Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Steve Jobs,” the authorized biography of Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive written by Walter Isaacson, was the bestselling book on Amazon.com this year, according to the online retailer’s website.
That’s an impressive accomplishment considering the book was published in late October, and had less than two months to rise to the top. Jobs died Oct. 5.
Intriguingly though, while the Steve Jobs biography was one of the bestselling e-books for the Kindle, it was not THE bestselling book. That honor went to “The Hunger Games,” a young adult book originally published in 2009 that is set to become a major Hollywood movie release in March 2012.
The Steve Jobs biography was the No. 3 bestselling book for the Kindle. It was also beat out by John Grisham’s “The Litigators,” which was also published in October.
One more interesting note from the bestseller list: The parody not-for-kids book “Go the F– to Sleep” was the No. 10 bestselling print book on Amazon for the year. This is interesting because proofs of the book went viral on the Web before it was published. It turned out that rather than spoiling the surprise, the proofs fueled sales in a very big way.
Microsoft on Tuesday began wooing developers for a February opening of its first “app store” for computers powered by the US technology giant’s Windows software.
The Windows Store will open in late February when Microsoft releases a test version of its next-generation Windows 8 operating system.
It will take on Apple and Google in the booming market of fun, hip or functional programs built for smartphones, tablets, or computers.
“I think we are going to do great,” Windows Web Services vice president Antoine Leblond said as he gave developers and press a preview of the store in a San Francisco art gallery.
“The reach of Windows is absolutely huge and can’t be matched,” he continued, noting that the Microsoft operating system powers a half billion computers around the world.
Independent developers understandably devote their limited resources to making programs for platforms that promise the most potential customers, and Windows would outshine Apple gadgets and Google Android devices in that regard.
However, Windows has a meager presence when it comes to smartphones and tablets, where third-party applications such as games are typically bought.
A Google executive recently said the cloud computing market in 2012 will focus more on mobile devices and social networking in order to keep pace with businesses’ interests. Amit Singh, vice president of Google Enterprise, told eWeek that the cloud trend next year will try to move businesses more into the realm of teamwork from the era of individual production.
With the move more into social networking, Singh said Google is trying to push forward the integration ability of its social networking website Google+. Singh said businesses will start using more of a BYOD, or bring your own device, approach when it comes to using mobile devices at work. Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com said he sees the cloud helping users break through with features and capabilities they may not have had before, such as the ability to create a document on one device and view it on another.
“People do not want to be burdened by what device is holding a piece of content,” said Coffee, who added that having content that is device-neutral will be important for everyone in the business world.
Gartner’s predictions for the future of cloud computing agrees with Singh’s prediction, adding that by 2016, 50 percent of cloud-based email users will rely on a browser, tablet or mobile device instead of a desktop.
Google on Tuesday announced that more than 10 billion applications had been downloaded worldwide in its software store Android Market.
In a company blog post, Google said Android Market reached the milestone with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month after app downloads hit 6 billion in July.
Partnering with some Android developers, Google also unveiled a ten-day celebration with a selection of apps for only 10 cents each day since Tuesday.
We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012,” said Eric Chu, director of Android developer ecosystem, in the blog.
Google has been gearing up to close the gap with Apple in the mobile market. Thanks to the broader availability of smartphones and tablets running Android, the software’s mobile market share is expected to be twice as Apple’s iOS in 2011, according to data from several research companies.
In July, Apple said app downloads had surpassed 15 billion in its App Store.
New Zealand already has lush rainforests and sandy beaches, bungee jumping and scuba diving, gourmet restaurants and lively night life, even a thriving tech community that has drawn investment from the likes of Peter Thiel. (Of course, they drive on the left side of the road, but hey no place is perfect).
Now the country has something else the rest of the world does not: Facebook’s new Timeline feature.
New Zealand is getting first crack at the major redesign of the profile page. Key to the decision: It’s English speaking and very far away from Silicon Valley.
That’s according to Sam Lessin, product director of Timeline, who told the New Zealand Herald: “We chose New Zealand to be first — and I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this — primarily because it is an English-speaking country…. It’s far away from our data centers, so we can monitor speed and performance.”
It may also have something to do with the country having about 4.4 million people, 2 million of whom are on Facebook.
And just how long will the rest of the world have to wait?
“We’re definitely taking our time with this one,” Lessin said. “It will give people a chance to get excited about what they can do with it.”
via LA times
A court error on Friday offered a brief glimpse at information that Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics have tried to shield from the public during their high-stakes patent litigation.
