Facebook revamped the pages businesses can set up on its online social network, providing a new way for brands to promote their goods to Facebook's 845 million users. The new feature lets businesses, as well as celebrities and bands, create self-contained mini websites within Facebook using the Timeline format Facebook introduced for its users' profile pages earlier this year.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced plans to raise $5 billion in an IPO expected to value the company at between $75 billion and $100 billion. The introduction of Timeline for businesses comes ahead of a big event Facebook is holding in New York City on Wednesday to introduce various new services for marketers. Businesses can set up pages on Facebook for free, but the idea is that companies whose pages experience a lot of customer interest might be interested in advertising on the service as well.

The world's No. 1 social network is ramping up efforts to attract the attention and budgets of large companies and advertisers ahead of its initial public offering. Facebook generated $3.7 billion in revenue last year, with 85 percent of it from advertising.

Get ready all you consumers for your first taste of the future of Windows. Microsoft announced Wednesday it’s rolling out a fresh preview of Windows 8, and this one, called the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, is for everyone to try. This Metro-styling interface is not your father’s desktop OS. It’s not even your big brother’s desktop operating system. It looks and works differently — at least most of the time — than all Windows that have come before it (though you can still find a more familiar-looking OS just a mouse move or gesture away). The OS is designed to run on standard Windows PCs (anything that ran Windows 7) and ARM-based devices — think tablets.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview is quite a bit different from the developers version released last year. All parts of it have been touched, said Sinofsky, and improved in Windows 8. “We have made over 100,000 code changes to Windows 8. So for many people, this is a whole new product,” said Sinofsky. He also said the OS is “alive at a glance” and that it can work from entry-level to hard-core users. It can scale across use scenarios and will work with apps. Apps will work together “to get richer.” One app plus another app will be like three apps, said Sinofsky.

Microsoft started planning Windows 8 before Windows 7 was delivered, so devices that would support it didn’t even exist, said Julie Larson-Green Corporate VP for the Windows Management Program. They actually walked around the halls of Microsoft with cardboard cut-outs to try and get a feel for how the Windows 8 tablet should work.

During the tablet demo, Larson zipped through the Metro-style interface to show how “fast and fluid” it is. A quick look at Internet Explorer in Windows 8 Consumer Preview shows how different the experience is than what you find on the standard Windows desktops. Windows 8 also introduces the concept of share contracts that apps use to work with each other. Microsoft used this portion of the demo to pitch its cloud-services: SkyDrive, which is pretty deeply integrated into Windows 8. We also got a preview of some of the upcoming Windows 8 hardware, including Microsoft partner systems from Lenovo, Samsung, Acer and HP. We saw an next-gen Ultrabook with a touch screen, and Lenovo’s Yoga foldable, touch-screen laptop. All were running Windows 8.

Those who choose to operate with both the MacBook and the iPad may feel the urge to streamline their processes and migrate towards one device for both work and play. So, the question boils down to: Can my iPad really replace my laptop? Unfortunately (or fortunately), the answer is both yes and no. While increased expansion of iCloud and the apps it can control radically changes exactly what can and cannot be stored on a tablet device, there are plenty of caveats to consider. Furthermore, those who use their electronics for business typically have software demands that can’t be sated by a relatively professional app suite. The multiple factors involved makes the idea of living laptop-less a little more complex than at first blush.

Those familiar with Mac OS should also be familiar with Pages, and rightfully so. Apple’s sanctioned writing application has undergone multiple improvements since its first iteration on the original iPad, and it’s become quite effective when used in tandem with iCloud — you could upload a document into the cloud and edit it from nearly any device you can think of seamlessly and in practically no time at all. The result is a fully functioning text-editing suite that keeps the end product in mind — whether it’s including visual references in reports or creating fully styled documents. For those who are interested in a more minimalist (and inexpensive) approach, Clean Writer is a bare bones text interface that can be connected to cloud applications or pushed to other major platforms, such as WordPress for seamless posting to a blog or website. And with a price that’s less than a cup of coffee, Clean Writer has all of the necessary utilities for full-time writers on a tight budget.

