I’ve said it before, but I like skeuomorphic designs.

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto General Hospital in Canada, had seen reports from scientists who turned their smart phones into microscopes. “There were a couple of papers that showed how certain groups were attaching the little ball lenses to their iPhones in a laboratory setting, and they were saying, ‘Hey, you can magnify specimens pretty easily,’” Bogoch told NBC News.

Since its founding more than a century ago, the company has worked on tens of thousands of landmark projects, including Hoover Dam, the Channel Tunnel, and entire airports in Hong Kong and Qatar.

“Bechtel projects by definition require innovation, because they are things that have not been done before,” says Walker Kimball, Bechtel Senior Vice President. Bechtel’s complex international operations demand powerful, flexible project management tools and support systems. iPad and an array of custom-built and third-party apps connect workers with essential information that helps them meet the company’s exacting efficiency, quality, and safety standards worldwide.

That’s impressive.

The Tech Block put together hands-on comments from around the Web.

A few other mid and senior-level executives sounded surprised at the changes in just asking around so far. But EA suffered a big black-eye in the last few weeks with the botched launch of Sim City.

Here’s a guy that can barely sell enough devices to keep his company in business and he goes after Apple.

”They were very concientious to not say or do anything that might offend,” said Calhoun.

Yeah, that didn’t go so well.

“So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes,” Bradshaw admitted. “But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision…The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.”

More and more, the message from gamers is that they think EA’s vision sucks.

BrightNest will help you tackle important home tasks with easy-to-follow instructions, a personal schedule and helpful reminders. From basic maintenance to cleaning tricks to home design ideas, we deliver everything you need to shape up your home and simplify your life.

This could be a very helpful app.

They appointed two co-CEOs after the Galaxy S 4 event. Apparently they must think that nightmare was a success. The two new co-CEOs will join the existing CEO.

Taking a page from RIM’s playbook (You see what I did there?).

A new app called Unbound for Mac allows photo viewing by waving your hands in the air to mimic gestures. I actually emailed the developer to see if the video was real and he assured it was.

Even assuming Congress wants to leave the broader problems of the DMCA alone for now, we can do much better. In this blog post, I give a brief background on the DMCA and its relation to phone unlocking, take a close look at each of the congressional proposals and suggest what an effective unlocking fix would look like. Both the Obama administration and the FCC have come out in favor of allowing American citizens to unlock their cell phones, contrary to legislation imposed by the Librarian of Congress which went into effect earlier this year.

Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, takes a look at some of the proposals already on the table to make it happen and suggests a different course of action. Worth a read.

“I’ve analyzed all of the data calls to and from EA servers – all of the APIs, every request for data, and all of the data that comes back,” explains the modder. And in doing so, he’s found some surprising results. “The SimCity servers are not doing any calculations that could not be done on your PC, even for an entire region single player offline mode, let alone just the city you are in.”

SimCity was released a couple weeks ago for the PC amidst a fair amount of controversy. First Origin, EA’s game download service, was overwhelmed. Then the game’s servers were too busy, causing failed connections, dropouts and saved game problems. The game’s DRM has drawn the sharpest criticism, however, since it requires a persistent online connection.

EA says SimCity absolutely requires servers to work, not just for DRM but also for its core operation. SimCity’s multiplayer support obviously needs a connection, but that’s different. EA may want the connection to be persistent to help combat piracy, but “Azzer” has shown that the game works otherwise.

I have two thoughts here:

Don’t be a thief. And don’t treat your customers like assholes.

Feedly has announced that more than half a million Google Reader users have signed up for its RSS service following Google’s service termination announcement on Wednesday.

Lots of services have stepped forward to fill the gap, or have announced their intent to do so. Feedly seems to have the most momentum right now, though.

A message on the Feedly blog says:

Our main priorities over the next 30 days are 1) to keep the service up, 2) listen to new users for suggestions and 3) add features weekly.

I’d like to thank Preschoolians for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Preschoolians is a footwear company for children birth to five years of age. Our footwear most closely resembles being barefoot. Our footwear protects the feet while being sure to stay out of the way.

Our Visu-Fit is a clear panel on the bottom of the shoe which allows parents to know for sure if our footwear fits and when it is time for a new pair. Time Magazine awarded Visu-FIt Invention of the Year.