The material appears to be less important for what it says about the companies than what it reveals about efforts to keep court proceedings secret.
In denying Apple’s bid to stop Samsung from selling its Galaxy smartphone and tablets in the United States, District Judge Lucy Koh’s ruling inadvertently included details she had intended to black out. The judge’s staff quickly realized the error, sealed the electronic document and posted a redacted version four hours later.
The fuller version, which Reuters obtained while it was publicly available, did not expose the technical inner workings of the iPad — or anything close. Rather, it contained internal company analysis about the smartphone market, as well as some details about Apple’s patent licensing relationships with other tech companies.
The lawsuit, which Apple filed in April in a San Jose, California, federal court, says Samsung’s Galaxy products “slavishly” copy the iPhone and iPad. The South Korean electronics maker says Apple’s arguments lack merit.
The case is scheduled for trial next year. The Friday ruling means Samsung can continue selling Galaxy products for now.
Sealing documents has become standard in intellectual property cases. Investors, academics and other observers have expressed concern that some judges too readily accede to litigants’ claims that documents contain trade secrets and must be kept private.
Judges have wide latitude in granting company sealing requests, and Koh has granted all of Apple and Samsung’s requests to keep documents secret in the case.
Some crucial legal briefs from both companies were kept entirely secret for months, and then released with redactions. After an inquiry from Reuters last week, Koh issued new guidelines so that redacted briefs become public much sooner.
Timothy Holbrook, an intellectual property professor at Emory Law in Atlanta who reviewed Koh’s Friday ruling at Reuters’ request, said there did not appear to be any trade secrets among the blacked-out portions.
“Most of it just seems like it was sealed out of an abundance of caution,” Holbrook said.
In an email on Monday, Koh declined to comment on a pending case. Representatives for Apple and Samsung also declined to comment.
SMARTPHONE, TABLET BATTLE
The California case is just one battleground in Apple and Samsung’s bruising legal war, which includes more than 20 cases in 10 countries as they jostle for the top spot in the smartphone and tablet markets.
Global tablet sales are expected to explode to more than 50 million in 2011. Apple, which has sold more than 30 million iPads so far, is expected to continue to dominate the market in the near term.
While Amazon.com has also entered the fray with its Kindle Fire tablet, Samsung’s Galaxy line-up is widely deemed the closest rival to the iPad in terms of capability and design.
In her 65-page ruling denying Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction against Samsung, Koh attempted to redact nearly two dozen sentences or short fragments. But because of a formatting characteristic in the prior electronic version, the redacted material can be viewed by copying text from the PDF and pasting it into another document.
The version now available to the public cannot be viewed in such a manner.
According to the redacted portions, Apple’s own studies show that existing customers are unlikely to switch from iPhones to Samsung devices. Instead, the evidence suggests an increase in sales of Samsung smartphones is likely to come at the expense of other smartphones with Android operating systems, Koh wrote.
In arguing against the injunction, Samsung — which is also a huge components supplier to Apple — said Apple’s supply cannot keep up with market demand for smartphone products. Koh recounted the argument in the redacted portions of the ruling.
But Koh then called Samsung’s argument “dubious,” given rebuttal evidence presented by Apple regarding its ability to keep up with demand in the long term.
The redacted portions also refer to licensing deals that Apple struck with other high-tech companies over one of its key patents. Issued in December 2008, the patent covers the method of scrolling documents and images on Apple’s touch-screen devices.
Apple has already licensed the patent to IBM and Nokia, according to the ruling. A technology blog, The Verge, first reported this detail on Saturday; the blog said it had been shown two statements that were redacted from the ruling.
Scant information has previously been made available about Apple’s licensing deals with Nokia or IBM.
While Apple and Nokia publicly announced a patent settlement for an undisclosed sum in June, they did not divulge any specifics, except to say the agreement resolved all litigation between the companies and that Apple would make a one-time payment to Nokia and pay future royalties. At the time, the settlement was viewed as a victory for Nokia.
There appears to be no reference to any patent-licensing deal for mobile technology between IBM and Apple either in news archives or company regulatory filings.
“Apple doesn’t license much, and it could be that they don’t want people to know who the licensees are,” said Holbrook, the IP professor.
Representatives for IBM and Nokia did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Samsung was also offered a royalty license during negotiations with Apple in November 2010, the ruling says, five months before Apple wound up suing Samsung in the United States.
