The world's cheapest tablet is now commercially available... and only costs $81. On Wednesday, Indian firm Simmtronics announced the launch of their new XPad tablet in Dubai. Retailing for approximately $81, the 7-inch tablet includes a Cortex Arm 8 processor, multi-touch display, and wifi capabilities and runs on Android 4.0. Simmtronics is aiming the tablet towards students; more expensive models offer capabilities such as larger screen size and more stoage. The $81 tablet has only 4GB of storage.

According to Middle Eastern technology site ITP, Simmtronics' Indrajit Sabharwal said that "By launching the XPad in the UAE, we believe in taking the tablet revolution to as many people as possible."

A previous attempt to build a $35 tablet in India, the Aakash, ended in failure.

Twitter And Buddy Media Introduce "Age Screening" So Brands Can Screen Who Follows Their Accounts
As Twitter continues to court advertisers to purchase real estate on the platform, it also has to come to terms with the rules that bind certain brands. Today Twitter and partner Buddy Media introduced age screening, a new opt-in feature that lets brands with age-restricted or adult content prevent minors from following their accounts. Now, when you try to follow a brand such as Jack Daniels Honey or Miller Lite, you'll receive a direct message that will take you to age.twitter.com to verify your age. After you verify once, you won't have to do it for every opted-in brand you want to follow.

Digg, Darling Of The Pre-Facebook Web, Sells To Betaworks For A Rumored $500,000
Via WSJ: Digg, the social news site and former Web 2.0 darling that was eventually pushed into obsolescence by then-newcomers Facebook and Twitter, has been acquired by Betaworks, the New York tech development behind popular links shortener bit.ly and analytics service Chartbeat, among others. The Wall Street Journal reports the price tag for the deal was just $500,000, though TechCrunch cites a source who disputes that number. That's a paltry sum for a company that Google reportedly offered $200 million for in 2008, before the deal fell through. However, trouble for Digg started to mount in 2010 after a controversial redesign led to the loss of a quarter of its audience; founder Kevin Rose departed in March of 2011; and the site lost its tech staff to The Washington Post this April. (Rose recently joinedGoogle Ventures as a partner). Betaworks CEO John Borthwick will head Digg and reportedly plans to have the team behind News.me, Betaworks' news reader service, manage from hereon out. What to expect next? A startup approach to rebuilding Digg, which means smaller budgets and faster cycles for new products, such as a cloud-based Digg in the works.

Columbia Amps Online Courses, Appoints Sree Sreenivasan First Chief Digital Officer
Columbia University is about to start amping up its online-only distance learning programs, as well as its traditional courses that lack a robust digital presence. To that end, the school just appointed long-time professor and journalism school dean Sree Sreenivasan as its first chief digital officer. Columbia's pursuit of the digital route is further affirmation that a new crop of digital education companies is starting to have a trickle-up effect on traditional institutions. Current players in the space range from teach-anyone-anything companies such as Skillshare, online education portals like Khan Academy and Coursera, open education initiatives like OpenCourseWare, and other storied institutions such as MIT and Stanford.

Facebook Makes Events More Useful, Groups More Snoopful
One of the nice things about Facebook when it first launched was that it gave you a quick, casual way to communicate with large groups of people--everyone attending your weekend zombie costume party for example, could be informed of the last minute switch to a pirate theme--without the messiness of endless multi-responder email threads.

Facebook recently made some deft changes to two key group talk tools, Facebook Events and Facebook Groups. On Groups, Facebook has introduced a feature that snitches to Group admins about which members have and haven’t seen new posts on the Group message boards, and when they've seen it. (Update: Members of a group and users who've been included in the visibility settings can also see time stamps and read receipts.) The introduction of these read receipts is in some ways a departure for Facebook, which is traditionally guarded about revealing users’ browsing habits within Facebook to other users. But then, others argue, the feature isn't so different from read receipts Facebook already has for personal messages.

The changes to Facebook's Events feature incorporate ideas born at one of its hackathons. “A couple of us felt there should be a better way for people to see their friends' birthdays a few days in advance and make plans for the weekend. So we built it,” Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin wrote in an introductory blog post. Birthdays, suggested events, and events you're invited to now show up as a list or as thumbnails in a calendar, letting you respond to an invite from a drop-down box that appears within the calendar view. Coincidentally, or not so much, this follows the launch of a plush new events feature on rival Google+. Google+ Events, first showed off and activated at Google's I/O conference in late June, makes good use of Google’s multiple products, seamlessly linking Google+, Google Calendar and Gmail features, with convenient but non-essential add-ons, like letting event attendees automatically upload photographs to a group bin on the event page.

Uber Taste-Tests On-Demand Ice Cream Trucks
Uber, the mobile app that lets you order private cars on-demand, is getting a little sweeter. Tomorrow, the company is test-driving a mini-fleet of ice cream trucks in seven cities across the country and in Toronto. Uber users, who can already order the service's cars on their phones, will be able to request an ice cream truck to purchase treats in bundles. (In New York, for example, you can get a five-pack of ice creams from city favorites Van Leeuwen and Cool Haus for $12.) It's the cherry on top of a great week for Uber: It just won a major victory against the Washington, D.C. City Council that would have required the on-demand service to charge five times the cost of a D.C. taxi by law. It's also an interesting peek into a world in which Uber can offer customers more than just cars. Which makes us wonder: What else can we Uber?

Hackers Publish 450,000 Usernames Pilfered From Yahoo Voices
Hackers have infiltrated a Yahoo service, sneaking out 450,000 passwords and usernames and posting them online. Ars Technica was among the first to spot the breach, which seems to have affected the otherwise low-profile Yahoo Voice network, a voice service associated with Yahoo chat. The hacker group behind the heist is calling itself the D33Ds Company. Worryingly, as the Guardian points out, Yahoo had not encrypted the passwords. The lack of similar first-level security landed LinkedIn in trouble when hackers accessed and published 6.4 million passwords online last month. Yahoo has yet to comment.

Amazing Alex, The New Game From Angry Birds Creators, Launches For iOS And Android
Amazing Alex, the second game from Angry Birds maker Rovio, is now out for iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Like Angry Birds, the mobile game is based on physics and falling, but in Amazing Alex you don’t break, you build. As the teaser video below shows, the game is about balancing regular objects and creating chain reactions, to help engineering nut Alex get things done in a creative way. As a bonus, users can create and share game levels they make. So far, some users are running into difficulties accessing the iOS Game Center after downloading the game, but Rovio says it is looking into it.

Judge Rules New York's Aereo TV Retransmission Service Is Legal
A New York district judge has now ruled that Aereo, which retransmits live TV signals to iPhones and iPads using a complex and strange array of antennas, can continue its business. Aereo asserts its merely sending signals to users on a different device than they'd be watching free TV on at home--because you can't take your domestic TV on the road. TV networks see it differently and say Aereo is infringing their copyright, but Judge Alison Nathan has ruled that the law is on the side of Aereo. An appeal is expected to be filed immediately.