If what we have previously seen about the upcoming new Nexus 7, then today's news equates to a virtual dam breakage. This morning, Best Buy opened up pre-orders for the new 7-inch pure Android tablet. This major leak comes just hours before Google is expected to unveil the new Nexus at a breakfast being held in Mountain View at 9AM Pacific today.

With the full product listing being made available, we finally learned what hardware the refreshed device will feature and it is pretty hefty. The 7-inch display will feature a 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution, while a QUALCOMM 1.5Ghz Snapdragon S4 Pro and an Adreno 320 graphics processor will handle the data crunching duties. A 5-megapixel rear-facing camera will handle all of the photon capturing duties, while 2GB of DDR3 RAM keeps things running nice and smooth.

The new Nexus 7 will be available in both 16GB and 32GB configurations, with both devices featuring Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, and NFC. Falling right in line with recent rumors, the tablet will run Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which also lends credence to the rumor that we will see 4.3 detailed at today's event. The product listing shows that the 16GB model will run consumers $229.99 while its 32GB brother will cost just $269.99. As of this publishing, the pre-order button has been removed.

YouTube's Comedy Week has widely been considered a smashing success and the company is now looking to follow up that success with another week of themed, highlighted content. On August 4, YouTube will kick off its first annual Geek Week event in which the video sharing service will highlight more than 100 channels that feature Geeky and Nerdy content.

Participating channels include heavy hitters such as Chris Hardwick's Nerdist, the UK's Channel Flip, Machinima, and Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton's own Geek and Sundry. Additionally, Schmidt and Co will be hiding easter eggs over the event and will give users collectable virtual badges if spotted. Some big time players in the motion picture industry have taken notice as well, and an exclusive trailer for Thor: The Dark World will premier on Wednesday, August 7, right in the middle of the event.

I'm still looking forward to unboxing my first 4K, or Ultra HD, display, but until then I can only dream. But, during SIGGRAPH this week, Dell unveiled their new UltraSharp 32.

Dell's UltraSharp 32 is a 32-inch 4K-capable display that features an IGZO-based 3840x2160 display. Beautiful. Dell has opted for an aluminum stand, which replaces their usual plastic-based stand in previous models. The usual height adjustment is at play, and the UltraSharp 32 is jam-packed full of display inputs.

We have miniDisplayPort ports, HDMI, a built-in USB hub and an SD card reader. Dell haven't told us how much we can expect it to suck from our bank accounts just yet, but we should all prepare for Q4 of this year, just in time for the holidays.

I've used Oculus Rift HD and I really just don't want to go back to normal reality, but I guess I have to. Oculus VR, the company behind Oculus Rift, and IndieCade are teaming up for a three-week long gaming event called VR Jam.

VR Jam will get developers together in order to create content for Oculus Rift. VR Jam starts on August 2, and ends on August 25 with two categories to compete in. The first of which is 'Selected Developers' and the second, 'Open Call.' Selected developers will compete against hand-picked teams of 10, while Open Call pits any independent developer to register and compete.

Oculus VR and IndieCade will don their judging hats, with winners being announced on September 19. Games will be scored by their innovation and virtual reality design. As for prizes, there will be more than $50,000 in total with a $10,000 prize for the winners of either category. Registration, rules and everything else you need to know about VR Jam is available on Oculus VR's website.

Microsoft appears to be having issues today with its Xbox Live service. The company says that some members are currently unable to sign in to their Xbox Live accounts and they have a team engaged with fixing the issue. When visiting the current status page, users are prompted with a notice that says the outages is affecting Games for Windows Live, Windows 8, Windows Phone, the Xbox 360, and Xbox.com.

After trying to sign into my Xbox Live Account, I was greeted with an error, and also experienced a similar error when trying to connect to Xbox Live via a Games for Windows Live game. Microsoft says that those who are trying to post or view messages on Xbox.com may experience issues as well. Additionally, some 360 owners are currently unable to watch video content or listen to streaming music from their consoles.

Following both Apple and EA games, AT&T posted their Q2 2013 financial report today with stronger numbers over the same quarter a year ago. During the second quarter, AT&T saw $32.1 billion in total revenue, which is looking pretty good when compared to the same quarter in 2012 in which the company posted $26 billion. Net income for the second quarter totaled $3.8 billion, which amounted to about $0.71 per diluted share.

