Latest Technology News

Geeks looking for their fix of programming have something of a treat in store thanks to YouTube’s upcoming Geek Week. The video site has teamed up with the UK's Channel Flip and the US channel Nerdist to showcase over 100 of the geekiest, most sci-fi packed channels known to man. It will also be "unveiling new videos, series premieres and creative collaborations".

YouTube Geek Week runs from August 4-10, starting with Blockbuster Sunday which will kick things off with a look at the icons and heroes of geek culture.

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For the past decade, Apple has posted year-over-year revenue growth every quarter. The company announced its Q3 2013 earnings yesterday, posting revenue of $35.3 billion. While that beats the $35 billion posted in the same quarter a year ago -- it’s a tight 1 percent growth this time around.

Apple also reported a net profit of $6.9 billion, down from a net profit of $8.8 billion in the same quarter last year. However, average sale prices are lower now, at $581, compared with $608 a year ago.

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When I left IT little more than a year ago, my company still rocked Office 2007. Of course, computers were still running Windows XP and web browsers had only recently migrated from Internet Explorer 6 to IE 7. Now, with the addition of SP2 to Office 2010 business may be ready to make the move onto this platform.

"Today, we released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 set of products.  SP2 provides key updates and fixes across our servers, services and applications including security, stability, and performance enhancements and provides better compatibility with Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013", says Microsoft's Chris Schneider.

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If you are unfamiliar with Flipboard, it is a service which aggregates your favorite online news sources and social media accounts. It then displays the data in a magazine-like layout, including page-turning animations. In addition to personal use, Flipboard also allows users to create "magazines" which can be shared publicly with the world. These are an aggregate of various sources on a specific topic (skiing, cats, technology, and more). Unfortunately, people with whom you shared your magazines were required to have a Flipboard account and access the mobile app -- until today.

Flipboard announces that magazines can now be shared with anyone using a modern browser (an account is not required). "The Web magazines are supported in desktop browsers IE9+, Safari, Chrome and Firefox in 11 languages, including English, Japanese, Chinese, French and German", according to the company. Is this worth flipping out over?

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The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Apache OpenOffice 4.0, a major update with plenty of interesting new features and enhancements.

The most obvious interface addition is the sidebar, a Lotus Symphony-sourced panel which provides quick access to options most relevant to the current editing task (setting fonts, text style and alignment in a text box, tweaking brightness, colors and contrast for an image, and more).

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Forecasting enterprise cloud costs can be hard to do well but is essential to businesses who want to implement cloud solutions effectively. RightScale announces today that its PlanForCloud product has helped companies forecast $1 billion in cloud spending since its launch last year.

By analyzing data from more than 9,500 cloud deployments, PlanForCloud has revealed a number of interesting trends. For example 70 percent of cloud spending goes on servers, 18 percent on storage and only 6 percent on data transfer, with a further 6 percent accounted for by other costs such as transaction charges and support.

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Google has previously sent its Maps team beneath the waves around the Great Barrier Reef, up the tallest mountain in the world, and into the mile deep depths of the Grand Canyon. Most recently the team scaled the heights of iconic Japanese landmark Mount Fuji, with the familiar Street View cameras firmly strapped to their backs.

Today the search giant rolls out images of Japan's volcano for those who either cannot get there or do not wish to climb the 3,776 meters to reach the summit. "The currently dormant volcano has inspired countless haiku and woodblock prints over many centuries, and around the world, its perfect conical shape has become one of Japan’s most iconic symbols", says Setsuo Murai, Head of Geo Partnerships for Google Japan.

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Following Photo Editor by Aviary, that was released earlier this month, yet another picture editing app is now available on Windows Phone 8 -- the Microsoft-developed FreshPaint. The new offering arrives on the tiled smartphone operating system six months after the launch of its Windows 8/RT sibling.

According to Microsoft, FreshPaint for Windows Phone 8 "lets you make original works of art, or turn your photos into beautiful paintings with just a few taps". The app is quite easy to use, allowing users to snap pictures, add filters on-the-fly (users can choose between three distinct ones when taking a photo) and create new digital paintings, as the main highlights.

