 news articles »

Jeff Atwood, the co-founder and CTO of Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites mostly about programming and gaming, and Stack Overflow, is stepping down from day-to-day operations at the beginning of next month.

Atwood writes on his Coding Horror blog that startup life was having too much of an effect on his family (Atwood has a son and twin daughters).

Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn’t sustainible (sic) for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, highlighted the risks for a lot of folks.

…

You may have more discipline than I do. But for me, the mission is everything; I’m downright religious about it.

Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

I concur with Instapaper creator Marco Arment, who says Atwood clearly has a healthy perspective on life, and others praising him for the decision, though maybe that’s because I became a first time father myself not too long ago.

You may also want to check out the Hacker News thread on the topic.

Stack Exchange has raised $18 million from Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Spark Capital and individual investors like Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Chris Dixon, Caterina Fake, Joshua Schachter and many more.

Commenting about the move some more on Twitter, Atwood says his decision to leave Stack Exchange’s day-to-day ops has also to do with his “personality and temperament”.

He adds: “Either I’m all the way in, or all the way out”.

Atwood blogs that he doesn’t know what’s next, though it seems he’s already pondering about it:

What’s next for me?

I honestly don’t know. I do know that I love the Internet, and I remain passionate as ever about making the Internet better – but right now I need to be with my family. In six months, perhaps I’ll be ready to choose another adventure.

Also check out our video interview of the other Stack Exchange co-founder, Joel Spolsky: (Founder Stories) Joel Spolsky On Startups: “Have A Co-Founder Otherwise You’ll Go Insane”

The Age
IDC: The iPhone is once again the world's No. 1 smartphone
CNNMoney
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt February 7, 2012: 4:53 AM ET It will come as no surprise to Apple (AAPL) watchers that the company sold 37 million iPhones last quarter. Tim Cook reported that number two weeks ago. Getting comparable figures from Apple's ...
Android nabbing more than half of new smartphone buyersCNET
Apple snares top smartphone sales spotComputerworld
Smartphones Dominate 2011, Driven by iPhone 4SPC Magazine
Los Angeles Times -BusinessWeek
all 179 news articles »

Judging from every single TechCruncher’s inbox right now word on the street, there are job poachers amongst us. That’s cool, all’s fair in love and war and technology recruiting, right? Except when it’s not which, in a world filled with people who just want to win at any cost, is pretty damn often.

But let’s pretend for a second that you’re not as fantastic and amazing and desirable as a TechCrunch writer. What happens if you want to be poached!? Well, If you’re actively looking to be recruited like the rare species of programming fauna that you are, look no further than JobPoacher, which allows people who are in the market for a new employer to advertise as such, anonymously.

Just plug in your current salary, desired salary, email and locale, and JobPoacher does the rest. “I was inspired by the news of anti-poaching ‘gentleman’s agreements’ in the news a few weeks ago between high-tech companies,” explained JobPoacher creator John Everett about the inspiration behind the project, ‘I thought to myself, ‘I bet a lot of people out there would love to get poached from their jobs.’”

Indeed! So far the site has seen over 500 job postings, and over 100 emails have been sent to [the] postings from recruiters in the past 24 hours, according to Everett.

So how you like them apples?

Nanowerk LLC
Stanford Scientists Use Light to Weld Nanowires
Tom's Guide
The technique could turn out to be much more effective than the current method that uses heat or pressure to create a mesh nanowires, which usually damages the wires. “When two nanowires lay crisscrossed, we know that light will generate plasmon waves ...
Stanford engineers use light to weld nanowiresThe Stanford Daily
US researchers use light to weld meshes of nanowiresThe Engineer
Stanford sees the light with nanowire meshTechEye
Nanotechnology News (press release) -Overclockers Club -WebProNews
all 16 news articles »