First Samsung and then HTC decided to offer their flagship phones with a pure build of Android(s goog). Who’s next to bring their handset with a “Google Experience” to the Play Store? Sony(s sne) with its Xperia Z smartphone, says Android Central. The enthusiast site claims that sources have confirmed Sony is working on a stock Android edition of its flagship device.

The Sony Xperia Z is the newer, bigger brother to the Xperia ZL I’m currently reviewing. The two are very similar but the Xperia Z is more comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and HTC One, which it would share shelf space with in the Play Store.

The 5-inch, full HD display has on-screen software buttons, which are ideal for a pure Android device. The Nexus 4, for example has no hardware buttons on the front face of the phone as the latest version of…

So you’ve added two-factor authentication to your web service? That’s a good start. But at this point, two-factor authentication should be just a baseline standard for basic security practices. How much further will you go to protect your users from hacks?

LinkedIn (s lnkd) is the latest company to announce that it’s added two-factor authentication to protect user accounts, and it’s a welcome addition from the company that’s experienced significant security breaches in the past. Twitter finally added it last month (after going far too long without it) and Apple and Microsoft have added it in recent months as well. Facebook added its own version of two-factor authentication in 2011, and Google has had it for much longer.

But two-factor authentication, which essentially asks you to confirm your identity with a second code from a device like a smartphone when you go to enter your password, is just a start…

Pushing for a comeback in the States, Sony(s sne) directly sells its Xperia ZL smartphone in the U.S. for $629.99 through its Sony Store. That may be a tough sell in this land of subsidized cell phone addicts, but this market is changing. And Sony’s device is priced at or below other flagship phones currently available on the market.

The folks at Sony loaned me an Xperia ZL Android(s goog) unit to look over and although I’ve only had the device for less than 24 hours, I can already share some first impressions. My early take is that this handset is worth the look if you’re already considering an Android flagship phone from HTC, Samsung or LG. Here are photos followed by some initial thoughts, in no particular order:

• Sony claims the ZL has the the sharpest 5-inch smartphone display and is also the world’s most compact handset with…

With each new Samsung Galaxy flagship phone, the company is breaking records. On Thursday, Samsung announced the latest one: 10 million Galaxy S 4 sales in the first 30 days after launch. That figure is sales to retailers, not consumers, but it’s an accomplishment nonetheless. And strong U.S. sales should continue, as the Galaxy S 4 became available on Verizon(s vz)(s vod) today.

It’s interesting to see the time frame for each Galaxy smartphone to hit the 10 million sales number: It shows how much momentum Samsung has achieved in the past four years. It took seven months for the original Galaxy S to cross the 10 million units sold mark, while the Galaxy S 2 did so in five months. Last year’s Galaxy S 3 crossed the milestone in 50 days and now the current model has done the same in just a month.

All of this…

As the calendar ticks down to Apple’s first public event since October 2012, more details are starting to emerge regarding what the company will present. It’s fairly clear WWDC 2013 will primarily be about software, for both iOS and Mac OS X. And a new report contains some hints about the coming visual overhaul to iOS.

9to5Mac, which earlier reported that iOS 7 would get a new look with “very, very flat design” and see some default iOS apps get a refresh, has a report with far more detail about the coming changes. The sources are anonymous and obviously final decisions are still yet to be made. Still, the report is a good indication that we’re not going to get the same old iOS this year.

It’s a long piece filled with many details, but a few of the more interesting slated changes include:

• User interface functions, like the slide-to-unlock…

Apparently, lots of people have dreams of being just like Spock. On Wednesday, health electronics startup Scanadu launched an Indieogo campaign for its Scout “tricorder” that, much like the medical hand-held device in Star Trek, can determine a person’s vital signs from a simple scan. And according to the crowdfunding site, Scanadu set a new record for the fastest funding velocity on the platform.

The campaign reached its goal of $100,000 in two hours (and doubled the goal within five hours), making it the fastest campaign to reach its goal on Indiegogo (of campaigns with a goal size greater than $20,000). Through Indiegogo, supporters could contribute at various levels for a range of perks, including early access to features and visits to NASA for a space medicine workshop. Early funders were able to pre-order a device for $149, while the amount went up to $199 for subsequent contributors. As of…

The de-facto standard for small Android tablets is arguably Google’s(s goog) own Nexus 7, which debuted last May. I was expecting to see the popular $199 slate get a refresh at last week’s Google I/O event, but that didn’t happen. Instead Google focused on software: Unifying the services and APIs between Android and Chrome. That opens up a window of opportunity for other Android tablet makers. Take, for example, the Hisense Sero 7 Pro, announced Thursday and now available at WalMart(s wmt).

