Amazon buys Touchco

Amazon has purchased Touchco, a company specialising in touch-screen technology, in an apparent move to develop a new Kindle that would be able to compete directly with Apple’s iPad. According to the New York Times, Touchco’s six employees will be incorporated into Amazon’s Kindle hardware division, known as Lab126, which is located in Cupertino in California, also the home-base of Apple.

Google and NSA team up

The Washington Post has reported that Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) have joined forces in order to investigate the series of attacks from hackers that the internet search giant suffered in China. The ultimate goal of this partnership is to make Google and its users more secure, to prevent similar attacks from occurring in the future.

A million+ downloads of OVI Maps downloads in a week

Downloads of Nokia's new free version of its popular OVI Maps, that features free walk and drive navigation for its smartphones, surpassed the million mark in the first week of the services' availability. In related news, Nokia has released a clever new mobile racing game on its OVI Store. The free OVI Maps racing game might feature some pretty average graphics, but what sets it apart is the fact that it uses data from OVI Maps and enables you to construct tracks based on those maps. You can race around a virtual replica of your own neighbourhood which seems like a pretty cool idea.

New processor technology from Intel

Intel has launched the world’s first 25-nanometer (nm) NAND technology, that will allow for a more cost-effective way of increasing storage capacity in devices like smartphones and the latest solid-state drives (SSDs). This means we might actually start to see bigger capacity and more affordable SSDs soon.

Top three smartphone sellers in 2009

Sales figures from 2009 show that Nokia again topped world smartphone sales with 39% share of the market, selling around 68 million smartphones. RIM placed second by selling almost 35 million BlackBerry devices, capturing almost 20% of the market. Apple was third by selling over 25 million iPhones, translating to an almost 15% market share. The remaining share of the market was taken up by HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Palm and the rest of the also-rans.