Latest Technology News

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it acquired Instagram for $1 Billion. The company is less than two years old, has no revenue, and about a dozen employees. Remember, acquisitions are about what the acquirer can do with the company in the future, not some multiple of revenues or profits today. Why is Instagram worth $1 billion?

Facebook acquired Instagram for about $30 per user, or $1B. ($30/user X 33M users = $1 billion) Facebook is valued at about $100 per user or $80 billion ($100/user X 800M users = $80 billion). Other popular social apps are valued around $20 to $50 per user. The monetization models need to work out about the same to justify the valuations.

Toshiba's first Android tablets, called "Thrive," were a bit thicker and boxier than their competitors; but at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, the company revealed it had slimmed down its second generation considerably with the 10" Excite tablet.

Tuesday, Toshiba unveiled a new member of the Excite family that proves the company still has size in mind with its Android Tablets. The new Excite 13 has the largest LED touchscreen of any Android tablet yet.

Malwarebytes Corporation has updated its anti-malware tool, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to version 1.61. The latest build promises 25 percent faster quick scans on Windows 64-bit, plus a number of usability enhancements, greater stability and bug fixes.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.61, which comes in both free and paid-for versions, is designed to be safely installed alongside existing anti-virus and anti-spyware software, providing a second opinion or safety net to add additional layers of protection to the user’s computer.

Last week, Microsoft quietly released a public beta of Bing Desktop, a toolbar that brings Bing searches to your desktop (as long as it’s Windows 7, at least -- the program isn’t available for earlier versions of Windows).

And if that’s not quite enough to interest you, then the program can also double as a wallpaper changer, with its option to download and use the daily Bing image.

The official Tumblr app was a late-comer to Android, and, sigh, hasn't kept pace in the years since. That's all changed. Today's update simply puts the iOS version to shame. Surely this lead can't last.

Tumblr for Android has a spiffy new user interface, which look and feel -- including post-type icons -- is more like the social network. The revamped UI is the real deal; well close to it. The app is speedier, and that includes photo browsing as well as loading blogs and posting to them. By comparison, Tumblr for iOS looks ugly and lacking. Access to Tumblr Radar from the Android app rocks. Still there are omissions that favor Tumblr for iOS, such as audio uploads. I'm surprised this feature isn't available on the Android app (Wasn't it once?).

There have been quite a few studies aimed at figuring out what makes the so-called "digital native" (i.e. children of the 90's who have had Web access and mobile technology their entire lives) tick.

Most of them arrive at some disparaging conclusion or other: "Digital natives are slow to pick up nonverbal cues," "Digital natives need help understanding search," and my personal favorite, "Beware the Digital Native!" (in which Enrique Salem, president and CEO of Symantec, says digital natives don't think about identity and security "the way we do.")

That's the question I will answer this week, for myself, as I kiss off RSS subscriptions, press releases and the like in favor of social media and honest to goodness live interaction. The moratorium includes Google News, which I rarely look at anyway (although some of my colleagues are obsessed with it). Press releases, blog posts, etc. that I see on social networks (including blog comments), or someone refers me to, are fair game.

The objectives are simple: To see if RSS feeds are antiquated and to increase my social engagement, which too often is limited to coworkers and the stories I manage. Hey, I work at home, where the grind makes dust of real interaction unless it is pursued. Aggressively.

The PC world has so many image viewers already that downloading another probably isn’t high on your list of priorities. GonVisor is a little different, though, and just might be good enough to justify your giving it a closer look.

The program works well as a comic viewer, for instance, and is able to open all the usual CB formats (CBR, CBZ, CBA, CB7). You’ve no interest in digital comics? No problem, GonVisor can also open and view the images in folders and archives (ZIP, RAR, ACE, 7Z), as well as display individual image files.

When I was in college, a housemate and I inexplicably decided to include “Friend or Foe?” in the title of every paper we wrote one semester. I’m going to one-up him here, with two Friend-or-Foe headings in a single column. Take that, Eric.

Now for the first one. “Laptop Touchscreens: Friend or Foe?” This debate, which began a couple of years ago with the rise in popularity of all-in-one desktops with touch interfaces, is percolating again now that touch is migrating onto laptops.

Just days after making its big arrival on the Android platform, popular photo-filtering social network Instagram will be acquired by leading social network Facebook.

The acquisition will give San Francisco-based Instagram approximately $1 billion in cash and shares of Facebook. The deal will close later this quarter.

At first glance PTray doesn’t seem like the most interesting of tools. Does the world really need another CPU monitor? Probably not: on the rare occasions that we care about our CPU utilization, Task Manager and Performance Monitor generally tell us everything we need to know.

Take a closer look, though, and you’ll find there’s a little to more to the program than meets the eye.

It's truly the final curtain call for Netscape. A portion the company's technologies are part of a massive $1 billion patent sale between AOL and Microsoft, announced Monday morning. Microsoft was the top bidder in an auction to sell off non-essential technologies that include about 800 patents.

Microsoft is also acquiring a subsidiary of AOL. While AOL did not specify the subsidiary by name, sources tell All Things Digital that it is Netscape. AOL still retains the right to the brand and related businesses, but all the technologies behind it are now owned by the Redmond, Wash. company.

April 14 is the 100th anniversary of Titanic's sinking. As the height of technological and engineering innovation of its day, the great ocean liner is more than fascinating for its sinking -- reminder that today's tech obsessions are nothing new.

In 1977, before the wreck had been discovered and when few people knew much about Titanic, I wrote a term paper on the ill-fated vessel in between college and high school. I participated in the federally-funded Upward Bound program for teenagers from low-income families wanting to go to college. I spent three summers at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The Titanic paper completed my three-year participation. Much about the disaster has changed since the wreck site was found, more than 2 miles beneath the Atlantic, in 1985, and my research. I confess. I am a Titanic buff.

We now find ourselves well into Spring, so what better excuse is needed to start spring cleaning your computer? You can set about doing this manually, but it’s easier if you turn to a dedicated tool to take care of system maintenance.

iolo System Mechanic Free 10.8.3.51 is a free tool that can be used to delete unnecessary files, defrag your hard drive, clean out the registry and much more. If you’re someone that takes a keen interest in the smooth running of your computer, you probably have some form of application monitoring software installed, and Bad Application 1.0 is a simple little utility that will enable you to test these out, checking what happens with crashed and hung applications.

Recently, an article ran in the MIT Technology Review blog, in which Skyhook Wireless CEO Ted Morgan said "a lot of companies" are forking Android; that "nobody wants to just be a manufacturer for Google," and that a major non-Google Android device is coming out later this year.

The headline claimed Android manufacturers are "mutinying."