With the exception of additional battery power, most every smartphone cover is purchased for protection. But Microsoft and the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria are out to show how much more a case can be. When the FlexCase is opened, it doubles as an extended touchscreen for your device that can also be flexed for unique ways to interact with your phone.

Instead of having to use two-fingered on-screen pinch gestures to zoom in on a map, users could simply bend the corner of the case’s cover forward or back for quicker navigation. Piezoelectric circuitry inside the cover is able to detect touches, squeezes, swipes, and exactly how it’s being bent or warped. All of those gestures can also be translated to shortcuts or other alternative ways to interact with an app.

Imagine quickly navigating through an e-book by grabbing and bending the edge of the case, not unlike how you’d grab the page edges in a real book to flip through it. And because the cover integrates its own low-power e-ink display, it can serve as an extended screen for your smartphone. Copied clipboard contents could be left visible for quickly pasting between apps, or you could leave a map with directions on the cover, allowing you to respond to an email while still keeping tabs on where you’re going.
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For the time being, the FlipCase is just a research project that will be presented at the Computer-Human Interaction conference being held in May. (Hence the awkward cables hanging off the bottom of it in the picture above.) But eventually the technology could make it into our hands as smartphone cases become just as useful as the devices themselves.

Ricky Lavina was an auditor at Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, one of the largest accounting firms in the world. He had worked there for over four years and was expecting to eventually be a partner.
But during the Uber ride to his office, Lavina began to wonder why there wasn't a way to easily pair real accountants like himself with people who needed help filing their taxes. He became envious of the Uber driver's professional flexibility.

When you set out to file your taxes, you have two options. You can submit all of your documents to a CPA, and have them do the dirty work for you, or you can file yourself with online services like TurboTax or H&R Block.

Then there's Tickmark, Lavina's seven-month-old startup that lets you file your taxes through a mobile app called Taxfyle. It's pitching itself as the "Uber for accountants," and it was recently named one of the best new apps in the App Store by Apple.

'We're turning the traditional CPA firm upside down," Lavina said in an interview.

Taxfyle, a chat-based messaging app for quickly filing your taxes, is designed to be dead simple. Once you give the app some basic info and submit tax documents by taking photos with your phone, it connects you with a CPA that does your paperwork and asks you follow-up questions.

300 CPAs are on call 24/7 in the app, and Lavina said it takes 60 seconds to submit tax information, 90 seconds for a CPA to take the request, and generally 24 hours for all of the necessary paperwork to be completed. Taxfyle lets you take photos of your tax documents, like a W2 or 1099 form, with your phone and upload them directly in the app.

Taxfyle's CPAs have on average 14 years of experience in their field and they look through all documents submitted through the app.

"No one else is doing this," said Lavina. "No one else has an army of CPAs like we do. No one else is pairing them with customers at very competitive rates."

Filing taxes with Taxfyle starts at $49, and adding itemized deductions brings the cost to $100. Taxfyle also charges $3 for three years of audit protection. TurboxTax's mid-tier package starts at $55 and charges $40 for audit defense.

While TurboTax is the obvious elephant in the room, Lavina isn’t worried. "We don't see [TurboTax] as our main competitor. You can always paint your house for cheaper," he said. "But there's going to be a huge market of people out there who don't have the time to do it or don't have the skill set to paint their house."
"We see our main competitors as the brick and mortar, the Liberty Tax and the H&R Block, that have billions and billions of dollars in market space already."

Intuit, which owns TurboTax, recently debuted its own chat-based tax filing app called Tada that works in a similar way to Taxfyle. The app, which is currently in beta, costs $40 to file state and federal returns.
Lavina doesn't seem scared about Intuit encroaching on Taxfyle's territory.

"We're the future of a CPA firm. We're not the future of filing your taxes. He said many users are asking for the app to handle more everyday book keeping, and he plans to expand the kind of services Taxfyle provides.
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"There's no reason why the vehicle we created should just be for transporting tax jobs," he said. "It could also be transporting bookkeeping jobs, payroll jobs, even audits."
For now, Lavina isn't shy about his small team's potential. "This is the next Uber," he said.

