Itching for a chance to fly aboard Boeing's state-of-the-art 787 "Dreamliner?" Now's your chance: the aircraft is returning to commercial service in the United States after four years of grounded status due to battery fires.

United Airlines will fly a 787 from Houston to Chicago Monday, the aircraft's first commercial flight in 123 days

Boeing and United's CEOs will be among the 250-plus passenges on board the flight, according to CNBC. That's likely a move to inspire confidence among those afraid to fly the troubled jet, grounded last January following two separate battery fire issues.

The Dreamliner takes to the skies with a new battery system encased in steel and with greater separation between individual cells. Those steps, Boeing believes, should put an end to the battery fire issues that caused the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the 787 fleet in January. The FAA approved Boeing's solution to the 787's battery issues last month following extensive test flights. Read more...

Itching for a chance to fly aboard Boeing's state-of-the-art 787 "Dreamliner?" Now's your chance: the aircraft is returning to commercial service in the United States after four years of grounded status due to battery fires.

United Airlines will fly a 787 from Houston to Chicago Monday, the aircraft's first commercial flight in 123 days

Boeing and United's CEOs will be among the 250-plus passenges on board the flight, according to CNBC. That's likely a move to inspire confidence among those afraid to fly the troubled jet, grounded last January following two separate battery fire issues.

The Dreamliner takes to the skies with a new battery system encased in steel and with greater separation between individual cells. Those steps, Boeing believes, should put an end to the battery fire issues that caused the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the 787 fleet in January. The FAA approved Boeing's solution to the 787's battery issues last month following extensive test flights. Read more...

The Atlantic Media Company has hired an editor to run Defense One, a digital-only publication concentrating on defense and national security launching this summer.

Kevin Baron, a national security reporter for Foreign Policy magazine, has been brought on as editor-in-chief, effective June 3. The position is a homecoming of sorts for Baron, who prior to Foreign Policy covered the "business of war" for another Atlantic Media publication, National Journal.

Baron has just a few weeks to contract staff writers and contributors and to launch the title. It will start with just a handful of writers and editors, borrowing stories from other Atlantic Media publications and drawing on the company's existing technical and production resources, Baron said in a phone interview with Mashable on Friday. A spokesperson for Atlantic Media said the size of the Defense One team will eventually match or surpass those of other core Atlantic brands such as Quartz or Government Executive, which each have between 15 and 20 employees working on content and production. Read more...

The Atlantic Media Company has hired an editor to run Defense One, a digital-only publication concentrating on defense and national security launching this summer.

Kevin Baron, a national security reporter for Foreign Policy magazine, has been brought on as editor-in-chief, effective June 3. The position is a homecoming of sorts for Baron, who prior to Foreign Policy covered the "business of war" for another Atlantic Media publication, National Journal.

Baron has just a few weeks to contract staff writers and contributors and to launch the title. It will start with just a handful of writers and editors, borrowing stories from other Atlantic Media publications and drawing on the company's existing technical and production resources, Baron said in a phone interview with Mashable on Friday. A spokesperson for Atlantic Media said the size of the Defense One team will eventually match or surpass those of other core Atlantic brands such as Quartz or Government Executive, which each have between 15 and 20 employees working on content and production. Read more...

“Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” Mayer said. In fact, Tumblr CEO David Karp wasn’t on the morning’s call: He was at an all-team meeting. (“Instead of calling his all-company meetings ‘all-hands,’ he calls them ‘all-team,’ Mayer noted. “I think in the future we’ll call meetings at Yahoo ‘all-team’ meetings.”)

“When you look at the best and most successful billion-dollar acquisitions in the tech space — eBay and Paypal, Google and YouTube — there’s a meme that emerges,” Mayer said. “The best acquisitions…allow the two brands and the two products and services to evolve somewhat separately.”

Yahoo has “well over” 700 million users, Mayer said, while Tumblr has 300 million — but these audiences overlap so little that the companies can count their combined user base at over a billion.

The difference in user demographics, Mayer acknowledged, means there’s “a type of user that will always prefer Tumblr and may never come to Yahoo” — and that’s fine. Yahoo can “provide search seamlessly in the background,” for Tumblr, but it could be existing and future Yahoo users that benefit most from the Tumblr acquisition: “As we pull Tumblr content into our news feeds and our media experiences, it will cause the core Yahoo properties to become that much more interesting and that much richer,” leading more users to the site even if they are from “very different [demographic] profiles from people coming to Tumblr.”