If you’re looking to port a traditional laptop experience into you text editor, Elements is a great Dropbox-powered text editor that actually works with a viable and portable file system. In short, you never have to deal with scrolling through massive lists of documents to get to what you’re looking for. Simply group all related files together within Elements and prioritize them for easy access. There’s no place to start better in talking about business for iPad than with the Salesforce application. It’s no secret that Salesforce is the CRM du jour for small businesses and entrepreneurs, particularly for its in-depth integration into popular apps and its all-in-one style delivery. Now, all of the power of the application is available for the iPad — making the tablet more like a portable business command center. Sales can be imported directly in real time, and recorded through the Salesforce CRM to be accessed virtually anywhere — the ultimate business workflow if you’re looking for speed.

For those who are more interested in keeping your finances in check, Kashoo is definitely the strongest accounting application out on the market. This app allows you to generate and send invoices, keep track of expenses, visualize spending and generate in-depth financial reports — all from the free edition that comes with the app download. For those looking for a heftier suite, $10 a month will gain you access to Kashoo Premium — and along with it comes full import and integration with FreshBooks, bank servers and unlimited users for businesses that are sharing financial duties among multiple employees.

What about recordkeeping? Thanks to Wi-Fi devices, laptops are no longer needed for scanning and recording documents. For an extra $199, you can snap up Wi-Fi powered mini-scanner Doxie Go — technology at a relative steal, since a bundle with the right iPad model would cost less than the Air. With a Wi-Fi card inserted into the scanner, you can easily scan receipts and other crucial paper documents and send them automatically to the iPad or the cloud. While it is a peripheral to independently manage outside of your tablet, it’s a sound investment for those who are interested in using their iPad for as a full-service business operation.

The video-sharing site announced Tuesday it is beefing up its ability to automatically caption videos in an effort to reach more viewers with hearing disabilities and language differences. The number of captioned videos on YouTube has tripled since late July, and more than 1.6 million videos with captions have been uploaded to YouTube since the site started caption support in 2006. YouTube said it wants to improve the caption reading experience to comply with a law Obama passed last year that requires captioned TV shows to also have captions online.

The site will have automatic captioning abilities in three languages — English, Japanese and Korean — and non-automatic subtitles are available in 155 languages and dialects. In addition, YouTube users can search specifically for videos with captions. Font, color and size of the caption text can be changed to improve the viewer’s experience.

YouTube allows broadcast caption support, so channel owners have the ability to insert a preferred video caption file into the video. This makes it so the captions appear within the video near the person who is speaking, instead of near the bottom. YouTube will now support more common caption file formats including .SCC, .CAP, EBU-STL, and others to make uploading to YouTube easier on channel owners.

The Monday announcement of the 41-megapixel Nokia 808 PureView represents a major leap in mobile camera technology. While more megapixels don’t always automatically lead to better photos, they do mean data-rich photos that can be more easily zoomed and edited. You’ll be able to do a lot more in post-processing with a camera like the Nokia’s. Of course, the photos will be very large in file size, so the PureView will undoubtedly need ways to bring in external memory cards or export photos to the cloud to prevent photographers from quickly running out of storage.The images were about 12 megabytes after one click.

Nokia unveiled the 808 PureView at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The phone will retail for 450 euros, or about $600, when it launches in Europe in May. The camera technology, brought to Nokia by Symbian, will appear in upcoming Nokia mobile phones as well.

Opera has launched new versions of its Mini and Mobile web browsers at the MWC today: Opera Mini Next and Opera Mobile 12. Opera Mini Next is actually a preview of what’s coming in the next version of Opera Mini, the company’s browser that works on Java-supporting feature phones and smartphones.

It brings Facebook and Twitter integration through something called Smart Page, a starting screen that gives you easy access to social networking functions, news and other goodies. The Smart Page won’t appear in the smartphone version of Opera Mini Next, though. There, users will get hardware acceleration and a revamped speed dial, which now features an unlimited number of Speed Dial shortcuts.

The company’s native smartphone browser, Opera Mobile, has reached version 12 for Android and Symbian devices. It brings WebGL support, which should make it easier for developers to create and distribute cross-platform games. It also supports Opera’s HTML5 parser Ragnarök, more Speed Dial customization options as well as support for camera use in the browser.