Apple has brought claims against Samsung based on design patents — which protect the look and feel of a device — and so-called “utility” patents, which cover engineering innovations.
A footnote in the ruling says “it does not appear” that Apple and Samsung discussed design patents during their negotiations that preceded the lawsuit.
Yet since much of Koh’s opinion covers design patents, the mistakenly released data does not reveal much about the inner workings of the technology, said Holbrook.
“There was nothing I saw that was shocking, just stuff that is not (otherwise) available to the public,” he said.
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846.
(Reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco and Carlyn Kolker in New York; Additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington; Editing by Martha Graybow and John Wallace)
via reuters
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has won the right to petition the UK Supreme Court in his fight against extradition to Sweden.
He lost a High Court battle last month to be extradited over alleged sex offences, which he denies.
Judges refused Mr Assange permission to appeal directly to the Supreme Court – but said his case raised “a question of general public importance”.
He can now directly ask the Supreme Court to look at his case.
However, Mr Assange, who was at the London court to hear the judges’ ruling, still has no automatic right to be heard by the highest court in the UK.
He was cheered by supporters as he left the Royal Courts of Justice and, alluding to an MPs’ debate later on calls for the renegotiation of extradition rules, he said there were “many aggrieved families in the UK and other countries and in Europe struggling for justice”.
Speaking of his own case, he said: “I think that is the correct decision, and I am thankful. The long struggle for justice for me and others continues.”
Though Android Ice Cream Sandwich is only available for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus right now, it’s done enough to make us Android 2.3 users pretty dissatisfied with our perfectly decent OS. If reports are accurate, the update floodgates should be set to open – starting with the Google Nexus S.
The Google Nexus S is the former lead Android device and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus’s immediate predecessor. It’s a decent phone, with a 4-inch Super AMOLED display and a 1GHz single-core processor. It didn’t rock people’s world half as much as the Galaxy Nexus has, though.
Still, one of the key benefits of Google Nexus S ownership over the past 12 months or so has been priority updates – and that seems to be the case even with the next gen Android Ice Cream Sandwich too.
According to a number of Google+ postings, Google is in the process of testing its new OS on its old Nexus S device. How is it doing this testing? By using its own employees as guinea pigs, of course.
If you’re keen to try out the new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone, then Nokia is offering you the chance to get your hands on a handset for free thanks to the Nokia Amazing Collective. And you could even win some great gifts and free prizes, so why not sign up today at Nokia UK Facebook?
The Nokia Amazing Collective has been set up by Nokia UK to give people across the country the chance to try out the Nokia Lumia 800 free. All you have to do to be in with a chance is visit the Nokia UK Facebook page, click on the Join The Amazing Collective link at the left-hand side of the screen and then answer eight easy questions about your current smartphone usage.
Places on the Nokia Amazing Collective are limited, so sign up as soon as you can, if you want to take part and try out the first Nokia Windows Phone. You could be enjoying your own Nokia Lumia 800 handset before you know it and win some great prizes. And it’s all completely free, so why not sign up now?
More than three quarters (77 percent) of Brits prefer to buy CDs, DVDs and games online, says KPMG.
Research by the audit and taxation firm of 9,600 consumers in 31 countries revealed the UK has been quicker to adopt online shopping than other countries as the global figure for those that prefer to purchase these goods online is 65 percent.
However, when it comes to mobile banking, the UK is lagging behind with just 27 percent of Brits admitting to using their mobile phone to check their back accounts compared to 52 percent globally. This has surged dramatically since 2008 when the global figure was just under 20 percent.
Nearly three quarters (74 percent) said they were more likely to purchase flights and holidays online, while 60 percent also prefer to buy their groceries online, compared to just 21 percent in the US.
Nearly nine in ten (88 percent) Brits have downloaded an app for their mobile phone, while just over half (53 percent) of UK web users say they store their data online, which is less that the global average of 65 percent.
“From buying goods on their mobile phones to keeping up with friends on social networks, consumers are increasingly reliant on a range of technologies that perform important – yet often overlapping – tasks,” Tudor Aw, KPMG’s European head of technology, told the BBC.
A district court has denied fruit themed Apple’s attempt to get Samsung’s products banned in the US.
US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California denied Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction against Samsung, according to the Wall Street Journal. The two rival companies are scheduled to go to trial in the case on 30 July, 2012.
