- FriendFeed accelerated the move towards truly real-time search engines, with the introduction of real-time, constantly updating search results. As companies including Twitter, Facebook, Google and even Microsoft jockey to capture the audience for real-time search, FriendFeed remains a small player, but a technological innovator.
- The woman accused of cyberbullying a 13-year-old into committing suicide had her conviction overturned by a federal judge. Lori Drew and a group of teenagers had harassed Megan Meier by through pseudonymous accounts on MySpace, leading Ms Meier to hang herself.
- Microsoft withdrew the new ad for Internet Explorer 8 that had been roundly criticsed as tasteless, and described by some as “the worst technology commercial ever”. The ad, which was meant to highlight a feature in IE8 that lets users surf the web without their browsing history being recorded, featured a woman projectile vomiting after she saw what her husband had been looking at online.
July 3rd, 2009 6:00am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- The Palm Pre is heading for the UK, with O2 close to announcing an exclusive deal to sell the well-received smartphone, according to the Guardian. Meanwhile, an analyst said he believed Palm was on track to deliver 1m of the handsets to Sprint in its first quarter, well above most most estimates.
- A California appeals court ruled that MySpace - and by extension other internet service providers - could not be held liable if paedophiles use its service to make contact with minors. The NewsCorp social networking site is guaranteed more time in the headlines on Thursday when Lori Drew, the mother convicted on three misdemeanour counts for online harrassment of her daughter’s friend, who later committed suicide, faces sentencing.
- Facebook will begin encouraging users to make more of their personal information public to everyone on the web, a shift that moves the company into more direct competition with micro-messaging service Twitter.
July 2nd, 2009 5:00am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- Mozilla released the latest version of its Firefox internet browser, warming up a battle between competing browsers that is dramatically increasing the speed with which web pages are viewed. The 3.5 version of the Firefox software was released to the public on Tuesday, with a capability of loading web pages more than twice as fast as its 3.0 predecessor, thanks to advances in JavaScript, the scripting language.
- The Chinese government backed away from its Wednesday deadline for new computers sold in the country to come equipped with Green Dam/Youth escort, an internet filter ostensibly aimed at pornography sites that also blocks users from reaching some Web pages devoted to politically sensitive topics. While authorities said they would continue to move forward with the initiative, computer companies were encouraged and said strong domestic opposition and international pressure might shelve the harsh controls for good. Continue reading "techfile 1.07.09"
July 1st, 2009 6:02am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN, picked as the nonprofit group’s chief executive Rod Beckstrom, who until earlier this year served as cyber-security czar at the US Department of Homeland Security. Like his predecessors, Mr Beckstrom didn’t accomplish much there, but it later emerged he had a skeleton staff and equivalent funding. ICANN is as close to a governing body as the internet gets, but its core mission is minding the process by which Website names and numeric addresses are assigned.
- Some early buyers of Windows 7 will get it for the knock-down price of $49.99. Rob Enderle thought the limited-time special offer was a direct response to the $29 Apple is charging for an upgrade to Snow Leopard. Michael Gartenberg called it a “missed opportunity” to give all Vista users the chance to move beyond the much-maligned operating system. Continue reading "techfile 26.6.09"
June 26th, 2009 6:00am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- Apple’s new iPhone 3G S, which costs an unsubsidised $599 to buy in the 16Gb version, costs only $179 to make, according to iSuppli. The research firm took the phone apart to price its parts and found Toshiba provided the most expensive component - the flash memory at $24.
- Google unveiled a public trial of a key piece of its mobile internet strategy - an extension of the AdSense network to mobile app developers. Developers will be able to include adverts in their apps targeted by keyword, demographics and location. This potentially gives developers access to the entire base of AdSense advertisers, posing a big challenge to specialist mobile ad networks like AdMobs.
- Seagate Technology, which has cut jobs and salaries and restructured to combat slumping hard-drive sales, may have turned a corner. In a trading update, it raised its sales expectations for the current quarter to between $2.2bn and $2.3bn and predicted the industry would sell 120m hard drives, compared to its earlier estimate of 114m. Continue reading "techfile 25.06.09"
June 25th, 2009 6:00am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- A Tennessee hospital has confirmed it carried out a liver transplant on Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive. The Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis said Mr Jobs was “the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available. Mr Jobs is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis.”
- Intel and Nokia unveiled plans to work together to create a type of mobile computing device beyond today’s smartphones and netbooks. The move takes Intel a step further towards a breakthrough into the highly prized mobile phone market. Nokia typically works with potential suppliers on joint research for several years before deciding to adopt a particular technology. Continue reading "techfile 24.06.09"
June 24th, 2009 5:26am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- Steve Jobs has quietly returned as active chief executive to Apple after nearly six months on medical leave. Mr Jobs was quoted in a press release announcing that the company sold more than 1m units of the new iPhone 3G S in its first three days on the market. The subtle move by Apple came just days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago, in a move to help him recover from ongoing complications from an earlier bout of pancreatic cancer.
- At the same time as the launch of the 3G S, Apple had released a souped-up Safari 4.0 and claimed the title of fastest browser. But for how long? Mozilla has just issued the release candidate for Firefox 3.5, which it says is twice as fast at loading pages as 3.0 . The browser race is truly about speed these days.
- Samsung has announced a new solid-state drive (SSD) that it says will give netbook makers more flexibility in design than provided by standard hard-drives. The SSD, in 16Gb, 32GB and 64Gb Flash memory flavours, has a 3Gb per second interface and is nearly 80 per cent smaller than a standard 2.5-inch hard-disk drive.
June 23rd, 2009 6:00am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- The Federal Communications Commission said it would look into the exclusive ties in the US that have limited some mobile handsets to particular operators. The promise came as AT&T prepared to welcome another spate of new customers, thanks to its exclusive deal to carry the iPhone in the US. Three students were the first to start lining up to buy the iPhone 3G S in New York, arriving 24 hours before the official Friday morning launch of the device. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicted sales of 500,000 this weekend. Continue reading "techfile 19.6.09"
June 19th, 2009 5:00am in Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- After reported intervention by the US State department, Twitter delayed a scheduled maintenance outage so that its service would be available to help disseminate the message from protesters in Iran. With journalists there operating under increasingly heavy restrictions, the micro-blogging service has come to play an important role.
- How do you salvage a former internet star that has been flirting with irrelevance? Sack nearly a third of the staff. That was the first move by new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta on Tuesday as he tried to bring entrepreneurial drive back to the social networking site. Continue reading "techfile 17.6.09"
June 17th, 2009 5:00am in Tech, Techfile | Permalink | Comment
- Facebook, which overtook its social networking rival MySpace in global users last year, has now surpassed it in the US, according to the comScore research firm. Facebook users almost doubled in the space of a year to 70.28m, while MySpace members fell 5 per cent to 70.26m.
- Mobile payments are becoming a hot area for investment. San Francisco-based Boku has launched with an announcement of $13m in funding from Benchmark Capital, Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures. It also said it had acquired Paymo and Mobillcash, two other mobile payments companies. In March, Nokia made a $70m investment in Obopay. Continue reading "techfile 16.6.09"
June 16th, 2009 6:00am in Hardware, Internet, Techfile | Permalink | Comment
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