Two of the biggest companies in smartphone cases OtterBox and LifeProof are now one big happy family. OtterBox today announced that it has acquired LifeProof and it’s 250 employees and is now merging the brands together with it’s 650 employees worldwide. Details of the acquisition have not been disclosed as OtterBox is a privately owned company. For the time being LifeProof employees will stay put in their San Diego facility .

OtterBox was founded in 1998 and LifeProof in 2005 and is a DBA of TreeFrog Developments, Inc.

“The joining of OtterBox and LifeProof is a way to combine two great brands and provide customers with even more great products, services and choices for smartphone accessories,” OtterBox CEO Brian Thomas said. “Both companies are successful because we foster an environment where everyone takes pride in being part of a culture that knows how to identify opportunities and grow them quickly. Our goal in this acquisition is to create more value for our customers than we ever could have generated while operating individually.”

iOS fans continue to dream of a day their beloved angelic mobile OS would no longer be boring. The design genius running the Apple efforts has been said to favor the Windows Phoneish flat design, and that maybe the next direction. Check out one fans dreams come to life in this concept video below.

Shortly after their acquisition of tumblr, Yahoo slapped together a public announcement for all. After earlier reports that they would not “screw up” tumblr, aka the Facebook/Instagram promise, they rolled out a whopping 1TB of storage to new and existing users. Did I mention this is a full resolution upload deal?

Along with your damn near lifetime of space, the iOS, Android and Web version of Flickr gets a new user experience. Yahoo seems to be indeed focused on taking Flickr back to its core. With 1TB and full resolution upload, I am tempted to dive in, hmmmmm. Oh, and they’ll be opening an office on Time Square, New York, what ever the hell that means.

Instagram? Are you scared yet? First Google +, now Flickr/tumblr combo, its getting mighty warm in here!

I’ve been saying this for a long few years, maybe a bit less with the release of the new Z10 and the wondrous devices to follow. But even so, there is nothing wrong with reinventing your business as a service. Especially since there are two types of people in this world, those who refuse to leave Blackberry because the BBM addiction is too real, and those who managed to fight off the addiction, but still keep and eye on it.

I can’t help but wonder how they will turn this potential gold mine of leverage into a comeback for the brand. Will they limit the features outside of BB10 to give the Z10 and Q10 an appealing home advantage? Or is simply existing good enough for them?

In the first version of multi-platform BBM, iOS and Android users are expected to be able to experience the following BBM features:

• The immediacy of BBM chats
• Multi-person chats
• Voice note sharing
• BlackBerry Groups, where BBM users are able to set up groups of up to 30 people and share calendar, photos, files and more

The team here at BlackBerry has definitely been working hard to bring the much-adored BBM experience to a wider group of mobile users. In a recent press release at BlackBerry Live 2013, Andrew Bocking, Executive Vice President, Software Product Management and Ecosystem, at BlackBerry had this to say:

“For BlackBerry, messaging and collaboration are inseparable from the mobile experience, and the time is definitely right for BBM to become a multi-platform mobile service. BBM has always been one of the most engaging services for BlackBerry customers, enabling them to easily connect while maintaining a valued level of personal privacy. We’re excited to offer iOS and Android users the possibility to join the BBM community.”

BBM Quick Facts:

• More than 60 million monthly active users
• More than 51 million daily active users who are connecting with friends or colleagues an average of one and a half hours every day.
• BBM users send and receive more than 10 billion messages each day, nearly twice as many messages per user per day as compared to other mobile messaging apps
• Almost half of BBM messages are read within 20 seconds of being received; indicating how truly engaged BBM customers are

Today, BlackBerry also announced BBM Channels, a new social engagement platform within BBM that will allow customers to connect with the businesses, brands, celebrities and groups they are passionate about. BlackBerry plans to add support for BBM Channels as well as voice and video chatting for iOS and Android later this year, subject to approval by the Apple App Store and Google Play. If approved by Apple and Google, the BBM app will be available as a free download in the Apple® App StoreSM and Google Play store. Additional details about system requirements and availability will be announced closer to the launch.

I just gave a Firefox Android nightly a chance to win me over again. It had no idea what websites I frequented, no bookmarks, no plugins synced, no settings, no tabs open on my computer, nothing. Yes I realize Firefox can sort of sync up like Chrome, but it made me realize that there are benefits of surrendering one’s privacy, benefits I don’t want to lose, which is good because that seems to be the inevitable direction we’re heading. And what better way to do that than with Google as much as possible, given that they provide such a vastly wide array of services that all tie into each other. No one comes close to that, nor to their transparency.

