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We've often suspected that the Wall Street Journal is an "official" leak source used by Apple to seed the media with slightly more directed rumors about its upcoming products. And now the WSJ has chimed in on the four-inch iPhone screen rumor and said yes, that it's indeed true ... Apple's buying screens in large numbers from suppliers and these are for an "at least" a four-inch display, with the phone going into production in June.

So far, so promising. But Reuters has since chimed in and said its sources have agreed with the WSJ and that a 4-inch iPhone is on its way. Why so much excitement about such a seemingly secondary feature of a smartphone? Because it marks a design departure for Apple and sets the scene for Apple's rivals--some of whom have already been pressing for bigger and bigger displays as a unique selling point for their Android phones. A bigger screen will also make the iPhone better as an e-reader (threatening Amazon's market somewhat) and as a glossy display for mobile app magazines...potentially giving a boost to this industry as well.

The iPhone 4 brought the "retina" screen to the world's attention--a display with pixels so dense that you actually can't resolve the individual pixels with your weak, fleshy human eyeball, thus making displayed text look like printed quality and photos and images even more astonishing. The iPad 3 carries a similarly massive number of pixels and is probably better than every computer screen you've ever used. And that's why Apple's now said to be bringing retina displays to a revamped line of MacBook Pros, iMacs, and even its svelte MacBook Air, according to 9to5Mac.

The processing power to run these displays fits easily into the bigger chassis of the iMacs and MacBooks, but fitting it into the super-skinny Airs will take a little longer and may require Apple to use its proprietary battery power tech so that the ultra-portable machines still deliver long battery life. For this reason, we might not see them revealed at the same time as the bigger machines and they may not get much of an external design overhaul.

This is now looking like a dead cert: Apple's prepping its Air-inspired new MacBook Pros for a reveal at the upcoming WWDC event. They'll be ultra-thin, may come with a bias toward solid-state hard drives, and may not contain a DVD drive inside. They will be powered by Intel's new chips, Ivy Bridge, and they may also sport ultra-fast USB 3.0 tech alongside the Intel-Apple Thunderbolt port. 

iOS 6 is the next revamp of Apple's mobile operating system, and it looks like Apple's in advanced testing phases of the software because it's starting to show up in online analytics, as Apple's staff put it through its paces.

iOS 6 may well arrive alongside a revamped iCloud, which will include all sorts of new features like notifications on the website and more sophisticated web apps in general. It's also now thought that iCloud will get a video streaming feature so video clips can be shared around a household the way photos are in PhotoStream and that Apple will boost its photo-sharing system with the ability to comment and to share photos to other iCloud users. That sounds an awful lot like a photo-centric social network, and could explain why Apple ws rumored to be interested in buying Instagram.

Alongside the iOS 6 and iCloud update, Apple's also said to be revamping Siri, its cloud-service voice recognizing personal assistant. Siri has inspired many rivals and comes in for a lot of criticism, despite the fact that Nuance--the firm behind its voice-recognition tech--says it set a new high bar for understanding the human voice. With an update, Apple may lay many criticisms to rest because it's said to be coming to the iPad too and also, according to Daring Fireball to include an API so that other apps can interact with Siri, and be controlled by it. That means you may be able to get GPS navigation instructions, send a tweet, and maybe even launch and play games or other apps by voice control alone.

[Image: Flickr user bgarciagil ]

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Via FierceWireless: Should Verizon’s current 3G customers decide to migrate toward 4G LTE pastures, their $30 unlimited data plans won’t be going with them. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo announced at a J.P. Morgan conference today that the company’s “grandfathered” 3G customers will have to purchase shared data plans if they upgrade to devices that are compatible with the newer LTE network. Till now, customers have been able to stay on unlimited plans as long as they had signed on before Verizon introduced tiered-pricing last July. The new shared plans will allow customers to connect multiple devices under one data plan, will arrive this summer, but Shammo did not share pricing information.

The announcement comes two weeks after AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said his company’s unlimited data plan, which it pulled in 2010, was his “only regret.”

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Google today launched the Knowledge Graph, a new search engine feature that helps users quickly find relevant information using semantic search technology. Now, when a user conducts a search, Google will return results with two right-hand-side panels that will include additional relevant information on the search subject, such as biographical data, as well as a list of related topics. The Knowledge Graph attempts to make the search process more user-friendly by providing information about a search result’s relationship to other, previously scattered pieces of data.

The Knowledge Graph is powered by both private and public databases, including Wikipedia, Freebase, and the CIA’s World Factbook, that feed into the graph’s current storehouse of information on more than 500 million people, places, and things. It’s the company’s most significant search engine enhancement since 2007, when its Universal Search feature sprinkled video, image, and shopping results into its main list of search results.

The Knowledge Graph will roll out nationwide over the next few days. The announcement comes one day after Microsoft made its newly launched slew of social features for competitor Bing available to all U.S. users.

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Mother's Day recently got me thinking about the power of Mom. No, I'm not talking about her power to get us to finish all our vegetables or clean up our rooms--I'm talking about her power in 2012 to brand.

Let's face it, the American mother is an incredibly iconic figure that is constantly changing and growing. That evolution is most evident from television over the years; from the sweet 1950s apron-and-pearls portrayals provided by Donna Reed and June Cleaver to today's TV housewives that are both Desperate and Real. Moms are long past being just about apple pie and folding laundry; they've become a force to be reckoned with on all fronts.

That became very apparent a few weeks ago when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said a few words on CNN that set off a political firestorm of epic proportions. Rosen made the assertion that Ann Romney, the wife of Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, "never worked a day in her life" because she didn't work outside of the home.  

