BlackBerry has shut the doors on it music streaming service. BBM was BlackBerry's version of a streaming service similar to Rdio or Spotify and this morning the company has announced that after April, the service will close for good on the grounds of a lack of popularity.

For those not familiar with the service, BBM let users download up to 50 tracks a month to listen to offline, but you could also connect to your friends and gain even more music to listen to. The idea was to have a more social interaction with the music and not just a vanilla "build a playlist" style app.

BlackBerry is advising users to begin transitioning to another service ASAP as everything halts at the beginning of May, but says that the shutdown date could change without notice. BlackBerry is not leaving users totally in the dark though as they are offering a free 30 day trial to Rdio premium.

Apple has tweaked the App Store UI in an effort to make age ratings on apps more visible. The new change is a small and stubble, but easy to notice notification box that is placed beside an apps developer information.

The change comes as consumer groups put pressure on the company to curb content that parents may consider too graphic or obscene for children. This new "Age Rating Box" will do little to prevent such exposure to kids though because as of this posting, the age rating does not show up in App Store charts or search results.

The company is also hoping that the new update will help put out some fires that has arisen over apps like Vine and 500px displaying pornographic material. Personally, I feel that kids will be kids, and they will find a way into things that they are not supposed to get into. A pretty new box of pixels is going to do little to stop that problem.

Samsung is set to release its WiFi-only point and shoot camera / smartphone mash-up this month. Samsung took the tech community by storm when it first released the Galaxy Camera which basically features a fully connected Galaxy smartphone on the back of a full featured point and shoot camera.

Now those who want a smartphone / high-end point and shoot camera, but hate the idea of a monthly data fee can rejoice as Samsung is finally going to begin shipping its WiFi only version just a mere three months after it was announced at CES.

The WiFi-only version of the Galaxy Camera will feature a 4.8-inch Super Clear Touch LCD, 16MP BSI CMOS sensor and 21X optical zoom. The Android Jelly Bean powered device will retail for about $50 less than its cellular data connected big brother, which retails at a price point of $500.

Just as web developers across the world were settling down to enjoy the good life, Google and Mozilla have walked in the door and thrown a wrench into their smoothly running machines. This morning both Google and Mozilla announced that they are moving their browsers to new rendering engines.

Google has announced that it has forked the popular WebKit engine off into a more "manageable for chromium" engine called Blink. Google says that Blink will focus on speed and simplicity, and will still hold true to its WebKit roots. Opera, who just switched to WebKit says that they will follow Google's lead and fully embrace and contribute to Blink.

In a blog post, Adam Barth, a Software Engineer at Google said:

"Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit."

Not to be left out, Mozilla had its own announcement about a new rendering engine as well. Dubbed Servo, the engine is a collaboration between Mozilla and Samsung, and is coded in an entirely new language called Rust. It will not replace the Gecko engine current versions of Firefox are built around just yet, but the transition will take place at some point says Mozilla.

It was only yesterday that we heard about Samsung's Galaxy Mega range of smartphones, coming in both 5.8- and 6.3-inch, but now there's news of yet another smartphone under the Galaxy umbrella of devices.

The new device is being referred to as the Galaxy Win I8552 handset, with the details of the device unveiling by a Vietnamese mobile retailer, Mainguyen. They've said that the Galaxy Win I8552 will arrive with a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, dual-SIM support, a 2000 mAh battery and Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean.

The future of smart device cameras could lay with Toshiba, as the company announced this week the industry's thinnest CMOS image sensor camera module for next-generation smartphones and tablets.

Toshiba's new sensor is just 4.7mm high, and will allow companies to bake in high-end 13-megapixel cameras in an ultra-thin frame. Andrew Burt, vice president of the Analog and Imaging Business Unit, System LSI Group at TAEC has said:

Toshiba once again proves its technical expertise in the development of this ultra-low height module enabling customers to create the thin, attractive mobile products that consumers have come to expect. Our strategy of continuous innovation and enhancement to the TAEC systems offering, especially for the camera/imaging markets, provides the technology solutions that will drive thinner mobile devices without compromising picture quality or performance.

Toshiba's new CMOS image sensor camera module will be available to manufacturers starting next month.

According to NetMarketShare's latest numbers, Apple's web browser, Safari, has actually increased its market share despite the very strong competitors on the market such as Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome browsers.

