Dave Burns has been covering stock car racing from pit road for seventeen years, including spending the past twelve covering NASCAR's premiere Sprint Cup Series. These days he's a Pit Reporter for ESPN, covering Nationwide and Sprint Cup practices, qualifying, and races, all over the course of a single weekend -- every weekend -- for months at a time

Facebook today released a new standalone iPhone app dedicated to posting and sharing photos on the 900-million strong social network.

The North Carolina Utilities Commission today officially approved (PDF) Apple's proposal to construct a 4.8-megawatt fuel cell electric generating facility near its data center in Maiden, North Carolina. The Commission previously approved a plan by Apple to build the first of two 20 megawatt solar farms around its data center. The Public Staff presented this matter to the Commission at its Regular Staff Conference on May 21, 2012

Studies of "brand value" are always difficult to compare, as widely differing methodologies used by those measuring such data yield markedly different results. But tracking year-to-year movements using a consistent methodology can offer some interesting perspectives, and so Millward's Brown's latest BrandZ study ( via The Next Web ) makes for a good look at trends in marketing and branding

In line with today's claims of taller iPhone prototypes with 3.95-inch displays, one of our sources has provided us with images of what are claimed to be new next-generation iOS device parts being carried by a supplier. The most significant of these parts is a claimed front panel from the next-generation iPod touch, with the supplier claiming that the display would be taller than the current model and that the opening in the front panel measures 4.1 inches diagonally.

9to5Mac reports that Apple is currently testing two prototypes of the next-generation iPhone that offer a taller screen while maintaining the existing 640-pixel width. According to the report, the two prototypes carry a display with a height of 1136 pixels, up from the current 960-pixel height and leading to an increase in the diagonal size of the display from 3.5 inches to 3.95 inches

As noted by 9to5Mac , the latest developer build of OS X Mountain Lion released last week sets the stage for bringing iOS-like automatic app downloads to Mac App Store purchases. Like on the iPhone and iPad, when you buy and install an app on one of your Macs, all of your other Macs logged into the same App Store account will automatically install the app too

Following last month's announcement that Apple and Samsung had agreed to high-level talks involving the two companies' CEOs in an attempt to resolve ongoing patent litigation, Reuters provides a preview of the session set to begin today in San Francisco. The talks, which will be mediated by a federal judge, are scheduled to take place over the next two days

Russian forensics firm ElcomSoft earlier this week announced that it has discovered a way to easily access iCloud backups of iOS devices, incorporating the functionality into its Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker software. While the Apple ID and password must be known in order to access the iCloud data, once that information has been obtained the software makes it easy for investigators to download full iCloud backups and then follow incremental backups in near real-time to track a device's use without the knowledge of the user. ElcomSoft researchers analyzed the communication protocol connecting iPhone users with Apple iCloud, and were able to emulate the correct commands in order to retrieve the content of iOS users’ iCloud storage.

Bloomberg reports that Steve Jobs was intimately involved in the design work for the next-generation iPhone scheduled for release later this year, reiterating claims that the device will be a substantial change from previous designs in part because of a larger display. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, has placed orders from suppliers in Asia for screens that are bigger than the 3.5- inch size now on the smartphone, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had worked closely on the redesigned phone before his death in October, one person said