The world’s tech press, fickle bunch that they are, have moved on from bashing Sony over the continued outage of the company’s Playstation Network and Qriocity services, and are currently drooling over Google’s latest and greatest at the I/O 2011 conference in San Francisco.
Google just wrapped up its Chrome keynote at I/O 2011, during which SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai and Co. revealed some of the details surrounding the long-overdue launch of Chrome OS, including some pretty attractive pricing for enterprise and education users.
Around this time yesterday we were just starting to hear rumblings about what the launch of Google Music would entail – and they were spot on. The service was debuted as predicted, with all the rumoured features and functionality. We point this out because, 24 hours later, another interesting, and completely plausible, rumour has surfaced courtesy of a story in Forbes.
A few weeks ago Google lifted the lid on its next social effort, and its answer to Facebook’s “Like”, the +1 button. The functionality is simple – a small +1 icon appears next to search results and embedded in pages for you to press if you think the content is useful or noteworthy. The wider implications, however, could be far more meaningful.
Early this morning Microsoft went official with news that has been rumoured for the last 24 hours – they have saved up their pocket money and are using it to buy Skype, the ubiquitous VoIP service, for a cool $8.5 billion. Other suitors such as Facebook and Google has also been in the mix, but it would seem Microsoft have reached deepest in order to secure the deal.
Well, Google I/O week is officially underway. We mused what might be shown yesterday evening, but it would seem Google can’t even keep it in their pants until the event is open to attendees.
Google’s annual developers conference, I/O, is mere hours away. In preparation for the big event Google has posted a quick guide to what people can expect over the next few days, as 5,000 excited developers pour into San Francisco, no doubt expecting a free gizmo of some kind.
Sony’s beleaguered online services (specifically the Playstation Network, media download and streaming service Qriocity, and PC gaming network Sony Online Entertainment) have entered their third week offline, with Sony yesterday missing their promised restoration date and begging for forgiveness from their increasingly weary and irritated customers.
A little while ago we discussed how analyst predictions about Apple’s iPad dominating the tablet market for the next four to five years seemed broadly plausible, despite the historical inaccuracies of those same analyst’s long-term forecasts. Today numbers released by research firm Nielsen indicate the iPad’s inevitable slide may have already begun.
In News Corp.’s quarterly earnings call yesterday there was good and bad news for the media giant – although mostly bad. TV revenues grew, movie revenues were reasonable, however Murdoch’s online division, which includes the likes of MySpace and The Daily, lost a massive $165 million in the first three months of the year.
Although Apple’s iTunes is still the dominant force in digital music – so dominant as to make all its competitors look like hilarious, insignificant specks – the competition are lining up to attempt to slay the Jobsian giant.
It’s been fairly obvious for a while that Amazon is planning to release a fully-fledged tablet. Having already got their hardware feet well and truly wet with the Kindle, the online retail giant has been slowly putting the building blocks in place for their own tablet ecosystem built atop Android. Now rumours are beginning to circle that they have tapped giant OEM Quanta to build the device, to be released later this year.
It would seem that Sony wasn’t content with losing only 77 million users’ details, and has now smashed the 100 million mark with another leak of personal information, this time through Sony Online Entertainment, a game development house specialising in online RPGs such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies.
Apple’s reclusive CEO Steve Jobs, while usually just as mysterious as the company he runs, occasionally grants the general populous an insight into his thoughts and feelings via personal replies to emails sent to his publicly-available email address ([email protected], if you want to try your luck).
As we mentioned last week, things just keep getting worse for Sony. Hackers gained access to their Playstation Network’s backend on April 19th, and the service (along with on-demand service Qriocity) has been offline since a few days after the attack.
It’s long been suspected that Google is taking a cloud-based approach to productivity on tablets and other portable devices, recently enabling mobile editing for their widely-used web office suite. However Google today surprised everybody by rolling out a full-featured Google Docs app for Android, with a couple of other goodies in tow.
Nokia has been losing two things at alarming rates recently – market share and employees. In what is the third round of redundancies in recent memory, Nokia has announced it will be cutting loose 4,000 employees from its operations in the UK, Demark and Finland.
It always raises a wry smile when well-intentioned customer relations moves result in a user backlash, which is why we smiled with more than a hint of wryness when Motorola’s “Let’s engage our users!” Facebook activity saw fans of the manufacturer voting with their feet and demanding an end to locked bootloaders.
Last week we brought you news that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) had crashed, taking with it popular services like FourSquare and Reddit. Just a few hours later Sony’s Playstation Network (PSN) was taken offline in response to an “external intrusion”.
Although many heralded the arrival of Amazon.com Inc.’s Android Appstore as a boost to the Android ecosystem, and a victory for consumer choice, Apple Inc. congratulated Amazon.com in a rather different way – they sued them.
Following the spectacular failure of Amazon.com Inc.’s Elastic Cloud Compute service last Thursday, another giant Web service, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network, has crashed and is showing no signs of coming back up soon. The network, boasting about 70 million users worldwide, has apparently been floored by an “external intrusion” and has been offline since around the same time Amazon.com’s service went down.
This morning buttocks are tightly clenched all across internet-land, as Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service, which is used by many big-name companies and services, has spectacularly crashed, taking down Quora, FourSquare, Hootsuite, and a whole host of other well-known services that use Amazon’s cloud to power their backend.
Hot on the heels of Google’s earnings call at the beginning of the week, today was Apple’s turn to publish their figures and, surprise surprise, they beat expectations and sold a whole load of bushed aluminium to mobs of doe-eyed consumers.
Google Maps is one of the few things that is universally loved by internet users. Find a person who doesn’t like Google Maps and I can guarantee you they’re either insane, a moron, or both. That said, the ubiquitous cartography service isn’t without its little quirks.
A few months ago it was reported that social media software conglomerate UberMedia were in talks to buy UK-based Tweetdeck for $30 million. This would be a significant move by the group, as it would mean the combined reach of all their clients would be over a third of all Twitter users.
