appleinsider.com/ - At WWDC, Apple made little public mention of its new iBeacons feature in iOS 7, apart from showing the name prominently on a Keynote slide depicting a variety of other new features included in the release. However, developers' tweets and other comments have offered new illumination of what the new feature can do for their apps.
Micro-location door activation
Essentially, rather than using satellite signals to locate a device anywhere on Earth as GPS does, BLE can enable a mobile user to navigate and interact with specific regions geofenced by low cost signal emitters that can be placed anywhere, including indoors, and even on moving targets. Additionally, it appears iOS devices can also act as an iBeacon:
Acting as iBeacon, a user with an iOS 7 device in hand could trigger events around them, allowing them to, for example, turn on lights and unlock and open doors simply by signaling the user's proximity to devices listening for it via BLE.
While Apple's specific feature set for iBeacons remains under NDA, the BLE specification also supports the concept of device leashing, which could, for example, enable a peripheral like a watchband to communicate its location to a configured smartphone. The specification also supports peripheral push notifications, which Apple supports in new APIs in both OS X Mavericks and iOS 7.

usatoday.com - Microsoft will use its annual developers conference to release a preview of Windows 8.1, a free update that promises to address some of the gripes people have with the latest version of the company's flagship operating system.
Many of the new features have been shown off already. The Build conference, which starts Wednesday in San Francisco, will give Microsoft's partners and other technology developers a chance to learn more about the new system and try it out. It also will give the company a chance to explain some of the reasoning behind the update and sell developers on Microsoft's ambitions to regain relevance lost to Apple's iPad and various devices running Google's Android software.
There's also speculation that Microsoft could show off a new, smaller version of its Surface tablet computers. One of the new features in Windows 8.1 is the ability to work well on smaller-screen devices.
Windows 8.1 will be available as a preview starting Wednesday for anyone to download. It will be released to the general public later in the year, though a specific date hasn't been announced.
Windows 8, which was released in October, was meant to be Microsoft's answer to changing customer behaviors and the rise of tablet computers. The operating system emphasizes touch controls over the mouse and the keyboard, which had been the main way people have interacted with their personal computers since the 1980s.