On the surface the Sero looks just like the Nexus 7 and it shares many of the same hardware specifications: a 7-inch 1280 x 800 IPS touchscreen, a quad-core 1.3 GHz Nvidia(s qcom) Tegra 3 chip, 10 hours of battery life and 1 GB of memory. The device also runs Android 4.2 out of the box, so the software is up to date. The Sero…

At a press event in New York City on Friday, Acer announced new mobile products running Google Android (s goog) and Microsoft(s msft) Windows 8. The company showed off the $169 Aspire A1, which runs Android and is meant for one-handed use. The new Aspire P3 is a convertible Windows 8 Ultrabook that works as a tablet or laptop due to a unique hinged dock with keyboard.

The new A1 is targeted to budget-conscious shoppers. Similar to the HP Slate 7 at the same price, the A1 cuts corners that keeps it from using premium components. Acer is keeping costs down with a 1.2 GHz quad-core chip from MediaTek and includes only 8 GB of internal storage capacity. Customers can expand storage through a micro SD card or spend $50 more for a 16 GB model. The 7.9-inch display uses the same 1024 x 768 resolution of Apple’s(s aapl)…

Square is looking to build a recommendation engine in addition to its payments system that could challenge the likes of Foursquare and Yelp as the company moves into the local recommendation space, The Verge reported Friday.

“I think we can do something a lot better” than those other apps, Ajit Varma, Square’s director of discovery, said in the interview.

While Foursquare has recently confirmed its intentions to move away from check-ins and mayorships and toward local commerce, hoping to solve the problem of finding the best businesses near you — that you’ll actually like — hasn’t been completely solved. Not enough people are checking into places on Facebook yet to make the company’s service all that useful, and while Yelp is the established favorite, reading reviews there is a little like shopping on Amazon — you need to know what you’re looking for when you go in. Google’s…

Google(s GOOG) already has some really compelling apps that are meant to replace core services on the iPhone: apps like Gmail, Drive, Google Maps, Chrome, Capture and others. Now with an update to the Google Search app for iOS(s AAPL), the company has effectively trained its sights on Siri by adding Google Now to iOS.

Google Now has been an integrated feature of Android 4.1 since June 2012, but starting Monday, it will, for the first time, be available on the iOS platform. (And no, Google did not have any problem getting the app approved, company representatives said.) The service, which draws on a wealth of user information in Google’s mobile apps and desktop services, aims to give users relevant answers to questions before they’ve even asked them. That information pops up on a “card” on the screen.

For example: if you’ve entered your work address, every morning when…

Attendees of the annual Google(s goog) I/O developer event are looking forward to the conference, which takes place in two weeks. Sure, they’ll get to hear details of Google’s latest Chrome, Chrome OS and Android efforts, but that’s only part of the story. Often, Google introduces a new Nexus device to showcase its software. Last year the Nexus 7 tablet arrived and this year, it could be a larger Nexus 11 tablet if leaked specifications pan out.

The SamMobile blog, which has a better than average track record for such leaks, reported on Monday that the Nexus 11 appears on Samsung’s 2013 tablet roadmap. Samsung currently makes the Nexus 10 tablet and it also built the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S smartphones. As the biggest seller of Android hardware, Samsung is Google’s key partner of late. Then again, the two have a complicated relationship as Samsung’s Galaxy line is…

I’ve long been a fan of Orange Amps, the pricey-but-excellent-sounding tube amplifiers. Recently, IK Multimedia released Amplitube Orange: it costs $99, and individual amps are also available in IK Multimedia’s in-app Custom Shop Store, but with AmpliTube running natively on OS X, you can record with them in GarageBand via a plug in. Now, given that most of these amps retail between $800 and $2,100, it’s asking a bit much to presume a $99 amp package will sound at all close. But I took them for a spin anyway.

First, a word about my needs

Here’s a little bit about how I make music these days: most of my guitar playing is spent practicing, or doing some light recording. While I’m not in a formal band, I jam with a few regular folks. My live rig, so to speak, is a small Egnator Tweaker tube head, a Mesa cab, and my pedal board with the usual…

Enlighted, a startup using sensor and big data software to control lighting and power in large commercial buildings has hit a few milestones this week. The company, which we put on our 12 smart grid startups to watch in 2012, has raised a sizable $20 million round, and has also doubled the size of the building space under management over the last five months, to hit 10 million square feet of commercial real estate.