The news comes straight from Google’s head of Android, Andy Rubin, who posted the stats on the Google Mobile Blog this morning. With 850,000 devices activated daily, Android is already 150,000 devices above the count from December, and the number represents year-over-year growth of 250%, according to the post. The estimated total of android devices in the world is now a staggering 300 million, Rubin says.

About a year ago Google had just 150,000 apps in the Android Market, but today it says there are 450,000. That’s impressive growth, but the platform still hasn’t caught up with Apple, whose iOS App Store boasts 550,000 apps officially, though some estimates go as high as 725,000. However, Android is clearly miles ahead of other rivals like Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace (65,000) or BlackBerry App World (60,000).

Although the official count of Android apps is high, it bears reminding that Google counts wallpapers and “lite” versions of apps as separate apps. Microsoft, for one, says it doesn’t count such apps when tallying its count for its Windows Phone Marketplace.  Android’s rapid growth has a well-known price: fragmentation. With so many different devices — phones, tablets and now even gear like TVs — running Android, it’s difficult for users to know when, or even if a specific device will get an update. The latest version, Android 4.0 aka “Ice Cream Sandwich,” is intended to mitigate fragmentation somewhat but obviously it only applies to devices that ship with the OS.

The "Harry Potter" saga may have seen the end of its run in the movie theaters, but J.K. Rowling's wizardly brain child will live on in the world's libraries.

Samsung is expanding its Galaxy Tab tablet line with the brand new Galaxy Tab 2 lineup: a 7.0-inch variant and a 10.1-inch variant.While the smaller tablet was announced a week ago, its big brother, the 10.1 is entirely new. It sports an 1280×800 resolution screen (the 7-inch model has a 1024×600 pixel screen), and the rest of the specs between the two tablets are nearly identical: a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, a 3-megapixel camera on the back and a VGA one on the front.

The tablets are available as 3G models (meaning HSPA) or as WiFi-only, and they’re both equipped with the latest flavor of Android – 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich. The devices should hit the global market in March, starting with the UK, at a yet-unspecified price.Samsung is also announcing a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. It’s a big tablet with a stylus.

Aside from bumping up the screen resolution of its LCD to 1280 x 800, from 1024 x 600 on the 7.0, the 10.1 features the same 1Ghz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity, front and rear cameras (VGA and 3-megapixels, respectively) and 21Mbps HSPA+ connectivity if you opt for the 3G model instead of WiFi. The 10.1-incher notably comes equipped with a 7,000 mAh battery (up from 4,000 on the 7.0), which will hopefully ensure stamina that's similar to its predecessor. The slate is unsurprisingly loaded with TouchWiz-flavored Ice Cream Sandwich, and will be offered in 16 and 32GB models (expandable by up to 32GB if you supply your own microSD card).

If your answer is “yes”, then you are part of 61-percent of people feel addicted to the Internet which accordingly says unable to quit browsing on their normal days. The data is from SodaHead‘s survey last February 16th where 602 people participated whether they experience Internet addiction. Apparently, the survey returns most of the participants are self-diagnosed addicted with 64-percent of women compared with 55-percent of men reporting the symptoms of addiction. To give you a brief overview of the survey results, there’s infographic –just do a virtual jump after the break.

Biz Stone, a cofounder of Twitter, told an audience in Montreal this week that spending up to 12 hours a day on the platform is not necessarily a great idea.

“I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you’ve found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something,” Stone said, according to the report.”I think that’s a much healthier engagement. Obviously, we want you to come frequently.” Twitter doesn’t provide stats on the average amount of time users spend on the site. Alexa, however, pegs that time at about four and a half minutes a day on the site. According to a 2009 report by Sysomos, only 1.13% of Twitter users update more than 10 times a day. Some 85.4% of Twitter members tweet zero times a day and about 6.5% tweet once a day.


The relative healthiness or unhealthiness of compulsive tweeting wasn’t the only subject that Stone discussed. He also described how he thought it was important for entrepreneurs to take pride in their mistakes. Before Stone helped create Twitter in 2006 with Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams, he created a company that let people send broadcasts to iPods. “We thought we were geniuses,” Stone said, according to The Montreal Gazette. “It turns out it was called podcasting and people were already doing it.”

