Apple’s “Your Verse” iPad campaign continues in full force, as the tech company has unveiled several new videos focusing on unique uses for its latest iPad Air tablet.

The two new ads focus on how the iPad helps hearing-impaired writer and traveler Cherie King navigate foreign countries, as well as Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new The Orchestra app that helps demystify the process of creating orchestral scores. Read more »

Popular note-taking service Springpad will be shutting down on June 25, the company confirmed through a blog post. The service was created over six years ago and since then has had over 5 million users.

Once shut down, all features will stop working and the data will be deleted from their servers. Springpad is working on an export tool that will be available for users to download and migrate their data elsewhere. The company will inform users about the availability of this tool via their blog. Read more »

Google keeps expanding the reach of its Play Movies video service and today four new countries have joined the supported list. If you live in Belgium, Philippines, Switzerland or Uganda, you can now rent and purchase movies from the repository.

The new wave brings the total number of countries where Play Movies is available to 69. However, you should keep in mind that this number only concerns movies, whereas TV shows are still only available in four countries. Read more »

Windows Phone 8.1 Developer’s Preview has been out for weeks and it brought so many new features that even today we keep discovering new ones. The latest one making the rounds is the option to backup 16MP, 18MP, 34MP and 38MP Lumia HD pictures to OneDrive.

This feature has been there since the release of the WP 8.1 Developer’s Preview as ours first backed up high-res pictures date April 30. Read more »

Google Maps got treated to an update for both Android and iOS. Versions 7.7 and 3.0 of the app for Android and iOS respectively bring new features and welcome tweaks to the platform.

The update sees offline maps officially arrive on Google Maps for iOS. Read more »

Google has released a flurry of updates for some of its key apps on Android, including Google Search, Play Music and Play Games.

The first is the Search app (version 3.4.15.1143430.arm), which gets a cool new addition. The app will now try and determine the position of your car when you park it, so when you return you know where to find it on the map. Read more »

Facebook has announced two new ways of logging into apps using your Facebook account. The ability to log into other services using your Facebook account has always been a convenient option but the cost of that convenience was giving away your personal information to an app that you may not fully trust.

With the new Anonymous Login feature, you can now log into services without giving away any personal information. You will see the option to login anonymously on apps that support this feature along with the standard Facebook Login. Read more »

Mozilla has released version 29 of their desktop and mobile browser. But while the mobile browser only gets a few new features, the desktop version get a completely revamped interface.

Firefox for desktop interface features a new tab bar that looks like the one on Google Chrome, with its pyramid shaped tab structure. One interesting design feature is the way background tabs just blend with the background until you highlight them. Read more »

Popcorn Time, which debuted a few weeks ago as a service providing torrent streaming for movies and TV shows, was promptly taken down due to obvious legal issues.

Now, the service is back up with the promise that it will “never be taken down” again. Better yet, a new Android and updated desktop versions are just around the corner. Read more »

Nokia joined Microsoft last Friday officially but since today is the first working day after the agreement was done Microsoft has issued an ad on YouTube that portrays the big happy family as Not Like Everybody Else.

In the ad Microsoft is the colorful person out of a crowd of black and white street-dwellers in a black and white murky world. As he moves along, being cool and different he sees another colorful person (naturally using a Nokia slate) and finally at the end of the ad we see the colorful protagonist through our own point of view (suggesting perhaps we’re black and white as well). Read more »

The latest data from Opera’s Mediaworks ad tracking platform shows that Android has for the first time surpassed iOS in number of mobile ad impressions.

Apple’s iPhones and iPads still generate more ad revenue, however, receiving 52% of ad revenue, despite accounting for just 38.2% of all impressions. Read more »

Microsoft released a Remote Desktop Preview app for Windows Phone 8.1. If you are among the many early adopters of the new OS, you can head to the Windows Phone Marketplace (where the app enjoys quite a few good reviews already) and try it out.

The application supports multi-touch and Windows OS gestures thanks to Remote Desktop Protocol and Remote FX. Read more »

Popular IM service WhatsApp has reached the 500 million users milestone. And it’s not just the total number of users the service has but active users who use the service regularly.

This comes shortly after the company was acquired by Facebook, although WhatsApp had a healthy 450 million users at the time of acquisition. The majority of the growth comes from countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, with India alone having 48 million WhatsApp users. Read more »

The latest generation of devices reintroduced fingerprint recognition into mobiles, with online payment services like PayPal quickly jumping aboard to enable secure one-touch authorization for purchases.

Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba is allegedly also looking to enable mobile purchase verification using the Samsung Galaxy S5‘s fingerprint sensor, this time to the wider Asian market. Read more »

Dropbox had a lot of announcements to make yesterday, starting with a new service and two new apps. First is the Dropbox for Business service, which lets companies get a Dropbox account for all their employees, who can then manage their personal and business accounts from the same device and using the same account.

Dropbox for Business gives admins features like remote wipe, account transfer and sharing audit logs. One new feature arriving later is Project Harmony, which lets you see who is editing a file and chat with other users, similar to Google Drive. Read more »