Safari now enjoys a chunk of that mobile web browsing market share, with 61.7%. Android Browser is second in line with 21.8% and Opera Mini sits in third position with 8.4%. Just last month Safari accounted for 55% of mobile browsing, so that is a considerable surge for the last 30 days. Apple continue to dominate mobile web browsing with nothing to stop them at the moment.

Zynga have launched their online poker and casino games in the UK this week, their first move away from social gaming and a very serious push into real-money gambling.

The company now offer online poker, slot machines, blackjack and other games. They've partnered up with bwin.party, who are the world's largest publicly traded online gambling company, who saw a profit of $32 million in 2012. Barry Cottle, Zynga's chief revenue officer, took to the company blog, where he said:

Launching the download and web versions of Zynga's real money games for play in the UK is an exciting move to bring players the real money games they have been asking us for. We look forward to launching our social versions of real money games for players on Facebook and mobile in the UK throughout 2013.

Zynga shares rose considerably with the real-money gambling launch, seeing a nice 15% rise on the day.

CyanogenMod founder Steve Kondik has taken to his Google+ page to announce that he has restored the opt-out feature on stats gathering within CyanogenMod this morning. He had some choice words to say about the situation:

It's incredibly frustrating that a handful of incredibly vocal users are ready to "fork" over the issue. News flash: there are already a hundred forks of CM. We like it, and we enable it! And there's no sinister plot to crack the hashed data and sell your deepest darkest secrets to Verizon and the NSA.

 

In the end though, we should respect everyone's wishes here. The change was well-intentioned- we just want to have better answers to certain questions. There are many applications out there who are doing incredibly dubious things like uploading all of your contacts without your consent, so certain suspicions are understandable. I do not want CM to ever be perceived as a group who doesn't respect the privacy of it's users.

Skype has reached quite the milestone this week, where they're seeing more than two billion minutes of users connecting with each other. Skype has celebrated this milestone with an awesome infographic, below.

Breaking two billion minutes into hours provides us with a very crazy 33 million hours per day. This is the same as 1.38 million days, or 3805 years all crammed into a single day of Skype use. This is enough time to walk around the world more than 845 times, fly around 700,000 times, or travel to Mars 5400 times.

Around six years ago, a rumored sequel to Doom was talked about, but it didn't excite id and Bethesda envisioned according to Bethesda vice president of marketing and publications, Pete Hines.

Kotaku have reported that the game was then thrown in the bin, with Hines backing up this claim stating that id Software refocused their efforts into a new version of Doom 4 that promises to meet the uber high expectations of the game and the Doom franchise. Hines has said that when they're ready to talk about it, they'll let people know.

The problems reportedly lie within id Software itself, which is described as a company that was once full of the world's best talent, but lacks direction. Politics and mismanagement all played a negative role at the company, with executives more focused on getting Rage shipped in 2011 rather than pay attention to what was happening with Doom 4 - how that happens, I just don't know.

The Google Maps team have just unveiled the latest update to Google Maps for Android, where the addition of voice navigation for 9 more countries went live earlier today. Users in the below countries will now be able to use the Google Maps app on their Android device with the new features starting now:

• Ghana
• Kenya
• Cote d'Ivoire
• Senegal
• Estonia
• Bulgaria
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Slovakia

There's no news on when we should expect more countries to gain the navigation abilities to Maps for Android, but its good to see the Mountain View-based company at least beginning to stretch their navigation legs.

Google has given their awesome Android app, Google Now, some new abilities, with the updated version now capable of real-time package tracking from certain carriers.

This new trick is only going to work if a tracking number has hit your inbox of course. The other improvements to Now include a new information option that shows some basic settings, as well as faster Google search results. These new abilities can be found in the updated Google Now app on the Google Play store, if your device hasn't already alerted you of the update.

Microsoft has announced a major milestone for the video and instant messaging platform Skype. They say that Skype users now use the service for a total of two billion minutes every day. To celebrate and explain just how large two billion minutes is, Microsoft provided the following infographic:

Two billion minutes is a testament to our users who are making Skype the everyday communications hub that brings people together. This massive amount of connection - enough time to watch 1.6 million movies - is also a testament to the hard work of our product teams who have enabled these great experiences. Whether making a voice or video call, sending an instant message, sharing a file or connecting with a group of friends, now more than ever before, Skype brings people together whenever they are apart

Twitter has released an update to its iOS app, bringing the version count to 5.5. With the new update, Twitter has added the ability to launch and install apps linked in a tweet. These feature is a direct result of Twitter's updated Cards feature.

