Acer's first global launch for the year is happening in New York City on May 3, where the company are going to have a demonstration on "how Acer is designing the best touch experiences in the industry."

This could really be anything, from a new Windows 8-based product, or an entirely new smartphone or tablet we haven't heard about yet. Acer are one of the stronger Microsoft partners, so we should expect a Windows 8 PC - or maybe this could be the world's first tease of Windows Blue?

Three LulzSec hackers have pleaded guilty for cyberattacks against various UK- and US-based websites, reports The Guardian. The three UK-based hackers - Ryan Ackroyd, 26; Jake Davis, 20; and Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18 - admitted to hacking Sony, News International and the UK's National Health Service.

The LulzSec hackers are set to receive their sentences on May 14, with another LulzSec hacker, Ryan Cleary, who pleaded guilty to hacking into websites for the Pentagon, the CIA, the NHS, News International, PBS, Sony, Nintendo, and the 20th Century Film studio joining them on the day.

There have been various crowd funded websites talked about over the last year or so, with Kickstarter being the most popular of all. Growth in 2012 has been stellar, with sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo becoming massive sources of financing and independent business.

There have been a total of $2.66 billion in projects backed, which is a huge 81% increase over 2011's crowdfunding of $1.47 billion. Most of the money came from the United States, of which US-based consumers invested $1.6 billion in various projects, which is a 105% increase over 2011.

Apple may be lying on the street, bleeding from their various wounds to their stock prices, but this hasn't stopped iPhone's from selling like iHotcakes. According to Canaccord Genuity analyst, Mike Walkley, Apple have sold more iPhone's than expected during the March quarter.

Walkley has now adjusted his full-year EPS estimates to $43.86 from $43.59, and sees Apple selling 37 million iPhone's in the March quarter, up from his previous estimate of 34.5 million.ii

Google has announced that there are now seven new countries that Google Play Music has extended into: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Portugal. This now allows users to buy music through the Google Play Store on both the web or their Android device, as well as the cloud associated with their Google account which will hold 20,000 songs for a user.

The streaming service is made available to 10 devices at a time, with the settings allowing a user to tune the authorization and deauthorization of devices. You can check it out by downloading Google Play Music from the Google Play Store.

If you're like me, you've been waiting patiently for Neill Blomkamp's second movie, Elysium. His first movie, District 9, was a smash hit, and now the director is ready to launch his second movie which is due out in August.

It also stars District 9 actor Sharlto Copley, with Jodie Foster playing a government official. The trailer above doesn't show you too much, but what it does show you is enough to impress, that's for sure. Elysium is set in the year 2159, where two classes of people that exist, the extremely wealthy (today's equivalent of the 1%) who live on a perfect, man-made space station called Elysium. The rest? They live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth.

The full synopsis, is below:

In the year 2159 two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard line government official will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn't stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max (Matt Damon) is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that if successful will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.

It was only at the unveiling of Sony's PlayStation 4 that third-party developers discovered there was 8GB of GDDR5 RAM inside of the machine, as they were told that the PS4 would only come with 4GB of GDDR5 previously.

These developers even received development kits before the PS4 was announced, and were still not aware of the bump in RAM until the PS4 reveal. Just Add Water's CEO, Stewart Gilray, spoke with VideoGamer.com, teasing that they're working on a mystery title for the PS4, said that third-party developers were told that the PS4 would feature just 4GB of RAM, but were very surprised when the PS4 system lead architect, Mark Cerny, announced the 8GB of RAM cranking along inside of the PlayStation 4.

Gilray told VideoGamer.com:

We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally. And we first knew it had 8GBs when Mark said at the event's stage, 'And it has 8GB of memory.' We'd had kits at that point for a good while.

Gilray suspects that a few of the bigger, first-party developers knew the PS4 would feature 8GB of RAM before the PS4 reveal. He continues: "It's a fantastic amount of memory. especially DDR5 memory, because it's so fast you don't have to have everything there at once. You can swap it in and out instantly, effectively. But when they said 8GB it was like, 'Ooookay.'"

It's no secret, Google Street View is one of the most revolutionary products ever developed. It has changed the way we search for locations to shop, view homes for sale, and has even helped me pick out dining locations close to a hotel I stayed at in Las Vegas.