Moms rose up as one to state the obvious; stay-at-home parents are on the job 24/7. Can you even put a dollar sign on all they do? Well, Salary.com took a shot at with its Mom Salary Survey, concluding that a full-time mom should be making at least $110,000 per year.  And even if she was only being a mom part-time, she still should be making $66,000 on top of her regular paycheck.

Should be, but isn't--which is why some enterprising mothers are taking to the Internet to create a "celebrity mom" status for themselves and using it to brand their own entrepreneurial endeavors (at this point, who hasn't read Dooce or The Pioneer Woman?). It makes sense; according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly one in four married mothers with children younger than 15 stay home with their kids--and they could probably use the extra household income. And running a business out of a home is increasingly commonplace. As a matter of fact, according to another U.S. Census survey, home is now where over half of the businesses in the U.S. are located.

There aren't any stats readily available on how many stay-at-home moms are becoming entrepreneurs (as CNN points out here), but you can find examples of  Mom power in action everywhere. Check out Dorothy Beal's site, Mile Posts, to see how this amazing woman and mother of five overcame a medical condition to become a marathon runner, and then branded herself to take advantage of sponsorship and advertising opportunities. Then there's Jen, The Suburban Mom, who promotes brands and special deals through her website, and Holly, who runs a fitness program to help transform any out-of-shape mom into a "Fit Yummy Mummy," at ClubFYM.com.    

These are just three examples of so-called "ordinary" moms who took tried-and-true branding principles and transformed themselves into marketing powerhouses. The lesson here? The ordinary becomes extraordinary when you leverage your everyday status to attract others just like you to your business. 

So, dads, you'll have to wait closer until Father's Day to get your due. In the meantime, let's not forget that when you turn "Mom" upside down, you get "Wow."   

However, I would first ask her permission before you do that.

JW Dicks (@jwdicks) & Nick Nanton (@nicknanton) are best-selling authors who consult for small- and medium-sized businesses on how to build their business through personality driven marketing, personal brand positioning, guaranteed media, and mining hidden business assets. They offer free articles, white papers, and case studies at celebritybrandingagency.com.

[Image: Flickr user Jason Rodman]

New York City's government just announced a new listing service for tech jobs. But what about that pesky poor-business-broadband-in-NYC problem?

New York City matters to tech. It's also a place where the high-tech sector is largely tied into existing industries such as fashion (Gilt Groupe), marketing (Foursquare), and media (Tumblr). Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been outspoken in the past about diversifying New York's high-tech scene, and the city government has just unveiled a new tech job directory--Made in NY--that lists jobs from hundreds of local firms.

Bloomberg announced the initiative on Tuesday morning at Internet Week New York. At the press conference, NYC chief digital officer Rachel Sterne said the city government wants to attract engineers, programmers, coders, developers, and program managers from around the world--not just New York. The mayor then went on to criticize the H-1B Visa Cap that restricts foreign tech talent from entering the United States. Boosting and diversifying New York's tech sector has been one of Bloomberg's pet projects; a science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island was recently announced by Cornell University and Israel's Technion; the school (which was involved in a controversial bidding process) is expected to double the number of engineers graduating from the city's colleges and universities. Despite the robust tech efforts of NYU and Columbia University, New York has no nerd educational hub on the level of Stanford University or MIT.

The map launched with job info preloaded for over 325 tech firms, and also contains a visual guide to investors and coworking/incubator spaces. The investor roster mainly consists of A-list VC and financing firms (Union Square Ventures, Elevation Partners, Lerer Ventures) but also includes an impressive coworker/incubator space list that ranges from biggies like General Assembly to tiny coworking spaces in residential Brooklyn. NYC.gov created the map with the assistance of New York Tech Meetup members and the design was handled by Mike Bodge. Job information for the map is imported directly from the listings pages of participating companies--a challenge when it comes to future site maintenance.

A bigger issue for the growth of New York's tech sector is the wretched state of local broadband access. Although a much-vaunted recent study by the Center for the Urban Future said New York has the fastest-growing tech sector in the country, the same report said local broadband infrastructure rates a solid B-. Despite New York's status as the world's top business hub, technical factors make it difficult to acquire broadband redundancy--a must-have for many firms. Both FiOS and Time Warner Cable commercial broadband are regularly plagued by outages; Internet connection speeds also vary wildly from building to building. A larger issue is the fact that high-speed commercial Internet is severely limited in cheaper outlying neighborhoods--as tech firms who are leaving high-priced Silicon Alley and DUMBO for cheaper Greenpoint and Long Island City have found to their chagrin.

At the Internet Week press conference, Mayor Bloomberg ducked an audience question on the poor quality of broadband infrastructure. On-stage representatives from the city government said that a new broadband improvement announcement would be made in the coming weeks, but no details were given.

Mayor Bloomberg, as always, is an aggressive cheerleader for the city's tech sector. He riffed off an audience question by claiming that tech-heavy Manhattan neighborhoods like NoHo and Chelsea held the same allure for Internet entrepreneurs as Brighton Beach does for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The Mayor's team also brought Josh Miller, the 21-year-old CEO of Branch, on stage. Branch moved from New York to Silicon Valley and back in the past year; on-stage, Miller boasted about how New York gives entrepreneurs far more opportunities than California. The CEO, who has raised millions in VC, also told the crowd how he “never had a real job” before starting Branch.

In the biggest surprise of the press conference, Bloomberg appeared to criticize Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not giving enough to charity. After an audience member asked Bloomberg what he thought of the upcoming Facebook IPO, Bloomberg declined a direct answer and instead urged Zuckerberg to “give something back” and to engage more in philanthropic efforts. Perhaps Bloomberg was upset that Zuckerberg's philanthropic efforts are mainly west of the Hudson?

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here or find him on Twitter and Google+.

[Image: Flickr user Charley Lhasa]