Stone also outlined his vision of social media including Twitter as a positive force. “The more connected we get through all social media, the more humanity can move as one,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being hallucinogenically optimistic, but the idea that once we’re connected we’ll be able to move together, suggests we’ll be able to get a lot more done in a lot shorter time.”

We’ve all heard of solar power and wind power, but researchers at Wake Forest are developing another alternative form of power: thermoelectrics. They’ve created a fabric — comprised of tiny carbon nanotubes  that can convert body heat into an electric charge.

The device, called Power Felt, uses temperature differences to create electricity.  “We waste a lot of energy in the form of heat. For example, recapturing a car’s energy waste could help improve fuel mileage and power the radio, air conditioning or navigation system,” graduate student Corey Hewitt Hewitt says. “Generally thermoelectrics are an underdeveloped technology for harvesting energy, yet there is so much opportunity.”

How might we see Power Felt used in practical applications? The researchers say it could line car seats for a battery boost or line clothing garments to power devices that monitor performance or your iPod — among other uses.

“Imagine it in an emergency…

The founder of the file-sharing website Megaupload was released on bail Feb. 22 after a New Zealand judge decided Kim Dotcom lacked means to flee because his funds had been seized.

 SkyDrive, Microsoft's cloud storage product, will be getting a Metro-style app with Windows 8, the company announced today.

Also coming for SkyDrive will be a desktop app for Internet Explorer and the ability to fetch remote files from the Web, the software giant revealed on its Building Window 8 blog.

Microsoft intends for SkyDrive to "evolve with Windows 8 from a website today into a true device cloud for Windows customers," Mike Torres and Omar Shahine, group program managers for SkyDrive, wrote in the post. "With Windows 8, we wanted to make sure that your files would be instantly available and up-to-date as you move between PCs--without configuring add-ons or using a USB drive."

"This will bring a file cloud to every Metro style app, allowing you to open files in your SkyDrive and save them right back to your SkyDrive just like you would on your local hard drive," the pair writes. The desktop app will allow "easy drag-and-drop upload and download support for SkyDrive, anywhere access to your data, offline access, and the power of Windows Explorer to manage your files and folders."

A software development student in the U.K. who hacked into Facebook via an employee's account is jailed after being found guilty of stealing intellectual property. 

this was also the explanation offered by 26-year-old Glenn Mangham, who was yesterday given eight months of incarceration for hacking into Facebook's inner sanctum. The Guardian records Mangham's words to the court: "It was to identify vulnerabilities in the system so I could compile a report that I could then bundle over to Facebook and show them what was wrong with their system."

I know there are at least 14 altruistic people in the world. This court, though, seems to have decided that Mangham, a software development student, wasn't one of them. Indeed, the proceedings dwelled a little on what might have been his motivation for using a Facebook employee's account to burrow into the company's secrets.

Mangham's lawyer suggested that his client was really a sort of Harrison Ford or Nicolas Cage: "He saw this as a challenge. This is someone who in previous times would have thrown everything aside to seek the source of the Nile."

Oddly, even the judge decided that Mangham had not done this for financial gain, nor even to pass the information he had gleaned to dangerous entities like the KGB or Google. And yet he was tossed into jail for eight months--principally, it seems, because he entered the systems of an important company. The judge actually declared: "You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance."

Still, Mangham clearly knows a thing or two about Facebook. Perhaps, once his time inside is done, he might receive a lunch invitation or two--just to, you know, see if he can offer a little background. Perhaps, at least, he might visit a bier keller with Austrian law student Max Schrems, who is enjoying a very noble and interesting battle to help people get information from Facebook--their own.

And now, let us commence months of speculation on Android 5.0! Just a week after suppliers claimed that Android 5.0 “Jelly Bean” (which, by the way, has not been confirmed as a code name) would be popping up this summer, Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin claims that Google will be including a dockable desktop mode in the next version of Android. That’s not too far from a reality right now – most Android phones can output their video via HDMI in some form, and Motorola’s high-end phones can connect to LapDocks to use the packaged WebTop OS. But instead of a completely different OS, Android would simply adjust its user interface for desktop mode.

