Latest Technology News

If 2011 was all about integrating social media relationships to CRM software, 2012 looks like it will be all about taking relationships to the mobile realm, and mobilizing sales, service and marketing teams with powerful CRM apps.

Microsoft on Monday announced the next update to its customer relationship management product Microsoft Dynamics CRM will include a new native mobile client for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7.

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It's fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, and Samsung has a surprise -- a 90-second commercial for the Galaxy Note, which is available for order today. I got to the game late, so can't say if this spot aired earlier. Oh, but it's a goodie.

"Freedom!" yells one of the people waiting to buy iPhone, raising his arms and running from outside the Apple Store. Earlier, while still in line (and missing the big game), he mumbles: "This feels like detention". Next to him another waiter asks someone else: "Wanna see a picture of my cat?" "No!" And we don't want to see it either, Bud.

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PowerDVD has always been one of the most popular commercial DVD and Blu-ray players, but these days that’s just the start of its abilities.

CyberLink is now trying to position the program as more of a universal media player, a one-stop shop for all your media playback needs -- and PowerDVD 12 Ultra takes that a notable step forward.

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The update rate for web browsers is faster than ever, and this has been a particularly busy week for Firefox, starting off with the release of Firefox 10 FINAL. While there aren’t a huge number of big, notable changes, aside from perhaps the rejigged forward button that hides until it is needed, this is still an important milestone and offers impressive performance and stability improvements over previous version as well as better support for third-party addons.

There is also a portable version of the browser available in the form of Firefox Portable 10.0. The release of a new stable version of Firefox means that there has been a spate of releases in the other channels, including Firefox 11 Beta 1. If you’d like to peer a little further into the future, Firefox Aurora 12.0a2 gives a taste of what to expect from upcoming releases.

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A plane crash in Boise, Idaho has claimed the life of Micron CEO Steve Appleton. He was 51. Boise Airport officials say that Appleton's experimental fixed wing single engine Lancair crashed shortly after takeoff at 8:58am local time Friday after attempting an emergency landing. NTSB officials say that witnesses reported the plane climbing about 100 to 200 feet, then attempting to turn before falling to the ground.

According to Boise NBC affiliate KTVB-TV, Appleton is heard shortly after taking off telling air traffic controllers: "I'd like to turn back in... and land. Coming back in." In the background of the audio from air traffic control a woman is heard saying "oh my god" repeatedly. The station has refused to release the remainder of the audio due to its senstitive content.

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Microsoft on Friday announced the publication of the C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (AMP) specification under the Microsoft Community Promise license. This specification lets C++ developers write programs that can compile and execute on data-parallel hardware like discrete graphics cards or the SIMD vector instruction set in a processor. It can also be thought of as hardware acceleration.

Soma Somasegar, the Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division, revealed last summer that the company was working on support for parallelism in the next version of Visual Studio.

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In a major update to its privacy policy and the addition of "Search Plus Your World", Google has managed to attain the consensus from the tech-enthused world that it is way beyond the innocent baby days of "don’t be evil". Matt Honan of Gizmodo signalled the privacy shift as the end of Google’s "don’t be evil" promise, which the company built its business on, and Sarah Lacy of Pando Daily shared similar sentiments, though hers was related to the Search Plus Your World outcry.

In a nutshell, one of the biggest sore points that people are having with Google’s new privacy policy is the fact that it permits the search giant to utilize your basic profile information and extend it across your identities when using your other Google services. These changes aren't so much evil, but adaptation to our merging online and offline identities.

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Hacktivist group Anonymous has released an audio recording of a January 17 conference call which it claims includes members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the UK's Scotland Yard discussing their latest anti-hacking efforts. We've embedded the 17-minute long clip above.

The participants in the conference call talk about Anonymous, LulzSec, Antisec, CSL Security and other black hat security groups, the evidence they have against such groups, and their progress in arresting suspects.

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iPhone's remarkable fourth-quarter surge -- 37 million units -- lifted the handset ahead of the two previous smartphone leaders, according to Canalys. For full year 2011, Apple shipped 93.1 million smartphones, compared to Samsung's 91.9 million and Nokia's 77.3 million. Nokia, the company that invented the smartphone, has bled share since iPhone launched nearly 5 years ago, but artery versus vein since announcing the switch to Windows Phone from Symbian in February 2011.

Apple's climb to the top followed October's iPhone 4S launch and availability of older 3GS and 4 models for free and $99, respectively. Samsung shipped 35.3 million smartphones in Q4, behind Apple, while Nokia shipped 19.6 million -- a stunning 31 percent decline. By comparison, iPhone shipments surged 128.1 percent for the quarter and 96 percent for the year.

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Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android mobile platform, revealed on Thursday that the Android Market has secretly had a system in place named "Bouncer" to scan apps for malicious code.

"Bouncer" was running in secret for most of 2011, and Lockheimer says that the period between the first and second halves of 2011 showed a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market.

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Following on from the release of Firefox 10 FINAL, Mozilla has updated its developmental branches to versions 11 (Beta), 12 (Aurora/UX) and 13 (Nightly) respectively.

As always, the rapid release cycle -- a new version of Firefox ships every six weeks -- means that changes aren’t as radical as you might expect considering the regular version number jumps. However, the latest batch of updates hints that some major updates are heading Firefox’s way over the next few months. Get a head’s up on what’s coming and discover which build is best for your personal needs with our updated guide to what the future holds in store for Firefox.

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Just weeks ago the Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists giddily posted about how iPhone had reversed Androids' gains. But new data from comScore shows that, in the United States at least, Android is doing just fine, despite iPhone's remarkable fourth-quarter sales surge (more than 37 million units).

As measured by smartphone OS among cellular subscribers 13 and older, Android share grew to 47.3 percent at the end of December from 44.8 percent three months earlier. During the same time period, iPhone/iOS rose 2.2 points to 29.6 percent share. More broadly, for all handsets, Apple was the only manufacturer to gain share during fourth quarter -- up 2.2 points to 12.4 percent, or twice free-falling Research in Motion. Samsung firmly held its lead, 25.3 percent, which is the same as end of September.

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Your system is misbehaving, and you think there’s a good chance it’s been infected by malware, but your antivirus package isn’t raising any alerts. So what do you do next?

One option is to install the trial version of Security Task Manager. This can display all your running processes and rate their potential risk -- all based purely on behavior and code analysis, no signature files are required, and so it may highlight dangerous processes which other tools miss.

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Hard drives, memory card readers, DVDs and Blu-rays, network drives, removable disks and more: even a budget PC can have a host of storage options available at any one time. If you find you have trouble managing these with Explorer, though, then the free, portable Drive Manager has plenty of tools to help.

These start by presenting the key drive basics on a single opening screen, so just about everything you might need is available at a glance. There’s the drive volume name and type, for instance; network path; file system; capacity and space free; vendor or product name (useful for identifying which USB drive you’ve connected), and more.

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Are you ready to pay for Facebook? You just may. Analyst Foad Fadaghi of Telsyte, an Australian technology research firm, tells news.com.au that premium accounts are an option to increase revenues.

As I argued on Wednesday, Facebook now must answer to shareholders. Being a public company is a completely different world from life as a private company. Fadaghi also expects Facebook to make advertising more invasive, as investors demand better performance. Ain't that grand?

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