According to a piece on Reuters, Amazon is looking to scoop up a bunch of intellectual property (IP) experts to help them enter the patent acquisition and licensing game, after seeing the patent war between Apple, Google, and more.

Amazon have reportedly hired executive recruiting firm Argos Search in order to help Amazon hire an IP "Acquisition and Investment Leader" that can "identify and evaluate strategic IP acquisition and licensing opportunities" according to a job description that Reuters had fall into their hands. The person Amazon hires will work close with all of Amazon's technology team's and leaders on future product development, according to the document. Amazon said in their job posting:

At Amazon we are rapidly growing in many new and exciting technology areas. To support and protect our expansion we are seeking an executive to work with our business teams to identify and procure intellectual property.

We all know Research in Motion (RIM) is in trouble, and one of, if not their only safe haven, is their forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS. But now there's some new spark to rumors that the troubled company could be saved by Samsung.

This is all according to Jefferies analyst, Peter Misek, who believes that RIM's strategic review will end up with a decision to license the company's BlackBerry 10 OS, and that the company best suited to handle it, is Samsung. Misek wrote in a note to clients:

Given recent management comments in the press, it now appears that RIM is realizing what Wall Street has been saying for some time: they are a subscale manufacturer and desperately need a partner. We believe RIM is attempting to revive discussions with Samsung regarding a BB10 licensing deal.

Ouya's journey on Kickstarter has come to an end, and what a journey it has been. The Kickstarter-funded, Android-powered home gaming console raised its required $950,000 goal in 24 hours, and since then has reached limits that the creator didn't even realise.

We've posted a few times about Ouya, as it is a great story of gamers all across the world coming in and pledging their money toward a device that isn't even available yet. There were multiple models to choose from, with some Kickstarter-exclusive models that are sure to get people bragging once they receive them. The $225 (or more) pledge was a Kickstarter-exclusive, where you received an Ouya console, with two controllers, each with your username ETCHED into it. Yes, how cool is that. I managed to get in on one of those, and I'm incredibly excited as there are only 2,500 of them making their way out to people.

Ouya received over $200,000 in the last couple of hours of funding, as well as over 1,000 more backers. Ouya finished its Kickstarter funding with $8,579,673, and 63,264 backers at the time of writing. This number is slowly increasing with the few remaining pledges.

Some Android developers have tinkered with the Jelly Bean-powered Nexus 7, where they've overclocked its NVIDIA Tegra 3-based processor to an astonishing 1.64GHz, where it promptly smashes all other smart devices on the market in benchmarks.

The Nexus 7 was rooted, with a kernel installed named Trinity Seven and as you can see from the above screenshot, it scores 7130 in Quadrant, with the closest devices the HTC One X with just over 4500, and the other ASUS-made Transformer Prime TF201 with a little over 4000. These are some truly remarkable results for such a cheap tablet.

But, how does an overclocked device like that keep battery life when its spitting out 1.64GHz on all four cores? Well, the Trinity Kernel Toolbox lets you control this, where you can overclock when you're gaming and want the best results, and underclock for everything else. That's not the only benefit, either, as standby usage has been improved, big time. Deep sleep mode offers huge results, where even after a 12 hour stint at being awake, there's still plenty of battery left on the Nexus 7, as the screenshot below shows.

This is something you don't see or hear everyday, but a few nights ago a Kentucky-based woman was forced to walk into an Apple Store with her kidnapper, who was forcing her to purchase goods on her credit cards. But an alert Apple Store employee came to her rescue, and she is now safe and the kidnapper is in prison.

Police have said that the woman met the man, who called himself "Greg", when he arranged a date with her. When they first met, "Greg" showed up to her house and forced her into his car at gunpoint. While holding a gun to her, he forced her to drive around to a handful of stores to purchase cellphones in her own name, with her own money.

"Greg" and his victim then drove to an Apple Store in Louisville, where they tried to buy some Apple products from one of the in-store Geniuses:

Despite the disparity in cost and convenience, DVD and Blu-ray rentals through mail and physical retailers still outnumbers streaming. Rentals through retail stores, kiosks, and Netflix's mail service made up more than 62 percent of all movie rentals in the first half of the year according to NPD Group.

In stark contrast to the figure above, subscription streaming, pay TV video on demand, and Internet VOD made up only 38 percent of movie rentals. Even though rentals are still the majority, the size of their majority has been shrinking. Rentals are down 17 percent from last year and stores continue to be replaced with kiosks.

45 percent of rentals came from kiosks, up 5 percent from last year. Netflix's push to streaming has also contributed to the decline in physical rentals. Netflix announced 530,000 new streaming customers while at the same time losing 850,000 of its DVD service. Part of what is keeping streaming down is the lack of extra features and availability of all movies. Often times a movie is only available as a physical copy.

Valve, the company behind Steam, is keeping itself busy. Gabe Newell has publicly bashed Windows 8 and is working towards making Linux into a viable alternative for gamers. Valve is working on porting the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux and has achieved some great results. Now, Steam will be expanding into software other than games.

Starting September 5, software will begin to show up in the Steam store. Options will include creativity and productivity software and a majority will feature Steamworks integration. "Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you."

Furthermore, Indie developers will be able to submit their software through Steam Greenlight. Steam has some competition in this market as Mac already has its own store and Windows 8 will be coming with a Windows store. "The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games," said Mark Richardson at Valve. "They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests."

Today, Google has been doing a lot of talking. They debuted their exclusive field trial of integrating Gmail emails with searches and they've been talking about the future of search. But, how can you look towards the future without knowing the present? You can't and that's why Google has provided us with some incredible numbers about the current state of search.

To make an average day, Google crawls an incredible 20 billion pages. However, to put that number in perspective, there are about 30 trillion URLs on the Internet. An average month is made up of serving 100 billion searches. Google's current Knowledge Graph is composed of 500 million items and that is just a baby step towards the future of search.

Google's vision of the future of search:

Apple.pro have posted scans from Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily showing off the new "iPhone 5" enclosures that have been available for the past couple of weeks, and even went as far as taking measurements of them.

The thickness of the next-gen iPhone enclosure measures in at 7.6mm, with the rest of the dimensions appear to be equivalent to the specifications that are making the rounds of sites across the world, and the same as the leaked specs by case manufacturers in June:

One manufacturer we spoke to said that he was sure that the leaked images were accurate - so sure that he was already preparing to construct iPhone 5 cases and he'd be willing to ship replacements for free if they turned out not to be perfect. He enumerated three big changes from the old iPhone 4S to the iPhone 5:

Zombie apocalypse game, Day Z, if you haven't heard about it, is a mod for ArmA II, and has been quite successful. It's talked about quite often, and started out as just as play around mod by Dean Hall. But, his mod for ArmA II has just passed one million players, after only being available in April of this year.

The mod hasn't even reached beta status yet, and has been announced its going to be featured in its own standalone game. The announcement of the game was made on the official Day Z Tumblr this morning, with Bohemia Interactive, who is the studio behind ArmA II handling development. Hall will serve as project lead. Hall has some words on the standalone release:

Development and updates of the mod will continue in parallel with the development of the game, so anyone who is playing the mod now will be able to continue to do so. The project will follow the Minecraft development model; fast iterations with the community alpha available for a heavily discounted price.