Latest Technology News

At GSMA Mobile Asia Congress yesterday, Sina Mobile general manager Gaofei Wang said his company's 15-month old microblog Weibo is well on track to hit the 100 million user mark by the second quarter of 2011. The Twitter-like service launched in August 2009, and recently hit the 50 million registered user mark. It took popular microblog Twitter a little more than three years to hit the same milestone.

One week ago, Microsoft's Web services branch MSN announced it had partnered with Sina.com to team up and offer a comprehensive web services package to Chinese users.

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A report delivered to Congress Wednesday says that for a 20-minute period in April, a Chinese state-owned telecommunications firm redirected Internet traffic through its own servers, highlighting concerns over possible 'sniffing' of the data within. The traffic included packets from US government and military networks, it claims.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said that it could not tell whether or not the redirecting was unintentional or deliberate, however it did argue that it could lead to "severe malicious activities." It is believed to be the largest redirection of Internet traffic in the history of the Internet.

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Today, just under one month after last update from PDC10, Microsoft has rolled out Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7.

The last update included new support for two HTML5 technologies: CSS3 2D Transforms, and recognition of HTML5 Semantic Elements as object-type HTMLElement. This time around, the focus is on improving the browser's real-world performance with hardware-accelerated HTML5.

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Ten years ago this month, Microsoft settled its antitrust case with the US Justice Department and handful of suing states. The settlement eventually ended government plans to break up Microsoft into two companies. Yesterday, a Microsoft shareholder asked why the company doesn't breakup now. It's a good question. From a shareholder perspective, breakup is probably the best way to return value back to company owners.

Strategically, however, such action would undermine Microsoft plans to reinvent itself for the post-PC era, in part by dragging on the personal computer's relevance long beyond its obsolescence. Breakup's timing would cripple Microsoft competitively, too. But that doesn't mean Microsoft should stick together. There is a case for bringing back internal startups like Live Labs or spinning out one or more companies from the core.

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In the first big partnership announcement related to its upcoming 4G LTE data network, regional wireless network operator Cellular South today said that Samsung will be providing consumer LTE hardware in its upcoming 700 MHz-band LTE network.

In an FCC filing from the Rural Cellular Association (RCA) earlier this week, Cellular South said that it would not be participating in Verizon Wireless' "Rural American Partnership" LTE licensing plan, where regional LTE networks license their coverage out to Verizon.

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Google on Wednesday announced that it will add support for real-time document editing in Google Docs on iOS 3.0+ and Android 2.2 (Froyo) devices.

The feature is an extension of the real-time document editor that Google added last April, and it will be rolled out at docs.google.com over the next few days. The new web-based document editor lets multiple users access the same document or spreadsheet, and changes show up in real time. For Android users, the added benefit of speech-to-text is available, letting users dictate their document changes.

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Hulu Plus, the premium version of popular streaming TV website Hulu designed for set-top boxes and mobile devices, officially launched to the public today.

The service gives subscribers access to every available episode of currently-running TV shows on ABC, Fox, and NBC, and a large catalog of back episodes and movies that they can watch on their PC, mobile device, or connected TV.

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Google on Monday unveiled a new service called Hotpot which marries Google Places with Google Profiles to try to provide more accurate recommendations when searching for physical destinations such as local restaurants and businesses.

Users of the new service are encouraged to use their Google Profile to rate and review businesses they've had experience with. These reviews then serve two main purposes: to strengthen the database of Google Places reviews, and to build a profile of what the user likes and dislikes to help Google learn what to suggest to him in the future.

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Any doubts over Microsoft's foray into motion-sensing gaming may have been erased as it announced Monday it was on track to sell five million units of its new Kinect controller. In just the first ten days, one million Kinects were sold, which included sales from both the US and Europe.

Kinect launched on November 4 in the US and last Wednesday across Europe. It is slated to launch Thursday in Asia, and in Japan on Saturday. By the holidays the company expects some 60,000 retailers worldwide to carry it, with 17 titles available.

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After a long battle for its place as a native iPhone app, Google Voice is finally available in the iTunes App Store.

Google today announced that Google Voice for iPhone is now available in Apple's App Store, compatible with iPhones running iOS 3.1+ in the United States only.

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As widely rumored and confirmed ahead of time by the Wall Street Journal, the Beatles debuted on iTunes today in an exclusive distribution deal. I contacted Apple, Apple Corps. and EMI about exclusivity and heard back from Apple early this afternoon. "The Beatles will be exclusively available on iTunes, with exclusivity expiring in 2011," said Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr. Uh-oh. Exclusivity could bring Apple under fire for violating antitrust laws. The Beatles deal is representative of exclusives available only from iTunes.

Depending on the analyst firm doing the counting, Apple's market share for U.S. digital downloads ranges from more than 70 percent to about 90 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's command of the portable music player market is 75 percent or more, again depending on who's doing the counting. Apple's market-leading position -- not just in the United States -- means that antitrust enforcers apply different rules, so to speak, to Apple compared to its competitors. One thing they'll watch for: Actions that forestall competition or compel consumers to pay higher prices for music.

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Mobile network operators AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA today announced they have joined forces in a new venture called Isis, a commerce network based upon so-called "wallet phones."

The idea is that a user's smartphone is equipped with a near-field communication (NFC) chip encoded with their banking information, and exchanging money is as quick as swiping your phone over an NFC reader. These types of devices have been in use in Japan for more than six years, and have been extensively tested in the United States by the likes of MasterCard, Citigroup, Nokia, AT&T, and Visa, but this is the first time such a unified move by network operators has been made in the space.

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Today's Apple homepage iTunes teaser -- "Tomorrow is just another day. That you'll never forget." -- sent the rumormongers howling and Mac fanatics salivating. And I looked on, groaning: "Oh, please, get a life." I really couldn't care less about Apple's so-called "exciting announcement," which distracted from other big tech news, like Facebook's messaging service or Microsoft's 1 million Kinect sales, and from global stories like the coming vote that could divide Sudan into two countries. Apple's little teaser has geek bloggers and reporters once again doing the hamster dance in the proverbial wheel. Steve Jobs has you trained well, and he's promising some sweet kibbel as reward.

I've been chuckling, wondering what would make me never forget. Some days I won't forget: My daughter's birth; my best friend's death; my 14th birthday (I had appendicitis); Sept. 11, 2001; the D.C. Snipers' first day of killing; and Black Friday weekend 2009 car accident. What could Apple do tomorrow that would make it unforgettable? In marketing, smart companies always deliver more than promised. I can't imagine what Apple could deliver tomorrow that would even meet the implications promised.

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Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that "isn't just e-mail," but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread.

The new system puts a user's identity above the communication protocol. Facebook Engineer Joel Seligstein today said, "You decide how you want to talk to your friends...They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message."

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SkyTerra 1, the communications satellite that will be a part of LightSquared's hybrid satellite/terrestrial mobile network, successfully launched into orbit yesterday afternoon, LightSquared announced this morning.

The satellite launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:30 yesterday afternoon, and established its first connection with ground-based communications approximately nine hours later.

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