The fact that Google is in the closing stages of its Motorola acquisition lends a little credence to this rumor – and let’s be clear, it is just a rumor. (Murtzin is the same guy who brought us this stupendously fake Samsung phone.) As we’ve seen Asus’s Transformers in a few demonstrations, using Android as a desktop operating system is possible right now, albeit with some extra equipment. Combine a Honeycomb/ICS tablet interface with a WiDi/DLNA wireless display, and you’ve got a pretty awesome desktop in your pocket.
If, and we stress if, Google was to announce major changes to Android’s core functionality any time soon, it would be at the yearly Google I/O conference in June. The prospect of them actually releasing new software at that point seems remote, since they’re shifting to a once-yearly release schedule now that Android’s smartphone and tablet code bases have been integrated. We’d certainly like to see this feature added to Android (and after ICS, there needs to be a headline feature to differentiate it) but we don’t expect to see it until late fall, at the very least.

Microsoft on Friday announced that it was redesigning the logo of Windows software, making a fundamental change to the iconic four-colour Windows logo users have been used to for 20 years. Meshing with the Metro design of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8, the new logo is a slightly-angled blue block with a thin white cross in the middle, making it look like a window instead of the four-colour wavy flag in the past, reported Xinhua.

"The Windows logo is a strong and widely recognized mark but when we stepped back and analyzed it, we realized an evolution of our logo would better reflect our Metro style design principles and we also felt there was an opportunity to reconnect with some of the powerful characteristics of previous incarnations," said Microsoft in a blog post.

"We did less of a re-design and more to return it to its original meaning and bringing Windows back to its roots - reimagining the Windows logo as just that - a window," the company said. The new logo is designed by Paula Scher from the Pentagram Design Agency, whose notable works include the Citibank logo.

The first Windows logo debuted in November 1985. Since then, the logo has gone through several redesigns, which were all based on the design of a four-color wavy flag.

 A news report says Apple plans to unveil a new iPad early next month. AllThingsD, a website affiliated with The Wall Street Journal, says Apple Inc. is holding an event in San Francisco the first week of March - the same week Apple announced the iPad 2 last year. The report cites unnamed people familiar with the device. Apple declined comment Thursday.

It's not known whether the new device will be called the iPad 3, and when it will be available for sale. Last year, sales of the iPad 2 began in the US nine days after the announcement. Since the first iPad came out in 2010, sales of traditional computers have slowed. Rivals PC and phone makers have been unable to mirror Apple's success with their own tablet computers.

The next iPad will look similar in design to the iPad 2, but run with a faster chip, an improved graphics processor, and better resolution, AllThingsD reported, citing anonymous sources. The tablet could also feature a 2048x1536 Retina Display, bringing its pixel density in line with the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

MSN, is about to dive headfirst into one of the Internet’s hottest trends: Social Media. The initiative is actually two components. According to MSN General Manager Bob Visse, a team of 20 editors will use a new Demand Dashboard to measure velocity and volume of trending topics across Facebook, Twitter, the Bing search engine and BreakingNews.com (a joint MSN/NBC venture). Stories that are trending will appear on msnNOW in a constantly updating “Biggest Movers” box. In addition, a team of editors will select topics and stories from among those social (and search) trends and create 100 word write-ups for posts that will appear in msnNOW’s What’s Trending homepage.The page, which will look pretty much the same on the web and in the new Facebook app, will feature a large main story and a grid of other popular stories below. Visse described it as a “river of real-time content”. Within each area, reader will find small icons for Twitter, Facebook and BreakingNews.com. The presence of each will indicate on which social networks the stories and topics are trending.

Along with each MSN-created post, readers will find related Bing search terms, Tweets and other content. Not every topic or story will get an MSN write-up. For those, What’s Trending will link to a Bing result, which will also offer a link directly to the original content source. “We give the best of the web regardless of where that content or hot story originated from,” Visse told us.

