On CE - For Dealers, Distributors and OEMs of Consumer Electronics throughout EMEA

Following months of rumours Beats confirms the purchase of online music streaming service MOG for an undisclosed sum to the USA Today newspaper.

The companies give no further details of the acquisition as MOG CEO David Hyman says "the addition of MOG's music service to the Beats portfolio will provide a truly end-to-end music experience."

Founded in 2005, MOG offers over 16 million songs (in 320-kilobit MP3 format) through its website, Facebook app and subscription services on LG and Samsung devices. While similar to Spotify, MOG lacks one thing-- user numbers. Active MOG users amount to around 500000, while Spotify has around 3 million paying subscribers.

It makes sense for Beats to buy a music service-- or rather, it makes sense for HTC, who bought a majority stake in Beats for $309m back in August 2011. And let's not forget, as Android devices become increasingly similar, vendors continually look for services setting their hardware apart from the competition.

So, Beats wants to sell music-as-a-service. HTC wants to sell more phones. Will the combination of two markets turn the fortune of a struggling service around?

Go Beats Electronics Acquires MOG Music Service (USA Today)

America’s Duke University researchers designed a gigapixel device powerful enough to read a postage stamp from more than half a mile away.

They work with DARPA, the US Department of Defense agency that has financed the development of tech successes such as the Internet and autonomous cars. No doubt the US agency has planned better uses than reading postage stamps… a single device placed at a sports stadium or political rally could monitor thousands of people at once --and be able to zoom in at any time on any one in the crowd.

The team already built and tested only a two-and-half-foot-square gigapixel camera(1000-megapixel) and will now construct a 10,000-megapixel version and predict future cameras will have higher resolution (as much as 50,000-megapixel photos).

Achieving such ultra-high resolution requires overcoming costly, computationally complexity, and geometric aberrations. The Duke team created their gigapixel camera by synchronizing nearly 100 individual microcameras (produce images with lower processing power and fewer problems).

The camera’s aperture is actually only a half-inch wide, with the bulk of the camera body being made of microprocessors to handle the information and stitch it together into a coherent image. With advances in computer technology, Duke researchers think the camera could shrink to the size of a hand-held device. The gigapixel camera already uses sensors similar to ones in the iPhone…

You can debate a number of issues facing Smart TV but we'd like to highlight one problem that jeopardizes the success of selling Smart TV.

Apps.

Apps are the computer routines that add functionality to the "brain" of the Smart TV. Without apps, your Smart TV might be a genius but no one would know and no one would love it.

To give you an idea of what makes a "smartphone" smart, you need to know (according to Nielsen data) users spend more than half their time with apps (versus text messaging at 13.4%).

The IQ of a smart TV is directly related its apps.

Yet another industry giant enters tablet space-- Google reveals the Nexus 7 at the I/O Developer Conference, a 7-inch Google-branded device carrying an other fresh announcement, Android version 4.1 (aka Jelly Bean).

However, unlike the high-end Microsoft Surface, Google's take on tablets (a co-development with Asus) appears more humble. With a $199 price point, the Nexus 7 aims for the lower end of the market where the Amazon Kindle Fire currently dominates.

The 7-inch display handles 1280x800 resolutions with a 178-degree viewing angle, while the tablet carries a Tegra 3 quad-core processor, 12-core Nvidia GPU and 1GB of RAM. It also supports bluetooth and NFC connections and includes a front-facing camera.

The second biggest I/O announcement is the latest Android version. Code named Jelly Bean, Android 4.1 includes a number of improvements aimed at polishing what already lies within version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).