Early Tuesday evening, the Mozilla organization gave BetaNews an update on its quest to have posted the single most downloaded (tracked) software item in a single day, having exceeded Firefox 2's single-day mark in just five hours' time.
As BetaNews confirmed this afternoon, the worldwide usage share of all Web browsers declaring themselves as Firefox 3.0 in HTTP requests, catapulted by 265% between 11:00 am and 6:00 pm EDT today, according to independent data compiled live by analysis firm Net Applications, from 0.96% to 2.54%. That means nearly one Web browser in 40 worldwide is using Firefox 3, as of Tuesday evening.
In a move to bolster its Portege notebook lineup, Toshiba today introduced a new notebook that features a single 128 GB solid-state drive.
Although the Alienware Area-51 m9750 can be configured up to 128 GB SSD using two 64 GB units, the R500-S5007V Portege is the first truly portable notebook with a single 128 GB SSD.
Hewlett-Packard's MediaSmart Connect digital receiver -- which enables people who store content on a home network or notebook PC to transfer it via wired or wireless connection to their HDTVs -- is now available for pre-order.
Originally introduced during the CES last January, the MediaSmart Connect receiver uses Windows Media Center to connect HDTV viewers not only to locally stored programming but also online content. This includes renting or purchasing movies using CinemaNow, sharing photos on Snapfish, and listening to online radio through Live365, according to HP.
In a stunning announcement, the city of Philadelphia said that it had reached a deal with a group of private investors to keep its wireless network alive and free.
Although details are still being worked out, free wireless access will be available to Philadelphians as of today. The system will be reassessed over the the next few months along with a formal roll-out later this year.
Today was originally scheduled to be the date that both NVidia and ATI launched their next-generation graphics products, but NVidia had the only one that made it out the door in time.
NVidia's GeForce GTX 200 GPU series (comprised of the 260 and 280 units) has now been made available. The 280 is equipped with 240 cores, and offers 1 GB of frame buffer memory, while the 260 has 192 processors and 896 MB of memory. They cost $649 and $399 respectively through such sites as Amazon, Newegg, TigerDirect, MWave, MCIX, and ZipZoomfly.
Sporting a design and feature list not unlike Nokia's N95 and N96, Sony Ericsson's C905 Cybershot blows Nokia's devices away in one area: picture resolution.
Sony Ericsson officially announced today its Cybershot C905 handset which had been shown through "leaks" last week. Offering support for GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 UMTS/HSDPA 2100, Sony Ericsson has announced that the C905 will be made available in select markets as early as the fourth quarter of this year.
Linux software player Red Hat this week entered public beta with a hosted edition of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, its second product to take advantage of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web-based infrastructure.
A hosted version of Red Hat's enterprise software which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was made available last November through Amazon's cloud, and is also still in public beta.
A Pew Research survey released Sunday indicates that nearly half of all Americans have used electronic media to get or spread information about the presidential election. And those active Web users are looking more blue than red.
How much of Americans' news about this year's national elections comes from online sources, and which segment of the voting populace will that news most likely impact? That's the subject of a Pew Research study, conducted with Princeton Survey Research, that polled 2,251 Americans of voting age between April 8 and May 11 (Full report in PDF format available here.)
Apple and AT&T said Monday they had reached a licensing agreement with Klausner Technologies over two of that company's patents related to visual voicemail.
Klausner filed suit in December, asking for damages and royalties totaling $460 million. Separate cases have also been filed against Comcast, Cablevision, and Skype for an additional $300 million in damages. Reuters also reports that the firm has settled with Skype parent company eBay and with US iPhone carrier AT&T as well, both of which will be licensing the patents. Discussions with Comcast and Cablevision are said to be "ongoing."
The AP's disharmony with bloggers may have only just begun, as the alternative it's now offering to being served with takedown notices involves paying an up-front sum for excerpting online articles -- as few as five words.
A meeting between the Associated Press' Vice President for Strategic Planning Jim Kennedy and Robert Cox, who heads the Media Bloggers Association, is now planned for Thursday of this week. The subject at hand is the AP's attempt to find a new way of sharing AP content, which now involves a fee per excerpt based on its word length.
Sony said Monday that its version 4 PSP firmware will allow users to access Google's search engine directly from the XMB interface.
Once the PlayStation Portable user installs Sony's new Version 4 firmware, a new "Internet Search" option will appear in the Xross Media Bar. Clicking on it will pop up a search box where the user can enter queries. The software also saves the user's past 20 searches through the device.
Adding another stone to the sinking ship of employee morale at Yahoo, long-time company stalwart Jeff Weiner has finally decided to leave, exiting to take on the role of "executive in residence" at two venture capital firms.
In his new dual role with Greylock Partners and Accel Partners, former Yahoo Executive VP Jeff Weiner will advise the companies' leadership teams about consumer technology investments, dividing his time between them.
Last Saturday, an arbitrator ordered Scott Richter, the president of online advertising and direct marketing firm Media Breakaway, to pay a stiff penalty to MySpace, including $1.2 million in legal fees.
The settlement is the second major one for Richter, who previously settled with Microsoft in August 2005 for $7 million. He was once considered one of the most prolific spammers, sending out over 100 million messages per day.
It failed to acquire Yahoo's search business -- or at least that's what Yahoo has said. So now Microsoft has to rely on its own resources to come up with a plan for moving forward in search; and to do that, it's setting up a second laboratory.
This morning, Microsoft publicly announced it will be opening what it's calling a "Search Technology Center" somewhere in Europe at some point next year. It did not say exactly when or exactly where, though with the company's slate of acquisitions in the search space already hailing from all over the continent, there are several intriguing candidates.
Download Firefox 3.0 Final Release for Windows from FileForum now.
Downloads commenced after 1:00 pm EDT will count toward Mozilla's try for the record.