Visse explained that MSN is targeting a younger “always socially connected consumer who lives an online lifestyle for information gathering and seeking.” That may mean that some of the trending content will be a little edgier than what you traditionally see on the portal. It’s all designed to start a conversation. Even the design has the younger demo in mind. It’s image-centric, with what Visse calls “short, pithy headlines.” It’s also one of the first times that MSN has launched a new product across three separate platforms at once and, as Visse noted, it’s the first time MSN “has done anything interesting with the Facebook social reader experience.” msnNOW, however, will not launch with Google+ integration, though Visse said Microsoft is open to tracking volume and acceleration on the still young social network at a future date.

Visse calls the msnNOW project a “transformative experience for MSN.” Even so, the design is still decidedly MSN-centric across all platforms. Visse contends that while msnNOW is not yet a Metro design (the cubist-look Microsoft is painting across virtually all of its interfaces), msnNOW’s “component-like design is not a big leap to get a Metro-like design.”

The intention with the current look is for a really good, super-easy-to-use interface. The mobile interface, in particular, is designed for easy touch and swipe consumption across multiple mobile devices (the mobile web site should work well on the latest iOS, Windows Phone and Android browsers). Though MSN currently enjoys a reported 125 million monthly visitors, with 75 million visiting the MSN portal homepage each month, msnNOW will not take over that hot destination. Visse told Mashable that msnNOW will have a hard and visible link from the MSN homepage and msnNOW content that does make the main homepage will feature msnNOW artwork and insignias.

msnNOW is an interesting bet for Microsoft, the big software company without its own big social network. Can it be the aggregator instead of the creator? And will content and media companies like the 100-word write-ups — or will they think such stories are cannibalizing their content?

Facebook is stealing a page from Twitter’s social media book and verifying the accounts of famous users.
Facebook requires all of its 845 million members to sign up with their real name, and even celebrities like Stefani Germanotta – aka Lady Gaga – have to use their legal name on the site.

The social network has stuck so strictly to this policy that in November it took down the Facebook profile of novelist Salman Rushdie because his legal first name on his passport is “Ahmed.” Rushdie took to Twitter — where he has a verified account sporting a blue check mark – to lambast Facebook’s policy. That policy is about to change in a few hours, said Facebook spokeswoman Meredith Chin. While public figures must still sign up on Facebook using their birth names, they can choose to display a nickname, with a real name in parentheses.

The verified accounts will help Facebook promote and recommend celebrities while assuring they aren’t imposters. “We wanted to make sure that people were connecting to the people they are actually intending to connect to,” Ms. Chin said. “We want to give people a way to amplify how the public actually knows them.”
In September, Facebook began allowing users to “subscribe” to others, meaning they can receive another person’s public Facebook posts without being friends with them. After launching subscribe, Facebook began making recommendations along the side of the screen for people to follow based on a user’s likes and preferences.

Facebook will begin requiring certain public figures to send a government-issued ID to verify their accounts. Once verified, Facebook may choose to promote these accounts to users. The company won’t reveal the number of users that will receive verification requests because its engineers are still tweaking it, Ms. Chin said. Facebook also won’t indicate that an account is real like Twitter does with its check mark.

Mr. Rushdie ultimately won his battle with Facebook, and his profile with the first name “Salman” was returned. But other famous people with large Facebook followings are currently forced to use a name that most of the world has never heard.

Chinese hackers on Monday attacked Microsoft India's retail website and stole the usernames and passwords of its customers, forcing the company to shut it down temporarily. The online retail site "www.microsoftstore.co.in" deals with computers, computer software and consumer electronics.

Microsoft said the company was investigating the matter and has already sent guidelines to its customers. "We are diligently working to remedy the issue and keep our customers protected," the spokesperson said.
The website showed an error message: "The Microsoft Store India is currently unavailable. Microsoft is working to restore access as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."
Evil Shadow, a Chinese hacking team that claimed responsibility for the attack, obscured the full username and passwords in the screen shots that were posted on a blog run by an Evil Shadow Team member 7z1. The hacker, 7z1, told Reuters that the data had been found unencrypted on the website.

Indian company Quasar Media, which operates the Indian edition of Microsoft Store, said that the company was investigating the issue. "I am not sure when the site will be up again or what happened," spokesman Rahul Roy said.

Microsoft said it has already urged its customers to immediately change their passwords and usernames if the same were being used for any other sites.

