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Microsoft has taken to New York City for their new flagship store, opening the store at 677 Fifth Ave.

The store will showcase the company's hardware, including the new hit Surface Book notebook, the latest Lumia 950 smartphones and new Surface Pro tablets. In addition, the company will also showcase the Xbox One and its Microsoft Band fitness tracker.

Microsoft is said to have been looking for an NYC flagship since 2009, but the time was just not right until now.

The store will be five stories, and include 84-inch TVs to play Xbox games on, a full "community theater" with hours of workshops every week, a full floor dedicated to Dell-built Windows devices, and a full floor for employees and meetings and events.

According to early real estate estimates, Microsoft could be paying a fortune for the space. Rental prices go for as high as $3,350 a square foot on Fifth Avenue, and the new flagship is over 20,000 square feet.

JPMorgan Chase Bank, the U.S.' largest bank, has announced their own digital wallet service: Chase Pay.

Chase will be partnering with MCX to have Chase Pay accepted in their stores, restaurants and gas stations. MCX includes major retailers 7-Eleven, Alon Brands, Best Buy, CVS Health, Darden Restaurants, HMSHost, Hy-Vee, Lowe's, Michaels, Publix, Sears Holdings, Shell Oil Products US, Sunoco, Target Corporation and Walmart.

In some cases, customers will pay by showing a unique QR code and in others, they will have to use Chase Pay inside MCX's own CurrentC app. That makes things interesting especially since the CurrentC app is currently in a very limited beta.

Chase also has some leverage in launching Chase Pay. Retailers/merchants will pay lower transaction fees for Chase Pay transactions compared to other methods, said the bank.

Gordon Smith, Chase's CEO of consumer & community banking, said the service is expected to launch in mid-2016.

Source:
recode

New Twitter CEO Jck Dorsey has given a third of his Twitter shares back to the company's employees, placing them directly into the employee equity pool.

The shares, which are worth about $200 million, will "reinvest directly in our people," added Dorsey. The move follows the executive's decision to lay off 8 percent of the workforce, inlcuding hundreds of engineers.

"I'd rather have a smaller part of something big than a bigger part of something small," Dorsey tweeted. "I'm confident we can make Twitter big!"

The shares amount to 1 percent of the outstanding shares of the struggling company.

Just months after raising money, Uber appears to be on the verge of raising another $1 billion from investors.

If accurate, reports have Uber seeing a valuation above $60 billion, making it easily the biggest capitalized private tech company in the world.

Despite the huge valuation, Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick noted that the company has no plans on going public anytime soon. "We're like eighth graders. We're in junior high and someone is telling us that we need to go to the prom, and it's just a little early. Let us get into high school before we start talking about these sorts of things," he said.

So far to date, Uber has raised over $8 billion dollars, an almost unheard of number.

If you were looking to do a little bit of gaming with the new Microsoft Surface Book but didn't want to completely deplete your wallet, Microsoft has added a new Nvidia GPU option to its lineup.

The notebook will cost $200 more than the base model (with integrated Intel graphics) but will add a discrete Nvidia GPU that seems to be the equivalent of a custom GeForce 940M.

Otherwise, the notebook has the same nice specs including a 6th-generation Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and all day battery life.

For more information on the Surface Book, check our initial read here.

The most popular version of Popcorn Time appears to be down and out for the count.

Following last week's drama where half of the founding members left Popcorn Time over concerns about the built-in VPN's revenue, the servers and domain for popcorntime.io are down permanently.

According to TF, the operators of the site tried to transfer the ownership of the domain but the registrar Gandi denied the changes. That was the beginning of the end.

"I shutdown all the servers, there is nothing I can do anymore. I deleted any logs that can be harmful for any other dev," founder 'Wally' added.

There are other forks of Popcorn Time available out there but none with the fan base or features of the former .io variant.

According to a new report, Toshiba is preparing to sell its image sensor business to Sony as part of its ongoing restructuring plans.

It is unclear how much Toshiba will sell the business for. New CEO Muromachi had promised to restructure Toshiba's lower margin businesses, starting with the image sensor division.

Sony is already one of the top manufacturers of image sensors, making the tech for Xiaomi, Micromax, and others.

A day after retailers leaked specs and assumed price for the device, BlackBerry has officially priced its Priv Android slider smartphone.

The device will sell for $699 unlocked, a massive price tag even for the powerful specs.

BlackBerry's first Android phone has a curved 5.4-inch QHD display, is powered by a Snapdragon 808 processor, 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage (expandable to 2TB), dual 2MP/18MP cameras, a large 3410 mAh battery and a full physical keyboard.

