Unexpected instabilities forced Adobe Systems to hasten a planned outage for its Creative Cloud Connection, a service that keeps files made on mobile devices or uploaded to the Web in sync with customers' PCs. Adobe launched it a half year ago in a preview version, and had planned to take it offline this week to update the interfaces the software uses to communicate with Adobe's servers.

One of the many announcements flooding out of Google I/O that may have gotten lost in the shuffle is Android's expected support for Bluetooth Smart technology. This may seem like an odd development, especially if you know that many Android devices already feature Bluetooth 4.0, the version in which Bluetooth Smart (that is, Bluetooth Low Energy) first appeared.

Google announced a small but cool update to Gmail. For emails where the developer has enabled this feature, Google will now show action buttons next to emails in your inbox that let you take actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the schema.org markup language to add their own actions to Gmail messages.

Google says it has rebuilt Google Maps for the Web with a new version that's more immersive and social. The new version takes a page from Google's mobile efforts by putting the search box inside the map and making use of cards - Google's take on interactive information widgets. "It's simple and powerful. The map is the user interface," Google's Bernhard Seefeld told attendees at the company's annual developers conference, where the new Web service was unveiled.

After last year's Google I/O conference, the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team started to think about how attendees experienced the event. They wanted to help attendees gain more insight about the conference space and the environment itself. Which developer Sandboxes were the busiest? Which were the loudest locations, and which were the best places to take a quick nap? They think about data problems all the time, and this looked like an interesting big data challenge that we could try to solve. So this year, they decided to try to answer their questions with a project that's a bit different, kind of futuristic, and maybe a little crazy.

The update to the struggling Windows 8 operating system, known by the code name "Blue," will be called Windows 8.1, a naming convention that Microsoft has used for its software updates for years. Tami Reller, the chief marketing officer and chief financial officer of Microsoft's Windows division, disclosed the name during a speech at J.P. Morgan's Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston this morning.

Google continues to increase the reach of its Google+ platform, and today the company is launching a new mobile content recommendation service powered by Google+. These recommendations will appear as small widgets at that bottom of the screen as users browse a news site that has enabled this service. Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites. Recommendations, Google says, can appear regardless of whether a users are signed in to Google+.

Over the course of the last week, Microsoft started a very negative anti-Google Docs campaign that fits the mold of its more general Scroogled anti-Google ads. But why the sudden focus on Google’s productivity tools? Quickoffice, which Google acquired last June, allows users to read and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the iPad, iPhone and Android.

Today, Samsung revealed the Galaxy Tab 3, a 7-inch tablet, a slim mobile device which may be able to directly compete with the smaller tablet ranges offered by rivals Apple, Amazon, and Google. The South Korean electronics maker's latest tablet offering sports a 1024x600 pixel screen - although perhaps underwhelming at today's standards - but is able to support full 1080p HD playback. The Galaxy Tab 3 is powered by a dual-core 1.2Ghz processor, and is available with either 8GB or 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM.

After the Associated Press' Twitter account was hacked into on Tuesday and the accounts of CBS News programs "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours" were hacked over the weekend, it's been made clear that Twitter needs to boost security. But, it may be doing just that. According to Wired's Mat Honan, the social-networking site has reportedly been working on creating a two-factor authentication for user password verification. Honan writes that the company is currently carrying out internal testing before rolling out the new security control.

Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for Adobe Social — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat. Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked Anthony Ha through the new features in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data — both in aggregate and at the customer-specific level — to predict the likely engagement level and sentiment around a specific Facebook post, and it can recommend keywords, content types and timing that might lead to a better response.

Yahoo is doing some spring cleaning. The company announced its plans on Friday to shut down several products, including Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts, and the Yahoo Mail and Messenger apps used on feature phones. It's all about getting rid of the old to make room for the new, according to Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's executive vice president in charge of platforms, who wrote about the changes in a blog entry.

Now the Facebook can really start to replace your phone. Today Facebook rolled out its free VoIP voice calling feature to US users of Home and its Android Messenger app. That means even less reason to open your standard “phone” app, and more data for Facebook about who you care about the most. Now all iOS and Android users in the US can Facedial their friends.

During its Q3 2013 earnings call yesterday, Microsoft’s outgoing CFO Peter Klein noted that the company plans to bring Windows 8 to smaller devices. Until now, Windows 8 was mostly geared toward desktops and larger tablets, including Microsoft’s own Surface and RT machines. With the forthcoming Windows 8 Blue, rumor had it that Microsoft would enable its OEMs to run Windows 8 on smaller devices, too.

Firefox Mobile OS will launch this summer in five countries, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said at the All Things D conference here Monday. Kocacs, who announced earlier this month that he will be stepping down from his post as CEO, said that the new operating system, which is designed for low-end devices, will launch this summer in Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain.

