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Matt Gemmell takes a hard look at Google Play’s new review system which lets developers communicate with users, and says that it comes up short.

You have to love these pups.

Many thanks to Indev for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Indev is proud to sponsor Loop Insight this week. Indev is the leading developer of plugins for Apple Mail Application. Mail Act-On, MailTags and Mail Perspectives transforms Mail.app into a email powerhouse and gives users the ability to process, organize and monitor their email more effectively and efficiently.Use Mail Act-On to create sophisticated rule workflows to automate actions and process email with keystrokes. Use MailTags to add meaningful metadata, including keywords, importance, projects and dates, to your messages and create a flexible email organization system. Use Mail Perspectives to create compact windows for your messages to monitor the contents of your mailboxes and smart mailboxes at a glance.MailTags 3, Mail Act-On 2 and Mail Perspectives are all compatible with OS X 10.7 and will soon be compatible with OS X 10.8. Loopinsight readers gain a 15% discount on all Indev products when they use the coupon code LOOP when ordering from Indev’s secure store.

Elisha Marquez has been accepted to Ivy League schools and is on her way to Stanford in the fall. The 18-year-old has already nabbed an engineering internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and earned a scholarship through the Gates Millennium Scholars program.

But her GPA wasn’t high enough and she got beat. These parents need to chill out.

I loved Billy Mays.

There is a kickstarter-like page for people to donate to have Mosspuppet come out of retirement. He’s a funny little man.

Justin Michael made this incredible illustration after I joked on Amplified 12 that I wanted a kickstand on everything I owned.

Jim and Dan discuss the Podcasts app for iOS and the implications it has for both existing podcast applications as well as for podcasting as a whole, Sirius and the Google TV, Epic games success on iOS, when Apple fanboys attack, Orbitz, the Retina MacBook Pro’s financial affect on Apple, and more. Jim also offers his advice for getting back into the guitar by practicing Megadeth.Sponsored by Shopify (use code 5BY5 for 3 months free), Igloo Software (they’re giving away an Aeropress to a B&A listener), and MailChimp’s new Mandrill email service.

The one to Uncle Bryan is funny.

Orbitz admits that it shows Mac users pricier hotels than their Windows-using counterparts.

Byron Kutchera and Ian Fleming (my daughter’s longtime boyfriend) are premiering their DVD this Friday. They are having a Facebook event as well. Very talented guys.

Kyle Baxter on building products to last:

The issue is that the computing industry, and especially the mobile computing industry, are developing very quickly, so hardware and software that’s as good as it gets today simply won’t be in a year’s time.

Good point.

Dilbert.

Karen Haslam:

Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak has spoken out about his recent visit to the founder of MegaUpload, who is currently under house arrest. Woz accused the US government of a “poorly thought out attempt to extradite” MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom, with prosecutors “attempting to take advantage of loopholes.”

Indev is proud to sponsor Loop Insight this week. Indev is the leading developer of plugins for Apple Mail Application. Mail Act-On, MailTags and Mail Perspectives transforms Mail.app into a email powerhouse and gives users the ability to process, organize and monitor their email more effectively and efficiently.Use Mail Act-On to create sophisticated rule workflows to automate actions and process email with keystrokes. Use MailTags to add meaningful metadata, including keywords, importance, projects and dates, to your messages and create a flexible email organization system. Use Mail Perspectives to create compact windows for your messages to monitor the contents of your mailboxes and smart mailboxes at a glance.MailTags 3, Mail Act-On 2 and Mail Perspectives are all compatible with OS X 10.7 and will soon be compatible with OS X 10.8. Loopinsight readers gain a 15% discount on all Indev products when they use the coupon code LOOP when ordering from Indev’s secure store.

I’ll admit it, I laughed.

A good bit of humor on a Monday. I especially like the “Find My Socks” feature.

Marketing Land:

After seeing yet another “hands-on” review of the Microsoft Surface tablet, I thought it would be interesting to shed more light on what exactly the journalists who assembled in Hollywood this week for the Surface launch event actually got to do with the tablets. In short, not a lot. Come along as I explain the hands-off reality of what I saw.

Nice to see someone calling a spade a spade. No matter what you’ve read, none of the assembled media got any real “hands on” with the Surface.

Our Mac and iOS support has now become so mainstream that we realized we just don’t need to keep Mac news on its own blog, so we won’t be posting here any longer.

Om Malik:

Google is very likely to launch a cloud services platform at its annual developer conference, Google I/O next week in San Francisco. It was one of the topics of discussion in the hallways of our Structure 2012 conference. We have since confirmed with multiple sources who are familiar with Google’s plans which include a more comprehensive offering that its current app engine and storage offerings.

This will be very interesting.

Many thanks to Sidecar.me for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Sidecar re-imagines the traditional phone call for your smartphone.

Sidecar lets you call and share:

• See What I See Video: Share amazing real-time videos.

• Photos: Snap brilliant pictures, or share photos from the phone’s gallery.

• Locations: See where you are in relation to others, and share locations.

• Contact: Information: Pass along and integrate contacts from their phone’s address book.

• Whisper Text: Send a private text message to another Sidecar user during a call.

And the price is unbeatable:

• Sidecar users can call each other anywhere in the world for free

• Sidecar users can call regular phones numbers in the US or Canada for free over Wi-Fi.

Download the app for free in the App Store:

MG Siegler dissects Gizmodo’s sycophantic stance towards Microsoft and the Surface tablet.

Google has added the ability for developers to respond to user reviews on their Google Play download service – a feature iOS devs have long dreamed of for the App Store.

The app, dubbed paycardreader, will skim card numbers and expiry dates, along with transactions and merchant IDs, and was successfully tested against a German PayPass Mastercard.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and friend of Steve Jobs, just bought Hawaii’s sixth largest island.

Wired:

A team of engineers and two crazy drivers are preparing for a history-making challenge drawn from the daydreams of every child who’s ever crisscrossed his parents’ living room with plastic race tracks: building, and racing on, a human-scale Hot Wheels double loop track, just like the one you had when you were a kid. The “Hot Wheels Double Loop Dare” is set to take place at this month’s Summer X-Games in Los Angeles.Drivers Tanner Foust and Greg Tracey will attempt to race through a 60-foot vertical loop modeled after the new Double Dare Snare Hot Wheels toy, in what would be the first time in history two cars mounted a vertical loop at once.

I have found memories of playing with this track as a kid so I’m looking forward to this stunt. But, just like the Niagara Falls tightrope walker, they’ve had to remove some of the element of danger by using a safety net in case the cars can’t complete the loop. Chickens.

GM Authority:

Last week, Apple announced a host of planned updates to the Siri personal assistant service found in company’s iPhone smartphone and iPad tablet (Siri integration is coming to iPad in the fall). One of those updates, called “eyes-free”, allows an iPhone or iPad user to use Siri without picking up or looking at the device to initiate the feature, which can be used to schedule a meeting, send a text message, add a reminder, find a local restaurant, check sports scores, and perform a myriad of other tasks — all using natural-language voice commands.Today, GM Authority has learned that The General will soon introduce Siri eyes-free integration in its vehicles and the first ones to get the integration will be the Chevrolet Spark and Sonic. While the automaker’s media representatives didn’t provide specific timing details, we were told that we should expect an announcement within the next 12 months.

Jim and Dan continue their conversation about the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. They also offer perspective on Microsoft’s Surface announcement, purchasing music, page views, proper attribution, guitars, and more.Sponsored by Harvest, and Squarespace.

OWC’s blog shows a Retina Display-equipped MacBook Pro driving three external monitors, plus its own – a ton of real estate off a single laptop.