The 54th Annual Grammy Awards was a huge hit across social, digital and broadcast platforms.
Excitement for the return of Adele, as well as the tribute to the late Whitney Houston kept viewers engaged online and off.

CBS reported that 39.9 million viewers tuned in to Sunday’s award show, the second-largest Grammy audience ever and the best ratings since 1984.

New Social TV Records

Of course, broadcast is only part of the story. This year’s Grammy Awards were a hugely social and digital affair. Even with the tape delay (which prevented a real-time social conversation from taking place on the east and west coasts), the Grammys still broke new social TV records.

According to Bluefin Labs, the Grammys earned 13 million social comments. That breaks the record from last week’s Super Bowl and absolutely dwarfs every other entertainment event from the last year. The most-talked about moments included Adele’s performance of “Rollin in the Deep” and her win for Album of the Year, Jennifer Hudson’s tribute to Whitney Houston and Chris Brown’s performance.

As the music community (and Internet as a whole) reacts to the untimely death of Whitney Houston, the Recording Academy is scrambling to arrange a tribute for Sunday night’s Grammy Awards. Executive producers have confirmed that Jennifer Hudson and Chaka Khan have been contacted about performing a tribute, but acknowledged that things are still too raw for a full-blown tribute.

Meanwhile, at Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy Gala, Grammy nominees and attendees are reacting to Houston’s death. Grammy Live is streaming red carpet and live interviews from the event, alongside live Twitter commentary from viewers. Saturday night’s event is particularly bittersweet because Houston was Clive Davis’s biggest star and she was supposed to appear at the pre-Grammy Gala.

Fans are gathering outside the Beverly Hilton Hotel (the location of the Gala and where Houston died) to express their condolences. Social media has already played a strong role in the 54th Grammy Awards and that will continue into Sunday. Mashable will be at the Grammy Awards, tweeting and live blogging live from the show.

Your Songs & Voice Will Always Remain Alive In Our Hearts. May Your Soul Rest In Peace.

Regards: Cyber Technology News.

Google will reportedly soon jump into the consumer electronics market with a “home entertainment device,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The fabled device will first work as a wireless music streaming unit, but could later be updated for other purposes.

Google announced its signature Chrome browser would start to roll out to Android phones on Tuesday. If you’re one of the lucky ones running Ice Cream Sandwich, also known as Android 4.0, you’ll be able to download Chrome on the Android Store.

As you can see from the above gallery of screenshots taken from both Google and our experience running Chrome on a Galaxy Nexus, tabbed browsing is a big highlight of Chrome for Android. It also boasts the ability to have simple private browsing sessions.

Most importantly, Chrome for Android blends in with other Google services seamlessly, such as Google Maps and YouTube. It was easy for us to import tabs from our computer browsers as well.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday.
While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study.

Anonymous broke into the mail server of the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs, accessing some 78 inboxes of Assad’s staffers, according a report from Israeli daily Haaretz. The password 12345 was associated with several of the accounts. Mansour Fadlallah Azzam, the minister of presidential affairs and Bouthaina Shaaban, Assad’s media adviser, were among the victims of the inbox hacks.

Haaretz obtained and published one email that included documents intended to prepare the Syrian leader for his December 2011 interview with Barbara Walters. In the interview, Assad claimed the Syrian government was not killing its people.

Nikon keeps looking for more mountains to climb. A little after unveiling its new D4 flagship DSLR and a point-and-shoot with world’s longest zoom, the company has announced a new special-format camera that’s said to be able to capture photos with higher resolution than any commercially available DSLR on Earth.


The camera is called the D800, and it snaps photos at a whopping 36.3 megapixels, more than double the maximum resolution of the D4, which maxes out at 16.2MP. The D800 can capture those ultra-crisp photos thanks to its full-frame CMOS sensor, which Nikon calls FX format. “Full frame” means the image sensor is the same size as a frame of 35mm film — significantly larger than a typical APS-C sensor in a normal DSLR.

When you have that many pixels, you need performance that can handle it, and the D800 boasts a new image processor called the Expeed 3. With the full-frame sensor and processing engine, Nikon says the camera’s pixel count is the world’s highest, though it qualifies the claim by only including DSLRs with interchangeable lenses with full-frame sensors. Medium-format cameras, such as ones made by Hasselblad or Phase One, can have pixel counts much higher.