The Priv will work with major U.S. GSM providers AT&T and T-Mobile and not with Sprint, Verizon or US Cellular. BlackBerry also says they have included their own security and privacy features including a tool called DTEK that constantly monitors your apps and the operating system for any security vulnerabilites.

Get it here for its November 6th release date.

Microsoft has confirmed that its new Edge browser will get the promised extension and add-on support, but in 2016.

The extensions, which are well known to Chrome users, were expected in the Windows 10 Fall Update but apparently did not make the cut.

Says Microsoft: "We're committed to providing customers with a personalized web experience, which is why bringing extensions to Microsoft Edge continues to be a high priority. We're actively working to develop a secure extension model to make the safest and most reliable browser for our customers, and look forward to sharing more in a future Windows 10 update in 2016."

Included in the Fall Update will be a few bug fixes and the addition of a preview pane when hovering the cursor over the tab.

Source:
Ars

According to the latest Q3 figures from Canalys, Huawei has now become the top selling smartphone vendor in China, beating out massive 'startup' Xiaomi.

It is Huawei's first time at the top, seeing 81 percent year-over-year growth. Xiaomi actually saw a decrease, but it has had double digit or triple digit gains for years now.

"Huawei's ascent to China's smartphone throne is a remarkable feat, especially in the context of an increasingly cutthroat and maturing Chinese smartphone market," added Canalys analyst Jessie Ding.

Canalys did not have full device sales just yet, but promised numbers early next month.

Internet radio giant Pandora has settled with the major record labels over royalties owed for tracks written before 1972, songs that aren't covered by federal copyright but are covered by most states.

Pandora will pay $90 million, a large sum that follows a $210 million settlement made by SiriusXM satellite radio earlier this year for the same copyright issues.

The settlement will cover all previous streams of pre-1972 music, and all streams until the end of 2016. At that point, a new licensing deal will have to be made or the music must be removed from the service.

"Pandora is excited to have found resolution with these record labels," said Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews in a statement. "We pursued this settlement in order to move the conversation forward and continue to foster a better, collaborative relationship with the labels."

Following claims that their new One A9 copies the design of the iPhone, HTC has struck back, stating that HTC actually pioneered the look.

"We're not copying. We made a uni-body metal-clad phone in 2013. It's Apple that copies us in terms of the antenna design on the back," said Jack Tong, president of HTC North Asia.

It is true that HTC created the design of a metal-clad phone with radio signals in the back when it unveiled the One M7.

"The A9 is made thinner and more lightweight than our previous metal-clad phones. This is a change and evolution, and we're not copying," he said.

You can read and see some pictures of the A9 in our announcement post here.

According to Windows insider Paul Thurrott, the Windows 10 Fall Update is slated for release next month.

Windows 10 build 1511 will be available to all Windows 7, 8.1 and Windows 10 users, and you won't have to reactive your Windows after the update.

The update comes with an improved Media Creation Tool (for backing up Windows), new features for Cortana, improvements for Edge and a ton of bug fixes.

You can see some more changes at the source.

Thanks to a couple of retailer leaks, we have the specs and price for the upcoming Android-powered BlackBerry Priv.

BlackBerry has been releasing minimal information about the device, but leakers like Evan Blass have outed the design through full mock ups.

If true, the leaked specs claim a 5.4-inch WQHD AMOLED, a 1.8Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 with 3GB RAM, 32GB storage (expandable to 2TB), a 37mm x 77.2mm physical keyboard and a large 3,410mAh battery. The main camera is a f/2.2/OIS lens with an 18MP sensor and the selfie cam is a weak 2MP but it does offer panorama.

While the specs are pretty nice, the leaked price is shocking. The pages show a $749 price tag for North America and £580 for the UK, which makes the Priv more expensive than a few iPhones and the Galaxy S6 Edge. It is also hundreds of dollars more expensive than the newly launched Google Nexus 6P.

It is nice to see BlackBerry thinking outside of the box, and I'm sure there are plenty of consumers still willing to take a physical keyboard but at that price tag BlackBerry has once again shot themselves in the foot.

Not even 48 hours after tickets went on sale, 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' has shattered records for pre-sales.

When the tickets went on sale, Fandango almost immediately crashed, and the company said its website traffic surged as high as 700 percent normal peak volumes.

'The Force Awakens' ended up beating the previous pre-sale record holder, The Hunger Games, by 800 percent, added Fandango.

AMC theaters said they sold out all 1000 shows in 12 hours, with 38 percent going to IMAX screens, netting $6.5 million in pre-sales, yet another record.

The latest installment of the Star Wars series is expected to be one of the biggest grossing films of all-time, although it has a long way to go to beat out Avatar at $2.78 billion.