Nicki Minaj Earns No. 1 Movie With 'The Other Woman'

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The Queen Barb is on top. Nicki Minaj‘s newest film, ‘The Other Woman,’ grabbed the No. 1 spot at the box office this weekend, bringing in $24.7 million dollars in the U.S., bumping ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ from its seat.

This is Minaj’s first role in a major Hollywood film and since it grabbed the top position, it’s likely that bigger parts are just around the corner. In a recent interview with MTV News, the 31-year-old rapper said she’s currently going on auditions. She’s in search of a role that’s specifically crafted for her, unlike ‘The Other Woman,’ which was written before she accepted the part.

As some might already know, the curvy Queens, N.Y., beauty attended LaGuardia High School, which focuses on music and the performance arts, so being in front of the camera and memorizing lines is nothing new for her.

But will her entry through Hollywood’s doors be as smooth as her entry into hip-hop? Because let’s face it, she pretty much single-handedly brought the female voice in rap back to prominence, so if anyone is capable of making a big splash in the film industry, it’s definitely Minaj.

Being on top isn’t anything new for the entertainer. In 2012, she starred as the voice of a woolly mammoth in the animated movie ‘Ice Age: Continental Drift.’ The film opened $46 million that year.

On the music front, Young Money’s first lady is preparing her third album, ‘The Pink Print,’ for release this year.

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Nicki Minaj Offers Love Advice in 'The Other Woman' Trailer

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Nicki Minaj makes her acting debut in the upcoming romantic comedy ‘The Other Woman.’ In a special preview clip released on Wednesday (March 19), the rapper-actress shows off her acting skills opposite Cameron Diaz, who plays Carly.

In the one-minute scene, Queen Barbz plays Lydia, an executive assistant who comes to Carly’s aid after witnessing her in despair. Apparently, Carly finds out that her boyfriend is married and she is completely devastated.

Lydia consoles her and gives her some, uh, love advice. When Carly tells her she’s tired of being a jump off, Lydia disagrees and suggests that married men are her type.

“All I’m saying is that married guys would be the perfect fit for you,” she says. “I think you need someone with something that’s gonna keep ‘em busy.”

It’s then Carly reminds Lydia that she met her third husband while she was married as to suggest that she doesn’t want to copy her unique marital path.

Before leaving, Minaj’s character offers some more words of wisdom.

“I’ll tell you what my mother told me, and these are words to live by: Selfish people live longer,” Lydia advises.

In the end, Minaj is showing her versatility as an artist with her new movie role in ‘The Other Woman.’

According to the synopsis, the film stars Diaz as a jilted woman who befriends her ex-lover’s wife, played by Leslie Mann, and another mistress, played by Kate Upon, to exact revenge on the philandering lothario.

‘The Other Woman’ will open in theaters on April 25.

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Bits Blog: The ‘Other’ Server Makers Are Gaining Ground

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Pogue’s Posts Blog: What Readers Found in Facebook’s ‘Other’ Folder

A couple of days ago, I wrote this post about the hidden “Other” folder on Facebook. This secret folder contains all messages sent to you by anybody who’s not among your Facebook friends. Because you’ve probably never looked in there, it might contain really important messages that you’ve never seen.

Hundreds of you wrote to report what you found in there. Some found nothing there. Some found only spam. Some found awkwardly written mash notes: “They were all men who wanted to get to know me and commented on my looks,” wrote one reader.

In all of those cases, the Other folder is doing its job.

But many more of you wrote that, sure enough, your Other folder contained important, now outdated messages, some with sad results:

• “Notification of the death of a friend was hidden in my Other box. I had been very hurt at not being told, and actually missed her funeral.

• “Thank you, David. I will never be able to say that enough. Our son died very unexpectedly on New Year’s Eve past (http://MackBrady.com), and thanks to your note, I am just now seeing dozens and dozens of kind and wonderful messages of sympathy and support.”

• “I learned of the death of a former, valued colleague two months ago.”

A number of you discovered, too late, that you’d won prizes or jobs:

• “Shoot, I just discovered I had won a contest for Knicks tickets, but the message was in that ‘Other’ folder. It was from 2011. Grrrr!”

• “Damn, I discovered that a year ago, I won free tickets to the theater and I never knew.”

• “I just checked my ‘Other’ folder and found out that I won a free high-end kitchen faucet for a contest I entered last year. Rats.”

