Summary: While Intel is enthusiastic about touch-enabled devices, even if it hits 25 percent market penetration by 2016, it will still be niche rather than a must-have feature, which doesn't bode well for Microsoft and its touch ambitions for Windows.

By 2016, about a quarter of all notebooks shipped will feature a touchscreen display, claims research firm IHS.

While touchscreen-enabled notebooks are pretty rare at present, a combination of falling touchscreen display prices and Intel's supply chain muscle will see global shipments increase from just 4.6 million units in 2012 to 78 million units in 2016, by which time they will account for 24.6 percent of all global PC notebook shipments, according to IHS's Notebook Touch Panel Shipment Database.

Keep calm and carry on.

(Credit: TMZ Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

It's not easy being the boss at 1 Infinite Loophole.

Instead of traveling around the world to expand your business and inspire your troops, you go to Washington in order to expand narrow minds and perspire at the absurdity.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Microsoft's Xbox One is out of the bag, and the next-gen console war's in full swing. So what happens next? Truthfully, the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U are still big boxes of mystery--even though one already's been out in stores for months.

So, how will this new gaming landscape shake out? Sony and Nintendo, the also-rans to the current success story of Microsoft and the Xbox 360, have options. But they're not always pretty.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Sony

Differentiate or die
Under the hood, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are more similar than any two gaming consoles have ever been: both have AMD-based processors, Blu-ray, camera bar sensors and motion controls. And both promise cloud service improvements. Microsoft may have the edge on TV-input promise, but that's not an ace in the hole. Sony needs to explain why people would choose a PS4. That "share" button isn't enough. Microsoft's clearly going after Sony's media-hub consumer electronics strategy and design aesthetic, so PlayStation needs another angle.

"Those games will continue to run on your Xbox 360 for as long as your Xbox 360 runs," Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer told GameSpot. "The box is not backward compatible and we think for somebody who invests in a large digital library that you want to keep your [Xbox 360]. Keep that as a vibrant part of the ecosystem."

Continuing to play on an Xbox 360 while others are on Xbox One won't be an alienating experience, Spencer said, because friends lists and achievements will remain constant between both platforms.

Read more of "XBLA games won't carry over to Xbox One" at GameSpot.

GiftCards.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch.

Giftly’s acquisition follows a number of other ones. Karma was picked up very early by Facebook although it may not produce meaningful revenue for some time for the social network, according to its earnings results earlier this year. Another gifting startup, Giftiki, which pooled together people’s money to get gifts, was acquired by Launchrock.

We’ve confirmed with Twitter that it has rolled out a new part of its #Music service for the web, charts that we were accustomed to from the company We Are Hunted, that it acquired and now powers the service.

The charts are broken up into a few areas: the familiar genre breakdown, as well as some categories like “Superstars” and “Unearthed” that appear to be built based on current Twitter trends and trajectory of artist mentions. This is leveraging all of the data that Twitter is collecting from tweets that include links to tracks from popular and emerging artists.

As you click on each category, the tiles on the page swap out quickly, letting you surf around to find new artists and songs. The categorization was a necessity to be able to find hidden gems, as the original breakdown of Popular and Emerging changed so rapidly:

Another step for Adobe in its bid to become the go-to place in the cloud for those working in design and other creative industries: it is acquiring Thumb Labs, a bootstrapped, New York-based mobile app design agency.

Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs along with Rich Kern, tells TechCrunch that financial terms of the Thumb Labs acquisition are not being disclosed.

The news follows on from Adobe’s acquisition of another New York-based design startup, Behance, a platform for designers and others in the creative industries to share their work, which Adobe picked up in December 2012 reportedly for around $150 million. Earlier this month, Adobe put the Behance acquisition into context when it announced a massive push on its Creative Cloud strategy, with social/community features powered by Behance.

Countless wearers of Google Glass stalked the halls of this year's Google I/O developer conference, but only a lucky few were sporting the prescription model, which makes room for lenses in a more conventional glasses frame. Among those lucky early adopters with imperfect vision was Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor who, in 2010, was recruited to join a top-secret project at Google's fabled X Lab. That project, as it turned out, was Glass, and Starner's role on the team as a technical lead would be a vital one.

Starner invented the term "augmented reality" in 1990 and, after experimenting with wearable technologies for 20 years now, offered us a rare perspective on where the stuff has been and where it's headed. So, then, we were very glad to get a few moments to chat with the man at I/O and get his insight into how we got to be where we are and, indeed, get some suggestions from him on where we're going from here.

Have you ever wished that you could navigate through the apps on the phone as easy as clicking links on the web? Such a thing may now become a real possibility thanks to a new service from Cellogic, called Deeplink.me. In a nutshell, it’s a bit.ly for mobile app deep linking – meaning not necessarily just linking to the app itself, but to a specific page, section or  - in the case of a mobile game – a specific level, within an application.

The link (deeplink.me/yourname), meanwhile, works from anywhere, whether web, mobile web, or any other native mobile application.

It can automatically detect where an end user is coming from and whether or not they have the necessary mobile app installed on their device. If the link is clicked on the web, it would simply point the user to the developer or publisher’s web version of that same content. If on mobile with no app installed, it could be configured to point to the app store or mobile website instead. And if the app is present, it could take you right to the relevant screen.