News: Tech News Round-up - Facebook wants to own the Face name

Facebook shows a different face

According to TechCrunch, the world’s most popular social networking destination, Facebook, is pursuing legal action towards Teachbook for using a similar name. This comes after the social networking giant forced Placebook to change its name.

Facebook is also seeking to register the word ‘Face’ as a trademark, taking over this trademark application from a British company called CIS Internet Limited, which ran a website called Faceparty.com.

The first opposition to this trademark application came from Aaron Greenspan, Mark Zuckerberg’s (Facebook CEO and co-founder) classmate at Harvard who claims to have played a role in creating Facebook.

This claim was however settled. Greenspan and his company Think Computer owns a copyright for the name of its mobile payments app, FaceCash.

A number of other companies may face legal action if Facebook gets its way, even Apple’s new video calling feature on the iPhone 4 is called FaceTime.

Gmail users talk up a storm

This week Google launched a new service which allows Gmail users to make calls directly to phones utilising Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. This latest offering is proving to be an instant hit and looks to be heading down a different path than Google Wave which was given the axe this month.

“Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours! Thanks to everyone using this new feature,” the company tweeted yesterday.

At present this service is only available in the US.

New Intel chips to boost notebooks

According to Macworld, Intel’s next-generation notebook chips will boast a number of new features such as a graphics performance boost as well as the ability to play Blu-ray 3D movies.

Notebooks equipped with processors that are based on the Sandy Bridge architecture (which will go into production later this year) will be able to play Blu-ray 3D movies while preserving battery life.

Notebooks powered by these new chips could become available during the first half of 2011 the company says.

New AMD GPU names revealed

AMD this week released its latest Catalyst graphics driver suite (Catalyst 10.8) bringing some new features and improvements to its GPUs. According to VR-Zone, Catalyst 10.8 also lists various new codenames that most likely refer to Southern Islands (the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 Series of GPUs) products.

Some of these codenames are Cayman, Antilles, Blackcomb, Barts, Whistler, Seymour, Caicos and Caspian.

Microsoft beefing up Hotmail

Microsoft will add ActiveSync support to Hotmail by 30 August. According to ZDNet, the new functionality will allow Hotmail users to receive push e-mail on their phones and other devices.

ActiveSync will also enable Hotmail users to sync their contacts and calendars across their iPhones, iPod Touch devices, Android phones as well as any Windows Phone 7 Series mobiles.

No royalties for H.264 video coding standard

MPEG LA, which is the group that oversees licensing for a number of Internet media standards, this week announced that Internet broadcast content using the H.264 video coding standard will remain free of royalty fees for the entire life of the license.

A previous announcement from MPEG LA stated that it wasn’t going to charge royalties for such video through to 31 December 2015 and the latest announcement means that no royalties will be charged for such video after that time.

Tech News Round-up - Facebook wants to own the Face name

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