GungHo Entertainment is a game publisher based in Japan, and the company has just released some really wild financial numbers. According to the latest numbers, GungHo made $118 million this past April alone, most of it from one game: Puzzle and Dragons, currently available on iOS. Puzzle and Dragons is pulling in so much money (from audiences in both Japan and around the world) that GungHo says it's making $3.75 million a day. In Japan alone, Puzzle and Dragons is claiming 13 million players -- which is over 10% of the population there.

That is a phenomenal success story, and it gives GungHo a higher market cap than even the legendary game publisher Nintendo. As a result, the company's stock has skyrocketed, and it's even challenging current megapublisher...

The wait is over. Random Access Memories, Daft Punk's first proper album* since 2005's Human After All, is now streaming in its entirety over at iTunes. It features guest spots and contributions from Chilly Gonzales, Nile Rodgers, Pharrell Williams, Julian Casablancas, and others. While the album doesn't officially hit stores until May 21, its leak earlier today most likely brought about this early stream.

Head over to iTunes to stream the album in one glorious 74-minute track. Don't worry, that's just the format of the stream. If you're not sold on Daft Punk or have been living presumably dance-free under a rock for a few years, we've included their delightful tune "Get Lucky" featuring Pharrell Williams for your listening pleasure below.

*Yes, they did the soundtrack for Tron: Legacy. No we don't count that as a proper album....

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has sent letters to several smartphone makers asking them to explain what they're doing to deter thefts, Bloomberg reports. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung are said to have been contacted on May 10th. "I seek to understand why companies that can develop sophisticated handheld electronics, such as the products manufactured by Apple, cannot also create technology to render stolen devices inoperable and thereby eliminate the expanding black market on which they are sold," reads Schneiderman's letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook.... ...

A handful of recently discovered job listings suggest a possible next-generation iWork software suite may soon see release, with the latest postings asking for specialists in quality assurance, one of the final steps in software building.  ...

It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

No Flash? Click here to listen.

Subscribe via RSSDaily Update for May 13, 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 17:15:00 EST. Please see our...

How can you type on an iPad? You could muddle along on the virtual keyboard; or you could carry a physical Bluetooth keyboard around with you. The TouchFire takes a middle course. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

We've seen beer-pouring robots before, but MIT has recently put together a smartphone-controlled robot bartender, with three robot arms that can pour and mix up to 100 different alcoholic and non-alcoholic flavors. The Makr Shakr lets you order up a drink directly from your iPhone, and then it will make the drink and deliver it to you as requested.

The robot will be officially unveiled later this week at Google's I/O conference, and for now it's just an interesting robotics project, so it's unlikely you'll see your own robot bartender in a local watering hole any time soon (plus, who would you flirt with if there was a robot pouring you drinks?). But this is a fascinating idea -- it would save bars time and money to have a robot behind the counter, and the fact that nearly...

One of the most common frustrations among mobile phone owners is the feeling that you're paying way too much for services you're not using. Being locked in a contract that doesn't fit your needs just because it's all that offered is the pits. Zact, a new service from the Verizon-backed software company ItsOn, is looking to change that. Zact provides a flexible, changeable, data plan that empowers users to only pay for the services they actually use.

Along with customization of how many minutes and texts you pay for each month, users are offered an unprecedented amount of flexibility for data plans, down to forgoing traditional plans and just buying app-specific data. In addition the service credits back any money you paid for a plan that was bigger than you ended up needing. Families can connect an unlimited number of devices to a single plan. The service also including powerful parental controls, including curfews on service, app lock outs, and even contact restrictions....

Two iOS apps, Twitterific and 1Password, have today received significant updates. Twitterific 5.2.2 adds support for bookmarking service Readability and image service Droplr. A number of smaller improvements have also been made, such as automatic flipping of the read/unread state of tweets as users scroll, and similar updating of indicators in timeline tabs. Yfrog images should appear in the in-app browser instead of the photo viewer....  ...

Triple Town is one of my favorite games on iOS over the past few years -- it's a puzzle game with a simple ruleset and a whole lot of complexity. The creators of that game, called Spry Fox, have announced a new title in development called Road Not Taken, and you can now see some concept art from it over on the official blog.

The game is sort of a roguelike, according to the developers, and as you can see above, it has some similarities to the grid-based Triple Town. But instead of building up a world, it's more about finding a path through the world, and avoiding or confronting various dangers on the way. As you can tell from the title, which refers to the famous Robert Frost poem, the game will offer various paths, and it seems like most of the strategy will come from choosing your own way.

Sounds interesting. Road Not...