This gives Samsung a long time to sell its hardware, and critically, the holiday sales period that surrounds Christmas.
Last week Samsung was somewhat victorious in Australia when it ensured that it could provide local shoppers with its gear in that country, after having seen off other similar challenges from Apple.
The US market, though, is much bigger than the Australian market, making this a key victory for Samsung and probably something of a blow to Apple, which has always said that it vigorously defends its designs, designs that it claims Samsung has copied.
“It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas,” Apple said both when it launched its legal action against Samsung and ever since.
We’ve asked Samsung for comment.
Source: inquier
He is the “other Steve”, but to geeks around the world, he is the real deal; the man who practically invented the personal computer and changed the world. Steve Wozniak, supreme geek of the 1970s and the maker of the Apple II computer which brought about a worldwide computer revolution, was in Bangalore on Saturday to speak to a bunch of young entrepreneurs and achievers of the Young Presidents Organisation who wanted to hear the story of the most-loved technology brand in the world — Apple.
Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer (now Apple, Inc) in April 1976 along with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne. Both Apple I – the company’s first product – and the hugely successful Apple II (arguably the world’s first fully-loaded personal computer) were designed by Wozniak making him – and not Jobs – the darling of geeks around the world.
obs may have created the Apple brand, but it was Wozniak’s initial work on the company’s first two products that made Apple a multi-million dollar company within a year of its founding. Now 61 years old, Wozniak is still an Apple employee with a minimum pay and goes around the world representing the company – giving speeches and mentoring young engineers.
Wozniak took time out during his Bangalore visit to speak to Sunday MIDDAY. Excerpts from the interview:
What brings you to India?
Oh, I was invited by the Young Presidents Organisation to address their group (in Bangalore) and they had gotten in touch via all my speech-people. This is the first time I have come to India; in fact, this is the first time I have been invited which is strange because about two years ago, I did three keynotes all around the world for Infosys (Infosys Technologies, the Bangalore-headquartered software firm). And I kept telling all the top executives that I would love to come to India some day and I never got an invitation until this one.
When you see these young guys in India, do you believe they will break the mould of India being the backoffice hub for the world when it comes to developing world-changing software products?
Yes, I do. And I have a reason. I see a lot of technical enthusiasts, a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley. I see a lot of Indian people. I see a lot of people from Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore. But look at the Indians. They are bright, they are enthusiastic, they are hard-working. They have all the attributes to become successful in Silicon Valley. Some of the great engineers and technologists in Apple and all the other big companies like Google and Microsoft are Indians. So clearly they have got some inner skills and abilities. I think then it just means having a sense of clarity and the level of confidence, and they could make it big.
But is being at Silicon Valley so important for technology innovation?
Not at all. Microsoft did not start in Silicon Valley; it started way up north in Seattle. Nor did Apple. And they could have been anywhere in the world. Infosys is “elsewhere in the world” company. So there are ways that technology companies can start off today with the Internet. A lot of our (Apple’s) developers are anywhere in the world. And we hire engineering groups in India; in Russia, everywhere.
What is it about America then that all these young geeks set up businesses and they become super-successful… Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter…
You know, there are already a lot of people around you that have done it. And that gives you the confidence to feel you can do it too and not feel scared.
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, with Senator Charles Schumer and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who inscribed a wall at the company’s Madison Avenue sales office on Friday. -Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Facebook announced on Friday that it planned to open an engineering office in New York City in early 2012, establishing the company’s first such outpost beyond the West Coast.
At a gathering in Facebook’s sales office on Madison Avenue, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Senator Charles E. Schumer joined Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in hailing the move as a testament to the city’s growing technological profile.
“We want the next Facebook to start here,” Mr. Bloomberg said. High-tech jobs in the city have grown by more than a third over the past five years, the mayor added, noting his goal to make New York “the world’s No. 1 hub for information technology and social media.”
Several companies in Silicon Valley have established a presence in Manhattan in recent years, and this year, Twitter and Yelp opened local offices.
Ms. Sandberg would not estimate how many workers the new Facebook engineering office might employ, but said the company as a whole planned to add thousands of jobs in the next year. The new office will be led by Serkan Piantino, an engineering manager who previously oversaw the team behind the company’s News Feed.
“This isn’t a satellite office,” Mr. Piantino said. “This is going to be a core part of our engineering stack.”
