TechBlog

Microsoft’s upcoming Project Natal is a full-body motion controller, promising an incredibly immersive gaming experience and biting into the market first tapped by Nintendo Wii, back in 2006. Now, Project Natal was all but confirmed for October launch by Microsoft Saudi marketing manager Syed Bilal Tariq in an interview with GamertagRadio. “It is going to be somewhere in October. We will be in a position to confirm the date at E3, which is in June, but definitely it is going to be October 2010,” he said. ...

I had a look at my twitter page early this morning and read “Twitter is a rich source of insanity”, and thought “Wow, the twitter marketroids are really bold, but it’s a good line.” Upon re-reading, however, I realized that what it really said was “Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information.” It might, however, have been a Freudian slip, because twitter got hacked yesterday, and bunches of celebs found they had been forced to follow the hacker. Even worse, as it struggled to right the ship, twitter temporarily removed their followers, and celebs found themselves in the traumatic position of being unpopular, at least for a while. ...

Demand for Evernote’s notetaking tool is growing at an ever increasing rate. The startup has just surpassed three million users, which means the company has attracted over one million new users in four months and that growth is rapidly accelerating. Evernote is now registering 8,000 new users per day — no doubt with the help of its fantastic iPad app. The company also points to international interest as well as partner referrals as drivers of growth. ...

Jailbreaking and Unlocking with iPhone is fun, but these days apple is trying to make people life harder by introducing new changes in iPhone hardware and software which could stop or prevent people from jailbreaking their devices. One of the change done by apple is the fix they had done in iPhone 3GS bootroom, they have fixed the potential bug found in old iPhone device which allows to unlock the iPhone to use a different carrier. There is no tool which can unlock an iPhone with new bootroom. Now the question arise here, how could one know whether his / her iPhone has a newer or old bootroom so that he /she gets to know whether their apple devices can be unlocked or not. ...

Buddy Media already helps big brands do more with their Facebook presence. Today the company is extending its service to include Facebook Open Graph integration. This update is about connecting the dots between user activity on and off Facebook — think the “Like” button — so that platform users can manage and track their website’s Facebook performance in addition to Page performance and content. They’ve also added real-time analytics for all social activity and a new publish option so that clients can connect with customers who “liked” content on their sites. ...

In the UK, Google was forced to give its email service Gmail a different name, Googlemail, because of a trademark dispute. These disputes take a long time (Gmail was changed into Googlemail in October 19, 2005), so Google opted on using a different (yet recognizable) name until the dispute is resolved. Four and a half years later, UK users will finally get their @gmail.com addresses, as Googlemail is changing back into Gmail. Users will have the possibility of keeping their old @googlemail.com address or switching to a new one. From the announcement: “If you already have a Google email account in the UK, you’ll soon have the option to switch your existing @googlemail.com address to the matching @gmail.com one, but you’re also free to stick with @googlemail.com. And starting later this week, anybody who signs up for a new account in the UK will get an @gmail.com address.” ...

Poor iPad. It’s only been on the market for a month, and it’s already been crashed to bits with a baseball bat, blended and generally abused in every possible way. In hopefully the last act of agression against this beautiful piece of technology, the iPad has now also been microwaved. As always, it’s not hard to guess what the outcome is, but you just have to see the inevitable result. ...

If you’re a fan of cloud storage service Dropbox and own an iPad, it’s your lucky day. The iPhone version was already quite good, but Dropbox have now updated the app for better iPad support. The new version of the app, available for free here [warning: iTunes link], makes great use of the extra screen real estate afforded by the iPad and takes advantage of both portrait and landscape modes. A few other visual niceties separate the iPad from the iPhone version, making an overall slicker appearance and implementation on the larger device. ...

When consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo prepared for Mother’s Day by conducting a survey of parents’ social media practices, it found that nearly half (48%) of parents add their children as friends on Facebook. Parents admitted that “it can be awkward at times” when they follow their kids’ Facebook updates, but think that it’s probably worth it to keep tabs on them. Of course, savvy teens could easily exclude their parents from seeing potentially incriminating updates using Facebook’s advanced privacy features. ...

The Android Team today published a snapshot of the platform which shows the versions of Android most commonly in use. Though the platform is frequently criticized for being highly fragmented, there are three versions used far more than the rest. Out of the six supported versions of Android, it is a close three-way split between 1.5 (37.2%), 1.6 (29.4%), and 2.1 (32.4%). Version 1.1, 2.0, and 2.0.1 combined only make up 1% of Android users. ...