SXSW

Photo via Bloomberg

Finally some wisdom from Schmidt that I can’t dispute: “If all you care about is having fun, you should go to college.”

You know, the Google chairman has a point. He did include a number of other reasons for attending college as well, but that was really just sugar coating:

If all you care about is money, you should go to college. If all you care about is culture and creativity, you should go to college. If all you care about is having fun, you should go to college. Go to college. I can’t be any clearer.

His comments were made during a session at last week’s SXSW (South by Southwest) Festival (via TechCrunch) in Austin, Texas, in yet another appearance to promote his book The New Digital Age.
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Image via <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/03/10/jay-z-kanye-west-sxsw-samsung-concerts/" target="_blank">Mashable</a>

On the heels of its Galaxy S5 product announcement, Samsung will once again enlist JAY Z to make a publicity splash for its smartphones. According to Mashable, JAY Z and Kanye West are set to perform a one-night only concert on March 12th at SXSW with entry only permitted to fans with the Milk Music app installed on a Galaxy device. The imagery on the invitation hints that the duo will revisit their raucous Watch The Throne days.

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Today during a talk at a SXSW Interactive event, Google’s Android and Chrome chief Sundar Pichai apparently announced that a new Android SDK for developers interested in developing wearables will arrive in the next two weeks (via TheVerge). While Google isn’t announcing any specific products, Pichai made it clear that Google will be approaching Android on smart watches and wearables much like on smartphones. With the new SDK, Sundar said the company plans to “lay out a vision for developers as to how we’ll see this market working.” Pichai also hinted that the new Android SDK for wearables will incorporate wearables beyond simply smartwatches.

“We want to develop a set of common protocols by which they can work together,” Pichai said, “they need a mesh layer and they need a data layer by which they can all come together”… “when we say we say wearables, we are thinking much more broadly”

9to5Google first reported that Google was working on a smartwatch that would rely heavily on Google Now-like features. There have been unconfirmed reports recently that Google as well as some of its close partners like LG have been developing smart watches and wearables running Android. Google also picked up WIMM Labs late last year for its Android smartwatch/wearble platform and SDK and the most recent report claimed that a Nexus smartwatch announcement could come as soon as this month.
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Cofounder of the leading iOS photo-sharing app “Instagram” Kevin Systrom recently announced at SXSW (via TechCrunch) that the app has now reached over 27 million registered users. He also briefly teased the highly anticipated Android version of Instagram, which Systrom had an early build of running on his device at the show. The good news is, while we do not have a solid release date, Systrom said the company is taking its time to make sure the Android version is not just a scaled port of the iOS app:

“I don’t think it took us so long. We just had priorities. Had we tried to be both on Android and iPhone at the same time, it would’ve been tough to innovate in the way that we have”

Systrom also said the Android app is, “In some ways, it’s better than our iOS app. It’s crazy.” TechCrunch reported Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger said the Android team is “pretty impressed” with the app’s ability to differentiate itself from the iOS version. Unfortunately, the executives said the current build of the app was not ready for a full demo, which means we are likely still a few months out. We will keep you posted.

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