A Windows 8.1 option to boot to desktop? That seductive rumor has been making the rounds over the weekend. What could be a reflection of wishful thinking, a post at WinBeta (via Neowin), cites a Russian-language Web site as the source. Apparently, there is Windows 8.1 code that disables the Metro Start Screen and sends you "to the desktop automatically."

Up until now, only Apple's Safari browser had blocked third-party cookies by default. Last week's release of Firefox 22 to its developer's channel also came with the feature, indicating that the option will soon make it to all Firefox users. Firefox 22 Aurora blocks third-party cookies by default, putting the ad industry on notice that browsers are about to start looking askance at them. While Safari has had the feature for a long time, no other major browser has supported it until now. Mozilla first announced in February that it was changing its third-party tracking cookie policy.

Adobe has changed the way it sells technology used to enable high-quality streaming services from TV networks and other video providers. With the launch of Adobe Primetime — previously know as Project Primetime — the technology company is providing a suite of tools for video delivery. And it has signed up a couple of big new clients for the suite of products.

Remember that hefty leak from a few weeks back that pointed to a dramatic redesign for Google’s Play Store Android app? Well, in case you were still unconvinced, Google has confirmed that just such a facelift has been in the works, and that the new 4.0 version of the Play Store app will start rolling out to devices running Android 2.2 and newer some time today.

Google released an AdMob SDK for iOS developers today that completes its transition away from allowing apps access to Unique Device Identifiers, weeks before Apple's official deadline for retiring the system. UDIDs are the unique string of numbers that individually identifies each cellular device. Typically, they have been used by developers to track app installations across Apple's user base. Tracking users lets companies tailor advertising to each individual, but it also raises a host of privacy concerns.

Microsoft has opened its Active Directory (AD) to general availability on Windows Azure, giving developers access to the single-sign-on service for access to the suite of Microsoft services, third-party apps and SaaS providers. Active Directory is the long-time single point of access to Microsoft Windows technologies. The Windows Azure AD compatibility means customers can provide similar controls online that had traditionally been integrated into servers managed by customers and their IT departments.

It’s sure been an interesting week for people who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday Frederick Lardinois got an email from Mozilla, asking if he had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written in. Turns out, Mozilla Research wasn’t just going to work on this alone, but managed to get Samsung to help out with bringing this new engine that’s optimized for multicore and heterogeneous computing architectures to Android and ARM. Given that Mozilla had remained relatively quiet about Servo until now, it was a bit of a surprise that it was now ready to put it into the spotlight.

Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.

Google will refresh its Nexus 7 tablet this summer, launching a new version powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor around July, according to Reuters – which is about a year after it launched the original Nexus 7. The news agency said two unnamed sources also told it Google is aiming to ship between six and eight million of the tablets in the second half of the year.

Adobe Systems has released Lightroom 4.4 with support for two mainstream SLRs, Nikon's new D7100 and Canon's Rebel SL1, and with better image quality for a Fujifilm cameras with unusual sensors. Lightroom is designed for editing and cataloging photos, especially those shot in cameras' proprietary raw image formats that offer higher quality but impose an image-processing burden on photographers. Adobe periodically updates the software to support new cameras -- and in the case of version 4.4 to fix problems with existing cameras such as the Fujifilm models.

Facebook continues to pull back the curtain on some of the technical details behind its search products, this time with a new look at the Social Graph. The social network's latest reveal is about LinkBench, a new database benchmark for the Social Graph, which is being released this week on GitHub. Touted as a tool for developers who need to benchmark and fine-tune database systems, LinkBench was designed to replicate the data model, graph structure, and request mix of Facebook's MySQL social graph workload.

The next version of jQuery, the popular JavaScript library, will drop support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t very bullish about getting developers to use jQuery 2.0 and HTML5 to develop “a new wave of jQuery-based Windows Store applications.” As Microsoft announced, Microsoft Open Technologies, the company’s wholly owned open source-focused subsidiary, and the JavaScript experts at appendTo, have been working with the jQuery community to ensure that the next version of the framework offers full support for Windows Store applications.

Back in 2011, Epic ported its popular Unreal Engine 3 technology to Flash and showed how relatively high-end 3D games could run in the browser. It’s 2013 now, however, and Flash isn’t exactly a hot topic anymore. So to show off what game developers can do with a modern browser and without plugins today, Mozilla and Epic teamed up a little while ago to port Unreal Engine 3 to the web, something that was unthinkable back in 2011.

For years now, Google has offered its Google Maps Engine to enterprises that want to visualize their custom geospacial data. Starting today, anybody will be able to use a subset of this functionality, thanks to the launch of Google Maps Engine Lite (beta). This new tool, Google says, will allow any mapping enthusiast to “create and share robust custom maps using this powerful, easy-to-use tool.”

Getting to easily store and share content online as well as immediate access to new updates are benefits of using cloud-based software that should be at a subscription price which "well and truly" supports this real value. That's how Adobe Systems hopes to convince more customers to use the cloud version of its creative media and digital marketing software, according to Craig Tegel, regional president of Adobe Japan and Asia-Pacific.