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Google's mergers and acquisitions are at its lowest figure since 2009, with the company spending just $250 million so far in the first 9 months of 2015.

By comparison, Google spent nearly $5 billion in the first 9 months last year, and $1.3 billion in the first nine months of 2013.

BI compiled a nice list of Google's previous M&A:

2014 (first nine months): $1.1 billion on non-named acquisitions, plus $2.5 billion on smart appliance maker Nest, $517 million on Dropcam, and $478 million on satellite company Skybox Imaging.
2013 (first nine months): $369 million in non-named M&A, plus $969 million for Waze.
2012 (first nine months): $1.1 billion in non-named M&A, plus $12.4 billion for Motorola Mobility.
2011 (first nine months): $502 million in non-named M&A, plus $676 million for ITA Software, $151 million for Zagat, $114 million for DailyDeals GmbH.
2010 (first nine months): $626 million in non-named M&A, plus $179 million for Slide, $681 million for AdMob, $123 million for On2 Technologies.

Amazon has announced today that if you order Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and use the company's Prime Now same delivery service you can get the game delivered to your door at midnight on launch day.

The only caveat is that you have to live in one of 20 major metros - Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami, Minneapolis, Orange County, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle.

Additionally, if you order snacks, Amazon will deliver those, as well.

"Why wait in lines on release night when we'll bring Call of Duty: Black Ops III right to your door? We're making it easy for hardcore gamers to download the app, reserve a coveted delivery window for midnight delivery and sit back while the game comes right to their doors. Our Prime customers will be on their way to ranking up before they know it, and all without having to leave the comfort of their house," said Stephenie Landry, Amazon's worldwide director of Prime Now. "We love offering exclusive opportunities for our Prime members and the gaming community, and now they can get the most anticipated game of the year, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, moments after it is released."

Amazon has updated their Prime Music service this week, adding some highly requested features.

The company will now allow desktop and mobile users to download songs for offline playback, and mobile users can now download the songs to your phone's SD card (if you have one) allowing you to save precious internal storage.

Additionally, the service is now supported via Android Wear, the popular smartwatch operating system. The support allows for browsing via your watch and playback control.

Finally, Amazon also added a "New to Prime" tab to find the latest releases and a "Popular" tab to see the top songs and albums in the U.S. at that time.

The RIAA has asked the courts to issue a default judgement against the new Grooveshark music service, demanding $17 million in piracy damages and 'willful counterfeiting' damages.

The original Grooveshark settled its lawsuit with the RIAA earlier this year, but the new Grooveshark was started a few days later using the name. The RIAA sued almost immediately, and Namecheap and CloudFlare both eventually shut down the domain and their servers.

Grooveshark stayed around for a while, moving from domain to domain but is now shuttered for good.

"Defendants' Counterfeit Service prominently featured counterfeit replicas of the Grooveshark Marks as well as identical graphical elements taken from the original Grooveshark website," the RIAA said in their motion. "Plaintiffs have provided conclusive evidence that infringing copies of MP3 files that correspond to each of the Works-in-Suit have been streamed, reproduced, and distributed via the Counterfeit Service to computers located in New York."

The RIAA has asked for full damages for 89 infringing tracks, $400,000 for cyberquatting and $4 million for willful counterfeiting of the Grooveshark trademark, which is owned by the record labels. While the courts will absolutely side with the RIAA, there is very little chance the labels ever see a dime since the alleged operator is located somewhere in Europe.

A month after releasing their first Android app (to help consumers migrate to iOS), Apple has launched a second app for the operating system.

Apple's Beats Pill+ app is a companion to Apple's Beats Bill+ portable Bluetooth speaker, letting users queue up tracks and other basic DJ features.

The app, comically, has terrible ratings from users that are mostly just mad at Apple putting anything in the Google Play Store but nothing compares to Apple's Move to iOS app that has over 30,000 1-star reviews.

If you are interested, you can check out Beat Pills+ here.

According to the latest figures from Pew Research, 68 percent of American adults have smartphones now, and 45 percent have tablets.

The figures are significant since in 2011 the smartphone figure was 35 percent and the tablet figure was almost non-existent.

Breaking down the smartphone number further, we have 86 percent ownership for the 18-29 age group, and 83 percent for those in the age 30-49 range.

With the increase in tablet and smartphone ownership has come a decline in desktop and laptop ownership. 78 percent of adults under 30 own a desktop or laptop, down from 88 percent in 2010. In total, 73% of U.S. adults own a desktop or laptop computer, down from 80 percent in 2012.

In total, mobile phone ownership is almost fully saturated, with 92 percent of American adults owning a mobile phone of some kind.

Amazon has removed all listings for the Google Chromecast and the Apple TV, taking down direct competitors to its own Amazon set-tops and streaming sticks.

Besides selling it directly, Amazon has also removed third-party reseller listings and even new and used devices sold by Amazon users through the marketplace.

Taking it one step further, if you search for the items you will instead get a recommendation for the Amazon Fire TV or the Amazon Fire TV stick.

As part of their decision to stop selling the items, Amazon says "It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion." This, of course, doesn't make too much sense since Chromecast's SDK is open and Amazon could have added support pretty easily.

