Latest Technology News

For those of us who like the fact that Google+ remains free of the clutter that games on Facebook cause to our news feeds there, we may soon find that reprieve short lived. More evidence surfaced Friday that Google does indeed plan to add some type of gaming functionality to its social network.

Tech blog Slashgear discovered evidence within Google+'s help files that make reference to a 'Games Stream.' This likely means that Google plans to separate those incessant game status posts from the standard stream, but is eventually planning to add some type of social gaming to its platform.

Microsoft must move beyond Windows, as clearly seen in fiscal 2011 fourth quarterly and yearly results, announced late yesterday. The operating system remains a pillar of the company's revenue stream and will long be the identifying brand. But its relevance is diminishing, in developed markets for now. Emerging markets will come much later.

For the third quarter in a row, sluggish PC shipments diminished Windows & Windows Live revenues -- and there is little sign anything will change anytime soon. Revenues fell by 1 percent and operating income by 4 percent during fiscal fourth quarter. Global PC shipments grew by 2.3 percent, according to Gartner, and 2.6 percent, according to IDC. US PC shipments were disastrous, falling 5.6 percent year over year, according to Gartner, and declining 4.2 percent by IDC's reckoning. Microsoft estimates global PC shipments grew by 1 percent to 3 percent. Windows actually underperformed, by comparison, with OEM revenues declining by 1 percent for the quarter and growing by a tepid 2 percent for fiscal 2011. OEM sales accounted for three-quarters of Windows revenue during fiscal Q4.

Oracle has announced a major update to its open-source, cross-platform virtualization software. VirtualBox 4.1, which allows users to run different operating systems in virtual environments through a window, boasts a number of major new features, including support for VM cloning and an experimental WDDM graphics driver providing Windows Aero support in Windows guests. There's also a networking mode (UDP tunnel) that's designed to allow VMs running on different hosts to connect easily and transparently.

In addition to these new features, VirtualBox 4.1 sports some user-interface improvements, including the ability to keep the aspect ratio scaled in Windows and Mac OS X hosts when manually resizing the guest window. In addition to this it features numerous bug fixes and other minor tweaks.

EASEUS has released a public beta of its Todo Backup 3.0 software. Version 3.0 adds a number of major new features to this versatile backup application, which is capable of backing up and cloning entire disks and partitions as well as offering file-based backup tools.

EASEUS Todo Backup 3.0 Beta adds support for dynamic disks while improving compatibility with SSD drives, and adds one-click options for system backup and restore as well as migrating a drive image to new hardware.

Yesterday, I posted a quick stub about AT&T's contribution to the overall proliferation of iOS-powered devices for the last quarter: 3.6 million iPhones (both 3GS and 4) and an indeterminate amount of iPads less than 545,000 in total. AT&T's iPhone sales alone, I concluded made up 10% of all the iOS devices sold for the quarter.

One commenter complained that the article lacked context, and I'll give him that… But it was meant to serve as a single piece of a larger puzzle that will hopefully present a more complete picture of where Apple products are going, who's using them, and what it means to the mobile device market as a whole.

While I studiously covered Microsoft's fiscal fourth quarter earnings, Apple announced that more than "1 million users" purchased Mac OS X 10.7 Lion during the first day of availability. That's why I'm posting this later than everybody else.

For some reason Apple made a distinction between "users" and "copies" of software, which I find surprising. Is the distinction meaningful, I wonder. Users is appropriate from perspective of how the software is sold -- from the electronic Mac App Store for which there is an Apple account and person attached to it. On the other hand, users could refer to number of installs per copy, which would mean more installations than sales. Apple probably means the former, but I call it out because the company is typically quite deliberate in use of language.

Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn thinks Motorola Mobility might be sitting on a goldmine with its wireless patent portfolio, and thinks the mobile communications company should perhaps begin shopping them around.

In an amended schedule 13D Icahn filed with the SEC today, the investor's beliefs were clearly laid out:

Microsoft closed its fiscal year on a high note, despite globally slow PC sales that weighed down Windows division sales. The Redmond, Wash.-based company announced fourth quarterly and yearly results after the market closed today.

For fiscal 2011 fourth quarter, ended June 30, Microsoft's revenue rose 8 percent to $17.37 billion, year over year. Operating income: $6.17 billion, or 4 percent increase. Net income rose 30 percent to $5.87 billion, or 69 cents a share. Earnings per share rose by 35 percent year over year.

Hackers with the group Anonymous claimed Thursday that they had hacked into the servers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, it wouldn't release much of the gigabyte of information it stole because doing so would be "irresponsible," seemingly indicating some of the data may be sensitive to security interests.

"Yes, #NATO was breached. And we have lots of restricted material," the group tweeted over its @AnonymousIRC account. "In the next days, wait for interesting data :)"

Today's dismal Nokia second-quarter earnings results offer little good news. Apple now leads Nokia in smartphone sales, 20.3 million units to 16.7 million. The sliver of good news: Nokia will ship a Windows Phone handset this year, which probably isn't soon enough.

Nokia smartphone sales collapsed during second quarter, plummeting an awe-numbing 34 percent year over year. By comparison Apple smartphone sales soared by 142 percent. The percentages alone are sobering enough.

Is better late than never really applicable in the rapidly-changing smartphone market?

Finally, seven months after debuting for T-Mobile, the Samsung-manufactured, Google-branded Nexus S is headed to AT&T. Best Buy starts taking preorders today for the smartphone, which goes on sale July 24 -- $99 with two-year contract.

Wolfram Research, the innovative company behind the Wolfram|Alpha computational search engine, officially launched a new online document container called Computable Document Format (CDF) which is essentially your average PDF file that has been given the ability to do live computations and display the data accordingly.

The programming and computational functions in Wolfram's Mathematica software can be used to build, for example, a complex graph with a number of variables. It can then be saved as a CDF file so users can manipulate the variables and see the graph results live within the document. To view a CDF file, all it takes is the free CDF Player plugin.

Fridge, a Y Combinator-funded startup that concentrated on small, private groups for social content sharing, has been acquired by Google with the intention of folding its team and product into Google+.

Fridge worked on a pretty simple concept: create intimate, private user groups to share photos, links, and status updates. Think Facebook, but limited to your "real friends." Users would create a group, invite other users by email, share their content about a particular event or subject in facebook-style feed, and close it up when the talking and sharing is done.

Anonymous and LulzSec issued a joint statement Wednesday, firing back at FBI director Steve Chabinsky over his comments to NPR that Tuesday's arrests of 14 hackers associated with the groups was meant to send a message that "chaos on the Internet is unacceptable." The response strikes a markedly political tone.

Posted to Pastebin, the statement accuses governments of lying to their citizens and "dismantling their freedom piece by piece," governments conspiring with corporations and wasting taxpayer money, and lobbyists having too much control over day-to-day business "and corrupt them enough so the status quo will never change."

Global mobile payments will generate $86.1 billion in revenue this year, Gartner forecasts today. That's up 75.9 percent, from $48.9 billion, in 2010.

The big numbers are coming from a relatively small base -- 141.1 million users, up 38.2 percent from 102.1 million last year. That base isn't growing fast enough.