HTC has officially released Rhyme in the Indian market today. Priced at INR 27,499 (MRP – 29,990), it has been available for a much lower price of INR 24,800 for quite some time. But, we believe that it going to change soon. All the major cellphone manufacturers are correcting their pricing to take the increasing load of poor rupee value and it has impacted the pricing pattern deeply.
Results are clearly before us, a single core Gingerbread smartphone with 3.7 inch display has been priced in the range of some time old Samsung Galaxy S II, which features a dual core processor and 4.27 inch Super AMOLED Plus display along with several other great features.
To refresh your memory, HTC Rhyme features a 5MP rear camera, 0.3MP front shooter, 768MB RAM and 1GB internal memory with 1600 mAh battery. Rhyme package in India comes with Charm indicator, and tangle free headset in the box.
Unveiled with much fanfare at its global even in London in October, Nokia’s Asha phones were announced in India. The phones, Asha 300 and Asha 200, run on Symbian S40 operating software. They are a crucial part of Nokia’s strategy in India and African countries. While Asha 200 will be available from mid-December, Asha 300 will hit Indian market in early January.
Security Researchers have revealed that the hackers behind the Duqu Trojan horse virus, a sibling of Stuxnet, have shut down their operation and wiped all of their command and control servers, leaving very little for security experts to investigate further.
Kaspersky Labs analysed a number of Duqu command and control servers and discovered that the virus was in operation from as early as November 2009, despite it having only been discovered in October of this year. This is a worrying revelation, as it means that computers and servers might have been infected for years with malware that still has yet to be discovered.
The researchers also found that a global cleanup took place earlier this year on 20 October, a day or two after it was revealed to the world that the virus existed. All of the command and control servers were wiped clean, right back until the 2009 infection, leaving little trace that anything had ever happened.
This is interesting, as it means that the hackers behind the virus were particularly intent on keeping it a secret and effectively pulled the plug as soon as a whisper of it got out to the public. The fact that the people behind Duqu could do this so quickly and effectively raises questions about how powerful they are and how much money and how many personnel they have at their disposal. Since Duqu’s relative Stuxnet is widely believed to have been created by a government, it is not unreasonable to think it likely that Duqu had similar origins.
Some things the researchers did find, however, include the likelihood that the servers were hacked through brute-forcing the root password, as opposed to the OpenSSH 4.3 zero-day theory, and the hackers upgraded OpenSSH 4.3 to version 5 immediately after gaining control of the servers, suggesting there is some importance in the newer version of the software.
Source: The Inquirer
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange has warned, “You’re all screwed,” when it comes to smartphone and gadget monitoring and surveillance.
Users of the Iphone, Blackberry and Gmail are among those who are supposedly ‘screwed’ because more than 150 organisations can monitor data on mobile devices. Assange made the statement at a press conference while unveiling the Wikileaks ‘Spy Files’ project.
Wikileaks said, “Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries.”
“It sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, mass interception systems, built by Western intelligence contractors, including for ‘political opponents’ are a reality.”
Assange said, “Who here has an iPhone? Who here has a BlackBerry? Who here uses Gmail? Well, you’re all screwed.”
“The reality is, intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all those products.”
The organisations apparently have the ability to track devices, intercept messages and listen to phone calls, according to The Press Association.
It might sound like a complete invasion of privacy but the goings on are legal according to Assange and are leading to a “totalitarian surveillance state”.
He said the US, UK, Australia, South Africa and Canada are all developing “spying systems”, and the data is collected and sold on to “dictators and democracies alike”.
The publication of the ‘Spy Files’ consisting of 287 documents in collaboration with the web site spyfiles.org is a “mass attack on this mass surveillance industry,” added Assange. µ
Source: The Inquirer
The mighty Angry Birds has come to the Nokia Lumia 800 and it’s better than ever. Looking fantastic on the stunning 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, we’ve recorded a quick hands-on video preview to whet your appetite for our full Angry Birds on Nokia Windows Phone review, coming tomorrow.
We doubt there are many people left that haven’t heard of Angry Birds, but if you’re one of them, here’s the deal. A pack of evil green pigs has run off with your eggs and it’s up to you, the angry birds, to take the battle to the swine, smash their defences and bring home the eggs and bacon.
While this amazing game has long been one of our favourites and by far the best smartphone game you can play, it looks better than ever now thanks to the stunning Nokia Lumia 800, with the gorgeous 3.7-inch AMOLED ClearBlack screen showing the great cartoony graphics to their best effect.