Amazon has announced that it is exiting the daily deals business, effective December 18th.

On that date, Amazon will stop selling the deals completely, including through the Amazon Local app, but any deals purchased before the shutdown will still be usable and supported.

Overall, the entire daily deal space is struggling. Market leader Groupon, once valued at $16 billion, now has a market value of just $2.4 billion and laid off 1100 employees just two months ago. LivingSocial also just laid off 20 percent of its workforce.

Amazon closed Amazon Destinations earlier this month, a service that let Amazon users find deals on hotels within range of their current location. It seems pretty clear that both Destinations and Local were not seeing the revenue Amazon had expected.

For their part, Amazon only left consumers with a vague message: "We've learned a great deal from the daily deals business and will look for ways to apply these lessons in the future as we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers and merchants."

Google has released a new app this week, "Who's Down," to make it easier to make plans with your friends.

The app, in its basic form, will let you know what friends are free and looking to go out, but of course for it to really work it will require a lot of people actively using it and as of now there are very few. Compounding that problem is the fact that the app is invite-only currently.

In the app, you can toggle a switch that lets your friends know you are available for the next three hours, and it lets you choose from a list of popular activities like "dinner" or "movies."

The app also allows you to see what friends are down for, and chat with them from within the app.

One of the most popular scene groups, YIFY, has shut down permanently.

The group took down their YTS website yesterday, and Ernesto confirmed with the group that is indeed down for good.

YIFY has shared over 6000 movies since starting in 2010, and the films were popular due to the quality of the release and their encode size.

At the same time, Popcorn Time was backed primarily by YIFY releases and that service was already having its own issues before this latest news.

Apple's latest and definitely the greatest iPad so far has gotten a release date today. The iPad Pro will go on sale on November 11th, in just under two weeks.

Apple has not officially revealed yet the release date but the information comes from a rather reliable source, Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac. According to Gurman the iPad Pro will be sold starting on Wednesday the 11th on both brick and mortar stores as well as online.

Gurman also says that the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard will be available as well on November 11th. The iPad will be available in both WiFi and LTE flavors and will start at $799.

What makes iPad Pro greater than previous installments of Apple's tablet series is of course its larger 12,9 inch touch screen display. It remains to be seem, though, how well users adopt the new product. After all there are limitations that come with the size.

SK Telecom is the Korea's largest mobile operator and aims to be the world's first 5G carrier. Nokia on the other hand aims to be the technology provider, and after recent tests it seems likelier than ever.

Nokia and SK Telecom demonstrated a new wireless 5G connection that was able to peak transfer speeds at 19.1 gigabits per second. If one movie would be 2 megabytes the connection would be able to optimally transfer that in less than a second.

The cmWave technology by Nokia uses 8x8 MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) transmission, 256 QAM modulation and 400 MHz bandwidth. The cmWave gets its name from the wavelength that the 3 to 30 GHz frequency range bands translate to – 1 to 10 centimeters. The test was done in 15Ghz average frequency.

The companies tell that this is the first time centimeter waves achieve such results. Previously millimeter waves have been used. Nokia says that it is likely that the commercial bands in the future will use centimeter wavelengths and fall in the frequency range.

The two have been in close cooperation this year and in addition to 5G techonologies they've introduces improvements to LTE speeds and LTE Advanced techonologies.

You can find more information about the Nokia cmWave 5G here.

According to a new report, Google plans to merge its Chrome OS operating system into its Android mobile operating system by 2017.

There is expected to be a beta of the unified operating system next year ahead of the full launch in two years.

The move is unsurprising. Chrome OS has been popular for certain niches (like schools) but otherwise never really gained traction. Many of the features of Chrome OS are already in Android, as well, or well known to Chrome browser users on desktop or mobile.

Android is a clear winner, with over 1 billion global users, which also means there is a hefty base of users that are already comfortable with the OS. Adding Android to notebooks could be huge since Android is free compared to Windows which costs OEMs for each license.

If accurate, the large screen Android will give consumers access to the Google Play Store and developers can offer apps that will work with all screen sizes with little extra code (potentially) compared to writing for different operating systems.

Source:
WSJ

The Tor Project has released the beta version of their anonymous Tor Messenger chat client.

The client works on Tor's secure browsing system and will allow for out of the box "off-the-record" chats supporting Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, and Yahoo.

Tor says the client is based off the popular Instantbird, the messenger app built by the Mozilla dev community.

For the time being, Tor says the beta is a major work in progress so don't expect everything to work perfectly.

EA's upcoming Mirror's Edge sequel has been delayed a few months.

"Catalyst", first announced last year and then shown off at E3 this year. Initially, the game was scheduled for launch in February but EA has announced a delay that will see the game now released on May 24th.

"Years ago, we set out an ambitious vision for Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Achieving that vision and delivering the best possible experience is equally inspiring and challenging," says EA. "And it takes time. We set out to create a vast city to explore, full of stunning vistas, majestic skyscrapers, and mysterious tunnels. We're building the most immersive action-adventure game with fluid movement and combat in first person. Mirror's Edge Catalyst will be an all-new playground with a deeper and more engaging story - and we want to accomplish all these goals to the highest quality possible."

Mirror's Edge Catalyst will be available for PC, Xbox One and PS4.