• “Just looked at my ‘Other’ messages and found one about a job opening — in 2011. Think it’s been filled?”

Many of you discovered greetings from long-lost friends or students:

• “I found one from someone I had worked with in Viet Nam in 1970 — he had sent me a message to reestablish contact over two years ago. Glad I found it. Hope he still reads his messages on Facebook.”

• “Whoa! There’s tons of important messages in here. Former students of mine were trying to reach out to me. I can’t believe Facebook doesn’t notify you in any way about these.”

• “Just found a message from a long-lost friend in my ‘Other’ folder. I’d been trying to find her for more than a decade with no success. ??David Pogue, when she and I finally reunite, our first glass will be raised to you!”

• “I reconnected with an old penpal who I haven’t heard from in 15 years thanks to your tip on the ‘Other’ folder!”

• “I logged into it and found a message from an old acquaintance from 40 years ago. It portends an interesting catching up on each other.”

There were missed social opportunities:

• “Just discovered my Other folder! Missed an amazing party (damn!) and found a ton of messages dating back several years!! How the hell did that happen?! I am a savvy social media user and I’m astonished at this!”

• “Whoa. I had 58 messages there, one being an invitation to a bridal shower.”

And there were Good Samaritans trying to return lost credit cards and wallets:

• “Unbelievable! My husband’s wallet was lost and presumed stolen — someone had found it a year ago and sent us a Facebook message, which was hidden until now! Thanks so much.”

• “Just checked and found a message from someone telling me that they found my lost wallet…a year ago.? They really need to redo some thinking on that ‘other’ folder.”

• “A couple of years ago, I stupidly left my card in an ATM while traveling in Argentina. ?I discovered this ‘Other’ inbox a couple of months ago, and my messages included one from a very nice lady in Buenos Aires, who had a) found my card, b) not stolen all my money and c) actually bothered to track me down through Facebook to see if I wanted to reclaim it. Unfortunately, I found out about 18 months too late.”

Several of you found yourselves in the same position I did: feeling bad that people thought they were being ignored:

• “Now I have to apologize to several past acquaintances and let them know I haven’t been blowing them off!”

Several readers wanted to know how they could access the Other folder on their phones or tablets.

The answer: you can’t. The Facebook apps don’t permit you to see the Other folder. (You can, of course, go to www.facebook.com in your phone or tablet’s Web browser — don’t use the app — to work on the Other folder there.)

There was also a comment from Jimmy Chen, who works for the Messages team at Facebook. He wrote:

• “Our priority is delivering the most relevant messages to you while keeping lower-quality messages out. We use a number of factors to determine that, the most important of which is friendship. If you’re already friends with the sender, or you have a mutual friend, then the message will land in your inbox.”

Mr. Chen was also concerned by the implication that the “Other” folder and the $1 charge to avoid it were created at the same time. They weren’t:

• “The Other folder has existed for a long time before we introduced that ability. The point of being able to pay $1 to deliver to Inbox is that sometimes there are legitimate cases where you’d want to message a stranger — for example, you discovered a long-lost friend, or you found someone’s wallet on the bus.”

One reader, Ilya, had a thoughtful solution to the $1 problem:

• “If the goal really is to prevent spam and not to raise revenue, why not refund the charge if the user replies to the message? In fact, why not let each user set his or her own amount for accepting messages from strangers? The deposit is refunded if the user replies (or just clicks a button acknowledging the message as valid).”

I love that idea! How about it, Jimmy?

I also heard from Jonathan Thaw, who works in Facebook’s public relations department. He said these critiques will be passed along to Facebook’s Messages team. He also pointed out that, in fact, one of Facebook’s preference settings lets you change how much mail goes into the “Other” folder. (When you’re viewing your messages, click the tiny padlock next to your name at top left of the screen. Click “Who can contact me?”)

You have only two options here: Basic (the factory setting, the one causing all the problems) and Strict.

Unfortunately, the Strict option puts even more messages into the “Other” folder! It’s making the problem of missed messages worse. (A warning there even says: “You may miss messages from other people you know.”)

Look: it’s clear that the “Other”-folder system is broken in a very upsetting way. It’s preventing important connections, blocking the very communications that Facebook was created to foster.

Let’s hope that Facebook finds a better solution to blocking unwanted messages. Because right now, the secret Other folder is swallowing up a lot more than spam.

