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stephen.schaubach writes 'Spanish Mathematicians have discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed until now. 'They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford's law. ... Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis. ... Benford's law (BL), named after physicist Frank Benford in 1938, describes the distribution of the leading digits of the numbers in a wide variety of data sets and mathematical sequences. Somewhat unexpectedly, the leading digits aren't randomly or uniformly distributed, but instead their distribution is logarithmic. That is, 1 as a first digit appears about 30% of the time, and the following digits appear with lower and lower frequency, with 9 appearing the least often.'' of this story at Slashdot.

LinuxDevices: 'The N-Vio routers are aimed at providing retailers with proximity marketing services, allowing them to beam discounts and advertising content to mobile-device users within a 100-meter Bluetooth or 200-meter WiFi radius, says Libelium.'

mikesd81 writes 'Google plans on advertising with spots promoting its Chrome browser this weekend. Google Japan had already released a 30-second video promoting Chrome on YouTube, but the company will distribute that video through the Google TV Ads network this weekend as an experiment to see if it can drum up interest in Chrome. Google advertised their browser on the New York Times' website on Wednesday.' of this story at Slashdot.

SilverMind writes in to note a blog entry at Byte Size Biology describing in detail a few hours spent with Wolfram Alpha (which we have discussed before). 'After playing around with Wolfram Alpha for a few hours, I can safely say the following: it's different, it's incomplete, it's idiosyncratic, and it's funky cool. And no, it will not dethrone Google, nor does it aim to do so.' of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes 'Last month, Google officially announced the Android 1.5 update, dubbed 'cupcake.' The new software is apparently ready to roll out to Android-powered devices beginning tomorrow. Make no mistake, Android 1.5 is a major upgrade — they could have called it 2.0. The software brings a host of new capabilities, some of which can't be found on rival mobile platforms, including video recording and sharing.' of this story at Slashdot.

RIM may be on tap to release the BlackBerry Storm 2 with Wi-Fi, which would keep pace with competitors as the feature becomes integral to growth in the smartphone market.

Google launches a wide-ranging campaign highlighting what it calls its competition and openness, meeting with policy makers and media in order to convince them of its anti-monopolistic intentions. However, at least one consumer advocacy group has decided to refute the search engine giant's claims in a particularly high-profile way. - As Google has grown larger and come under scrutiny for potential antitrust practices, the search engine giant has decided to launch something of a charm offensive, engaging both politicians and media types on talking points designed to portray the company as healthy for online competition. In ...

Its low-price strategy has enabled Vizio to outsell competitors Samsung and Sony in a weakened economic climate.

theodp writes 'Slate's Farhad Manjoo feels the end of voice-mail is nigh, and it won't be missed. Since March, he's been using Google Voice to transcribe his voice-mail messages into text that he gets as skimmable e-mail. No more listening to at least a bit of each voice-mail message, hearing the same instructional prompts between each, and worrying about whether it's 9-to-archive and 7-to-skip (or vice versa). Goodbye and good riddance, says Manjoo, to an 'absurdly backward mode of human-computer interaction' that he half-jokes must violate the Geneva Conventions.' of this story at Slashdot.

The acquisition would immediately boost Carphone's profits this year, increasing earnings per share by about 10%, chief executive Charles Dunstone saysCarphone Warehouse will become the largest residential provider of broadband after buying Tiscali's UK business. The telecoms company will pay £236m for Tiscali's network of 1.45 million broadband users - less than half what the debt-laden Italian company had hoped to raise when it started looking for a buyer a year ago.Chief executive Charles Dunstone said the deal would leapfrog Carphone over BT and Virgin to give it 4.25 million users, more than a ­quarter of the domestic high-speed internet ­market. It launched its first broadband package in 2004.'It feels like an extraordinary achievement, having not been in the residential broadband market for many years,' ­Dunstone said.Tiscali is the fifth largest internet service provider in the UK, behind BT, Virgin, Carphone and BSkyB.Dunstone said the deal would immediately boost Carphone's p