The Attorney General for the state of New York has asked Apple and other tech leaders to do more to stop smartphone thieves and, further, aid in the elimination of a growing black market for the stolen devices.  ...

The use of automatic repair routines on newer Mac Minis and iMacs may combine two separate drives into a Fusion drive. Fortunately, there's a way to get around that.

Sometimes all it takes is a moment of time and an open mind to change your opinion of someone. In a recent column at Forbes, Drew Hansen, a management expert specializing in hyper-growth startups, writes about Steve Jobs and how The Lost Interview movie changed his view on the Apple co-founder.

Hansen says he ignored Steve Jobs' advice on building a company and cautioned entrepreneurs not to model themselves after the Apple founder. This attitude changed after Hansen watched the Lost Interview and realized he and Jobs share many of the same thoughts on building successful teams within a company.

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview is a 70-minute conversation between Steve Jobs and Robert Cringely that was held in 1995. It was recently turned into a movie and...

1Password 4, the popular login manager for iPhone and iPad has been updated to version 4.2 today. The new version sports a bunch of new features and bug fixes, including the ability to search for items in your vault by their URL, improved sharing of vault items, and more. This update also features the fill animation that appeared in the desktop browser extension recently.
The update is available for free on the App Store...

The newest national carrier of the iPhone, T-Mobile, has ended a promotional "introductory price" period for the iPhone 5, raising the down payment from $99 to $149 for the 16GB model -- with similar $50 increases for the 32GB and 64GB models. Though it is still one of the cheapest ways to buy an iPhone 5 rather than buying a no-contract phone or going through a contract with one of the other carriers, the price difference with a T-Mobile plan is now down to about $20 less than buying the iPhone outright....  ...

Personal assessments of what technology to adopt and what to ignore is what we do these days. Developers develop, technical columnists experiment and report, and individuals decide yea or nay. However, basing those decisions on old-fashioned or emotional preconceptions in increasingly unproductive. John Martellaro roughs up the technical hobgoblins and sizes up iOS 7.

Smartphone thefts are running rampant -- especially in New York City -- so much that the practice of grabbing the expensive phones is being referred to as "Apple picking." Bloomberg announced yesterday that New York State attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman has sent letters to executives at Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung asking for information and cooperation on measures to diminish theft.

In his letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Schneiderman said "I seek to understand why companies that can develop sophisticated handheld electronics, such as the products manufactured by Apple, cannot also create technology to render stolen devices inoperable and thereby eliminate the expanding black market on which they are sold."

Schneiderman has concerns that the...

Low quality and fake versions of the much anticipated new album from electronic music super group Daft Punk have been leaking online for weeks now, but today we get our first official, high quality stream of the album through a free preview being offered on iTunes.
iTunes is currently streaming the full 74-minute album, but the stream appears be limited to users in the US and is now going live for iTunes users around the world. Random Access Memories is available to preorder through iTunes now and is expected to be released on May 21st.

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The Twitterrific 5 for Twitter iOS app has been updated today to version 5.2.2 with a number of new features and enhancements. Among them, the popular iOS Twitter client gets support for the Readability bookmarking service, Droplr as a new image service, and a few welcomed performance enhancements such as Indicators in timeline tabs that “are updated as tweets are read” and updating read/unread notifications for tweet...

Speaking at an Interop keynote last week, Paypal chief information security officer Michael Barrett hinted that PINs and passwords may be going away when it comes to account security on smartphones. According to a post on CIO's website, Barrett serves as the president of the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance, an industry group looking for ways to replace the 52-year-old password technology with stronger authentication methods.

FIDO combines hardware, software and Internet services to provide that higher level of authentication. That hardware can include a fingerprint scanner, a voice reader or something else. Barrett noted in his keynote that FIDO-enabled devices should begin appearing later this year, and he'd love to see Apple and...

The team behind a popular iOS camera app has put together a retrospective showing the dramatic improvement in image quality from Apple's first iPhone on through the iPhone 5.   ...

Flipboard has launched a new version of its popular news aggregating app for the iPhone and iPad. Following March's update which introduced user-created magazines, the v2.0.2 release adds a new Friends category in the Content Guide that can be used to quickly find magazines created by friends. Flipboard has also added new profile pages that provide details on readership and curation activities, as well as the ability to share content via SMS and to save images to the Camera Roll....  ...