Our recently introduced E-Photo-Fit allows you to take a photo of the bottom of your child’s foot and know for sure which size to order. We have have the largest selection of footwear in the world for pre-schoolers; in fact billions of choices.

We are the only company which even allows you to custom design the colors using our Design Your Own.

Use the code: theloop to save 20% on your first purchase.

Lacking hard numbers (because Samsung doesn’t release them anymore) most analysts assume that the bulk of the Korean manufacturer’s mobile sales come from its low-end phones. According to Raymond James’ Tavis McCourt, Samsung’s high-end Galaxy smartphone line outsold the iPhone only once — in the summer of 2012, when many of Apple’s (AAPL) customers were holding out for the iPhone 5.

“The iPhone app will bring in an incredible amount of revenue this year … mobile will be the majority in Q2,” Lerer told VentureBeat after the panel. “It’s a beast. This is where our guys are.”

According to the report, Thrillist’s annual revenue is in the vicinity of $40 million. That’s a lot of iPhone activity.

He said they have an Android app too, but it doesn’t create nearly the same amount of activity as the iPhone app.

“The only hope for Apple and its suppliers is the possible launch of a low-cost iPhone later this year, which may help the U.S. company to gain market share in fast-growing emerging markets such as China,” said Capital Securities analyst Diana Wu.

They found an analyst that heaps praise on Samsung while shitting on Apple. How unusual.

No shit.

Warby Parker did it for eyeglasses, offering style at a discount. Now one of the co-founders of the trendy retailer is tackling something almost every guy needs: razors. Warby Parker co-founder Jeff Raider and his longtime friend Andy Katz-Mayfield have built Harry’s, a startup selling more than just blades and handles, but what they are calling “shaving experiences.”

My wife the optician really likes Warby Parker, which sells trendy, high-quality eyeglasses and offers really great customer service without charging their customers through the teeth. So it’s great to see Jeff Raider try to duplicate his success with shaving products.

We’ve heard people say that RSS is a thing of the past, and perhaps in its current incarnation it is, but as daily (hourly) users of Google Reader, we’re convinced that it’s a product worth saving. So we’re going to give it our best shot. We’ve been planning to build a reader in the second half of 2013, one that, like Digg, makes the Internet a more approachable and digestible place. After Google’s announcement, we’re moving the project to the top of our priority list. We’re going to build a reader, starting today.

Zite, Digg. In a few weeks, no one is going to care that Google Reader is shutting down.

Nvidia passed on its hardware being used in the PlayStation 4 due to the “opportunity cost.”

“I’m sure there was a negotiation that went on,” Tony Tamasi, Senior VP of content and technology at Nvidia told GameSpot, “and we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay.”

AMD (which bought ATI several years ago) provides the graphics hardware used in the forthcoming Sony console.

But that’s how news reporters increasingly are treating the state of the industry. The desire for the “Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen” narrative is so strong that the narrative is simply being stated as fact, evidence to the contrary be damned. It’s reported as true simply because they want it to be true. They’re declaring “The King is dead; long live the King” not because the king has actually died or abdicated the throne, but because they’re bored with the king and want to write a new coronation story.

I think John Gruber is absolutely spot on.

Microsoft Corp. has sold about 1.5 million Surface devices, people with knowledge of the company’s sales said, a slow start in its bid to crack the fast-growing tablet market to make up for slumping personal-computer demand.

A stunning surprise. Not.

We at Zite were sad to hear about Google Reader’s impending demise. Google Reader and Zite have always been complementary products: GR providing news from sources you’ve subscribed to manually and Zite giving you news algorithmically-targeted from the whole web.

Since Google Reader is dying, we created a replacement in Zite that doesn’t depend on Google’s infrastructure. From start to finish, in six hours.

People were worried about what would replace it when Google announced that it was killing Reader. Doesn’t look like there was much to worry about. Zite’s one of the first out of the gate with a replacement, but I doubt that it’ll be the last.

Hello World:

Go outside, be present with the people you love when you’re with them, or go make something. Staring at your little screen isn’t doing anything for you.”

Take a look at the fascinating photo comparison on the linked web site. What do you think? Does the 2013 photo represent a good thing, a bad thing or just the nature of the world we live in?