May 2010

Information has leaked that Facebook is set to roll out location-based features for users and brands as soon as this month. According to Advertising Age, users could see location options any day now. These features include the ability to check in at various locations, including retail spots and restaurants. We’re unclear as to whether users will be able to add or customize their own locations, but we are fairly positive that this move will put Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla and other location-based services in an uncomfortable position. ...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally begun to enable top-level domain names based on non-Latin alphabets. The first three country code top level domains (ccTLD) written in Arabic script are now available for use. The three new top-level domains are: “Al-Saudiah,” “Emarat, and “Misr,” and they allow site names to be written right-to-left. ICANN began testing internationalized domain name (IDN) back in the Fall of 2006, and tested 11 languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. ...

Social news site Digg has just laid off 10% of its staff according to a representative from the company. The move comes a month after Jay Adelson’s sudden departure as CEO, in which he was replaced by company founder Kevin Rose. Rose writes in an e-mail to employees: “This is one of the hardest decisions we’ve had to make recently but we strongly believe that it is the right decision for the long-term health of the company. In order to achieve our goals, we are putting more emphasis on the engineering and development efforts.” ...

Lately, it’s not that hard to get a direct answer to your query from Steve Jobs himself; he responds to burning questions via e-mail quite often. Unfortunately, his answers rarely contain more than a few words. Macrumors reports that a reader asked Steve Jobs via e-mail why the iPad cannot print documents. Steve’s answer? “It will come.” Even if we disregard the possibility that the e-mail may be fake, Steve’s answer gives us very little to be happy about as we have no idea when printing to the iPad will come. Will it come this summer? When the next version arrives? Sometime in the next decade? We’re optimists, so we’ll just pretend that Steve meant “soon.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Gigabit Alliance have reached an agreement to set up standards for Wi-Fi to operate in the previously unclaimed 60 GHz frequency band, which would offer up to 10 times faster data transfer speeds. Currently, Wi-Fi operates in the 2.4 GHz an 5 GHz frequency bands. ”The 60-GHz band allows for significant boost in performance, so we are talking about speeds in the gigabits per second range,” says the executive director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, Edgar Figueroa. ...

Just as Apple promised last week, international iPad pre-orders are underway as of today. Customers from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK can pre-order the iPad from their respective Apple stores; the actual device is slated to ship on May 28. As you can see, the prices are quite a bit higher in the UK than in the U.S. but, unfortunately, European customers are already used to paying a premium for Apple products.

Location-based social network Foursquare counted its 40 millionth checkin a “couple days ago,” according to a tweet from one of its developers. The number shows that Foursquare’s growth rate is accelerating: Five weeks ago, the company announced that the total number of checkins had reached 22 million. In short: Foursquare appears to have doubled its checkin rate in just over a month. It’s just over two weeks, meanwhile, since Foursquare hit the million user mark. What’s more, recent acquisition rumors have driven Foursquare hype to new levels. ...

Smartphones carrying Google’s Android operating system outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, according to new research out today from NPD. During the quarter, Android handsets accounted for 28% of Smartphone sales, beating out iPhone OS and its 21% share. BlackBerry was the bestselling OS, with its devices capturing 36% of the market. NPD attributes the shift to strong sales of the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris. The news follows a report last month from AdMob that showed Android’s share of the mobile OS market had actually grown past that of iPhone OS, at least in the U.S. Worldwide, iPhone OS still has a big lead, however, with 46% share compared to Android’s 25%. AdMob’s data is based on ad requests across mobile websites and applications. ...

Exactly one year after making its public debut, the Wireless Gigabit Alliance has published its spec for the unlicensed 60 GHz band, which it is pushing as a new, faster standard for home networking. The 60 GHz WiGig spec is not meant to be a replacement to current 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi technologies, but instead to act as a complement that is targeted to devices requiring gigabit speeds, like HD video. While the new spec supports data transfer rates up to 7 Gbps, the high absorption of 60 GHz waves make it suitable only for short-distance communication. ...

Even Facebook board members are not immune to phishing attacks. On Saturday, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners became the latest victim when his account was used to send a spam message to more than 2,300 friends. The message in question (see below) came in the form of an event invitation reading, “Would You Like a Facebook Phone Number?” and included an RSVP link. The phishing scam prompted individuals who clicked on the faulty link to enter their login credentials, which then caused their accounts to be hacked in the same manner. ...

Almost one year ago, we’ve gotten a glimpse of the next major iteration of Firefox, at least when it comes to its gorgeous new visuals. Now, however, Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner has shared a presentation that reveals quite detailed plans for Firefox 4. HTML5 and CSS support are mentioned, as well as faster operation, a greater focus on security and stability, new developer tools, and a lot of personalization options. Furthermore, from the screenshots embedded in the presentation, we can see that the visuals from one year ago haven’t changed much, although most menu items (the home button, for example) are positioned differently. ...

Today, IBM is introducing a new social media monitoring tool, one that it says will measure consumer sentiment from data gathered on Twitter, blogs and other web services and networks. The software, called the SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, will use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze everything from product names and industry jargon to slang and emoticons, and it’s already being used by some pretty big businesses. ...

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that federal agencies have made 700 seizures of counterfeit Cisco hardware worth more than $143 million in the last five years. The investigations resulted in the conviction of 30 people in an initiative targeting the illegal distribution of counterfeit network hardware manufactured in China. Nine other individuals are awaiting trial and eight are awaiting sentencing. The agencies involved in the investigations include the FBI’s Cyber Division U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. ...

The University of California, Berkeley, has found that more than half young adults have become more aware of Internet privacy issues than they were five years ago. That number is similar to Internet users their parents’ age or older. “In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.” ...

It was speculative before given the lack of independent confirmation, but now apparently Apple has gone on record to confirm that the original deal signed with AT&T for iPhone exclusivity back in 2007 was a five-year deal. That means at least some legal hoops would need jumping through if we’re ever going to see that oft-rumored Verizon iPhone before 2012. Engadget reports that court documents filed by Apple in a California class-action suit confirm the original AT&T exclusivity deal had a five-year duration. The suit, ongoing since 2007, claims that Apple and AT&T were exerting a monopoly over iPhone service by surreptitiously locking iPhone buyers into renewing contracts with AT&T once their initial two years was up. ...