Monthly Archives: April 2012

Story of the Week: Privacy advocates wary of CISPA

April 29, 2012 4:12 pm by Maryam Nabi

Three months after the defeat of SOPA, a new bill in Congress had internet users, privacy advocates and civil rights groups up in arms this week.  On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that the authors claim will allow the government and private companies to work together in order to fight against cyber terrorism. Read more

Posted in Tech |
From FT PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY COLUMN April 26, 2012

Google drive

Apple has accumulated 125m users of its iCloud service just six months after the launch. But while it does a great job of saving and moving photos and music between different Apple devices, it is less agile with documents, video and non-Apple products – a weakness that three updated services are exploiting.

 Read more

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Posted in Personal technology |

Chris Nuttall Needle sews a social-commerce road trip

April 28, 2012 6:30 am by Chris Nuttall

Needle has been making its point about mobile and social, taking its office-on-wheels around the San Francisco Bay area this week to meet customers, hire staff and hold parties.

Its Airstream motorhome, which I visited as it was parked on Union Square (pictured), has served as a headquarters, recruitment office and promotional vehicle for the Salt Lake City start-up. Read more

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Posted in Mobile, Social, Tech Finance |

Richard Waters Yahoo takes aim at Facebook’s patent-accumulation strategy

April 27, 2012 8:54 pm by Richard Waters

A month ago, we marveled at how Facebook had stitched together a defence against Yahoo’s patent attack with what might best be called an “old, new, borrowed and blue” legal strategy.

It turns out Yahoo’s lawyers were thinking the same thing: in a new complaint, they take direct aim at Facebook’s rush to build a patent war chest (which most recently involved a $550m purchase from Microsoft.)      Read more

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Posted in Internet, Tech |

Facebook urged to add woman to board before IPO

April 26, 2012 12:35 am by April Dembosky

The titan of electronic communications received some hand-delivered mail on Tuesday: a petition signed by 53,000 people demanding that Facebook add a woman to its board of directors before its much-anticipated public offering.

About two dozen protestors gathered outside Facebook’s New York headquarters on Madison Avenue to submit the petition. When no staff person came to accept it, and security guards ushered the protestors out of the lobby, they left the box of papers on the sidewalk. Read more

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Posted in Social, Tech |

Maija Palmer Nokia wins patent victory over IPCom

April 25, 2012 7:52 pm by Maija Palmer

The complexity – one is tempted to say complete muddle – of the European patent system was highlighted on Wednesday when Nokia and HTC won a key victory in their intellectual property battle with IPCom.

IPCom, which is based in Germany,  has waged a battle for several years to get mobile handset companies to pay it royalties for some technology it owns related to how mobile phones connect to 3G networks. Some handset makers have bought licences from IPCom, but Nokia and HTC strongly denied the validity of the patents and refused to pay up. Read more

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Posted in Europe, Hardware, Telecoms |

Chris Nuttall iPhone powers Apple March quarter, June will suffer

April 24, 2012 9:40 pm by Chris Nuttall

Apple has announced another stunning quarter, with revenues of $39.2bn earning net profits of $11.6bn or $12.30 per share. That compares with analyst expectations of $36.5bn in sales and $9.94 a share in profits.

The company sold 35.1m iPhones -up 88 per cent on the year-earlier quarter – but is expected to sell fewer in the current quarter, with revenues declining 13 per cent sequentially.  Tim Cook, chief executive,  and Peter Oppenheimer, chief financial officer, spoke to analysts after the announcement – our live blog is after the jump. Read more

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Posted in Computers, Consumer Electronics, Digital media, Mobile |

Richard Waters Why Google needs Drive to be a success

April 24, 2012 7:53 pm by Richard Waters

For Google, missing the online storage and syncing market would be as damaging as missing social networking: much of the personal information that is most important to its users would sit on some other company’s servers, beyond the reach of its search crawlers.

That makes Google Drive its most important new service since Google+. Read more

Posted in Tech |

Chris Nuttall Intel sees record demand for 3rd-gen Core

April 24, 2012 5:04 am by Chris Nuttall

Intel told its “Ivy Bridge” launch event in San Francisco on Monday it had  more than 670 PC systems lined up to use this third-generation Core processor family.

That’s an unprecedented number of design wins for the world’s biggest chipmaker. It signifies that either this is one hot processor, or lengthy delays to it have created pent-up demand, or maybe the PC industry is gearing up for a big year, with Windows 8 launching. It could be all three, or something else, but Intel stuck to the silicon’s merits in its presentation. Read more

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Posted in Computers, Hardware |

Richard Waters Facebook gives the bulls pause for thought

April 24, 2012 12:47 am by Richard Waters

Amidst the rising anticipation ahead of its IPO,  Facebook’s latest quarterly numbers are like a splash of cold water in the face. The growth in user numbers continues unabated, but revenues and profit margins are not what some investors were expecting. Here are a few things to note: Read more

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Posted in Internet, Tech Finance |
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