T-Mobile is no longer offering a $99 down deal to get you an iPhone 5 – now it’s $149.
∞ Read this on The Loop

IF you’re a fan of “The Office” you’ll need to check this out. There are three available: Dwight Schrute, Jim and Pam and Employee of the Month.
∞ Read this on The Loop

I don’t see this as the smartphone manufacturers problem. They make a device that thieves want to steal — how can they combat that? Is Nike going to make their shoes explode if stolen?
∞ Read this on The Loop

Over the past few years, 4G LTE wireless networks that can handle download and upload speeds of up to 75 megabits per second (Mbps) have become increasingly more commonplace. Still, it takes a long time to download movies, and streaming video can be a challenge on today's handsets. Yonhap News reported yesterday that Apple's arch-rival Samsung has achieved success in the lab with 5G speeds in the range of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), and expects that the technology could eventually provide speeds in the tens of gigabits per second.

With wireless data speeds in that range, a full HD movie could be downloaded in seconds. Samsung used 64 antenna elements and operated in the 28 GHz frequency band to accomplish the fast feat, and the technology could be commercially viable by 2020 -- a scant seven years away.

Both China and the European Commission want to have 5G...

Robyn Morris:

Being a good designer means having a spirit of exploration and being OK with the reality that things may not always end up how you planned.

That can be applied to many professions.
∞ Read this on The Loop

Apple products like the iPhone and iPad may soon be subject to a new "culture tax," as France ponders levying such a fee on technology giants in order to help preserve its cultural products.  ...

When T-Mobile introduced the iPhone 5 for $99 down, many were quick to point out that the device would cost much less than the $649 Apple charges, costing customers a total of $579 after completing T-Mobile’s $20/month, 24 month payment plan. However, T-Mobile didn’t talk much about the fact that $99 down price point was introductory pricing that would eventually increase. Today marks the end of T-Mobile’s introductory pricing, as noted by TmoNews, with the carrier increasing the minimum down payment on an iPhone 5 for qualified customers to $149 for the entry level 16GB model.
All other models of the iPhone will see the same $50 increase with the 32GB and 64GB models now requiring a...

Apple’s countdown to 50 billion App Store downloads is nearing its end. At the current download rate depicted by Apple’s web site counter, the 50 billionth app should be downloaded at some point in the next two days; however, it’s unclear how accurate the counter is, and whether the…

Earlier this month we told you that Verizon-backed ItsOn, a company building software for carriers that provides users with dynamic pricing plans on mobile devices, was planning on introducing a new mobile service that takes advantage of its software. Today ItsOn has officially announced Zact, a mobile service that provides flexible, adjustable data plans that allows users to pay for only what they use, customize voice, text, and data plans in real-time at any time, and share data on an unlimited amount of devices:

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-Consumers are able to create their own unique mix of talk, text and data, and can even forgo buying a data plan altogether to instead buy an app-specific data plan for maximum savings.
-Customize your amount of voice, text and data right from your device, and adjust it any time
-‘Never...

T-Mobile’s carrier update to enable LTE has been “hacked” to increase “the amount of bandwidth allowing for better throughput of data and data connection” on the iPhone 5. Although Apple released an update that was supposed to improve speeds for users of unlocked iPhone 5s running on T-Mobile’s network, some…

I use my iPhone 5 so much throughout the day that its battery is often nearly drained by 4:00 PM. That's why I'm constantly carrying around and trying out new external battery packs to keep my iPhone charged. The latest battery pack I've tried is the Phonesuit Flex Pocket Charger. I've reviewed Phonesuit's products in the past (and the one I reviewed is now my external battery pack of choice), so I was excited to try out their new Lightning connector battery pack.

The Phonesuit Flex Pocket Charger is slightly thicker and longer than 2AA batteries in size, to give you an idea about how big it is. It fits easily into a jeans pocket but it's just a bit wider than my iPhone 5. When plugged into the phone, the Flex overruns the length of it on either end. Still, just given how small the...

Notable software releases this week include Thunderbolt Firmware Update v1.2, Alfred 2.0.3, Microsoft Office 2011 14.3.4, and Fission 2.1.3. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Apple informed staff at a recent town hall session that major changes would be coming to the AppleCare and AppleCare+ programs this fall, according to a report. Many of the changes will apparently focus on in-house repairs — instead of exchanging an iPhone, iPod, or iPad for a new device,…

Last night Bill Gates was interviewed by Charlie Rose on 60 Minitues. Though the interview covered a many subjects, it inevitably turned to Bill's relationship with Steve Jobs. In the part of the interviewed that aired, Gates understandibly teared up when he talked about the last time he saw Jobs, at his home in May of 2011. When Rose asked Gates what they talked about, Gates replied, "...what we'd learned, families... anything." Gates also elaborated on their relationship over the years in unaired footage of the interview that is available to watch online.Bill Gates talks about the last time he saw Steve Jobs originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on...