"This was a solid quarter for revenue and customer additions across our key growth platforms," said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO. "Our 4G LTE network is the fastest and the most reliable in the nation, and deployment is ahead of schedule. That contributed to a step-up in postpaid subscriber gains, and strong mobile data revenue growth of nearly 20 percent. Growth in U-verse and strategic business services also continued to be strong - adding to our momentum."

The company posted several highlights in the report:

Today, EA Sports released an extended version of the trailer it showed off at E3 for its upcoming game Need for Speed Rivals. The new trailer is one minute and 45 seconds long, which is about a minute longer than the original version, and places a lot of emphasis on the cops-versus-racers aspect of the game. Unlike previous Need for Speed games, players can now choose to play as a racer or as a cop when stepping behind the wheel of a new vehicle.

The trailer shows that the game will be sent in an entirely open environment, which will allow players to make the most of their high powered vehicles. Additionally, a series of difficult challenges will be presented for the player to complete, which will add collectible items to their inventory. Throughout the game players must maintain a healthy rivalry with the law in order to earn more street cred.

Today, Apple announced its financial results for the third quarter of 2013. The report says that Apple managed to post a revenue of $35.3 billion with a net profit of $6.9 billion, which equates to $7.47 per diluted share. This means that Apple's profit is down by nearly $2 billion over the same quarter in 2012. The company said that international sales accounted for 57 percent of the quarter's revenue.

The Cupertino based company sold 31.2 million iPhones during the third quarter alongside 14.6 million iPads and 3.8 million Macs. Overall, only the iPhone sales were up as during the same quarter last year Apple managed to sell 17 million iPads and 4 million Macs. The company's Board of Directors declared a cash dividend of $3.05 per share of the company's common stock which will be payable on August 15, 2013 to all shareholders who own stock before the close of business on August 12, 2013.

"We are especially proud of our record June quarter iPhone sales of over 31 million and the strong growth in revenue from iTunes, Software and Services," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "We are really excited about the upcoming releases of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, and we are laser-focused and working hard on some amazing new products that we will introduce in the fall and across 2014."

EA released its earnings report for Q1 of the fiscal year 2014 today, and the numbers are looking pretty good for the game publishing powerhouse. The company posted a total net revenue of $949 million, which was down about $6 million from the same quarter in 2012. EA said that their gross profit was up $5 million from the previous year at $755 million. Additionally, the company had total operating expenses of $522 million, which brought their net income to $222 million, up $1 million from Q1 of 2012.

"EA had a solid quarter driven by continued digital growth and disciplined cost management," said Executive Chairman Larry Probst. "We are also executing on a clear set of goals for leadership on mobile, PC, current and next generation consoles."

"EA delivered first quarter EPS above our guidance through a combination of revenue growth, phasing of expenses, and cost control," said Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen. "We are reaffirming our annual non-GAAP guidance of $4 billion net revenue and $1.20 earnings per share."

Today, trademark filings by LG were spotted by website PocketDroid that point to the company's future plans of developing a smartwatch, tablet, exercise band, and even something that might rival Google Glass. The filings were all placed under the company's use of the letter G, which denotes LG's high-end products. G Pad, G Watch, G Glass, G Link, G Band, and G Hub were among many of the names that were trademarked today and they all may very well be linked to current products in development.

Obviously, the G Pad would refer to an G-branded tablet that would most likely run Android, while the G Band would function similar to Nike's Fuel band. G Watch most certainly refers to the smartwatch LG is said to be currently developing, while the G Glass sound like the most interesting product of all. This means that LG could be working on its own version of Google Glass.

It is important to note that company's file for trademarks every day and more times than not, they are simply filing to protect their brand from squatters or other companies who might brand their product in a similar fashion to confuse consumers into thinking their product is associated with another company's brand. Simply put, LG may have filed for these trademarks just to protect the G brand or preserve them for products we may not see for many years.

Today, Verizon and Motorola teamed up in a press event to officially announce Verizon's newly refreshed lineup of Droid smartphones. Over the last month, we've seen many leaks surface about the phones and it appears that most of them were correct. The announcement included the new Droid Ultra and Droid Maxx, which are the follow-up devices to last year's Droid Razr HD and HD Maxx.

