A look at 28 Olympic stadiums.

Chris Breen, Macworld:

Macworld has learned that when the new Office launches, Microsoft will deliver an update to Office for Mac 2011. With this update, Office for Mac licenses can count as part of an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, making it possible to access your Office documents in the cloud.

There will also be Office Mobile for iOS.

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn M. Rusli for the New York Times:

Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next C.E.O. of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and corporate America.

The appointment of Ms. Mayer, who was employee No. 20 at Google and was one of the few public faces of the company, is considered a surprising coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top flight talent in its battle with competitors like Google and Facebook.

Yahoo’s previous CEO, Scott Thompson, resigned in May after a shareholder showed that he’d lied about his academic credentials. That CEO office has had a lot of turnover in the past decade, though, so Mayer certainly has her work cut out for her.

Tarmo Virki for Reuters:

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd increased its lead over Apple Inc and Nokia Oyj in the global cellphone market in the second quarter, helped by strong demand and large marketing campaigns for its latest flagship model, the Galaxy S III, according to a Reuters poll.

Samsung and Apple have been neck-and-neck for several quarters in the battle to be the largest smartphone vendor, but the May launch of the new Samsung model created a clear gap between the two, the poll of 41 analysts showed.

Of course, the poll is of analysts, whose numbers may be wildly off, so take it all with a grain of salt. Apple’s offerings are getting long in the tooth, even though they’re selling very strongly, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens later this year, ostensibly when Apple introduces a new iPhone model.

Lord, who co-wrote many of the group’s legendary songs including Smoke On The Water, had been receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer since last August.He co-founded Deep Purple in 1968 and also played with bands including Whitesnake during his career.

Well, the kid didn’t pass the test, but he got an A+ for creativity.

You never saw Woody like this in Toy Story.

Composed of 40 fraternities, Muxi offers its users a platform where they can share their experience, ask questions, find colleagues and more generally connect with people doing the same job.

Not the first professional social network, but they seem to be incorporating some of the things that have worked in other networks. It’ll be interesting to watch.

Mother nature can be scary.

Barbara Kyle, the ETBC’s National Coordinator, on Fortune:

“It’s important to understand that the manufacturers grade themselves against the EPEAT criteria first, and then EPEAT conducts a review of this grading. That EPEAT review has not yet occurred. They can require the manufacturers to remove any product from the registry if it is not found to conform to the IEEE standard.”

Okay, so Apple gave itself a gold rating. If the Retina MacBook Pro didn’t pass muster before, it certainly can’t pass now — nothing changed. If the gold rating sticks then we call bullshit. Maybe Apple saw the advantages of having the remainder of its product line on EPEAT even if the Retina models don’t make it. Seems odd though if you think that Retina is the future of the product.

The iPhone is now also the primary device for listening to music as 85 percent claim and as for alarm clocks, 57 percent say they no longer use one, other than alarm clock apps on their iPhone.

I never really thought about it like that. I use my iPhone for an alarm clock, GPS, phone, and sometimes even a mini computer. Soon maybe even a wallet.

Rene Ritchie posted a copy of the letter Apple lawyers were sending to retailers selling the Galaxy Nexus this week.

Dan and Jim talk about Apple’s departure and quick return to EPEAT certification, the Tweetbot for Mac alpha release, Android vs. iOS market share, business models for blogs, and much more!

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The sudden pullout — and subsequent return — of Apple from the EPEAT certification program it helped create increasingly appears to have been a dispute over the status that have been given to the Retina MacBook Pro if it were submitted, as the two 15-models with the high-resolution display may have been threatened with a lower-than-top ranking, a first for the company. The Retina models now appear on the EPEAT website with Gold rankings.

How is that possible?

A northern California jury directed Research in Motion Ltd to pay $147.2 million in patent litigation over a remote management system for wireless devices, according to an attorney for the plaintiff, Mformation Technologies Inc.

