Poor PC vendors. If a new report by analyst firm IDC is to be believed, the world and his wife are conspiring to reduce PC shipment growth for the rest of 2011. At the beginning of the year IDC predicted 7.1% growth for the PC sector, however after a poor Q1 that forecast has now been revised down to just 4.2%.
Back when Sony announced their Playstation Network and Qriocity services had been hacked, unleashed 77 million users’ personal details in the process, everybody knew it was bad. However, nobody realised that more than six weeks later Sony’s evidently laughable security would still be falling victim to marauding groups of hackers.
There’s not much love lost between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Although the latter pair are involved in a strategic partnership, Google unseated Yahoo as top of the search hill many years ago, and Microsoft were recently accused of poaching Google’s search results. Despite their differences, they do have one thing in common – the desire to be able to crawl your data and make it as easily searchable as possible.
Microsoft, impeccably timed bunch that they are, held two Windows 8 first-look events within hours of one another on different sides of the globe. First, Windows President Steven Sinofsky took the stage at the D9 conference in California to unveil the new OS, then just a few hours later Microsoft held a partner preview at Computex in Taipei.
Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Jonathan Kaplan, former CEO of Pure Digital Technologies, the company behind the Flip family of portable video cameras, has announced his next venture will be into the exciting and cut-throat world of grilled cheese sandwich production.
Recently the Finnish company behind the seminal Angry Birds, Rovio, announced that their game had been downloaded more than 200 million times, cementing its title as the most popular game of the smartphone era, and the most popular game of all time, eclipsing Tetris by almost 2-to-1.
A recent phenomenon of the social web – aside from your parents commenting on drunk pictures of you on Facebook – is the smattering of buttons now adorning every website, from Justin Bieber fansites to CNN. These buttons allow you to share the information on the page with your friends or followers on the likes on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any number of link aggregators.
In an odd move for a company usually so laser-focused on 100% secrecy, Apple today issued a press release to tell the world that Steve Jobs would be announcing a slew of new products at the firm’s upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event next week in San Francisco.
While all manner of cool new hardware is shown off in Taipei at Computex 2011, the Silicon Valley rumour mill keeps churning. This week’s choice titbit is that eponymous social network Twitter is due to launch its own photo upload and sharing service imminently, potentially when CEO Dick Costolo takes the stage at the D9 conference on Wednesday.
The annual Computex trade show is well underway in Taipei, and local manufacturer ASUS have been showing off their newest creations. While many device makers have been moving away from Netbooks, the diminutive laptops that took the world by storm a few years ago in favour of smart devices and tablets, ASUS are sticking to their guns.
Yesterday Google announced their long-rumoured NFC Android payment system, Google Wallet. The service was met with cautious optimism from the assembled press, and will begin trials in New York and San Francisco from today. PayPal however, aren’t very happy about the new product.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color has been on the market for around seven months now, and although it hasn’t managed to make a huge splash, it has generated some noticeable ripples. The lost-cost device, sporting an Android core with a custom Nook skin on top, has become a hackers favourite due to its uncomplicated, quality components and cheap price.
Google is holding a “partners event” today in the Big Apple, and its been all-but confirmed that the search giant will be launching its NFC payment system, the imaginatively-named Google Wallet , along with some retail partners.
Eponymous video streaming website YouTube is today celebrating its sixth birthday, while mobile advertising platform AdMob is marking one year as a Google property. In separate blog posts today both the YouTube and AdMob teams shared some impressive numbers showing how the two services continue to grow.
As far as tarnished reputations go, Sony is currently in rare air. The initial hacking furore of mid-April, which resulting in the company’s PSN gaming network and Qriocity media service being shut down for three weeks, is far from over.
Although we first heard about it a few weeks ago, today Twitter has gone official with their purchase of UK-based Tweetdeck, makers of the popular desktop social media client of the same name. The papers were finally signed yesterday, with Twitter reportedly paying between $40 million and $50 million in cash and stock.
The ongoing row in the United Kingdom over celebrity superinjunctions has taken a turn for the strange, as Twitter users have used the social platform to blurt out the details that aforementioned celebrities paid so dearly to protect.
If you’ll recall, a few months ago Microsoft filed a protest against Apple’s ownership of the “App Store” trademark, on the grounds that the term is too generic and cannot belong to any one company. Many other companies seemingly agreed with Ballmer and Co., and the trademark was also challenges in Europe by Nokia, HTC and Sony Ericsson.
Analyst firm Gartner today released their latest worldwide handset sales figures, including numbers for the first quarter of 2011 from all the big manufacturers. The headlines are that total handset sales have risen 19% year-on-year, with smartphones continuing to accelerate, seeing 85% growth since the same period in 2010.
A few months ago Microsoft Corp. announced that they were building a version of Windows to run on ARM architecture, the kind found in system-on-a-chip silicon used by smartphones, tablets and other portable devices. Around a month ago Microsoft surprised attendees at their MIX developer conference in Las Vegas by demoing an apparently fully-functional version of Windows on ARM architecture.
If you’re a frequent users of Twitter, earlier this week you may have seen a couple of pictures of the shuttle launch doing the rounds from one Stefanie Gordon. She snapped the photos on her iPhone while on a Delta flight which just so happened to be passing by the Florida launch site. The pictures quickly went viral and have notched up around 650,000 views between them at the time of writing.
Over the weekend Sony’s ailing Playstation Network was finally resuscitated and brought back online, to the delight of its long-suffering users. The network had been offline for over three weeks after Sony took it down and was forced to rebuild it from the ground up in response to a massive security breach, which saw the personal details of over 100 million users lifted by hackers.
The most lambasted pair since Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, have today been denied an appeal of the ruling against them last month, which stated they could not rehear their case against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Most Nokia news stories as of late have been doom, gloom and everything in between. The Finnish handset maker has been shedding staff left and right, outsourcing development of its …
A spat over data privacy that has been rumbling on between social network Facebook and search giant Google has today erupted into a Tom Clancy-esque game of subterfuge, after The Daily Beast pinned down the source of anti-Google stories planted in the press as none other than Mark Zuckerberg’s baby.