FreeCiv, the Civilization clone, now runs in an HTML 5-compliant Web browser.
∞ Read this on The Loop

With Managing Editor Josh Centers on the job, we have a nice set of ExtraBITS for you to read this week, including articles about how the iPad could interfere with pacemakers, how iOS encryption is slowing down law enforcement, concerns about Apple’s weak and confusing photo management story, Apple breaking into the Fortune 10 for the first time, and a nice overview of iPad writing tools. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

It appears Groupon is today launching a mobile payments app dubbed “Groupon POS” that will rival Square’s Register app and allow merchants to accept and manage payments directly from an iPad. The company has yet to make an official announcement but the app is already live on the App Store here.
Last year Groupon launched a similar app for iPhone called...

Amazon unveiled its Cloud Drive Photos for the iPhone and iPod touch over the weekend along with a companion Mac app in what looks like a move to compete with Apple's iCloud Photo Stream feature. Cloud Drive Photos includes 5 GB of storage and lets users upload images to their Amazon Cloud and then download them to other devices.
The Mac Observer Spin:
Several companies offer individual solutions that compete with iCloud features, but they aren't tied in at the system level like Apple's service is on iOS and OS X. Even still, competing services like Cloud Drive Photos tend to offer more storage for free, and that may be enough to turn some iCloud users to alternatives.

A big update today for the Flipboard app for iPhone and iPad brings new profile pages that will allow content creators to...

We’ve heard Bill Gates talk about his last, emotional meeting with Steve Jobs before. First in the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs bio and then again in a video interview with ABC, but last night Gates once again discussed the final meeting in an interview with 60 Minutes (above). Gates talks about Steve’s sense of design despite very limited engineering background, his “intuitive sense for marketing that was amazing,” and his emotional last meeting where the two discussed a number of topics including products, family, and the yacht Steve was having a built at the time.
“He showed me the boat he was working on and talked about how he’s looking forward to being on it,” Gates told 60 Minutes, “even though we both knew there was a...

Ne’er doubt Amazon’s ability to throw out a competing app.
Per Macworld, Amazon’s Cloud Drive Photos app has gone live and is available free of charge from the App Store, the app can transfer photos back and forth between a device and Cloud Drive, where they can be accessed using a desktop computer, Web browser, or other compatible device, like a Kindle Fire.
The app’s goal is to let customers enjoy the benefits of cloud storage—...

Wow. I don't think I've ever started any review with a "wow," much less an italicized wow, but here it is: That one word sums up my first impression of Silk -- Interactive Generative Art, an app for the iPad and iPhone. The app lets you create flowing, mirrored strands of silk-like lines of colored light. You do that simply by swiping, swishing, and dragging your finger. It's been around for a while, but after Apple highlighted it in the Entertainment section, it snagged a boost.

You’re going to see some changes in AppleCare this fall.
Per AppleInsider, in a town hall session held on Thursday, Apple informed tech staff that major changes to the AppleCare and AppleCare+ service programs will be enacted starting this fall, with a broadening of current policies likely to cut costs and make the service more attractive to consumers.
The town hall session was led by Apple Vice President Tara Bunch, who revealed a set of after-sales policy shifts would soon be rolling out across the U.S., and eventually the world, with many of the changes referred to under the “One Apple” brand, said a source close to the story. While Bunch was referred to as Vice President of AppleCare, AppleInsider cannot confirm this assertion....

Big news from the New York Times this evening. ABC, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company,  will begin streaming live content to iOS devices later this week in Philadelphia and New York City using a new button on their app called ‘live’. Users will be able to live stream all the programming from ABC’s local stations there, ‘the first time that any major broadcaster has turned on such a technology.’
For the first six weeks the service will be free to anyone with an iOS device according to GigaOM. Before you go grabbing the scissors to cut that cable cord, be warned that the live stream will eventually be available only to paying subscribers of cable and satellite providers, even though the stations’ signals are available free over the public airwaves...

You thought you were going to get through another weekend without that TUAW classic Caturday? Well, you're wrong. Today's feline geek is Max, a six-month-old Singapura who loves to help his human, Sumner Paine, work on his 27" iMac.

According to Sumner, "He helps me type on the keyboard, he helps me swipe on the Magic Trackpad, and he defends against those pesky mouse pointers by pawing and pouncing at them every chance he gets. On those occasional lazy days when he's in the mood to rest, he enjoys napping on the Time Machine under the desk."

If you've got a Caturday nominee to share, let us know via our feedback page. For security reasons we can't accept inbound attachments, so you should...