News: Tech News Round-up

The Daily and the iPad 2

This week saw the first edition of the The Daily being released, the first national daily news publication created from the ground up for iPad. The Daily is the first application made available on the App Store as a subscription. Users will be billed directly to an iTunes account, with costs of $0.99 a week or $39.99 for an annual subscription.

At The Daily's launch press event, a Reuters eyewitness reported about an apparent iPad 2 sighting, complete with “front-facing camera at the top edge of the glass screen”. Reuters, not normally known to indulge in rumours, also stated that a source with knowledge of the device confirmed its existence, adding that other features could be included on the final release model.

In related iPad 2 news, local retailer of the original iPad, Incredible Connection, announced that 70% of their iPad stock sold out in three days. In the press release Incredible Connection CEO, Dave Miller, also interestingly stated: “Version 2, due out in America at the end of February, will have both flash and cameras.” Miller’s statement fuels the general speculation that the iPad 2 will indeed see the light of day at the end of the month.

New IP for a new web age

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced yesterday that it has allocated the last remaining IPv4 addresses from a central pool, to the world’s five Regional Internet Registries (RIR), which are the organisations that manages IP addresses in different regions.

These RIR will assign the last IPv4 addresses within their own regions until these run out, which according to a blogpost by Vince Cerf, chief internet evangelist at Google and one of the fathers of the internet, could be as soon as the beginning of 2012.

Now the way forward is the adoption of the new IP, IPv6, which will enable a pool of internet addresses which is a billion-trillion times larger than the total pool of IPv4 addresses, which was approximately 4.3 billion. The new amount of unique IP addresses equates to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.

2.8 billion minutes of Facebook chats via Windows Live Messenger

According to a blogpost by Piero Sierra, group program manager for Windows Live, up until November last year Windows Live Messenger (WLM) accounted for more than 1.5 billion minutes of Facebook (FB) chat. Now the number of users that have connected WLM to FB has increased by over 75% to almost 18 million, taking the amount of chat session to 440 million with 2.8 billion minutes talked. The reason for this user increase being that Facebook chat from Messenger became available in additional countries.

Redmond also announced that Facebook chat is now available to “over 75 million more Messenger customers worldwide, wherever Facebook is available.” So these figures looks set to increase even further.

Ovi Store updated

Nokia has announced a new updated to the Ovi Store this week. This patch release contains some fixes as well as enhancements, such as a Search fix, enabling more relevant searches on all platforms (the likes of Symbian^3 and Symbian Series 60).

The Finnish manufacturer has also stated that users of Symbian^3-powered smartphones, including the Nokia C7, C6-01 and N8 will receive an Ovi Store client upgrade over “the next few days” that will also include various minor enhancements and fixes.

Brits heart BlackBerry

According to BlackBerryBlast!, a report by the GfK Group, one of the world’s biggest market research companies, has shown that Research In Motion’s (RIM’s) BlackBerry devices were the number one selling smartphones in the UK for 2010.

During 2010 BlackBerry smartphones accounted for 28.2% of all smartphone sales in the UK and for 36% of smartphone sales during Christmas, with more than half a million devices sold.

Not only are the actual phones sales doing well, but also the software and apps running on them. BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) is now employed by 33 million BlackBerry users around the globe, which is a 500% year-over-year increase.

Blue hedgehog for world’s biggest social network

According to the Los Angeles Times, Sega would not have been the only company to have a blue hedgehog mascot in the form of Sonic (who coincidentally turns 20 on 23 June 2011). Facebook at one stage considered a hedgehog mascot themselves.

The paper reported that Napster founder and former Facebook president, Sean Parker, had a Facebook mascot concept in mind, featuring a likeable blue hedgehog.

A former Facebook employee, Ezra Callahan, wrote about it on the popular Q&A website Quora. “True story: in the very early days of Facebook, Sean Parker wanted to make Facebook’s mascot a hedgehog. We had early plans to build a local business program around each college on the site (a Yelp-like service similar to what later became Facebook Pages). As part of that, Sean wanted us to send each participating business a little blue stuffed hedgehog. Matt Cohler and I even sourced a couple companies to make them…The local business program was shelved mid 2005 (we decided a revenue product wasn’t as important after the Accel financing), and Sean let his dream of the hedgehog go with it.”

Tech News Round-up - Web edition

Related Articles

Most Read Articles

Have Your Say