Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 is now up to £150 cheaper in the UK

If you live in the UK and think Microsoft’s new Surface Pro 3 is just a little too large, it’s worth taking a look at the now discounted Surface Pro 2. As Pocket-Lint reports, the company has dropped the price of its last-generation laptop-tablet hybrid by up to £150 on its online store. The 64 GB variant is now available for £569 (down from £719) while the 512GB version costs £1,289 (down from £1,439). The middle 128 GB and 256 GB Surface Pro 2 models, meanwhile, have been slashed by £140, bringing them down to £659 and £899 respectively. None...



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Square gets into the cash-advance game for small retailers as Square Capital exits pilot phase

While it has been rumored to be in the works for a while already, US payments startup Square has officially announced it’s getting into the merchant cash advance game with a new service called Square Capital. The program is designed to help businesses grow by serving up quick and easy access to funds “in a way that’s easy to understand”, as the San Francisco-based startup puts it. In short, Square is looking at ways to help smaller, independent companies access capital without months of paperwork and complex application processes. So why would Square wish to do this? Well, so it...



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Amazon confirms it’s ordering fewer Hachette books and blocking pre-orders

Amazon is heaping the pressure on book publisher Hachette in an attempt to get better deals for its wealth of literary titles. In a forum post, the retail behemoth admitted it was buying fewer print editions and “safety stock” than usual. Furthermore, customers are no longer able to pre-order Hachette’s books – they can be purchased as normal after their release, but Amazon won’t buy the books from Hachette until the order is fulfilled. “Availability on those titles is dependent on how long it takes Hachette to fill the orders we place,” it said. “Once the inventory arrives, we ship...



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Ranker rolls out its embeddable widget so you can rank all the things

Ranker has officially released its widget for sharing and contributing to its collection of crowdsourced lists about anything. The new widget is mobile-ready and includes the option for a slideshow mode when appropriate. Since the last time we caught up with Ranker in August 2013, the company has doubled the size of its audience and grown its monthly page views by more than threefold. The company now ranks as one of Quantcast’s top 200 sites on the Web. With the release of its widget, Ranker’s reach will become even more distributed as it works with publishers to bring its lists...



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Google removes NPAPI apps and extensions from Chrome Web Store homepage, search results, and category pages

Google today removed apps and extensions that use the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) from the Chrome Web Store home page, search results, and category pages. The company also revealed plans to block webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins using the harder-to-bypass page-action blocking UI as of Chrome 37. Back in September 2013, Google declared plans to drop NPAPI support in Chrome, starting with blocking webpage-instantiated plugins in January. Over the last few quarters, Google says it has seen an overall 12.9 percent drop in per-user instantiations of NPAPI plug-ins and declining usage of the most popular NPAPI plug-ins: Google hopes that...



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Facebook to cut back on third-party app spam in your News Feed

Facebook revealed today plans to show you less content that is posted automatically by your friends’ third-party apps and instead prioritize “explicitly shared stories” in your News Feed. The changes will be made in the coming months. We’ve all had it happen – sign up for a new app with your Facebook login, only to discover months later that it has been posting every single thing you do to your friends’ News Feeds. According to Facebook, some users have felt “surprised or confused” by content that just appears without choosing to share. The Verge notes that users had been marking...



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Google starts blocking extensions not in the Chrome Web Store for Windows users, disables installed ones too

Google today began blocking local Chrome extensions to protect Windows users. This means that as of today, extensions can be installed in Chrome for Windows only if they’re hosted on the Chrome Web Store. Furthermore, Google says extensions that were previously installed “may be automatically disabled and cannot be re-enabled or re-installed until they’re hosted in the Chrome Web Store.” The company didn’t specify what exactly qualifies the “may” clause, though we expect it may make exceptions for certain popular extensions for a limited time. Google is asking developers to reach out to it if they run into problems or...



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