Just what they needed.

Disillusioned with repeated delays to RIM’s next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and the company’s ebbing smartphone market share in the U.S., some are throwing up their hands and turning away from the platform.

That could be the final nail.

Apple:

We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.

A rare mea culpa from Apple.

I want to thank Meshin Recall for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop.

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I just can’t put my finger on it.

Joseph Walker and Spencer E. Ante for the Wall Street Journal:

New York technology development firm Betaworks has agreed to buy news-sharing website Digg, in an attempt to revive a company that was early to social media but outmaneuvered by rivals like Facebook Inc. FB -0.52% and Twitter Inc.

Under the deal, which Digg confirmed closed Thursday, Betaworks is buying the Digg brand, website and technology. The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen.

Digg is a social news site that got its start in 2004 as a way for users to put together collections of news and information that interested them, with a voting system to determine the popularity of information. It’s been overshadowed by other social networks like Reddit.

Digg had already been carved up by the time Betaworks put its bid in – Social Code hired half the company’s staff in May. Sources told the Journal that other companies offered a higher price for Digg’s assets, but Betaworks offered the best plan to actually resuscitate the brand.

Jamai Abdi for the New York Times:

Apple has not been taken over by xenophobes. The discrimination is one result of trying to enforce flawed and haphazard United States export controls against countries, like Iran, that are under sanctions. Retail employees are left to interpret and implement federal policy, and racial profiling results.

I think Abdi’s conclusion here is reasonable. I live by a precept known in some circles as Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” and that’s exactly what this sounds like to me. Replace “stupidity” with “ignorance” if you want to soften the message a bit.

Abdi goes on to explain that this has happened, at least in part, because of “flawed and haphazard United States export controls.” What’s bizarre to me is that these retail store employees would take it upon themselves to try to enforce such regulations, which are clearly beyond their judgment or control. I’m unclear on whether this is just overzealous enforcement on their part, racial profiling or what. What I’m certain it’s not is any sort of corporate policy, spoken or unspoken, that says “if a tanned person speaking what sounds like Farsi comes in, don’t sell them anything.”

Abdi goes on to pontificate that Apple must “enact policies to prevent discrimination,” and this is where he goes off the rails. Apple already does a huge amount to prevent discrimination, and has a much better track record than most other companies its size, I would venture to guess.

I don’t think Apple deserves to be singled out for special scrutiny, or should be held to some higher standard than it already is, notwithstanding the misguided attempts of a a few of its retail store employees to protect national security, or whatever-the-heck they had it in their heads that they were trying to do.

The Apple tax, as it is commonly called, is the belief that Macs cost more than PCs. I won’t ruin it for you, but Harry Marks nailed it.

Mike Williams for Gamesindustry.biz:

[SkyVu Entertainment founder Ben] Vu explained that cross-promoting other developers’ games via services like Chartboost was his primary method of reaching users, but the rising costs are a big problem.

“This mismatch is insane,” Vu said. “You have to pay attention to this, down to the hour or the minute.”

[Machine Zone CEO Gabe] Leydon cited costs as high as $7 for acquiring users, up from 50 cents a year ago. He sees a number of “billionaries” coming into the market with large brands to sell, with Asian mobile developers close behind. Weber backed up Leydon’s claims, explaining that it’s difficult to find the top-end of user acquisition costs.

The problem is that some companies are turning the “free-to-play” game industry on its head by spending more to acquire customers than they’ll see in a lifetime of ad revenue for that title. While it sounds foolish – and by some measure it is – Leydon sees it as a side effect of those “billionaires” settling in for a long-term war of domination on the iOS App Store, Google Play and Windows Store.

Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry is already fully Retina-ready, including all of the user interface elements as well as the image editing engine itself. And, what can I say—Pixelmator on the new MacBook Pro with Retina display (we’ve got a few of those around the office) looks totally incredible.

Love Pixelmator. Check out the video too.