The two new phones bring forth some impressive new features and hardware specs. The Droid Maxx is said to have an insanely impressive battery life of up to 48 hours, yet it still only measures in at 8.5mm thick. The Ultra comes in thinner at 7.2mm. Both phones apparently feature a 10-megapixel rear shooter that sports an f/2.4 lens which allows for superior low-light performance.

Additionally, both devices feature a five-inch 720p OLED display which in a way makes up for the resolution letdown. Both phones make use of the new touchless control system that has been reported in so many Moto X leaks. This new feature lets users make phone calls, get directions, or activate other functions by voice rather than having to physically pick up and unlock their phone.

Seagate announced today that the Enterprise Turbo SSHD, a drive which has been in use with IBM in their Series X servers for over a year. This SSHD has 32GB of flash onboard that allows the SSHD's, in capacities up to 600GB, to produce twice the IOPS performance from its 10,000 RPM's than a 15,000 RPM HDD. The SSHD provides up to 900 IOPS in random performance and comes with a standard five year warranty.

The massive speed increases are due to the tiered caching at the I/O level, accelerating 'hot data' via the flash layer inside the SSHD. This boost in performance will provide gains in performance with fewer devices, lowering the overall TCO of the storage solution. The Enterprise Turbo SSHD will provide radical acceleration in mission-critical applications such as big data analytics, virtual desktop infrastructure, and database and transaction processing. Key features of the SSHD include:

Tiered infrastructure, with SSDs serving as cache for large banks of HDDs, are becoming increasingly popular in the datacenter. The Enterprise Turbo SSHD bridges the gap between HDD and SSD, allowing for a one-drive solution in an environment where there is usually a requirement for multiple types of drives to perform caching duties.

A new report this morning is suggesting that Samsung is ready to beat Apple to the punch on releasing a smartwatch. Patently Apple is claiming that Samsung will show off its very own smartwatch in September ahead of the annual IFA trade show which is held in Berlin, Germany.

Dubbed the "Samsung Gear," the smartwatch will be shown off during a press conference in which we will also see the Galaxy Note III unveiled. Although the report cites no sources, we do know that Samsung is developing a smartwatch, and we've even seen leaks of the device's supposed interface. If Samsung does debut the Gear a little over a month from now, it will beat Apple in the smartwatch race by more than a year, which puts it in a very good position for market dominance.

It is safe to bet that any video professional, enthusiast, or even home theater junkie has heard of and most certainly used the H.264 codec which has become the de facto standard for compressing high-definition video. H.264 uses very complicated algorithms that help accelerate the decoding process, which in turn reduces energy consumption and allows for higher bit rates. Yesterday, we participated in a briefing on the new X265 and HEVC encoder project that is being tackled by a company called MulticoreWare.

The X264 encoder remains one of the leading H.264 encoders on the market and it resides under both the open source GNU GPL license as well as a commercial license which is designed for companies that wish to inject their own proprietary code without having to release it into the open source community. With Ultra HD Video beginning to flow in, H.264 was just not delivering the performance needed for high bit rate, high quality output. This is where H.265 comes in the play along with MulticoreWare.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), aka H.265, is being designed to replace H.264 and the official standard was released just over a month ago. And today, MulticoreWare announced its commercial open source project around the x265 encoder. The company has released the source code for x265 and it is available for download at Source #1 below. The x265 encoder is already highly parallel and supports all of the big instruction sets including FMA3/FMA4, AVX, and AVX2.

I still haven't gotten into Bitcoin myself, mainly because I live in a country that is behind in technology: Australia. But, a couple will be living in Utah after spending ten days on a tropical honeymoon in Costa Rica, purely on Bitcoin.

It's a tough challenge, a pure 90-day challenge dubbed "Married... With Bitcoin." Austin Craig and Beccy Bingham have a tough road ahead of them, with Craig saying to Forbes during an interview: "The goal is to find out how developed the Bitcoin ecosystem is, what needs to change, and how easy it is to use, understand, and explain."

The three-month challenge is being documented in a number of ways - Facebook, Twitter, blogging and YouTube clips as well as a documentary called "Life on Bitcoin." They announced their plans last month on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, where they raised over $72,000 as well as 82 Bitcoins, which are valued at the current valuation of $7,000 or so.