Gadgetwise Blog: To-Do Lists, File Sharing and Other Home Worker Needs

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High & Low Finance: How Apple and Other Corporations Move Profit to Avoid Taxes

A decade ago, that was a question some short-sellers were asking about Parmalat, the Italian food company that had seemed to be coining money.

It turned out that the answer was not a happy one: The cash was not real. The auditors had been fooled. A huge fraud was being perpetrated.

Now it is a question that could be asked about Apple. Its March 30 balance sheet shows $145 billion in cash and marketable securities. But this week it borrowed $17 billion in the largest corporate bond offering ever.

The answer for Apple is a more comforting one for investors, if not for those of us who pay taxes. The cash is real. But Apple has been a pioneer in tactics to avoid paying taxes to Uncle Sam. To distribute the cash to its owners would force it to pay taxes. So it borrows instead to buy back shares and increase its stock dividend.

The borrowings were at incredibly low interest rates, as low as 0.51 percent for three-year notes and topping out at 3.88 percent for 30-year bonds. And those interest payments will be tax-deductible.

Isn’t that nice of the government? Borrow money to avoid paying taxes, and reduce your tax bill even further.

Could this become the incident that brings on public outrage over our inequitable corporate tax system? Some companies actually pay something close to the nominal 35 percent United States corporate income tax rate. Those unfortunate companies tend to be in businesses like retailing. But companies with a lot of intellectual property — notably technology and pharmaceutical companies — get away with paying a fraction of that amount, if they pay any taxes at all.

Anger at such tax avoidance — we’re talking about presumably legal tax strategies, by the way — has been boiling in Europe, particularly in Britain.

It got so bad that late last year Starbucks promised to pay an extra £10 million — about $16 million — in 2013 and 2014 above what it would normally have had to pay in British income taxes. What it would normally have paid is zero, because Starbucks claims its British subsidiary loses money. Of course, that subsidiary pays a lot for coffee sold to it by a profitable Starbucks subsidiary in Switzerland, and pays a large royalty for the right to use the company’s intellectual property to another subsidiary in the Netherlands. Starbucks said it understood that its customers were angry that it paid no taxes in Britain.

Starbucks could get away with paying no taxes in Britain, and Apple can get away with paying little in the United States relative to the profits it makes, thanks to what Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former chief of staff at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, calls “stateless income,” in which multinational companies arrange to direct the bulk of their profits to low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions in which they may actually have only minimal operations.

Transfer pricing is an issue in all multinational companies and can be used to move profits from one country to another, but it is especially hard for countries to monitor prices on intellectual property, like patents and copyrights. There is unlikely to be a real market for that information, so challenging a company’s pricing is difficult.

“It is easy to transfer the intellectual property to tax havens at a low price,” said Martin A. Sullivan, the chief economist of Tax Analysts, the publisher of Tax Notes. “When a foreign subsidiary pays a low price for this property, and collects royalties, it will have big profits.”

The United States, at least theoretically, taxes companies on their global profits. But taxes on overseas income are deferred until the profits are sent back to the United States.

The company makes no secret of the fact it has not paid taxes on a large part of its profits. “We are continuing to generate significant cash offshore and repatriating this cash will result in significant tax consequences under current U.S. tax law,” the company’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, said last week.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

Bits Blog: Facebook's Other Big Disruption

Facebook A computer motherboard called Grouphug allows different manufacturers’ chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine.

Facebook just made a potentially game-changing announcement. It got less fanfare than Tuesday’s announcement that it is going into the social search business, but this other announcement may have bigger long-term implications for the technology industry.

Put simply, some of the world’s biggest computing systems just got a little cheaper, and a lot easier to configure. As a consequence, the companies that supply the hardware to these systems may have to scramble to remain as profitable. The reason is a Facebook-led open source project.

In 2011 Facebook began the Open Compute Project, an effort among technology companies to use open-source computer hardware. Tech companies similarly shared intellectual property with Linux software, which lowered costs and spurred innovation. Facebook’s project has attracted many significant participants, including Goldman Sachs, Arista Networks, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

At a user summit on Wednesday Intel, another key member of the Open Compute Project, announced it would release to the group a silicon-based optical system that enables the data and computing elements in a rack of computer servers to communicate at 100 gigabits a second. That is significantly faster than conventional wire-based methods, and uses about half the power.