Google’s Toolbar app launched more than 15 years ago as a convenient way to directly access the search engine from within Internet Explorer. Over the years it served as a Trojan Horse to convince Internet Explorer users to use Google search and other Google services, and eventually install Chrome to fully replace Internet Explorer. It was Google’s weapon to win the web away from Microsoft’s IE browser domination.

Cortana is slowly emerging as Microsoft's secret mobile weapon. While the software giant hasn't fared well with its Windows Phone operating system, Cortana is key to Microsoft's mobile future. Microsoft appears to be taking the same approach Google took with its Toolbar app. At the Build developer conference last week, the message was clear: Microsoft wants Cortana to be everywhere.

Cortana will help power Microsoft's new bot platform, showing up in Skype to help you talk to bots (see story below), schedule meetings, and generally digitally manage your life. Elsewhere, Cortana will be required to enable Android phone notifications to show up on Windows 10 PCs. Cortana was always designed to be web-based, and now Microsoft is taking advantage of that platform to ensure the digital assistant can make its way into apps it offers across multiple platforms.

Microsoft even showed off Cortana managing calendars within the built-in Outlook mail app for Windows 10. It's reasonable to assume that the same Cortana features will make their way to the Android and iOS apps eventually, as Microsoft wants a similar codebase and features across its Office apps. That's really where Cortana starts to get interesting. Baking Cortana into Outlook, Word, Excel, Skype, and other popular apps across Windows, iOS, and Android will only increase Cortana usage.

If Microsoft can convince people with iPhones and Android phones to use Cortana for even the most basic tasks like talking to bots in Skype, it starts to build a reliance and familiarity around the digital assistant. It took Google years to convince Internet Explorer users to switch to Chrome, but the Toolbar eventually helped push people towards Google search. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has discussed the importance of Cortana on multiple occasions, and the idea of the digital assistant being everywhere is clearly Microsoft's big bet at winning back some mobile relevance. We didn't hear much about Windows Phone at Microsoft’s Build Conference, but we're bound to hear a lot more about Cortana over the coming year ahead. Cortana will be everywhere.

3D printers have been around for quite a while. But as rapid as their recent boost in popularity has been, they’re pretty clunky machines and generally not inexpensive. However, a San Francisco-based startup has plans to release a 3D printer for your smartphone, all for under $100.

OLO is being launched through a Kickstarter campaign, which has already smashed its $80,000 target 16 times over with a total of more than $1,280,000 raised.

The OLO 3D printer allows users to create three-dimensional prints using the light from their smartphone screen. You can choose your choice of design from an existing 3D design platform that is compatible with the OLO app. The printer uses a photopolymer resin that hardens under the white light of the screen. The light emitted from the screen's image reacts with the resin and sets it stiff. The printer then hoists it up and a new layer of resin is "poured" in to react with the light.

Check out this video for more of an insight into how the printer works. 

The start-up also have plans to link the whole experience to social media, allowing users to share their raw designs and images of their final products with others.

Four AA batteries will get you 100 prints (it's not clear how long each print takes to make, though), and the device is described as a “virtually noiseless mechanism.” It also works with smartphones of almost any size or brand, including the monolithic displays of the iPhone 6S+ or Galaxy A7.

The team have been fine-tuning their design for over two years with the hope of making it simple enough for first-timers yet sufficient enough for professionals. Overall, it’s remarkably simple – comprised of just seven plastic parts, one chip, a motor, and four AA batteries. Most outstanding of all, the creators of OLO say it will cost as little as $99.
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As OLO is still in its crowdfunding stage through April 20th, there's no guarantee it will make it onto shelves. However, judging by the success of the Kickstarter funding thus far, it is looking promising that they will reach their target to commercially produce their first models around September 2016.