Today a design firm based out of Toronto, Teehan+Lax, has released a new and innovative way to put all of those Street View images together into a very awe-inspiring time lapse journey. The experiment has several pre-built "Hyperlapses" of things like crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, but the true awesomeness comes when you create your own Hyperlapse by selecting two points on a Google map and letting the service build a custom hyperlaps of what that road trip would look like.

Creating your own is quite simple. Just set a point A and a point B and the site will then stitch together all of the Google Street View images taken along that path. I was able to quickly create a Hyperlapse of a trip down US #1 in the Florida Keys. The actual site uses lower quality images, and a very fast frame rate to reduce load times. The entire source code is available on Github (source #3) with examples so users can create their own custom Hyperlapse engines.

Facebook announced this morning that it has begun rolling out a new emotion selection feature on its status box. Users can select between a full list of emotions or share what they are watching, listening to, reading, drinking or eating.

The new tool is only available in the US at the moment and the complete roll-out is expected to take several days. Facebook says that it wants to funnel conversations a bit to better convey what a user is doing, thinking or feeling.

Facebook wants you to actively link to an artist, food brand or even brewery when composing your status in hopes of drumming up more marketing revenue when those pages see increased traffic from your status updates.

This morning Google announced that it has redesigned the Play Store in an effort to improve application discovery and simplify purchasing. The new Play Store has a very minimalist look that is sleek and refined.

The new look will begin rolling out to Android phones and tablets that are running Froyo or higher. If your device does not upgrade today, Google ask that you be patient, as the roll out is expected to take several weeks before it is fully complete.

Google says that the new Play Store "focuses on bigger images that jump off the page." Similarly themed content is grouped together, and as you move down the page, new recommendations continue to appear, so there is always more to see and explore.

Despite a recent decision to put a cap on how much time free users get, Pandora has grown to over 200 million users with 1.5 billion hours of music listened to every month.

Those numbers cover the total number of US users to date, and more than half of them were added in the last two years. That equates to over 100 million new users since 2011. The service sees about 67 million active users per month, which in itself is a staggering number. Pandora streams 200 million songs before 10AM every day, features more than 100,000 unique artist, and more than one million songs in its library. Roughly 140 million Pandora subscribers use the service on their mobile devices.

In an interview with TheNextWeb, Pandora Founder Tim Westergren, had the following to say:

"We started this company to help people discover and enjoy music they love, and to help artists reach and grow their audiences. Only in our wildest dreams did we imagine what it would become.

 

It is now clear that radio is changing, and that's great news for music fans and for the tens of thousands of working artists who now have a home on the air."

Microsoft is said to be in the works of integrating two-factor authentication into its Outlook.com mail service. LiveSide is reporting this morning that security enhancements are being prepped, along with a new authenticator app for Windows Phone.

Google and Apple both already use two-factor authentication processes when you access their services and is the reason that you sometimes have to answer security questions when logging in from a new device. I won't get into how they both work here, but Microsoft's system appears to use the Authenticator App to generate the authentication codes.

LiveSide is also reporting that the new authentication system will not work with Microsoft Accounts that have been linked together, which means that users must un-link multiple accounts. The Authenticator app is already available for download in the Windows Phone Store, so it looks like two-factor authentication for Outlook.com is on the way soon.

Over the weekend rumors began to surface about the popular messaging platform WhatsApp considering a buyout from Google for $1 billion. This morning WhatsApp is speaking out about those rumors.

In an interview with AllThingsD, WhatsApp's head of business development Neeraj Arora dismissed all the rumors saying that the company is not entertaining any offers from Google, or anyone else.

This news makes me quite happy as I use WhatsApp almost more than my standard text messaging app to keep in contact with friends and family who are overseas.

Back in January at CES there was an influx of new 7-inch class Android tablets that all promised to compete with the ASUS made Google Nexus 7. Most notably was an offering from ASUS called the MeMO Pad, which was designed as direct competition for the Nexus 7.

This morning in a statement to the media, ASUS announced that it has begun shipping the $149 7-inch tablet to retail channels. Featuring 16GB of on-board storage, the MeMO Pad can add more storage via an SD card capabilities, which is something the Nexus 7 cannot do.

