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Tech news from around the web:

Arabic has become the fastest-growing language on Twitter, TNW reports. A study by Paris-based agency Semiocast found that out of approximately 180m tweets posted on a daily basis in October 2011, 2.2m of them were posted in Arabic, against 30,000 in July 2010 and 99,000 October 2010. A sample of 5.6bn public tweets, gathered from July 2010 to October 2011, revealed that the top five languages in use on Twitter are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Malay. Arabic comes in at number eight.

Tech news from around the web:

China has overtaken the US as the world’s biggest smartphone market by volume in the third quarter, Reuters reports. According to research company Strategy Analytics, smartphone shipments grew 58% to reach 23.9m units in China during the quarter, while US shipments fell 7% from the second quarter to reach 23.3m devices.

Chris Nuttall

Zynga has announced that Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive and chief executive of MySpace, has resigned from his position as Chief Business Officer at the leading social gaming company ahead of its IPO, surrendering 4.64m share options in the process.

The news came in a regulatory filing detailing management changes and new numbers on users – the kind of detail requested by the Securities and Exchange Commission as a public offering nears.

Tech news from around the web:

Downloads of Android’s apps overtook those of Apple’s iOS apps in the second quarter of 2001, Business Insider reports. According to figures from ABI Research, the market shares of Android and iOS were 44% and 31% respectively. However, Apple still gets more downloads per user than Android.

Tim Bradshaw

Amid all the Apple hoopla of the last fortnight, there has been surprisingly little mention of the potential impact of the new iOS5 on the games console industry.

Combining Apple TV with any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad running the latest software allows whatever is on the screen of the handheld to appear simultaneously on the big screen, through Airplay Mirroring – including games. The result is something which looks pretty similar to Nintendo’s planned Wii U console, combining a touchscreen wireless controller with traditional console-style gaming.

Chris Nuttall

Zynga has updated its IPO filing with a breakdown of the sales contributions from its most popular games – FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker – as it faces questions on whether its games cannibalise one another and on how it will maintain its record of success.

The leading social gaming company also announced it would list on the Nasdaq rather than the New York Stock Exchange, with a ticker symbol of ZNGA, although the timing is still unknown.

Chris Nuttall

Stewart Butterfield’s move – from co-founder of photo-hosting site Flickr to co-creator of a new game called Glitch – suddenly makes sense when he reveals Flickr itself, in its earliest incarnation, was made up of spare parts from an abandoned game.

Glitch, which launched officially on Tuesday, is the kind of creation the entrepreneur could only dream of making back in 2002, when his Vancouver-based startup Ludicorp was formed to develop an online game.

Tech news from around the web:

Amazon is to unveil its new tablet computer, to be called the Kindle Fire, on Wednesday morning in New York, according to TechCrunch. The computer, which will be sold along side the existing range of e-ink Kindles, will not be ready to ship until the second week of November, TechCrunch claims.

Tech news from around the web:

Online games group PopCap could be getting ready to launch a series of casino-style games on Facebook according to GeekWire. New domain purchases, changes to a Facebook page and a recent trademark application for ‘Lucky GemCasino’ by PopCap have been cited by GeekWire as a shift to a casino offering.

Chris Nuttall

Sony has been giving the media a sneak peek of the biggest makeover in the short history of Home – the games platform and online virtual world accessible through the PlayStation 3.

Games are being placed front and centre in the redesign, which was announced last month and will be introduced in the autumn, and the Home environment itself will become a game with the introduction of quests.

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Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and April Dembosky in the FT's San Francisco bureau share their views - plus tech insights from Tim Bradshaw and Maija Palmer in London and Robin Kwong in Taipei.

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