Nokia announced plans to cut 4,000 jobs as part of a restructuring of its manufacturing operations. Factories in Komarom, Hungary, Reynosa, Mexico and Salo, Finland, will be affected. The measures follow a review of smartphone manufacturing operations, announced by Nokia last September. Aiming to increase its competitiveness, Nokia on Wednesday announced it will shed 4,000 jobs, or 7% of its global workforce, as it shifts device assembly to Asia.

This forms part of attempts by the handset maker to catch up in the smartphone market, where it has been losing share to Samsung and Apple. The three factories will in future focus on smartphone product customization, serving customers mainly in Europe and the Americas. Device assembly will be transferred to Nokia factories in Asia, where the majority of component suppliers are based. Nokia said the move should help it reduce the time to market and more quickly introduce innovations in its smartphones.

As a consequence of the plans, the number of steps in manufacturing and the amount of work carried out at the sites in Komarom, Reyno sa and Salo are expected to decrease substantially. The job cuts will be phased through the end of 2012, with staff receiving financial support and assistance with local re-employment.

The company’s continuing decline in market share prompted another round of cuts in April 2011 that included the loss of 4,000 jobs in Denmark, Finland and Britain. The company also transferred 3,000 employees working on Symbian to Accenture. As of Wednesday afternoon, EST, Nokia’s stock price was up about 1% on the news.

Google India and Facebook have removed web pages considered offensive to India’s political and religious leadership to satisfy a court order in a censorship case. Indian prosecutors are suing a host of Internet companies on behalf of a Muslim religious leader who has accused them of hosting content that insults Islam.
Google India did not reveal which sites were removed, but the company has stated it will take down anything which violates Indian law. Reuters reports Facebook also removed content from some “Indian domain websites” and that the company would make a statement later.

According to Indian media and the Associated Press, a New Delhi court Monday issued Google, Facebook, YouTube, Blogspot and other Internet companies a two-week ultimatum for delivering plans to actively supervise their networks.

The Indian government has been aggressively lobbying 22 online companies to scrub content deemed “anti-religious” or “anti-social.” Indian officials consider American Internet standards unacceptable for the country’s 100-plus million online citizens.

The Indian government’s efforts to censor the web have alarmed proponents of online free speech around the world. But Indian government officials dismissed those fears, citing a goal of national unity in a country with over 2,000 ethnic groups and subscribers to every major religion. “There is no question of any censorship,” said Indian communications minister Sachin Pilot. “They all have to operate within the laws of the country.”

Last April, the Indian government passed regulations that required websites to remove any material considered “grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous,” “ethnically objectionable,” “disparaging” or that impersonates someone else. And in December of last year, India’s government called for Internet companies to screen content before users posted it, a task considered impossible by many.

According to Google’s Transparency Report, the Indian government asked the company to remove content 68 times between January and June of last year, and 51% of those requests were at least partially complied with. Earlier, Facebook India gave a compliance report to the court Monday while also saying that no public complaints have been lodged against the company. India, with more than 43 million Facebook users (second highest in the world) is Facebook’s third-fastest growing market.

Do you think the Indian government is justified in trying to remove objectionable content from the Internet? Sound off in the comments below.

 

Leading motorcycle player Bajaj Auto on Monday, January 30, 2012, unveiled a new model of its popular bike brand Pulsar, called Pulsar 200NS. "A little more than 10 years since the original Pulsar was launched, Bajaj Auto today unveiled the next gen Pulsar 200NS. This new Pulsar is all set to re-define motorcycling technology and design as much as the original Pulsar did way back in 2001," the company said in a statement.

The new Pulsar has a 200 cc gasoline engine while its chassis comprises a pressed steel perimeter frame and a rectangular tube section swing arm delivering over three times the lateral stiffness of a P220 frame.  "The Pulsar 200NS is best middle-class sports bike. It will be commercially launched beginning next fiscal through 600 dealers across the country. The price is expected to be below Rs 1 lakh," Bajaj Auto Managing Director Rajiv Bajaj told reporters here.