Sony Corp.’s legal team must be a busy bunch at the moment. On the one hand they’re battling LG Electronics Co. Ltd. in a Blu-Ray patent dispute that has seen European Union Playstation imports impounded in Holland, and on the other hand they’re fighting an increasingly vitriolic battle against renowned hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz, who is in hot water for cracking open the security on the companies popular console.
Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft Corp.’s newest and fastest-ever browser, has scored around 2.3 million downloads since it launched on Monday evening. Microsoft has issued a back-slapping blog post detailing the feat, and certainly seems pleased as punch that people are flocking to their new browser.
Google Inc. has been rolling out plenty of new features to its Docs productivity suite over the last few months, most noticeably enabling editing on mobile devices in response to the increasing proliferation of smart phones and tablets. Now the search giant has added another one of those features you didn’t realise was missing until you try it, “Discussions.”
Facebook may have most of the buzz and mindshare these days, but Google Inc. is still home to some of the hottest talent in Silicon Valley, as proved by the performance of one Petr Mitrichev at the inaugural Facebook Hacker Cup. Petr is currently the highest ranked Algorithmic Coder in the world, and just so happens to work at Google.
This week marks Twitter’s fifth birthday. Since it was first launched to the public, the micro-blogging service has noticeably changed the way we broadcast, organise and digest information.
Amazon.com’s curated Android Appstore has been some time in the making – it opened to developers a few months ago, and we’re assured it will be seeing a public launch “very soon.” In the meantime, Amazon.com has obviously been wining and dining the app royalty of this world, and as a result has scored a pretty hefty coup.
It’s hard to think of a more universally hated piece of software than Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 6. The aging browser came bundled with Windows XP, which had the unfortunate side-effect of making it wildly popular, as people used it day-in and day-out for their browsing needs, oblivious to the growing security holes and alternatives available.
Google Inc. veteran and VP of Consumer Products Marissa Mayer took the stage at SXSW in Austin, Texas, today and provided and interesting snapshot of Google’s mapping products. Google Maps is provided on all major handsets, and functions as the default service on iOS and Android, the two biggest fish in the smartphone pond.
It has been rumoured since essentially the dawn of time that Google Inc. is going to launch a social network. Although many of Google’s products, such as Picasa, YouTube, and Buzz include social elements, the search giant has yet to launch a full-on Facebook competitor.
Since last week’s catastrophic earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown triple-threat devastated large parts of northeastern Japan, many large organisations have jumped in to aid donations that will go towards helping those affected by the crisis.
Remember SXSW 2010, when check-in services such as FourSquare, Gowalla and BrightKite were hitting the big time? Austin was awash with people walking into closed doors as they stared intensely at their handsets, making sure they registered that all-important Starbucks check-in.
Since a very public backlash began over the allegedly decreasingly quality of Google’s search results a few months ago, the search giant has made some very public moves to restore confidence in their ubiquitous service.
Every year as part of the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, group of hackers pit their wits against the latest and greatest in browser security at an event called Pwn2Own. The name is a little ’95, but the concept is simple – hack a browser, and you win whatever hardware it was running on.
You may have heard of Square, a new mobile payment solution from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Essentially Square is attempting to make traditional Point of Sale services and hardware obsolete, by using your smartphone and a free card reader that plugs into your headphone jack.
Google Inc. has had something of an uphill battle on its hands with the Android Market. Although it is now comparable to Apple Inc.’s gargantuan App Store in terms of raw number of apps, it has been plagued with issues that wouldn’t crop up in Apple’s heavily-regulated outlet.
Google Inc.’s addition to the browser market, Chrome, just keeps getting better and better. Today the Big G has pushed out another update for the stripped-down browser which puts it at version 10 (10.0.648.172 to be precise), adding in a couple of new features and improving on the already-blistering Javascript performance.
Industry analytics outfit ComScore Inc. has released their latest figures for mobile operating system market share, covering the fourth quarter of 2010. The quarter is always the biggest period of the year for any retailer, covering Black Friday and the festive season. So how did the major operating systems do?
In the wake of last week’s discovery of a tranche of malicious apps residing in the Android Market, Google Inc. has leapt into action to protect those users affected by the malware, which not only collected and transmitted identifying information, but also left devices open to further attack.
It seems a month can’t go by at the moment without some kind of viral worm weaving it’s way through the Twittersphere, leaving a wake of dodgy linkbait and annoyed users behind it. This week’s Twitter exploit, TweetViewer, once again plays on the insecurity and gullibility of the average Twitter user, and purportedly allows people to find out who has been viewing their Twitter profiles.
As with most Android devices, it was only a matter of a few hours after launch until the Xoom was rooted, allowing would-be tinkerers access to the nuts-and-bolts of the device’s Android operating system.
The presentation in San Francisco is still winding down, but Apple have today taken the wraps off the next generation of their uber-successful tablet. The specs of the iPad 2 line up pretty nicely with all the leaks that have littered the blogosphere in the past couple of weeks, with a couple of noticeable omissions.
The openness of Android is what many people love so much about the mobile OS – you can run your own code on it, customise it however you see fit, and generally tinker about much more so than you can with it’s competitors. The Android Market is open too – anybody can put an App on there and wait to start raking in the cash.
It would seem that after all those rumours attributing an astronomical price point to the Motorola Xoom, common sense has won out and the Honeycomb-powered tablet will indeed be relatively affordable at launch.
It would seem you can’t escape fanboyism in even the most lofty corridors of power. It has been revealed by a former British MP that he nominated Apple’s eponymous CEO for the title, but the request was shot down by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown as payback for Jobs snubbing an invitation to speak at Brown’s Labour Party conference.
News reaches us this afternoon of a small legal storm brewing in Europe between Japanese electronics giant Sony and even-more-giant Korean rival LG, centred around Sony’s apparent use of patented Blu-Ray playback technology inside the Playstation 3.