More important, it means that elements of memory and processing that now must be fixed closely together can be separated within a rack, and used as needed for different kinds of tasks. There is a lot of waste in data centers today simply because, when there is an upgrade in servers, lots of other associated data-processing hardware has to be changed, too.

There were other announcements, like a computer motherboard called Grouphug that allows different manufacturers’ chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine. Before, they were custom made. Put together, such innovations potentially lower the cost and complexity of running big and small data centers to an extent that works for a lot of companies.

“Who wouldn’t want a cheaper, more efficient server?” said Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design at Facebook, and the chairman of Open Compute. “The problem we’re solving is much larger than Facebook’s own challenges. There is a massive amount of data in the world that people expect to have processed quickly.”

To be sure, it’s in Facebook’s interest to attack expensive hardware. The company makes money from a service that requires hundreds of thousands of computer servers distributed in big centers around the world. Google and Amazon.com, which are not members of the project, maintain proprietary systems which they apparently felt gave them a competitive edge.

For Facebook, the difference seems to be more in the software. To the extent hardware costs drop, that’s great for them. Mr. Frankovsky argued that, while “this puts challenges on the incumbents” in hardware, “it also helps them. They have a finite number of engineering resources, and this way they hear from a community about whether there is an interest for a product.” Intel may hope to benefit from its open-source release, since it could see an overall rise in demand for its chips with the move toward cheaper computing.

The real test is whether Facebook can increase the number of potential buyers for Open Compute equipment. “The question is, can they extend this beyond a few Web businesses like Facebook and Rackspace, or a few financial exercises at Goldman, and bring this to industries like oil or aerospace?” said Matt Eastwood, an analyst with IDC, a technology research firm. “That will take it from 20 or 30 companies to hundreds of companies.”

The issue isn’t so much a technical one, he argues, as it is one of getting corporate information technology professionals interested in radical design changes. Mr. Frankovsky is aware of the problem. Recently he and his colleagues led a seminar in Texas for BP, Shell and other oil giants on how they could use Open Compute hardware in their data centers.

This will not change things dramatically this year, and possibly even next, but over the long haul it could remake a lot of businesses. Linux, remember, was around for several years as a minor player, but eventually undid Sun Microsystems and others.

App Smart: News360, Edge Extended, Need for Speed and Other Great Android Apps

If you’re a new owner of one of these, you’ll be happy to know that there’s many an app that will simultaneously thrill you, inform you and welcome you into the world of tablet computing.

For a great news experience, the free app News360 has to be one of the better news-aggregating ones I’ve seen on any platform. When you first open the app, you are presented with a long list of topics that it can aggregate for your convenience into different categories, from arts through science to zombies.

The app uses this profile to grab news from the Web and present it to you within its elegant interface. This is dominated by picture-based “tiles” for each news article the app collects. Each tile tells you the appropriate category, where the news item came from and when. Tapping on one of these tiles takes you to a new page that contains a screen grab of the original online source, alongside the text the app has collected from the article.

The pleasure of News360 is that you can either satisfy your curiosity by tapping on a link to read the original article or decide you have learned enough and navigate on. You can also mark the article as interesting, save it for reading offline — perhaps on a commute — or share it on a social network. These controls are also accessible from the initial “tiles” screen, where you flip over an article’s tile to see the controls. The flip is accompanied by a very pleasing animation. It’s just a little graphical touch, but small details like this make an app great fun.

Part of the fun of having a new tablet is showing off its graphical prowess. Games are a great way to do this. I’ve had immense fun with Edge Extended (about $3 on Google Play). In this game, you play a multicolored cube that you roll around a blocky terrain to collect targets. You swipe your finger on the screen to make the cube flop onto its faces to move. There are all the classic elements of collecting points, avoiding pitfalls, activating switches and so on. But despite its graphical simplicity, the app is swift-paced and very satisfying; it even gave me that sensation of falling from a height in some of its trickier parts.

If you really want to impress people with your tablet’s screen, then you’ll probably get a kick out of a game like Need for Speed Most Wanted ($7 on Google play). It’s a racing game that uses motion to control steering and simple tap controls to brake, slide the car in a drift or turn on a nitrous turbo boost. True to the “Most Wanted” title, you race on regular roads, not racetracks, and can get in trouble with the police. This app has all the typical racing fun, along with the ability to earn points that unlock better cars and so on. But the standout feature is the attractiveness of the graphics, and the image rendering even includes reflections of passing buildings in puddles. It’s really eye-popping, and it even works on a diminutive tablet like the Nexus 7.

