Google acquired "Nest Labs"-designer and manufacturer of home products

The search engine giants Google has acquired Nest Labs for $3.2 billion reportedly.
                                     Nest Labs is designer and manufacturer of home products, founded in 2010 by Tony Fadell & Matt Rogers. The company has a learning thermostat and a carbon monoxide & smoke detector currently for sale. These equipments connect with Android and iOS devices to enhance their usual functionality and remote accessibility. More importantly you can check in on your home and control the temperature from wherever you are. It is also known for ease of use, awesome automation and its own energy saving technology.

Currently the service is available in US, Canada and the UK only. Nest will continue to operate with its own brand, under the leadership of the founder and current CEO Tony Fadell. There's no statement about Google's future plans with Nest, though we can expect some sort of cool home implementations.

                                   Google hopes to help bring Nest to homes in more countries. Nest said that they will now be even “better placed to build simple, thoughtful devices that make life easier at home, and have a positive impact on the world.”

Read the Q&A posted on Nest site here.

Samsung responds to latest Knox vulnerability reports, offers solution to prevent data theft.

Due to a critical security vulnerability within the software 'Knox' used by the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Note 3 which could enable "easy interception of data communications," according to researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev. 

                         This vulnerability not just exploits the user's emails and communication data, but it also enables hackers to inject malicious codes, which could affect the whole device.

How Knox Works? 

Samsung’s Knox creates an encrypted, virtualized space within the smartphone, so that apps such as email, phone, contacts, and others can be loaded securely. Data can be prevented, by policy, by being moved outside of Knox. 

                                Samsung finally mentioned some advise about  how users can avoid compromising important data on their Knox-enabled handsets. The tips will be also sent as a message to the Knox users. Knox now offers additional protections against Man in the Middle (MiTM) attacks, namely, Mobile Device Management (MDM), per-app VPN, and FIPS 140-2. 

If you are user of Samsung  Galaxy S4, Note 3 or any Knox enabled device, follow these Guidlines for further protection from MitM attacks. 

Yahoo! Acquires "Aviate", An Intelligent Android Home Screen Launcher.

Yahoo! has announced that it has acquired Aviate, an intelligent home screen application for android smartphones. Revealed by Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show.

 Aviate is an Android app that has been in beta for the last few months and automatically organizes your homescreen based on the time of day or location. It places icons, information and shortcuts in smart locations and changes throughout your day.

also Aviate using its algorithm understands your context, WIFI, GPS, Accelerometer, Time, etc, automatically surfaces information at the moment it's useful. In short, due to Aviate The homescreens will become smarter, more personalized and aware of your context.

Yahoo! says "We hope to make Aviate a central part of our Android-based experiences in 2014 (and beyond), and we are committed to continued innovation on the product."         

Well, Good for Yahoo. It'll be interesting to see what they do with it.

If you download Aviate from the store, you can enter "YAHOO" as the code, and you'll have it. No need to wait for an invite if you're one of the first 25,000 people to get it.