We love Cortana on our Windows Phone, and we’re going to love her on Windows PCs and tablets, too. If you are already running Windows 10 Technical Preview, then you can already try it out. In recent builds, a new option has shown up to help Cortana learn your voice. This makes it easier for her to initiate the ‘Hey Cortana‘ function. Watch her in action in our hands-on video.

Samsung Galaxy S5 users on US Cellular will be delighted to know that they are now pushing out the Lollipop update.

Lollipop has been rolling out for the Samsung Galaxy S5 across various carriers, and US Cellular is the latest to join in. Owners of the Galaxy S5 will begin seeing Android 5.0.1 hit their device through an over-the-air update.

Developers, enthusiasts, friends, and the desire to see ideas come to life. Oh, and meat. So much meat.

There are hackathons, backyard get togethers, developer summits, and programming sessions for beginners all over the world, all the time. Some of them are fantastic, but none of them are all of these things at once. It’s one of the things that has always made the annual Big Android BBQ event in Texas so special, and these new one-day events the IDEAA team has started over the past year exist as unique micro-scale versions of these events. This past weekend, Old Town Alexandria, Va played host to the first east coast version of these smaller events, the Big Android Meat and Greet.

Apple employees will be able to pick up an Apple Watch Sport or stainless steel model for 50% off.

In a memo to employees, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that over 1,000 Apple Watch apps were submitted last week after Apple began taking submissions from all developers. He also announced that Apple employees would be able to get either the Apple Watch or Apple Watch Sport for 50% off, according to 9to5Mac:

I know that many of you have been looking forward to choosing an Apple Watch for yourselves, and we want to make it easy for you. Starting Friday, in countries where the watch is available for pre-order, a special Employee Purchase Plan will offer a 50% discount on any Apple Watch or Apple Watch Sport for your personal use.

This discount brings the starting price of the Apple Watch Sport to about $175 for the 38mm, and $200 for the 42mm model. Employees will be able to take advantage of this discount for 90 days. The discount will start when pre-orders for the Apple Watch go live on April 10 at 12:01 a.m. PDT.

Source: 9to5Mac

ULTRAFLOW is a Windows Phone game that may drive you nuts. The puzzle game has you trying to bounce a ball through an obstacle course, eventually land in a hole. While the concept sounds simple in that you have a limited number of bounces to sink the ball into the hole.

Graphics are minimal and game play is challenging enough to make you grit your teeth and pull at your hair. The 99 levels of play will test your sense of aim, patience and just the right touch to bounce your way to victory. Available for low-memory devices, ULTRAFLOW is a fantastic way to pass the time.

Choosing a new game to buy is no easy task. There’s nothing more frustrating than having your wallet ready, yet you have no idea what game to get. Well, that’s where we come in. We’re here to help you make your decision a little simpler as we take a look at some of the best games on Xbox One. Today’s round-up will be about the top platformers for the console.

If you don’t know what a platformer is here is a short definition from Wikipedia.

A couple of weeks after Microsoft revealed that Windows 10 for phones would support NFC payments similar to Apple Pay, there’s more evidence that the company may try to compete directly with Apple’s payment system.

A new report out of TechCrunch today claims that Apple acquired a startup called Ottocat in 2013 in order to use its technologies to power the “Explore” tab in the app store.

Ottocat was a startup that launched a tool in May of 2013 aimed at making app discovery through the App Store easier by cataloging specific subcategories — that is until Ottocat’s website abruptly went down in October of 2013. As TechCrunch reports, there was no evidence of an acquisition by Apple until a patent application was discovered linking an Ottocat co-founder to Apple:

There is precious little evidence of the connection between Ottocat and Apple — no LinkedIn employment changes, no announcements to Ottocat users — save for one thing. One of Ottocat’s co-founders, Edwin Cooper, authored a patent that was granted to Apple as the original assignee. It looks like that patent was filed by Cooper as an employee of Apple. That patent, for a “System and Method for Divisive Textual Clustering by Label Selection Using Variant-Weighted TFIDF” pertains to the kind of technology used both by Ottocat and Apple’s explore feature.

As TechCrunch notes, Apple later announced the Explore tab for the App Store in mid-2014, which operates much like Ottocat did by providing a way to whittle down a search by increasingly specific categories.

Source: TechCrunch

Samsung has issued its guidance report for the first quarter of the 2015 fiscal year today, and it expects another quarter of declines compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Android founder and ex-Googler Andy Rubin has joined venture capital firm Redpoint, the company revealed today.

The announcement comes on the same day that Rubin’s startup incubator, Playground, disclosed that it had raised $48 million in funding from a number of investors, including Redpoint.