Tumblr users should get ready for more ads

Tumblr will remain a separate site, but that doesn’t mean its users won’t notice a few changes — particularly on the advertising front. “There’s a number of different places where we think we can monetize in a way that’s meaningful and really additive to the user experience,” Mayer said. Tumblr is already including a few ads in its dashboard, but “we would like to look at that and understand how we can introduce ads — a very light ad load where the impact is really created because the ads fit the user’s expectation and follow the form and function of the dashboard.”

In addition, Mayer said that Yahoo might allow individual Tumblr users to enable ads on their blogs, “but that would always be done with the blogger’s permission.”

So what about Tumblr CEO Karp’s well-known dislike of advertising? “David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change…we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

So, uh, what about Flickr?

In 2005, Yahoo acquired photo-sharing service Flickr. That acquisition, long before Mayer’s time, that acquisition is widely viewed as a big failure — one that ruined the Flickr experience because Yahoo tried to integrate it, then largely abandoned it.

On Monday afternoon, though, Yahoo is expected to announce updates to Flickr. Could we see a resurgence in that platform, as part of Yahoo’s new “don’t-screw-it-up” acquisition philosophy? Mayer was cautious: “In terms of how Tumblr evolves, it really depends on the creators,” she said. But when it comes to Flickr, “I think it is noteworthy that a lot of the posts on Tumblr are graphical. There’s some obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr, in that regard,” and it’s “probably something we’ll turn our attention to in the future. Flickr could provide great storage for albums or slideshows, things like that. We’ll see.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took a call with investors Monday morning to address Yahoo's $1.1 billion cash acquisition of Tumblr, fielding questions about how Yahoo plans to monetize a company that is not yet profitable but has a large and growing userbase

Perhaps most interesting for existing Tumblr users is Yahoo's plan to bring ads directly on to Tumblr blogs for users who want them

"[We] see some opportunities to work with bloggers who want ads, to provide ads on their website[s], done with bloggers' permission," she said

Yahoo will also to look to introduce more ads into Tumblr's dashboard (i.e., newsfeed), where it already runs some advertising. Mayer was quick to assure listeners that the ad load would be "very light," "really fit users' expectations" and "follow [the] form and function of [the] dashboard." Read more...

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took a call with investors Monday morning to address Yahoo's $1.1 billion cash acquisition of Tumblr, fielding questions about how Yahoo plans to monetize a company that is not yet profitable but has a large and growing userbase

Perhaps most interesting for existing Tumblr users is Yahoo's plan to bring ads directly on to Tumblr blogs for users who want them

"[We] see some opportunities to work with bloggers who want ads, to provide ads on their website[s], done with bloggers' permission," she said

Yahoo will also to look to introduce more ads into Tumblr's dashboard (i.e., newsfeed), where it already runs some advertising. Mayer was quick to assure listeners that the ad load would be "very light," "really fit users' expectations" and "follow [the] form and function of [the] dashboard." Read more...

Apple’s App Store recently hit its 50 billionth download. Since its launch in July 2008, the store has been the go-to place for mobile apps. To this day, mobile developers often choose to release their apps here first. Popular from the start, just seven months after the App Store’s launch, the store surpassed one million third party apps, many of those free.

Alongside its most recent and successful numbers, Apple released a list of its most 25 most-downloaded free iPhone apps of all time. A greatest hits list if you will from the past five years, the list contains a few apps you might expect — such as Facebook and Pandora — as well as a few you might not realize were so widely popular. Read more...

Apple’s App Store recently hit its 50 billionth download. Since its launch in July 2008, the store has been the go-to place for mobile apps. To this day, mobile developers often choose to release their apps here first. Popular from the start, just seven months after the App Store’s launch, the store surpassed one million third party apps, many of those free.

Alongside its most recent and successful numbers, Apple released a list of its most 25 most-downloaded free iPhone apps of all time. A greatest hits list if you will from the past five years, the list contains a few apps you might expect — such as Facebook and Pandora — as well as a few you might not realize were so widely popular. Read more...

Welcome to this morning's edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world.

Today, we're looking at three particularly interesting stories. It only took $1.1 billion, but Yahoo is on its way to becoming “cool.” The company announced it has acquired blogging service Tumblr, with a promise "not to screw it up." Pinterest is introducing a few new pins, one of which ties certain images to their associated brands. And as major companies continue to launch their take on the music streaming service, a smaller company called Bloom.fm is doing something a little different. Read more...