Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of a patent licensing company Interval Licensing, has filed a suit against 11 companies, including Apple, over several patents related to Web search technologies and e-commerce.
Yesterday Facebook released some astonishing statistic results showing an astronomical number of monthly active users – over 100 million on iPhones, almost 60 million on BlackBerry and 12 million on the Android client. However, double-checking, these numbers seem a little bit strange: can there really be more than 100 million iPhone users, when by June 2010 only 100 million iOS devices had been sold, and this includes the iPod touch, iPad and iPhone? Turns out, the explanation is just in the definition of “active”. Here’s how a Facebook spokesman accounted for the figures:
Facebook has released some statistics for its mobile application on different platforms, and the results are pretty interesting to look at. iPhone is right ahead with more than 104 mln active monthly users. BlackBerry goes second, with almost 60 mln, while Android is enjoying no more than 12 mln users. So, what do these numbers tell us? Last counted, there are more than 500 mln users of Facebook across the world, and it turns out that more than a third of them are using mobile applications. Quite an impressive figure!
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, a well as other developers, engineers and partners have announced a new application called Facebook Places, which is able to determine the location. It's a bit like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow identifying places where you've been to share them with all your friends and family on Facebook. You can see which of your friends are now being in the same place and who of them has already been there. Of course, you can change everything in your privacy settings, and select those users who are your friends on Facebook, so they can see your places. Facebook also plans to maintain a complete history of places that you have done on a special page in the Internet.
Existing location-based services, such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp are also announced as partners. So you can still use these services, but now they integrate with Facebook “Places”, which allows publishing their data on the wall of Facebook.
Facebook for iPhone 3.2 was released last night and now it supports the newly created function "Places", background downloading of photos and videos in iOS 4, together with other visual enhancements, such as "pull-to-refresh" for the iPhone. However, for many users, this new version was mostly broken, with the following error "Unable to load the page" on most of its pages. Yes, and if you try to uninstall and reinstall the application, it simply refuses to "Log in".
As it turned out, this problem occurs on jailbroken iPhones for those users who have installed the application BiteSMS from Cydia. The new Facebook application for iPhone 3.2 is not compatible with the current version of BiteSMS. So if you have installed this application, removing it from Cydia, you’ll solve this problem, at least it really helped some of the users.
We hope that the new version of BiteSMS will be released pretty soon and will be compatible with this new version of Facebook for iPhone.
Recently Facebook has released a new version 3.2.1 of Facebook for iPhone to correct some bugs. At the moment there is nothing new, but we observed only some bug fixes. Press the update button right now and tell us if you notice any changes.
Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse was finally unveiled for the whole world. It is a sexy mouse designed by Microsoft, whose concept is very similar to the latest generation of Microsoft’s Arc Mouse, except that it has a touch-sensitive surface, and you can straighten it and curl up as you wish! Isn’t it a curious idea to combine Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad? Isn’t it quite interesting?
Of course, it has not yet been officially introduced by Microsoft. We took these photos from a German online store, which reports that it will be available on October 13.
You can buy Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse at € 69,99 in Europe or $ 69.95 in the USA.
Today mobile media company ParkVu introduced an interesting Facebook app called "Music WithMe", which allows publishing your music library from iTunes to Facebook. After publishing the tracks it contains may be shared, commented on, liked and discussed by your friends.
To use it properly you should also install a desktop app, which is now available only for Windows (Mac will be supported soon). When the setup will be over the app will show your tracks in its Facebook application here. Note, that your friends also must install this app in order to comment on and like your tracks (and without it the app looks pretty useless).
According to a new report, published by Philip Elmer-DeWitt from Fortune, Apple's share on the portable PC market grew from 5 to 12% in the second quarter, making it the third world biggest mobile PC vendor after Dell and HP in volume sales.
Such data was revealed by Chris Whitmore, who is an analyst Deutsche Bank.
"Our retail checks suggest this share shift continues in July, where the iPad is directly cannibalizing demand for other vendors' notebook products. Remarkably, Apple's traditional MacBook business posted accelerated unit growth on a Y/Y basis in 2Q despite the launch of the iPad while every other Top 5 vendor slowed."
The Facebook application for the iPod touch/iPhone is now compatible with the iOS 4. Other new features are icons in high resolution, fast switching and also Korean/Russian localizations. There were also several minor bugs fixed.
Facebook is available for download from the App Store for free.
A new application for the iPad, iPod and iPhone from US President himself has just been released: Organizing for America.
This is an ambitious plan to connect to the voters in this year’s election season and to reach out to those who were inspired by the elections in 2008. With the application you can always stay involved and up to date with the main political events no matter where you are. You can even find some local events and get in touch with OFA supporters in your area. With Organizing for America, you’ll have immediate access to the latest news, photos and video.
If your iPhone 4 is pre-ordered – congratulations to you! You will be probably getting it very very soon. However, if you didn’t preorder, you’ll have to wait 6 more days, till June 29, to buy your iPhone at AT&T.
It’s no wonder that the date has been delayed, what with the mess the pre-ordering system was in and the fact that all the devices were sold out in less than one day. The pre-order sales of the iPhone 4 began on June 15 and they were 10 times as high as those for the iPhone 3GS last year on its first day. The company reports that they are happy to see the excitement around the new device and they are trying to help as many buyers as quickly as possible. As it was announced last week, the priority is to fulfill the pre-orders first.
AT&T is now in the middle of delivering iPhone 4 to those who preordered it on June 15. Here are some guidelines for the buyers getting iPhone 4 from AT&T:
Thermaltake Technology company has a devision called LUXA2, which has many interesting luxury products. The recent interesting one is LUXA2 H4 - the Apple iPad solid-aluminum holder.
The holder looks really nice and is well manufactured. The main material is aluminum. The design is great and reminds us different Apple products, especially the iMac stand. LUXA2 H4 holds the iPad with two short and two V-shaped arms, that have six rubber nubs. The nubs tightly grip the iPad without scratching it. The user is able to adjust the width of the stand by pulling these arms. That's why LUXA2 H4 fits not only for the iPad, but can hold Amazon Kindle and many other eBook readers and tablets. This gives the H4 additional advantage over other stands on the market.
The holder also allows 360-degree rotation and 300-degree vertical adjustment. So there is no problem putting iPad at the right angle. Setting the iPad in portrait or landscape orientation is really very easy. However be careful rotating the device, since there are no V-shaped arms on the top.
LUXA2 H4 is great for internet browsing, ebook reading, watching movies and even gaming. It looks especially good when used with iPad and external keyboard.
Specifications:
Height: 206mm (8.12 inches)
Width: 151mm (5.98 inches)
Depth: 138mm (5.44 inches)
Weight: 446g / 0.98 lbs.
Adjustable Angle: 360° (Rotated) and 300°(Vertical)
LUXA2 H4 costs around $59.99. The list of distributors is available here.