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I love free software but I’m not a huge fan of all the junk that often gets bundled with programs -- toolbars and the like -- or the changes that the software sometimes wants or tries to make to my search provider. The order, as far as I’m concerned, should always go like this -- Google first, Bing second, Ask never. But so long as the extras are clearly labeled, can be deselected without problem, and easily uninstalled afterwards if I accidentally miss one, I don’t have a real issue with this bundling. It provides a way to get the software for free and funds future development.

However, I’m a savvy computer user and as part of my job I install and uninstall a lot of free software, so I know what to look out for. For the less technically astute, it’s easy to get caught out and end up installing a lot of crap you don’t want. Which takes me to the point of this article -- Oracle and the Ask Toolbar.

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The release of Windows 8.1, complete with the more tightly interwoven SkyDrive, brings Microsoft's cloud storage service to the fore. In a new blog post, Mona Akmal from the SkyDrive team explains how the service is able to make files available on all of your devices without eating up too much bandwidth. How is this done? It's largely down to "placeholder" files.

The obvious solution to making all SkyDrive files available on all of your devices would be to simply sync everything. But when it comes to tablets and phones, it is entirely possible that the amount of available local storage is far lower than the amount of cloud storage space that has been used. Placeholders are essentially "ghost" files that take up a fraction of the space of the original.

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Information security consultancy MWR InfoSecurity is set to release drozer, its new open source Android testing tool, at Black Hat Arsenal in Las Vegas on August 1. Allowing dynamic analysis of applications running on Android devices, drozer is able to compromise a device using publicly available exploits so that organizations can understand how mobile exploits can threaten their business.

Based on the company's previous Mercury tool, drozer adds a number of new features, most notably the ability to get it on to an Android device remotely. Tyrone Erasmus, Senior Security Consultant at MWR InfoSecurity, says, "It is a major step forward as previously, various remote Android exploits were scattered across the internet and in some cases were not very reliable. Taking up Mercury's lead, drozer unifies these publicly available exploits into a single framework and improves the quality of the exploitation code and payloads available to the penetration tester".

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Earlier today, following the "something BIG" teaser, Finnish maker Nokia took the wraps off a 4.7-inch, entry-level Windows Phone 8 handset, called Lumia 625. The new device features the largest panel that the company ever offered alongside the tiled smartphone operating system.

The Lumia 625 packs a 4.7-inch display with a resolution of 480 by 800 (201 pixels per inch density), that can be operated using gloves, and is powered by a 1.2 Ghz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, 512 MB of RAM and a non-removable 2,000 mAh battery. The device comes with 8 GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot (can extend the capacity by a further 64 GB).

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The Linux community has been clamoring for a truly open-source Linux-based smartphone. While Android is a Linux based operating system, core Google apps are not open-source. And so, Canonical started development of a mobile operating system to meet the needs of the Linux community -- Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu Touch (sometimes called "Ubuntu Mobile" or "Ubuntu for Phones") has been available as a preview to testers. It has successfully been installed on devices such as the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus.

Unfortunately, Canonical is very limited in what devices can run its mobile OS -- most devices have locked bootloaders which prevent alternative operating systems. A locked-down phone is also in conflict with Linux-ideology. Today, Canonical officially launches a crowd-funding effort on Indiegogo to create its own phone without those roadblocks called Ubuntu Edge. There is only one problem -- it needs (in Dr. Evil’s voice) $32,000,000!

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AT&T GoPhone allows customers to pickup no-contract phones, including smartphones, on a pre-paid plan. Now the mobile carrier is adding the Nokia Lumia 520 to the program beginning July 26.

The handset, which was announced back in February, has a four-inch screen, 8 GB of storage and is running on a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor.

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On Monday, Finnish maker Nokia teased that "something BIG" will be unveiled tomorrow, on its blog, at 9 AM BST. At a first glance, the message can only mean one of two things -- either the company will announce a large device or reveal a pretty important upcoming app release.

Judging by the posted teaser (you can see the attached photo here), that is called "orange", the Finnish maker could also be hinting at an orange-colored version of one of its existing handsets.

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