A few days ago we reported about Samsung's new Exynos 5 Octa processor, but now we have some more details on the system-on-a-chip (SoC).

The new refreshed 5420 variant of the SoC is based on Mali-T628 MP5 silicon and features four ARM Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.8GHz and four 1.3GHz Cortex-A7s in an ARM big.LITTLE configuration. Samsung are claiming that the refreshed 8-core SoC features 20% more CPU processing power, too.

We also have dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz, which will provide the processor with an insane 1.49GBps of bandwidth, which will help out with that Full HD Wi-Fi display support. Image compression technology is involved, which will help save battery power and use efficient multimedia loading, pushing out more hours of use with high resolution displays.

Today Leap Motion launched what is being billed as the "Worlds most accurate 3-D motion control technology." The software allows people to control their computers with natural hand and finger gestures much in the way that motion tracking WebCam software works. Alongside the software they launched, the company opened up its AirSpace platform, a sort of App Store that is exclusive to the Leap Motion controller.

The company also announced that beginning July 28 the actual Leap Motion Controllers will be available for purchase in Best Buy stores across the United States at a price point of $79.99. Customers in the UK are able to purchase from Amazon and the company has partnered up with ASUS and HP to offer bundled packages with select computers from each manufacturer.

Leap Motion went on to say that at launch the Airspace Store contained over 75 applications that were purpose built by developers and more than four countries. The apps range from free to paid and spans the width of many categories. The Leap Motion controller works with computers running Mac OS X 10.7 or 10.8, Windows 7 and Windows 8. It requires a minimum of an Intel Coreâ„¢ i3 or AMD Phenomâ„¢ II processor, 2 GB RAM and a USB 2.0 port.

Amidst a massive security breach, Canonical today unveiled plans to build a ultra high-end smartphone that would run both its own Ubuntu Mobile OS as well as the latest version of Android. Unfortunately manufacturing a smartphone in any quantity is quite the financial undertaking and not one that Canonical appears to be fully ready to tackle itself. The company has turned to the crowdfunding website Indiegogo to offer its supporters an easy way to preorder their phone.

So how much does it cost to produce 40,000 units of a new smartphone? Apparently $32 million will just about do the job. The company launched its Indiegogo campaign today, and will run for the next 30 days. Supporters can land an Unbuntu Edge of their own for $600 today only and tomorrow the cost of entry will rise to $830. There are also 50 "One of a Kind" numbered edition Ubuntu Edge phones being offered but they will cost you $10,000 a pop.

Additionally, an enterprise bundle of 100 phones is being offered for the low price of $80,000. Those who funded this level will receive additional access to best-practice workshops as well as 30 days of online support to help IT managers integrate Ubuntu for Android into the workplace. Also for those who wish you just donate a little to the project there is a $20 funding option which will land you your name on the founders page.

Over the weekend, the Ubuntu forums went down after a massive security breach resulted in over 1.8 million user credentials being stolen. Canonical made a decision to put the forums in maintenance mode in an attempt to ward off any further attacks. The company says that the attackers managed to get away with every user's local username, password, and email address that was stored in the Ubuntu forum's database.

The company says in the passwords were stored as salted hashes instead of plaintext, but they still recommend that you change any and all passwords that were used on other services such as email, Facebook, or other forum accounts in which you might have use the same password. Canonical says that Ubuntu One, Launchpad, and other related services were not affected by the breach and users of those services need not worry.

Today, AT&T announced that it will be launching two new Mobile Share plans later this week on July 26. The new plans are designed to make data access more affordable for customers who might not need a high allotment of bandwidth. For just $20 a month, users with feature phones can have 300MB of data which will allow them to check their email and perform other less data-intensive actions on their handset.

A new 2GB plan was also introduced that is expected to fill the gap for users who use more than 1 GB of data per month. This plan will run smartphone users $50 plus the additional $45 for unlimited talk and text. AT&T says that their mobile share plans make it easy for customers to manage their data, voice minutes, and texting without needing to keep track of multiple plans.

"Our customers are living mobile lives, and our new Mobile Share plans give them even more options to design a plan that meets their unique needs," said Mark Collins, senior vice president voice and data products, AT&T Mobility. "Now, even more customers are able to enjoy the full benefits of their device, on the nation's fastest and most reliable 4G LTE network, at a great value."