• PC manufacturers — and apparently, some users — have gotten their hands on early builds of Windows 8, which will include support for ARM chips and features like enhanced graphics, 3-D support, facial recognition, instant-on capability and a Windows app store. Microsoft also looks to be experimenting with a new Ribbon user interface (UI), the same type used in the most recent versions of Microsoft Office, like Word and Excel. Whether or not this Ribbon UI makes it into the final build in some form or another remains unclear, but the results so far are apparent in the screengrab above. What do you think: hit or miss? (CNNMoney and PC World)
• Epsilon, one of the world’s largest providers of marketing email services for companies like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Barclays, Capital One Financial Corp., and Citi, experienced a security breach that may have enabled the hackers to gain access to the names and email addresses of customers. Luckily, no financial information was leaked. (Wall Street Journal)
• Salesforce.com and QuickBooks-maker Intuit, announced a joint partnership whereby Intuit will resell Salesforce.com’s CRM through its app center and customers will be able to synchronize customer data with QuickBooks and QuickBooks online, a web-based version of its software. (Fortune)
• There’s a whole new crop — more than a dozen, actually — of specialized agencies focused exclusively on Facebook advertising because the social network now accounts for more than a third of all online display ads, which is apparently more than three times as many as its nearest competitor, Yahoo. (Wall Street Journal)
• Were you one of the faithful Engadget readers mystified by the departure of many of its editorial staff? Don’t be. Turns out former editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky and seven other Engadget writers are toiling away on a competing tech news site backed by the media company SB Nation. (Joshua Topolsky’s blog)
• Greg Kumparak of MobileCrunch assembled a wishlist of all the things he’d like to see in the next major update to Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 5. Chief among them: an improved  notifications system, turn-by-turn navigation, and wireless media syncing. Check it out, and sound off on the comments below. What do you want from the next big software release? (MobileCrunch)
• My colleague Phil Elmer-Dewitt assembled a nice homage to Apple’s 35th anniversary in which he highlights, among several things, this extraordinarily detailed faux Apple Store playset from Playmobil. Video of it below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSU3ijxkp8Y]

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