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Turkey’s tablet loving Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been going on a tour of the U.S. in pursuit of the greatest tablet marker in the world to arm his students with. The prime minister visited Silicon Valley on May 18th to be briefed by the world’s best technology companies on their latest endeavors.

Erdoğan is looking to buy 10.6 million iPads for his country’s education new education project Faith. So far, Erdoğan was first greeted by Microsoft CEO, Steve Balmer, and then he paid visits to both Apple, Google.

Regarding his visit to the U.S., Erdoğan said:

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Samsung has a problem. It controled 33.1% of the global smartphone marketshare last quarter — Apple was only 17.9% — yet that’s almost entirely in the low-end of the market.

What’s keeping Samsung from conquering the high-end of the market, where all the profit is and which Apple continues to dominate? Software: there is a wide-spread impression amongst consumers that Samsung’s apps just aren’t as good as Apple’s.

That’s a problem Samsung is eager to solve. That’s why they are ponying up $800,000 to developers willing to make great, Galaxy-specific apps.

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Yahoo! has this morning announced that it has reached a deal to acquire popular blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The company promises “not to screw it up,” and says that Tumblr will continue to operate as a separate business, with David Karp remaining CEO.

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I used to mock Apple years ago because they advertised Apple as the fun alternative to stodgy, boring Windows.

The idea that Apple was fun and Microsoft was not was a misdirection at best. Windows was the biggest games platform and Xbox was the best console game (in my opinion). Apple had no games to speak of.

Five years ago, all that changed: Apple launched the iOS App Store, and it quickly became the biggest games platform ever, now making twice the money as portable game consoles. Apple’s App Store hit right when the casual and mobile games market was ready to take off in a big way.

The Android market is no slouch in the gaming arena, either, and will soon overtake the portable game console market as well.

But the mobile gaming market is still in its infancy. The Android gaming scene is about yesterday’s games — isolated, causal time-killing games, for the most part. So to take it to the next level, Google this week announced Google Play Games Services.

There are two gigantic opportunities that are potentially unique to Google: multi-device gaming and gaming as a mainstream spectator sport.

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Earlier this week, Google beat Apple to the punch by launching a streaming subscription music service before Cuperino could unveil its own offering, iRadio.

How did Google managed to do it? Apple has all the music industry clout, so how could Google swing a deal first? Because Google Play Music All Access is essentially a clone of services like Rdio and Spotify, and the contract terms of services like that are easy to copy.

Apple’s iRadio? It’s a wholly different beast.

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