Enlighted says its customers include Google (s GOOG), LinkedIn, Bank of New York, Turner Broadcasting and the City of San Jose. New investors RockPort Capital and DFJ JAIC joined the round, along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Intel Capital.

The startup’s lighting control tech can individually measure and manage lighting at each light fixture and can cut energy consumption from lighting in office and commercial buildings by 50 to 75…

Big data isn’t just about Hadoop distributions and analytics software — you also need servers to process it and disks on which to store it. On Tuesday, research firm IDC quantified the market for the latter aspect, predicting that the business of selling storage into big data deployments will be worth nearly $6 billion in 2016, up from just $379.9 million in 2011.

However, as a press release explaining the new report highlighted, defining “storage” for the purposes of big data is an exercise in subjectivity. There are systems for archiving data, and systems for storing post-processed data and systems — like the Hadoop Distributed File System — that put storage on the same servers that process data. There also are storage systems designed for operational data and those designed for transactional data, and very likely something in between.

Presumably, these numbers don’t account for the amount of storage baked…

Apple (S AAPL) is still dominating the digital download business, with eight out of ten digital music buyers getting their tracks from iTunes in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to new numbers released Tuesday by the NPD Group. Volume-wise, Apple sold 63 percent of all digital tracks in that quarter, followed by Amazon (s AMZN) as a distant second with 22 percent. Apple wants to maintain that lead and keep its digital download biz healthy — and that’s why it’s looking to launch its own streaming service soon.

iRadio, as the service has been called by some, will reportedly mimic the functionality of Pandora, (s P) offering users continuous streaming with limited interactivity. The company is negotiating directly with record labels as opposed to relying on the type of compulsory licenses that are at the core of Pandora’s business model. That means that Apple might offer its users…

In what would be an inevitable push for the company building toward a TV-centric future, Twitter is reportedly in talks to add live video to its platform through deals with Viacom (s via) and NBC (s cmcsa), Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Such a move would make perfect sense considering Twitter’s current trajectory, as the company has worked to build up support for visual media and partnerships with companies in the television industry. Twitter has clearly realized that television and live broadcast events give the company a unique opportunity to harness online conversations happening at a particular moment and then serve up advertising based around those events. So while it’s unclear exactly what a Twitter/TV parternship would look like, it’s easy to see why Twitter would be interested.

Twitter has talked with Viacom (which owns MTV and Nickelodeon) about hosting video clips on the site along with advertising, as well ast NBC, the reports…

Facebook(s fb) has further refined its ad-targeting capabilities, announcing on Wednesday the launch of “partner categories.” This new feature will allow advertisers to target more specific groups of people on Facebook and serve them ads based on their activity across the web, rather than just their activity on Facebook, using data from third-party providers.

It’s no secret that Facebook is working to build out its platform as an advertising service, slowly increasing the types of ads that different companies can buy and the ways in which they can target specific groups of people on the site.

The company explained what this will look like from a consumer perspective in the blog post published Wednesday morning:

“For example, a local car dealership can now show ads to people who are likely in the market for a new car who live near their dealership. To date, advertisers have been able to…

Confirming leaks and rumors from last month, Samsung officially introduced two new Android(s goog) smartphones on Thursday, the Galaxy Mega 5.8 and Galaxy Mega 6.3. The Galaxy brand tells you they’re going to look like most other Galaxy phones and the numbers actually indicate the screen sizes. I guess Samsung didn’t read how some people are leaving Android because the phones are getting too large!

Both devices share design cues with the new Samsung Galaxy S 4, so most of the differences are on the inside. Here’s a quick rundown of the specs on each:

The Galaxy Mega 5.8 uses a 960 x 540 display, 1.4 GHz dual-core chip, 8 GB of internal storage expandable up to another 64 GB, 1.5 GB of memory, a 2600 mAh battery and the typical assortment of wireless connectivity. Samsung’s Galaxy Mega 6.3 bumps the display to 720p resolution, uses a 1.7…

Apple(s AAPL) is reportedly planning to start production on the next generation of the iPhone sometime in the second quarter of 2013, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. That means production could start anytime from today through the end of June. Apple has made a new iPhone every year since 2007, so the start of production of a new model isn’t a surprise. However, the timing would suggest a launch of the latest iPhone some time this summer — less than a year after the iPhone 5 arrived.

According to the report, Apple has two different phones in production, the follow-up to the iPhone 5 and the long-rumored low-cost iPhone:

At the same time, Apple continues to work with its manufacturing partners in Asia on a less expensive iPhone that could be launched as soon as the second half of this year, these people said…