We’ve got a full review of Angry Birds coming for you soon, but to tide you over until then, we’ve recorded a quick hands-on video of Angry Birds on the Nokia Lumia 800, giving a glimpse into how great the game looks on the Nokia Windows Phone, thanks to the unbeatable Windows Phone 7.5 OS.
Young Steve Jobs
An April 1976 contract establishing Apple and signed by the technology giant’s three founding partners — Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak and Ronald Wayen — will go under the hammer at auction house Sotheby’s here next month and is expected to fetch about $150,000.
The “two typed documents” of the three-page “Apple Computer Company Partnership Agreement” dated 1 April 1976 will be auctioned by Sotheby’s on 13 December. It is estimated to fetch anywhere between $100,000-150,000.
Along with the original Apple partnership agreement, an amendment dated 12 April dissolving Wayne’s share in Apple will also be put up for auction.
“This is a foundation document in terms of financial history, social history and technological history,” said Richard Austin, the head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s. It is the “founding document of the company that has revolutionised technology, business, personal computing and the world.”
Wayne’s withdrawal as partner was documented by a County of Santa Clara statement, which is also part of the Sotheby’s lot. Wayne received $ 800 for relinquishing his 10 per cent ownership of Apple, according to the document
He subsequently received another payment of $1,500.
The original partnership agreement is in three pages (8½ x 11 in; 216 x 279 mm) with “small staple holes and crease in upper left corners.”
The trio met on April 1, 1976 in Wayne’s apartment to draft and sign the partnership agreement for the Apple Computer Company, with Wozniak’s friend Randy Wigginton standing by.
Facebook, the world’s largest Internet social network, is preparing for a initial public stock offering next year, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Facebook is exploring raising $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday. It hopes the offering will value the company at more than $100 billion, according to WSJ, which first reported the story.
Facebook’s Chief Financial Officer, David Ebersman, had discussed a public float with Silicon Valley bankers but founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg had not decided on any terms and his plans could change, the Journal said.
The social network, which now claims more than 800 million members after seven years of explosive growth, has not selected bankers to manage what would be a very closely watched IPO. But it had drafted an internal prospectus and was ready at any moment to pull the IPO trigger, the Journal cited people familiar with the matter as saying.
At $100 billion valuation, the company started by Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room would have double the valuation of Hewlett-Packard, the Journal said.
A formal S-1 filing could come before the end of the year, though nothing was decided, the newspaper added.
A Facebook representative declined to comment.
Silicon Valley start-ups have this year begun to test investor appetite for a new wave of dotcoms. If it does debut in 2012, Facebook’s IPO would dwarf that of any other dotcom waiting to go public.
“Farmville” creator Zynga has filed for an IPO of up to $1 billion. In November, daily deals service Groupon debuted with much fanfare, only to plunge below its IPO price within weeks.
LinkedIn and Pandora are now also trading significantly below the levels their stocks reached during their public debuts earlier this year.
Facebook has become one of the world’s most popular Web destinations, challenging established companies such as Google Inc and Yahoo Inc for consumers’ online time and for advertising dollars.
Facebook does not disclose its financial results, but a source familiar with the situation told Reuters earlier this year that the company’s revenue in the first six months of 2011 doubled year-on-year to $1.6 billion.
Eric Feng, a former partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who now runs social-networking site Erly.com, said that the cash Facebook will get in an IPO would allow them to make more acquisitions and refine or work on new projects, such as a rumored-Facebook phone or a netbook.
Twitter has acquired a start-up company that makes software to improve security and privacy for smartphones and other mobile devices. With its acquisition of Whisper Systems, Twitter gains technology to bolster security of its fast-growing microblogging service and gets a pair of highly-respected experts in the field of online security.
Whisper Systems was co-founded last year by security experts Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson. “The Whisper Systems team is joining Twitter starting today,” Twitter said in an emailed statement on Monday. “As part of our fast-growing engineering team, they will be bringing their technology and security expertise to Twitter’s products and services. We’re happy to have Moxie and Stuart onboard.”
Twitter did not disclose a price for the deal and declined to comment beyond its statement. Twitter, which has more than 100 million active users, allows people to send short, 140-character, messages to groups of followers.
The service has become a popular communications tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses. It has also played a role in several geopolitical events, such as the past year’s uprisings in the middle east, by allowing dissidents to organize and communicate. But some privacy advocates have warned that certain governments also have used Twitter to help monitor dissidents and activists.