Apps which support Twitter's Card functions will be able to be installed from the Twitter iOS app. Twitter has also included the usual performance increases, bug fixes, and improvements:

Twitter for iPhone now helps you discover, install and launch your favorite apps from Tweets. This update also includes the following improvements:

-Faster launch times and general performance upgrades

-"Retweeted by" in Tweet detail is now tappable

-Fix for reply-to-self in conversations

-Fix for bug that prevented undoing retweets in some cases

You can download the Twitter app from the Apple App Store.

SimCity has a new DLC available for free that adds the Nissian LEAF and LEAF charging station to the game. But nothing in life is ever free--the DLC essentially comes at the cost of having advertising inside of your SimCity gaming experience. We're pretty sure Nissan is paying Maxis/EA to provide this DLC.

For users who install a Nissan LEAF charging station, nearby businesses get a onetime increase of happiness and Sims who use the charging station gain happiness.

In-game advertising isn't anything new. Looking back, the first examples of in-game advertisements showed up as early as 1991. Of course, over the years, some in-game advertising has been done better than others. What are your thoughts on this DLC sponsored by Nissan? Will you download and use it?

AMD's representitive believes that NVIDIA may be bitter over Sony's choice to go with AMD in the PlayStation 4. His reasoning? A statement by NVIDIA's Tony Tamasi saying how the GTX 680 outperforms the PlayStation 4. He added that the 680 had been out for a year and a half.

If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX 680 GPU, which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago.

AMD's director of ISV relations Neal Robinson responded:

Well, of course they're going to do that. They're a little bitter. For us, really by looking at the APU that we designed, you can't pull out individual components off it and hold up and say, 'Yea, this compares to X or Y.' It's more than just a CPU doing all these amazing calculations and a GPU doing calculations. We are now going to be able to move certain tasks between the two.

It's true that the hardware being used in the PlayStation 4 isn't the latest and greatest. But AMD is able to offer both the CPU and GPU as a package, allowing certain optimizations that can work in the PlayStation 4's favor. We'll have to wait and see what Microsoft brings to the table with the Xbox 720.

If you haven't heard of the Stinky Footboard, don't feel bad. Until earlier today, neither had I. Now that I've seen the Kickstarter video, I'm rather impressed and thought I'd pass it along. The Stinky Footboard is a gaming controller designed to be used in conjunction with a mouse and keyboard.

The Kickstarter campaign is offering the Stinky Footboard package for cheaper than it will be when it hits stores this June. You can check out their Kickstarter campaign if you're interested in learning more or supporting this innovative gaming product.

A World Championship Series 2013 for StarCraft II is coming, Blizzard announced today. The World Championship Series will be run in conjunction with top eSports organisations, including Korea eSports Association, Ongamenet, GomTV, Major League Gaming, Turtle Entertainment, and Twitch.

There will be three different leagues in the sereis: one in Korea, one in America, and one in Europe. Each league will feature three sessions and three global season finals. Players will earn points from each of these events that will be used when deciding the World Champion.

Blizzard will be hosting the final match during their yearly BlizzCon event this Novemeber.

The structure of the StarCraft II World Championship Series is the result of an ongoing collaborative effort between Blizzard and our partners. Our collective goal was to make StarCraft II eSports even more exciting and easier to follow for fans than ever before. On the heels of the successful launch of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, we're all very excited about the present and future of StarCraft II eSports.

Samsung and Mozilla have teamed up to develop new Android browser technology. Specifically, the team will be working on developing a new browser engine for Android and the ARM architecture. The new engine is said to be called Servo and will make use of Mozilla's Rust programming language.

Mozilla and Samsung are optimizing the browser for multi-core processors since that seems to be the way mobile devices are heading. It seems somewhat of an unlikely partnership, but it does make sense on some levels for Samsung. The Korean giant currently relies heavily on the Android operating system, a system that Samsung does not own.

Samsung is looking to have alternative options going into the future. Working with Mozilla could help get them in on the ground level of Mozilla's upcoming mobile operating system.