By Dan Thomas
Google wants to get the world talking using their Androids with an application that will translate speech into any of 14 languages.
Although lacking a cute moniker as Apple’s also loquacious new personal assistant (“hello Siri”), Google Conversation will allow many Android users to speak to each other in their own languages – albeit in a slightly robotic female voice.
The news was dominated on Wednesday by reports of the arrest of a suspected British teenage computer hacker, in connection with a range of security breaches including attacks on the website of the CIA and the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, writes John Reid, a former British cabinet minister and co-author of ‘Cyber Doctrine’ published later this month. We can expect many more such events as our security agencies struggle to address the challenges of cyberspace.
LinkedIn shares hit $92.99 as trading opened before settling to $84.43, a 87.6 per cent increase, after its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
The professional social network sold 7.84m shares for $45 each, according to a company statement on Wednesday.
More than 70m users of Sony’s online gaming network have had their names, e-mail addresses and passwords stolen by a hacker in one of the largest privacy breaches to date.
Sony announced on Tuesday that the information had been taken – six days after it closed the PlayStation Network – as it began e-mailing users of the free service with warnings to be on the lookout for scams.
Walmart is exploring ways to take on online rivals by launching a test service in one Californian city that lets shoppers order fresh food on the internet for home delivery.
The world’s biggest retailer began the “limited test” on Saturday as it looks to online commerce to offset the mediocre growth performance of its bricks-and-mortar stores in the US.
Many challenged my grim assessment early last year, when I called for America to develop a new strategy to address the kinds of cyberattacks that could cripple our nation’s infrastructure, writes Mike McConnell, director of the National Security Agency in the Clinton administration.
If there were a cyberwar, I told Congress, we would lose. The unfortunate truth is that, a year later, we are no better prepared – and the stakes have risen.
Continue reading “To win the cyberwar, we have to reinforce the cloud”
Instant messaging applications for mobile devices, such as BlackBerry Messenger, are becoming so popular that use of text messages by 15-24 year olds will fall by a fifth in many large markets including the UK, analysts predict.
Mobile Youth, a consultancy, forecasts that text, or SMS, volumes will drop by 20 per cent in the next two years in regions including the UK, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil, where BBM is particularly popular among teenagers and students.
Locking horns with the Chinese government has not been good for Google’s internet search business in China. Data released on Friday shows Google has lost market share to Baidu - its main competitor – for the fifth quarter in a row. The internet giant currently has 19.2 per cent share of the market, while Baidu has 75.8 per cent. That’ s a decline of 11.8 percentage points since the beginning of last year, when the search giant first announced its partial retreat from the mainland to Hong Kong.
But it’s not all bad news for Google. While it’s search engine numbers are declining, Google’s overall revenues from China are not.
A guest post by Ben Fenton, the FT’s chief media correspondent
The rumour that won’t go away right now is that The Times is soon not going to be behind the same kind of paywall that currently shields it and its very fine writers. If that sounds like a convoluted sentence, it is deliberately so. The situation is opaque and must be approached cautiously.
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