If racing’s not your thing, you may like SoulCraft THD instead. In this hack-and-slash role-playing game, you control your character from above as it fights its way through a fantasy landscape of dungeons and cities. As on a standard computer action game, you can earn spells and improve your character’s powers.

The game is “freemium” so it’s free to download and play, but you have to make in-game purchases with real money to advance quickly. The graphics are slick, but don’t expect the kind of detailed rendering you would see on a gaming PC.

If you want to make your pals who own iPads jealous, turn on an animated background. This shows off the computing power of your tablet and Android’s skills, too.

Right now my tablet is rocking the seasonal Autumn Tree Live Wallpaper, which is $1. You can control all sorts of aspects of the app, including what type of trees wave their autumnal leaves in the wind, and it’s delightful. It’s also something that a stock iPad absolutely can’t do.

Have fun, but here’s a big reminder for you: Not all Android tablets will play nicely with all tablet apps, and some features depend on installing the latest edition of the operating system.

Quick Calls

Fresh and free on Android and iOS is a highly unusual “experimental” game, Curiosity. It’s a cube with faces made of millions of smaller cubes. Players all around the world hack away at these by tapping on their devices. A single prize is hidden inside an unknown number of layers. It’s weirdly fun to play ... One of the earliest and slickest apps for Windows 8/RT devices is the official Wikipedia app (free), which shows the online encyclopedia in its most elegant, graphical format yet.

Bits Blog: Hurricane Sandy Knocks Out Gawker and Other News Sites

A screenshot from Gawker’s Web site on Tuesday morning.

The power failures that swept through the East Coast, including large swaths of Manhattan, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, darkened millions of homes, as well as several major Web sites, including the hive of sites in the Gawker Media network, including Jezebel and Gizmodo. The Huffington Post and social media news site Buzzfeed also went dark.

The sites appeared to go off around 7 p.m., not long after Hurricane Sandy made its first contact with land. The sites seemed to share a common Internet service provider, Datagram. It is housed in the financial district in Lower Manhattan, which lost power on Monday evening. Although Datagram uses backup electricity generators in the event of a storm, its offices were flooded, knocking those machines out as well.

Buzzfeed alerted its readers to the outages on its blog and said it was able to get portions of the site back online with the help of Akamai, a site that hosts its content at various servers distributed around the globe. The company also encouraged readers to follow the site’s Tumblr and Twitter feeds for updates.

Gawker went dark Monday night after its servers were knocked out by flooding. The company has been updating its readers using Twitter and is encouraging people to follow the site on Tumblr for news and updates.

On a message posted to Twitter, the company promised it was “continuing to work on our servers and will be back online as soon as is possible. We miss you already. Stay dry.”

Pogue’s Posts Blog: New iOS 6 Loses Google Maps, but Adds Other Features

The arrival of the iPhone 5 isn’t the only big news for phone fans this week. Wednesday, Apple is also making iOS 6 available to anyone with a recent iPhone (3GS, 4, or 4S), iPod Touch (fourth generation) or iPad (2 or 3). It comes installed on the iPhone 5 and the new fifth-generation iPod Touch.

(Caution: Not all features are available on the older models. I’ve noted the biggest such exceptions below, but you should check here for full details.)

Apple’s Maps app for iOS 6.
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The challenge in creating a new operating system is always this: How do you add features without adding complexity?
On a tiny phone screen, that challenge becomes even more difficult. The answer, of course, is, you can’t — but few companies try harder to minimize the complexity than Apple. In iOS 6, for example, Apple counts more than 200 new features, but you wouldn’t know it with a quick glance.

Here’s the best of what’s new:

Maps. Apple, as you may have noticed, has been quietly dismantling its relationship with Google. In iOS 6, for example, there’s no longer a built-in YouTube app (Google owns YouTube); fortunately, YouTube offers a new app of its own.

And now Apple has replaced the iPhone’s longstanding Google Maps app. Apple says that Google had been steadily improving its Maps app — but only for Android phones, leaving the iPhone in the dust. For example, the iPhone app didn’t have spoken turn-by-turn directions. And on Android, the maps are composed of vector art—smooth lines generated by the computer — rather than the square tiles of pixels that you saw on the iPhone.