The MeMO Pad runs on a VIA WM8950 dual-core chip, and its 7-inch display has a resolution of 1024x600 that supports 10-point multi-touch. A 4270mAh battery provides up to seven hours of use while WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Micro USB port provide connectivity. The Android Jelly Bean powered ASUS MeMO Pad is available now in stores like Amazon, GameStop and Fry's Electronics in grey, pink and white.

Come this time next year, support is going to end for Windows XP and a few other pieces of software from Microsoft. The other software joining it is Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003, these programs will lose their extended support on April 8, 2014.

Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 will end its support on the same day, but with newer Service Packs, it will continue to be supported. The big issue here is that roughly 38% of people on the Internet are still using Windows XP. Not all of these users will jump over to a new OS in the next year, so we should see a large portion of the Internet continue to get slapped with malware.

I think we'll see Microsoft crumble under pressure and extend the support for Windows XP, unless they were to suddenly have surge of old consumers upgrading to new PCs or operating systems, which is doubtful with the way Windows 8 is performing.

Google's rollout of their gigabit broadband Internet service, Google Fiber, has cost the Mountain View-based company around $100 million so far. We've now got Carlos Kirjner and Ram Parameswaran of Bernstein Research estimating that the gigabit Internet rollout has cost Google $94 million total so far.

The estimate that Google have spent $42 million in Kansas and $52 million in Missouri. The analysts have the idea that the Austin rollout will cost around the same amount as the Kansas City, but they have remained skeptical on a nationwide build out. They added:

We remain skeptical that Google will find a scalable and economically feasible model to extend its build out to a large portion of the US, as costs would be substantial, regulatory and competitive barriers material, and in the end the effort would have limited impact on the global trajectory of the business.

The number of teenagers texting whilst driving has doubled since 2010, with every two out of five teenagers texting while driving. The information has come from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association.

The agency found there are more than 600,000 drivers use their cell phone when driving, where around half, or 48.6% of all drivers in the US have admitted to answering a phone call, and one in four admitting to placing a call. There are laws in place within some states in the US for distracted driving or using a mobile device when driving - with 39 states enacting the law. These laws have not been completely effective in preventing accidents.

Around 6% of drivers have claimed they were involved in a crash, and 7% in near-crash situations within the past year. 2% of which admitted to using a mobile phone and 3% specifically sending or reading a tex message.

Google have enjoyed their fair share of antitrust accusations in Europe, but now the New York Times is reporting that new anti-competitive allegations have been levied against Android. This new complaint was filed by Fairsearch, whose members include people from Microsoft and Nokia among other companies.

The group are claiming that Google are using Android as a way to push consumers into using Google's apps instead competitors' software. Fairsearch are pushing the fact that Google forces OEMs who use Android to place apps like YouTube and Gmail into hot places on the desktop. This is just the beginning of yet another antitrust lawsuit, so we should see Google respond shortly.

Sony are poised to add system level support for their DualShock 3 controllers to their Xperia-branded smartphones. A user would be able to wirelessly connect their controllers without root or hugely complicated setup procedures, using just a USB OTG cable for the initial setup.

All you would need to do is plug the controller into your Xperia device's USB port, turn it on, enter the device settings and then just enable the controller. Once there's some talk between the device and the PC, you'll need to unplug the controller and then you'll have the ability to use it through Bluetooth.

At the moment there's no news on whether this will jump across to non-Xperia-branded smartphones, but I'm sure it'll just be time for now. Games that support a controller are obviously the way to go, but this isn't a big problem.

If you're a fan of Street Fighter and have a spare dollars to see a web series of it made, you might want to open your wallet to a Kickstarter page on it. Joey Ansah, is behind it, where he is the director, writer and creative guru behind Street Fighter: Legacy and along with Christopher Howard, they need $950,000 to get a prequel series they're calling Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist off the ground.

Street Fighter: Legacy was produced and released on YouTube around three years ago, mostly as a proof of concept to show that a live action version of Street Fighter would look great, if it were done right. The video saw eight million views, with a 98.7% approval rating.

Ansah has said that Assassin's Fist has been in development for around three years, with the team purchasing the option from Capcom last year with plans to fund the film through independent investment. If the Kickstarter isn't successful, the team could lose the funding they've already received, pushing production back into 2014.