That reminded me of a USA Today article I ran into last night (in part because Google News knows I would be interested) on Siri vs Google Now for iOS. Its author, Anick Jesdanun, gave Google Now an extensive international test drive. He noted that while Siri has about a dozen amusing answers to “what is the meaning of life” and so forth, Google Now, which could recognize his voice well presumably due to various forms of data mining, produced information that tended to be remarkably relevant to his interests — presumably, largely, thanks to Google’s data mining practices of his behavior on Search and his Gmail too (that turned my head). Seems he was never the type to enable Chrome’s Do Not Track or Incognito mode feature, and consequently he knew the local currency rates, which hotel, a tap for turn-by-turn, tourist stuff, you get the idea.

“You must give it permission to access calendar entries. Privacy worries aside, Google Now’s appeal is in what it does with that data. That’s why I’m okay with Web History,” Anick aptly put it. This type of privacy invasion strikes me as being obviously helpful to consumers, to commerce and to the whole wide world. So what’s the problem? Grow up and just go with it.

Doug Simmons

Starting today, Instagram  users will get an update for a new features called “Photos of you,” aka Facebook! This feature will now allow you to tag not only people, but brands as well, along with the geotag information. But wait, it gets better, there’s an all new tab that will allow you to see pictures you’ve been tagged in by others, get it? Photos of you?

How about this, you can even set the photos you’re tagged in to be held until you approve by liking them, do you see what I call the thing a Facebook update? Check out the video below. Instagram users? Are you happy? Is this what you want? Too much like Facebook for you?

Who knows, maybe they’ll do something crazy like stop requiring users to ruin shots by cropping them into a square. who knows…

Yes, I know, its been posted already, but 2.8 million views later and well on the “viral” train, we’re going to watch it again damn it! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a technology commercial this funny and accurate! And how about the punch line? “engadget’s reader’s choice award for smartphone of the year.” BOOM! That’s it, just watch the video!

You rely on your smartphone for many things. One area that is lacking is integration with your TV watching. At best, the smartphone was used as a simple remote control to change channels. New apps make use of your phone as a search tool and scheduler. Finally, the phone and TV might really work together.

DirecTV Taps Into Your Phone

This summer, DirecTV will release into beta its latest app, DirecTV Voice. They have been working with Nuance, creators of Dragon Naturally Speaking, to create a voice controlled app to search DirecTV channels for your favorite shows. Their goal is to finally get rid of scrolling through the program grid displayed on the TV screen to find programs.

By using voice recognition, they are trying to also get away from pushing buttons or sliding through nested menus. Nuance is the county’s premier voice recognition specialists so they plan this release to have a high rate of success with this voice-driven application. Think of it as Siri with infinite knowledge of TV shows and movies.

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There is no doubt that iOS is in desperate need of upgrading. It has been around too long in it’s current state. Android and more specifically Windows Phone have a much more intuitive and modern look. Apple even borrowed some of Androids notification goodness in iOS 5. Now it seems that Apple may borrow some of Microsoft’s Metro UI flava for it’s own in the upcoming release of iOS 7. 9to5Mac is stating that multiple sources are claiming the new interface and general design will be “very, very flat”. While other sources are stating that the new design "loses all signs of gloss, shine and skeumorphism"

Jony Ive, who is now in charge of the iOS design team is said to favor the Metro minimalistic style and bring elements of that UI into Apple’s new UI that should be previewed at the WWDC 2013. Macrumors has a pretty cool mockup of the new UI and I can already tell you I am not a fan. What makes the “flat” style work on Windows Phones is that it is now tunable to your own desire by being able to make the truly live tiles bigger or smaller and move them around at will.

If these formerly called icons could be more like Android widgets and have the scalability of Windows Phone I think it would be more of a hit. It is also being stated that the "new panels [that] swipe from the left and right side of an iOS device’s display."

So it could very well possibly be that iOS 7 falls flat in a good way, but Apple better have something more up it’s sleeve than the mocked up image or it could find it’s not so shiny new UI falling flat in a bad way.

The popular Android personal assistant has not come to the iPad and iPhone but I don’t look for it to replace Siri anytime soon. Even though I have a love hate relationship with Siri there is a deeper integration that with Google Search which is where Google Now is buried. First thing is to fire up your iOS device and head to iTunes and either download or update Google Search. Once downloaded and you fire it up, the Google Search screen is pretty boring. At the bottom of the screen there are some notifications that you can lift up (swipe) and will display multiple cards. The cards will appear based off your location results and selections for example with sports and teams. When you are done with a card you can swipe it the heck out of there. Which is kind of neat. I’m still working with Google Now for iPad but so far I am pretty underwhelmed and the Android experience with Google Now is much better.