In any case, the new iOS Maps app offers those features — spoken navigation, vector maps — and more. You can just tell Siri where you want to go (“Give me directions to LaGuardia Airport”), and let the app start getting you there with one of the cleanest, least distracting navigation screens ever to appear on a GPS unit. The visual cues are big, bold and readable at a glance, and the spoken cues are timed perfectly so that you don’t miss a turn. You can even turn the screen off and let the voice alone guide you.

Real-time traffic and accident alerts are built in — no charge, courtesy of crowdsourced speed and position data from millions of other iPhone owners out driving.

Not all is rosy in Mapsland, though. Apple’s database of points of interest (stores, restaurants, and so on), powered by Yelp, is sparser than Google’s. There’s no built-in public-transportation guidance. For big cities, you get Flyover, a super-cool 3-D photographic model of the actual buildings — but losing Google’s Street View feature is a real shame.
During navigation guidance, you can’t rotate the map with your fingers or zoom in by more than a couple of degrees—to see your entire route, for example. Turns out you have to tap the screen and then tap Overview to access that more detailed, zoomable, rotatable map.

Flyover and the vector maps require a fast Internet connection, by the way. When you’re not in a 4G cellular area, it can take quite awhile for the blank canvas to fill in. (Navigation and Flyover don’t work on the iPhone 3GS or 4, the original iPad, or pre-2012 iPod Touches.)

Call smarts. These are some of my favorite new features. If you’re driving or in a meeting when a call comes in, you can flick upward on the screen to reveal two new buttons: Remind Me Later and Reply With Message. The first button offers choices like “In 1 hour” or “When I get home” (a message will remind you to call back); the second offers canned text messages, like “I’ll call you later” or a custom message, that let your caller know you can’t take the call now. Excellent.

Do Not Disturb is also incredibly useful. It’s like Airplane Mode — the phone won’t buzz, ring or light up — except that (a) it can turn itself on during certain hours, like your sleeping hours, and (b) it can allow certain people’s calls or texts through (people on your phone’s Favorites list, for example). You can sleep soundly, knowing that your boss or family can reach you in an emergency, but idiot telemarketers will go straight to voice mail.

(Similarly ingenious: The option called Repeated Calls. If someone calls you twice in three minutes — possibly someone who needs to reach you urgently — that call is allowed to ring during Do Not Disturb.)

Siri. Siri, the voice-activated servant, now understands questions about movies (“When is the next showtime of ‘Finding Nemo 3D?’” or “Who directed ‘Chinatown?’”), sports (“Who won the Yankees game yesterday?”) and restaurants (“Where’s the closest diner?”). In each case, Siri’s responses are visual and detailed—for restaurants, you can even make a reservation with one tap, courtesy of Open Table.

You can also speak Twitter or Facebook posts (“Tweet, ‘I just broke my shin on a poorly placed coffee table’”) and—hallelujah!—open apps by voice (“open Camera”). That’s a huge win.

Siri is also available in more languages and on more gadgets (the new iPod Touch; the iPad 3).

FaceTime over cellular. FaceTime is Apple’s video-chatting feature — and until today, it worked only in Wi-Fi hot spots. Now, at last, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and cellular iPad 3 owners can make video calls (to other iPhone, iPad, Touch and Mac owners) even when they’re out of Wi-Fi range, out in cellular land. When the signal is decent, the picture looks great. (AT&T doesn’t let you use FaceTime over cellular unless you have one of its complicated and expensive shared-data plans.)

Camera panoramas. You can now capture a 240-degree, ultra-wide-angle, 28-megapixel photo by swinging the phone around you in an arc. The phone creates the panorama in real time (you don’t have to line up the sections yourself). Available on iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPod touch (5th generation), and very welcome.

Passbook. This app collects and consolidates barcodes: for airline boarding passes, movie tickets you bought online, electronic coupons and so on. The feature hasn’t gone live yet, so I couldn’t test it except with phony coupons and boarding passes supplied by Apple to reviewers. But the apps for Delta, American, Starbucks and Fandango will be Passbook-compatible almost immediately, and that should be a great time-saver—your boarding-pass barcode appears automatically when you arrive at the airport (thank you, GPS), even on the Lock screen.

