Category: News

Google has updated its Play Services to version 4.1, bringing new features and updates like turn-based multiplayer support for games, a new Google Drive API, improved battery life for users with Google Location Reporting enabled, improved location-based ads and Google+ enhancements. Users can download the update from the Google Play store. Google announced the update via its Android Developers blog and said, "Once the rollout has completed, users will be able to download the SDK using the Android SDK manager and get started with the new APIs." The new turn-based multiplayer allows developers to build asynchronous games to play with friends and auto-matched players. Further, the turn-based multiplayer feature supports up to 8 players per game. The blog post notes, "When players take turns, their turn data is uploaded to…

  It’s been a bumpy road for Dave Morin’s Path, as manic rumors over the last year have pegged the “private” social network at once as the subject of lagging growth, shrinking staff and potential acquisitions, while at the same time raising a mega $50 million round at a $500 million valuation. Today, the company’s long path to a Series C appears to finally have come to an end. Having recently revealed an additional revenue stream with the launch of premium subscription plans and product additions like private sharing, over the last quarter, Path has been making moves that appear to have reassured investors of its long-term prospects. Tonight, Kara Swisher reports that Path has raised $25 million and added at least one new investor in Indonesia’s Bakrie Global Group,…

Earlier this week, Yahoo announced that it had acquired Aviate, a startup providing contextually relevant information on Android homescreens, but it didn’t say anything about the acquisition price. Now a source with knowledge of the deal tells me that the acquisition was for $80 million. My source didn’t know any of the details beyond the amount — the mix of cash and stock or how much of the total is tied to an earn out, for example. Regardless, that’s an impressive price for a young startup that raised a $1.8 million Series A (from Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others) less than a year ago. (It was also incubated at StartX.) When I reached out for this story, spokespeople from both Yahoo and Aviate declined to comment on the terms…

[caption id="attachment_684" align="alignnone" width="585"] Instagram invite[/caption]   Instagram has invited members of the media to an event in NYC on December 12 to “share a moment” with Kevin Systrom and the Instagram team. It’s unclear what this event is in reference to, but considering that the invitation was sent in the mail, on paper, the photo-sharing app could be hinting at a future in print. Other invites were a block of wood with pictures printed on them, with a hanger on one side to hang on the wall. If that isn’t a hint toward printing, I don’t know what is. It sounds ridiculous, considering the digital revolution is in full swing and paper is on its way out, but there is an entire ecosystem of applications, services, etc. that piggy…

Twill makes it easier to write programs that can take advantage of YARN. Twill uses a simple thread-based model that Java programmers will find familiar. YARN can be viewed as a compute fabric of a cluster, which means YARN applications like Twill will run on any Hadoop 2 cluster, including Cloudera's CDH 4, explained Tom White, an engineer at Cloudera.Using Hadoop running YARN to manage large clusters for Big Data analysis may soon become easier with a renamed open source project accepted by the Apache Foundation. The Apache Foundation accepted the open source project Twill, named "Weave" while hosted on Github, after foundation members began voting for its inclusion on Nov. 8. Bringing the Twill project to Apache incubation will ensure that Twill is more accessible to application developers, according…