China’s top economic planner has allocated 660 million yuan (103.6 million U.S. dollars) of special funds to guide cloud computing research, as part of the government’s efforts to boost the sector’s development, the China Securities Journal reported Friday.
The funds, the first batch of their kind, were designated to 15 cloud computing programs scattered across the country’s five cloud-computing pilot cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Wuxi, according to the report.
Internet giants Alibaba and Baidu received more than 100 million yuan to lead the projects while several other companies, including Shanghai East-China Computer Co. Ltd and Beijing Teamsun Technology Co. Ltd, received some 15 million to 20 million yuan, the report quoted an unnamed source as saying.
The news gave a brief lift to related stocks despite the downbeat sentiment on the broader market. Stocks of East-China Computer Co. Ltd, rose 2.23 percent in the morning trading to end the session at 23.4 yuan per share.
The business-led projects will experience a five-year assessment period, through which the National Development and Reform Commission will follow and evaluate the process to decide whether to inject more money, according to the source.
The report also said China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has drafted a framework document on the development of cloud computing during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015).
Tang Gang, an official with the MIIT, said China will see the effects of applying the technology by the end of the 2011-2015 period, but its large-scale application won’t emerge till the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020).
According to estimates by Orient Securities, the cloud computing sector in China could be worth 750 billion to 1 trillion yuan over the next five years, about 15 percent of the value of strategic emerging industries.
Motorola is building up on their Droid army. After recently unveiling the Droid RAZR across the globe, images and specifications of Motorola’s next handset have been leaked online through Droid Life. This time around it does not come in the form of blurry cam images, but rather official shots of the smartphone. The Droid 4 looks very alike to the Droid RAZR with the only difference being that the former has a slide out keyboard. The layout of the keyboard appears to be really good with the keys appearing to be well spaced. From the image, we can see that there is a white backlight that glows between the spaces of the keys.
Apart from images, the specifications of the Motorola Droid 4 have also been revealed. The handset will run on Android Gingerbread and powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor. Here is a quick look at the rest of the highlighted specifications:
- Android 2.3 Gingerbread with added Motorola features
- 1.2GHz Dual-Core Processor
- 1GB RAM
- 4.0-inch qHD display with Corning Gorilla glass
- 8 Megapixel rear camera with 1080p video recording
- HD front facing camera for video calling
- 4G LTE
- 1,785mAh battery
NASA to launch new Mars rover
Posted on: November 26, 2011
NASA will launch its latest Mars rover, Curiosity, on Saturday.
It is the agency’s most ambitious mission yet to discover if life ever existed on the red planet. The Rover lands next August and will spend two years studying the planet.
Top 10 Android phones in India
Posted on: November 26, 2011
Dell has officially launched its Windows 7 based tablet – Latitude ST. The tablet PC comes with security and productivity features that will entice the business users.
The price of the tablet starts at Rs 36,000, with up to 32 GB SSD which can be upgraded to 64 and 128 GB SSD Storage.
The tablet comes with a 10 inch multi-touch display with a stylus. You can also get a docking station with keyboard. The tablet uses Intel Atom chipset with 2 GB of RAM and has front and rear (5 megapixel) cameras with HD recording facility. Besides, it connects to projectors, printers, and other devices using built-in ports. For protection it comes with rubberised bumper, and anti-glare Corning Gorilla Glass screen.
There are several inbuilt applications for people working in education, healthcare and some other familiar business applications too.
The tablet will also offer controls that IT administrators want on employee PCs. Other specifications include 10.1 inch WXGA LED capacitive multi-touch screen, digital pen display with a resolution of 1280 x 800, WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth 4.0, A- GPS, USB 2.0, SD Memory card reader, HDMI. The tablet weighs 816 g.
Obama joins Google+
Posted on: November 25, 2011
Click here to go to Obama for America on Google+
Google+, the Internet search giant’s rival to Facebook, has a high-profile new member: US President Barack Obama.
“Obama for America,” the president’s 2012 reelection campaign, created an official Barack Obama page on Google+ on Wednesday.
We’re still kicking the tires and figuring this out, so let us know what you’d like to see here and your ideas for how we can use this space to help you stay connected to the campaign,” it said in its first message. Last month, Obama added popular microblogging platform Tumblr to the Internet arsenal for his White House campaign. During his 2008 presidential run, Obama relied heavily on the Internet for organising, fundraising and communicating and he is expected to do so again during his reelection bid. The White House is an active user of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and other online services.
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