Safari browser. You can now save a Web page to read later, when you don’t have an Internet connection, and in landscape mode, a full-screen browsing mode maximizes screen space by hiding toolbars. (I don’t think the third new Safari, feature, iCloud Tabs, will be as useful. It lets you open up whatever browser tabs you left open on your Mac or iPad—if, that is, they’re all signed into the same iCloud account.)

Shared photo streams. You can “publish” groups of photos to specified friends; they can view the pictures on their Apple gadgets or on a Web page. They can add comments or “like” them.

Mail. In Mail, you can indicate the most important people; they get their own folder in the Inbox, helping to lift them out of the clutter. And at long last, you can now attach photos to a Mail message you’re already writing, instead of having to start in the Photos app — better late than never, I guess.

Miscellaneous. The option to publish utterances, photos or other bits to Facebook pops up in a bunch of different apps. A new Privacy settings page gives you on/off switches for the kinds of data each app might request (access to your contacts, location and so on). Tweaks have been made to the App Store app, Reminders, Videos and other apps.

And you no longer have to enter your Apple password just to download an update to an app you already have. Hosannah.

In the end, iOS 6 is to software what the iPhone 5 is to hardware: a big collection of improvements, many of which are really clever and good, that don’t take us in any big new directions. Lots and lots of nips and tucks — that’s Apple’s motto lately.

Unlike the iPhone 5, however, upgrading to iOS 6 doesn’t cost anything. It’s free and available now. In general, you should go get it—and you sacrifice very little (a few Maps features) and gain a lot.

App Smart: Go Go Xylo, Meet the Orchestra and Other Music Apps for Children

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Zillow and Other Companies Moving From Consumers to Businesses

In the last 18 months, though, Zillow has lavished its attention on a different audience: real estate agents. It has created one service that lets them build their own Web sites, one for broadcasting their property listings and another for managing communications with home seekers.

There used to be a clearer line between Internet companies that catered to consumers and those that served businesses. The market was neatly divided between the unglamorous business-to-business or B2B companies, operating mostly out of public view, and the flashier business-to-consumer or B2C companies. But with Zillow and a wave of similar firms, that distinction is fading.

LinkedIn, Groupon and GrubHub — consumer services that help people advertise their talents, find daily deals and order takeout food — are among the companies seeking to burrow more deeply into the operations of businesses in their respective markets. Some companies, like Zillow, are shifting toward business clients well after they were begun. For others, it has been part of the plan from the beginning.

Of course, most consumer Internet companies have long had relationships of some kind with other businesses. Amazon.com works with thousands of manufacturers and with sellers who use its site as a storefront. EBay, initially known as a marketplace for individuals to peddle collectibles and other goods, now has plenty of businesses that sell on its site. Then there are the businesses to which Facebook, Google and Yahoo sell advertising.

But consumer Internet companies of the newer generation are doing even more. In many cases, the tools they are providing businesses resemble specialized versions of so-called customer relationship management services from companies like Salesforce.com, which help businesses increase sales and keep track of communications with clients.

By moving in this direction, consumer Internet companies hope to tap potentially rich new sources of revenue, which could make them more attractive to investors. A company that gets business clients to depend on a broad set of its services can make it tougher for competitors to swipe its customers.

“You can’t just sell advertising without being exposed to someone else undercutting you on price,” said Spencer Rascoff, chief executive of Zillow. “If you sell ads plus services, you’re in a more defensible position.”

Bill Gurley, a Zillow board member and venture capitalist, has seen enough hybrid Internet companies that serve both businesses and consumers that he coined a term to describe them: B2B2C. “We’re moving from a day and age where you’re just a Web site to one where we’re automating the connections between businesses and consumers,” he said.

Mr. Gurley’s firm, Benchmark Capital, has invested in several other companies he puts in that camp, including Uber, which offers a mobile app that lets consumers hail a town car and gives drivers a “heat map” highlighting the areas where they are most likely to find customers.

GrubHub, another one of his investments, lets consumers order takeout and delivery food from more than 15,000 restaurants online and through mobile apps. In many cases, the service uses a clunky system in which customer orders are sent to restaurants by fax and confirmed by phone.

Recently, though, GrubHub introduced a product called OrderHub that could allow it to become more entwined in restaurants’ operations. OrderHub is a tablet computer running Google’s Android operating system that lets restaurants receive orders electronically, confirm them with a couple of taps and improve the accuracy of delivery time estimates.

