So, the tech news blog has been on holiday for the past couple of weeks. In that time, quite a bit has happened. Clearly, the BIGGEST story in tech news during that time, was that I got to name the title of last week’s Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte; “bing is my back end”. Yeah, I’m a fan of the show (thanks Leo.)
Here’s the news I missed…
So, FaceBook has acquired FriendFeed – But why? It wasn’t for the platform and with a quarter of a billion users, FaceBook didn’t need to buy the relatively small FriendFeed user-base either.
However, by acquiring FriendFeed, FaceBook have bought something, which is of massively greater value to them as a company!
We are in the process of developing a whole new mojo, here at The Tech News Blog. Reader research has shown that people preferred our previous, ‘more in-depth’ approach to tech news, rather than the shorter posts we have focused on more recently.
How’s this for timing? Today we decided to add the TweetMeme Twitter button to our blog & then, we end up writing about TweetMeme for the first time. That’s because they have just accused a app rival (called ReTweet) of copying their idea – Oh, and some of their code too!
Businesspeople are an unforgiving bunch! Just because Microsoft released Windows Vista before it was finished and with limited driver support for their office machines, the majority of corporates have stuck with Windows XP. Vista is on just 12% of business desktops!
Excellent iPhone sales have helped Apple to beat financial forecasts. Apple’s net profits hit $1.23billion in the third financial quarter (to 27th June) up from $1.07billion for the same period last year.
However, there’s one statistic that’s been almost overlooked by many, who have covered this story!
Samsung Electronics has announced a $4billion (£2.4billion) investment, as part of their effort to reduce harmful emissions from their plants. The South Korean electronics giant has also pledged to focus more, on the development of energy efficient products.
According to Gartner research, PC sales have dropped by around half as much as analysts expected; with shipments down by just 5% as opposed to 9.8%. It seems shipments of netbook computers, which are up 20% on last year, are largely to thank for these better than expected figures.
Google has just announced a list of hardware manufacturers, that it’s working with on the new Chrome OS. Here they are…
The news keeps getting worse and worse for Phorm, the online behaviour tracking firm. After BT, the UK’s former state owned telco dropped plans to use Phorm, now UK ISP TalkTalk have done the same. Shares in Phorm have now dropped by over 50%!
