Tim Conneally

Filesharing software company BitTorrent on Thursday released two new pieces of software: µTorrent 3.0, a new stable release to the popular freeware BitTorrent client, and µChat beta, a new distributed chat app for µTorrent and BitTorrent Chrysalis.

µChat lets users communicate with each other from within their filesharing clients, with the ability to create persistent or temporary chatrooms by topic, to engage in private one-to-one conversation, to create buddy lists, and to "quick share" torrents via direct links to chat buddies.

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Mozilla and the community of developers behind the SeaMonkey Internet application suite have released the first beta of SeaMonkey 2.2 just over a week after issuing a major update with SeaMonkey 2.1.

Changes to the Gecko layout engine that affect all the community's projects (Firefox, Thunderbird, Lightning, Sunbird, Camino) will naturally also take effect in SeaMonkey 2.2. This means the suite now supports CSS animations, improved support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, Canvas, and general performance and security improvements have been made.

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Cloud Engines Inc. announced a new aspect to the Pogoplug media server solution, the software-only Pogoplug that gives users mobile access to photos, music, and movies that they have stored on their home computer.

"Our software-only product is a very natural expansion of the Pogoplug streaming service that started with our hardware," Daniel Putterman, CEO of Cloud Engines, Inc said in a statement Wednesday.

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Hulu Plus, the portable subscription-based streaming TV service from NBC Universal, Fox, and Disney-ABC has finally begun to roll out to Android-powered devices, starting with just a small fragment of the available devices, and adding more throughout the year.

Support is limited to only six phones: Nexus One, Nexus S, HTC Inspire 4G, Motorola Droid II, Motorola Droid X and Motorola Atrix. The joint venture did not say why these phones were chosen or why the launch group was so small.

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On Tuesday, Samsung announced its accessory suite for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet, which includes a desktop dock, a keyboard dock, USB adaptors, and cases available immediately, and an SD Card and USB adaptor and bluetooth keyboard later this summer.

Our traffic numbers tell us that you guys are very interested in Android tablets, so I try to keep an eye out for as much tablet-related information as possible, and ran out to go pick up Samsung's $79 keyboard dock for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 so I could do a quick hands-on review of it.

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According to the monthly Media Metrix report from Internet market research firm comScore, Google in May became the first web property to pass one billion unique visitors worldwide.

Even as the most popular web property in the world, Google still managed to grow its audience by 8% between May 2010 and May 2011. According to comScore, this increase was common among all of the top web destinations, with Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Wikimedia sites all trending upward over the year.

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Microsoft's Kinect 3D motion controller has hit a harmonious chord among both game consumers and interface developers, selling over 10 million units since it launched last November, and inspiring a whole movement of amateur developers to devise innovative new uses for the peripheral. Though Kinect is being applied to everything from Augmented Reality to education, one of the main areas where Microsoft is hoping to inspire developers, consumers and investors is interactive television.

Yesterday at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Microsoft unveiled Kinect NUads, an advertising platform that adds voice and gesture control to advertisements.

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Sony Erricsson debuted two new mid-range Android smartphones at CommunicAsia 2011 in Singapore on Wednesday, the Xperia Ray and Xperia Active. Both devices feature touchscreens in the 3" range, utilize a 1GHz processor and run Android 2.3 (Gingerbread).

While Xperia Ray is designed for more typical smartphone use, Xperia Active takes a very different approach and targets the more athletic user. It includes a handful of unique features that make it stand out in the ever-growing Android crowd, especially as we enter the summer months.

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Brasil.gov.br and Presidencia.gov.br, two sites belonging to the government of Brazil, were the latest victims of anti-security hacker group LulzSec on Tuesday.

The now-familiar cry of "Tango Down!" came across Twitter from LulzSec and another account named LulzSecBrazil on Tuesday evening, signaling that the hacker group had successfully brought down another website. The group initiated a DDoS attack against the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency this week, and called for a rally to pillage government data stockpiles for secret information.

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Proficient use of keyboard shortcuts is a hallmark of the diehard PC user. By using these commands, the hands don't have to ever leave their position on the keyboard, and general PC use becomes much faster.

Now think about what these users are doing with their feet. Probably nothing, right?

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Microsoft this week is upgrading its free consumer cloud storage and collaboration service SkyDrive, making it faster, cleaner, and more competitive with services such as Amazon Cloud Drive, Apple iCloud, and Dropbox.

"While we have always focused on improving the performance of our websites, it was clear that we had reached a point where the kinds of performance gains we were hoping for would not come without an assessment of our entire experience from the ground up," Omar Shahine wrote in the Windows Live Blog yesterday. "SkyDrive has been around since 2007 and was simply not built for the modern web."

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Image-Line studios on Tuesday released FL Studio Mobile and FL Studio Mobile HD, the first mobile versions of the company's popular Windows-based music production and beatmaking software FL Studio, which is now in its 13th year on the market.

Like many other iOS music apps, FL Studio Mobile can be used as a multi-track sequencer to create music from scratch, giving users resizable piano keys and assignable drum pads to link to the app's built-in synthesizers. The major difference that FL Studio Mobile offers over other music creation apps, however, is its interaction with the desktop software. Projects created in the desktop version of FL Studio can be exported and loaded into FL Studio Mobile for manipulation on the go, and vice-versa.

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Anonymous, the hacker collective famous for performing cyber attacks as public retribution, has reportedly teamed up with LulzSec, the hacker group that attacks mostly for entertainment, for a mission going by the title AntiSec (Anti-Security) which seeks to expose any government-classified information that can be stolen.

LulzSec, which has recently stolen headlines for a rash of denial of service attacks issued an AntiSec manifesto today, asking everyone to join the rebellion.

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Mobile network LightSquared today said it has a solution to the problem of interference with Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers that will allow the company to proceed with the construction of its new hybrid satellite/cellular data network.

LightSquared has been trying to answer the United States' massive mobile data bandwidth demands by combining satellite and cellular network services that creatively utilize the free spaces in the L-Band wireless spectrum where it could obtain licenses. But a report last week from the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Systems Engineering Forum (NPEF) assessed LightSquared's network technology, and found that it caused significant interference to defense and agriculture-related GPS satellites.

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Adobe quietly released an update to its Flash Builder and Flex framework on Monday that lets developers create and deploy apps for Apple's iOS and RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook OS in addition to Android, which it has supported since April.

Statistically, developers who design and release apps for multiple mobile platforms make up only a small portion of the community. But in terms of influence, these are actually some of the biggest companies in the field today, and it is not uncommon for the most popular app on one platform to also be the most popular app on MOST mobile platforms.

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