GrubHub is giving free tablets to restaurants, which pay a commission for orders received through the system. About 500 restaurants in Chicago and 500 in New York have the devices now, according to the company.

LinkedIn, meanwhile, is finding success in helping human resources departments manage recruiting. The site started as a place where people could advertise themselves professionally and build a network of contacts. Soon corporate recruiters began using LinkedIn to look for new hires.

Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other

The promise is more than a marketing boast. Aided by microchip transmitters, heat sensors and a fast-growing form of wireless communication, the boast is a measurable fact.

Inside each Ocado delivery van is a SIM-card module the size of a postage stamp that monitors the air temperature. The sensor sends data to a computer used by fleet managers back at headquarters near London every few minutes.

Ocado says incidents of spoilage of goods have declined since the transmitters were installed last year.

“It has saved us time and given us more confidence in our real-time monitoring, as well as being a safety check for the driver,” said Paul Clarke, Ocado’s director of technology, who oversees a 300-person department that develops software and hardware for the retailer.

The drone of low-density conversation between Ocado’s trucks and headquarters in Hatfield is one example of machine-to-machine communication, a stream of consciousness based on semiconductors that is poised to reinvigorate the mobile industry.

Berg Insight, a research firm in Goteborg, Sweden, says the number of machine-to-machine devices using the world’s wireless networks reached 108 million in 2011 and will at least triple that by 2017. Ericsson, the leading maker of wireless network equipment, sees as many as 50 billion machines connected by 2020. Only 10 billion or so are likely to be cellphones and tablet computers. The rest will be machines, talking not to us, but to each other.

The combined level of robotic chatter on the world’s wireless networks — measured in the digital data load they exert on networks — is likely soon to exceed that generated by the sum of all human voice conversations taking place on wireless grids.

“I would say that is definitely possible within 10 years,” said Miguel Blockstrand, the director of Ericsson’s machine-to-machine division in Stockholm. “This is a ‘What if?’ kind of technology. People start to consider the potential, and the possibilities are endless.”

Machine-to-machine communications has been around for more than two decades, initially run on landline connections and used for controlling industrial processes remotely. With advances in mobile broadband speeds and smartphone computing, the same robotic conversations are now rapidly shifting to wireless networks.

When the total amount of data traffic generated by machines overtakes that created by human voice conversations — or possibly before — mobile operators will have to choose who waits in line to make a call or receive an e-mail — the machine or the human.

“It really does raise some quandaries for the operators,” said Tobias Ryberg, an analyst at Berg Insight. “Most mobile networks are set up for human communication, not for machines. So there will have to be a whole revamping of the system to make this possible.”

Currently, about a third of all machine-to-machine communication involves so-called smart utility meters, which perform duties like sending data on household electric and gas consumption to utilities; the utilities use the information to tailor production to actual demand. In Europe, all households in Sweden and Italy are equipped with smart meters, many of them running wirelessly. In Austria, a law will require five million homes to be equipped with smart electric meters by 2019.

Another third is taking place in the auto industry, through car and truck fleet management systems, which allow transport companies or corporate car managers to track their vehicles in real time, or that are used by emergency accident, repair and location services like General Motors’ OnStar system, now installed on a quarter of new GM vehicles. In Europe, similar technology is beginning to appear in preparation for 2015, when the eCall initiative, an E.U. law requiring all new cars to be equipped with wireless transmitters will take effect. The transmitters would automatically report accident data, as well as airbag deployment and location, to emergency responders

Pusha T And Lil Wayne Have No Beef Towards Each Other

Pusha T recently dissed Drake and Lil Wayne just reacted by expressing what he had to say.

Pusha T came out dissing Drake on his track “Exodus 23:1,” so Lil Wayne fought back with “Goulish,” rapping, “Fuck Pusha T and anybody that love him.”

In a recent interview with MTV, Young Money said that he has no beef against the G.O.O.D Music member rather he just let go of steam on his track that time and expressed his reaction.

Lil Wayne stated, “I just finished recording my ‘I Am Not a Human Being II’ album. And we’re starting to work on the Young Money album. … It really wasn’t no beef, you know. It was just me. I just reacted. Just a reaction, a simple reaction. I don’t apologize for it because I’m human. But it was just my human reaction. I don’t take it back. But there’s no beef. Beef is a whole different thing. … I’ll move on.”

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