Latest Technology News

[Editor's Note: This was a live document starting at 4:46 p.m. EDT through the end of Apple's earnings call at 6:46 p.m.]

Apple didn't disappoint Wall Street analysts obsessed by goings on at One Infinite Loop -- delivering, after the Bell closed today, record fiscal fourth quarter and year 2010 financial results. In the days and hours before earnings disclosure, numerous blogs and news sites (this one included) mused about the role of iPad, which soared above strong Mac sales. In just two quarters, iPad has opened up a new line of business generating nearly $5 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, iPhone shipments ascended past analyst consensus by about 2.5 million units.

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In what could be potentially damaging to a company already being criticized over its privacy issues, Facebook admitted late Sunday that it had knowledge of developers passing information called user IDs within applications. The user ID is a unique set of numbers that identify users on the site.

Facebook engineer Mike Vernal said in a blog post that in most cases the company believed developers were doing this unintentionally, but regardless it was a violation of the social networking site's privacy policy. Vernal did however say the press was overblowing the situation.

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New York City, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area will be the next WiMAX deployments to go live, Sprint and Clearwire announced today. Before the end of 2010, the nationwide WiMAX network constructed by Clearwire and Sprint will be activated in four more major metropolitan areas, including Denver, Miami, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.

At the end of 2009, Sprint and Clearwire had about 30 WiMAX deployments open to the public in a dozen U.S. states, with plans to have more than 80 completed by the end of 2010.

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Last week, Sony, Dolby, and Netflix announced that the PlayStation 3 would be getting an all new native Netflix app today that supports 1080p streams and 5.1 channel audio without the need for a disc, as it turns out, the Nintendo Wii today has gotten a similar app update.

With a software update today and a free app from the Wii Shop Channel, the Nintendo Wii can stream Netflix Instant movies without a disc, too. Though the console supports neither High Definition nor surround sound, this update has much further-reaching consequences than the PlayStation 3's.

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Since the launch of the Apple iPad last January, print media has been reinventing itself for consumption on touch tablets. Magazines such as Glamour, GQ, Gourmet Traveller, The New Yorker, People, Popular Science, Vanity Fair, and Wired have all debuted subscription apps for iPad. E-books have also found a home on the iPad with apps from Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.

But in June, a huge splash came from the iPad app Flipboard. Heralded as "publishing revolution" by tech pundit Robert Scoble, and backed by high profile investors such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, Flipboard showed how the iPad could take Web data and make it into something more like a magazine.

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Audiogalaxy is back. But it's not the same service you knew a decade ago.

Audiogalaxy was one of the most elegant peer-to-peer filesharing services of the early 2000's, pairing a robust P2P client with a Web-based search and indexing system that made Napster look sloppy by comparison.

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Following last week's debut of "Kindle Singles," a new shorter-form publishing format exclusively for Amazon's Kindle e-reader, book retailer Borders has announced its own blogger-centric e-reader publishing platform called "Borders -- Get Published."

Powered by BookBrewer, "Get Published" will let independent authors publish and sell their e-books through the Borders e-book store in a quick and easy fashion. Borders is specifically targeting bloggers with this service, promising "Blog to e-book in 10 minutes."

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Very soon, the first build of Opera 11 will be released, and with it will come the long-awaited support for browser extensions.

Yesterday at Up North Web, Opera Software's global press day in Oslo, Norway, it was confirmed that Opera 11 will support browser extensions, the plug-ins that users can incrementally add to their browser to customize the experience. All of Opera's competitors: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and now Safari, each offer their own extension architecture already.

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The promise of Hauppauge's HD PVR digital recording device is that it will enable you to use the expensive television signal being piped into your house, on your own terms. Just a few years ago, it seemed, it was easier for most folks to be able to use that signal however and whenever they wanted, and TiVo blasted open the doors for people with busy lives to start, stop, restart, collect, and re-watch the programs that made the intervening hours between crises somewhat enjoyable.

But since then, the restraints and constraints started re-appearing -- the same-room recording restrictions, the "broadcast flags," the availability constraints, the second-run and third-run limitations that make lower-class viewers wait for upper-class viewers to be served first. As studios and content providers act on their second thoughts about opening up digital availability, "on demand" is becoming more of a misnomer. Perhaps "on plea" is more appropriate.

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Netflix and Dolby Laboratories today announced that Netflix Instant streaming will be enabled with 5.1 channel surround beginning on October 18.

The first consumer device to support the higher quality audio will be the Sony PlayStation 3, but Netflix says the feature will eventually come to more hardware, like the many connected HDTVs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, video game consoles, and mobile handsets supporting Netflix streaming today.

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It's a follow-up question to another question posed in late August: "Is Apple the real U.S. PC market share leader -- or soon will be?" I ask both questions based on another: Is iPad a personal computer? I assert "Yes" based on function, but neither Gartner nor IDC, which both released preliminary third-quarter PC shipment data late yesterday, classify iPad as a PC. Right now, iPad isn't really counted anywhere, despite generating $2.17 billion in new revenue during the launch quarter. If iPad is counted as a PC, then based on analysts' projected tablet shipments and IDC's Q3 data, Apple could rank as No. 1 in the United States. What is iPad then?

Even without counting the tablet, Apple had a great quarter. In the United States, Apple shipped 1.999 million (why isn't it rounded up to 2 million) Macs during Q3, according to IDC. U.S. Mac shipments grew 24.1 percent year over year reaching 10.6 percent market share, up from 8.9 percent in Q3 2009. IDC put Apple at No. 3 in the United States, but Gartner asserted No. 4, with 1,831,664 units to Acer's 1,848,511 for a difference of 16,847 units. Gartner had U.S. Mac shipments growing 13.7 percent year over year with third-ranked Acer falling 21 percent. Apple's market share was 10.4 percent, according to Gartner. Either Apple sold a helluva lot of Macs during Q3 or the company stuffed the retail channel with stock; Gartner and IDC only measure shipments into the channel not out of it. Given Apple's usually tight inventory management, I'd wager on sales.

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Verizon Wireless and Apple today announced that the iPad will be available in 2,000 Verizon Wireless Stores on Thursday, October 28th.

But don't jump out of your skin just yet, it's not a CDMA iPad.

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Mountain View software company Intuit has launched a new version of its Quicken personal finance software that offers a slick new interface that comes from the Mint.com product engineering team the company acquired one year ago.

For the 20th anniversary of Quicken, Intuit has taken big steps to make the software more approachable for new users, more in tune with online financial services, and better at automatically categorizing transaction data it receives.

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Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user's circle of friends into Bing's search results.

In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends' opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the "likes" of a user's friend list into search results.

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Apple was awarded a patent on technologies that would allow for the control of content sent and received to a mobile device, essentially filtering out any objectionable content within text messages. With "sexting" becoming ever more prevalent, a read through the patent which was published online Tuesday has lead some to call it the "anti-sexting" patent.

Parental controls are added to the device, which allows the administrator to choose how content is filtered. The filtering occurs as the message is typed, blocking certain text from being entered before it is sent. It could even be blocked altogether depending on the settings. In any case, the filtering occurs before the text is either sent or received.

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