For a little over a year Microsoft has been extracting license fees from HTC for their use of Google’s Android operating system, on the basis that Android infringes several of Microsoft’s patents. While their claims have yet to be tested in court, Microsoft has been dangling the threat of lawsuits in front of other Android manufacturers, including Motorola and Barnes & Noble.
Google’s latest attempt stab at a social network, Google+, has proved to be quite the hit amongst the tech elite and casual users alike – so much so that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has joined to check out the competition, and is currently the most-followed user.
As if RIM didn’t have a tough enough to worry about at the moment, with falling handset sales and a middling response to their inaugural tablet launch, it seems the Canadian handset manufacturer now has to worry about rogue execs penning scathing letters expressing disillusionment with company management.
Oh how the mighty have fallen. One-time king of the social networks, MySpace, has finally been sold by owner News Corp for a rather paltry (rumoured) $30 million to advertising firm Specific Media. The amount is less than a third of the $100 million News Corp were hoping to recoup with the sale of the iconic social network, which paved the way for current social supremo Facebook.
If you have visited a Google site in the last twenty four hours you may have noticed the normally subdued light blue shortcut bar at the top of the screen has been replaced by a rather more striking black and red number. This is a part of a company-wide redesign that Google announced yesterday on their official blog.
The days of Apple and Google’s tit-for-tat device activation race has long since passed with Google emerging the clear victor. The search giant’s Android operating system pulled ahead, somewhat inevitably, due to the broad range of devices available and, some would argue, its increasing quality compared the ageing iOS interface.
The launch of Google’s all-browser operating system, Chrome, was tempered somewhat last month by the fact that Acer, one of the two launch partners, didn’t have their hardware ready on time.
It looks as if those reports announcing the end of the iPad era may have been a little premature after all. A study released yesterday by research firm comScore shows that Apple’s best-selling iPad accounts for no less than 97.3% of tablet browsing in the US.
For many years the undisputed king of the blogging hill has been Wordpress. The platform is produced by software company Automattic, who also make comments system IntenseDebate and spam filter Akismet, and is available in one of two flavours.
At Google’s recent developer conference, I/O 2011, the three big topics we were expecting were Android, Chrome and Google TV. The first two were dealt with in depth, however Google TV only got a passing mention. Google notified current owners than they would soon get an update to a Honeycomb-based version of the TV software, but that was about it.
Google may not be the media darling it once was, having lost mindshare to social upstarts such as Facebook and Twitter in recent years, but when it comes to raw traffic the search giant is still top of the pile. Research firm ComScore estimates that last month Google’s family of web properties notched up one billion unique visitors.
Former king of the smartphone heap Nokia yesterday announced their newest flagship device, the N9. The new handset is powered by MeeGo, the mobile operating system that Nokia and Intel teamed up to produce in response to the increasing dominance of Android and iOS.
In a move three years in the making, yesterday the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the use of custom and extended Top-Level Domains (TLDs), registration for which will open next January. The new so-called gTLDs will replace the common .COM or .NET at the end of a web address with custom terms.
RIM’s continued slowdown was laid bare in the company’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, where the Canadian smartphone maker dished out their latest figures, which included lower-than-expected revenue, and bad news for those looking for a 4G Playbook.
What began with the hacking of Sony Corp.’s Playstation Network back in April has now snowballed into a full-on hackers open season, as a whole raft of websites have fallen to the group calling themselves LulzSec. The collective have now turned their hive-mind on the government, with high-profile hacks of both the Senate and CIA sites in less than 24 hours.
This morning Google Inc. hosted an “inside search” event to lift the lid on some more improvements the firm is making to its ubiquitous engine. There were additions on both desktop and mobile clients, all aimed at making the search experience more accessible, usable and above all speedy.
Nokia Corp., once king of the handset world, has been going through a tumultuous period as of late. Stephen Elop, who took over the CEO position last year after his predecessor Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was unceremoniously booted out for failing to maintain the Finnish manufacturer’s competitive edge, has made some aggressive changes.
Nokia Corp., who all-but invented the mobile phone market back in the halcyon days of the early-90s, look set to be dropping not one but two places down to a distant third in terms of smartphone manufacturing volume by the end of this year, if a new report from research firm Nomura is to be believed.
Apple’s launch strategy for new products is an interesting phenomenon. While the details are always jealously guarded so Jobs’ “one more thing” can have the maximum impact on stage, this does leave the Cupertino-based gadget giant open for other legal ramifications down the road. Case in point – the iCloud trademark, which Jobs and Co. have just been sued over.
Analyst firms are often accused of pulling figures from various places; the sky, their rear ends – basically anywhere but reality – and with the latest numbers from IDC its not difficult to see why.
After Steve Jobs gave his keynote speech at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, he left the romance of San Francisco behind him and went to a slightly smaller scale meeting – one of the Cupertino Council. At the meeting he presented Apple’s plans for their new headquaters – and to say they’re grandiose would be something of an understatement.
Tonight at a rowdy event in London’s Silicon Roundabout (our twee answer to Silicon Valley), Boxee launched the UK version of their popular set-top unit, the Boxee Box. The device, which has been out in the US for around six months, will be debuting for £199, or around $330 – $130 more than the US version.
Speaking at the Inspire Conference today in London, Rovio “Mighty Eagle” Peter Vesterbacka gave the audience at update on how the ubiquitous mobile game is doing, as well as the Finnish companies plans for the future
Apple’s historically profitable relationship with the four major record labels (Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal) paid dividends today as it became the first music vendor to allow would-be purchasers access to cloud-based copies of music they already own – even if it was not purchased through the companies iTunes music store.
The keynote at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is just wrapping up in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where the company’s CEO Steve Jobs announced the latest additions to their desktop operating system OS X, and iOS, its mobile sibling.
