TechBlog

Nepali mobile network operator Ncell has installed the first 3G base station at the summit of Mount Everest, giving visitors, climbers and people living in the Khumbu Valley the ability to make calls and wirelessly connect to the Internet. To test out the new facility, Ncell also made the world’s highest video call at 17,388 feet. So far, visitors of Mount Everest had to depend on satellite phones to make calls, but now they can do so through a standard GSM, 3G-enabled network. “The coverage of the network will reach up to the peak of the Everest,” Ncell Nepal chief Pasi Koistinen said to reporters in Kathmandu on Thursday. ...

Google search engine’s latest innovation technology that allows users to search for information in real time does not come without its own challenges. For example, how do you prevent children from seeing adult related content while conducting a live search? Howbeit controversial, the solution, it appears, is by restricting a group of search terms so that they do not function with the new instant search feature. Consequently, users will not be exposed to viewing pornographic, hate, violent or disturbing results when conducting searches. This means that inasmuch as Google Instant was designed to simplify search and make finding information quicker on Google, no one will see results deemed to be offensive in nature by the Google team, unless they want to. Users will therefore have to hit enter to confirm a search query once Instant search stops delivering new results due to these restrictions. ...

Software Magazine: Microsoft has launched the Apple version of its productivity suite, the Microsoft Office 2011. The package comes with a new version of Microsoft Outlook that has been specially built for Apple’s Mac. The suite supports those cloud based services Windows users have since the launch of Microsoft Office 2010 for this platform. The reason for launching Microsoft Office for a competitor’s operating system is simple: although the platform is completely different, there are lots of Mac users in this “Windows-centric” world that need to use Microsoft Office. There are also a lot of users who, although they use a Mac for every other task, they prefer to use Microsoft Office. ...

Many Ubuntu users will undoubtedly have strong opinions on Canonical’s recent proposal to replace the GNOME desktop with Unity in the Ubuntu 11.04 release. But for the programmers behind GNOME, one of the open-source community’s most important projects, the announcement might prove to be even more upsetting. Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, recently shared his thoughts on this topic with us–and he was none too charitable in his comments on Canonical. Read on for details. ...

FOXNEWS: That big old hard drive in your computer? Google says you don’t need it anymore. The company is also betting you won’t need that Windows, Macintosh or Linux stuff either. No, Google wants you to access, operate, and edit all your files on the Internet. To help with that, the company has developed a lightweight operating system of its own, the first new competition for Windows and Macs in years. It’s called Chrome OS. And it could have a profound effect on the way we work with computers. ...

Firefox is slipping in its development schedule; Mozilla says it won’t be able to release version 4.0 this year, and will have to delay the final version until early next year. “Completing this work is taking longer than initial estimates indicated as we track down regressions and sources of instability,” the company said in a statement. “As part of our commitment to beta users, we will not ship software before it is ready.” ...

SharesPost has valued Farmville developer Zynga Game Network at $5.51 billion, according to Business Week. That means it is now estimated to be bigger than console publisher Electronic Arts, which stands at a market cap of $5.16 billion. It still has a long way to go to beat Activision Blizzard, which has a market cap of $13.9 billion. While making such direct comparisons isn’t completely accurate, nor fair, it gives us a snapshot at how quickly social network gaming is growing. Zynga was founded four years ago and already six of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook belong to it, and it has more than 210 million monthly active users. ...

At its MAX conference, Adobe not only announced Air 2.5 for phones, tablets, and TVs but it also confirmed that it would be bringing Flash Player 10.1 to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, RIM’s BlackBerry OS, HP’s WebOS 2.0, Symbian, MeeGo, and the LiMo platform. Unfortunately, there’s still no timeline for a release on each platform; Adobe is only saying that Flash 10.1 is “expected” to hit each mobile OS. These six platforms will join Android 2.2, which has had Flash since June 2010. The current list of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 certified devices is thus not very long, but if Adobe manages to deliver on what it’s promising, it should grow very rapidly. The news today also means that the iOS is the only major mobile platform that will not support the plug-in: Apple won’t let it touch the iPhone, the iPod touch, or the iPad. ...

Microsoft has announced the launch of the Release Candidate version of Windows 7 Service Pack 1, the last test version prior to its official release. While the service pack, which is shared between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, comprises a collection of all the latest bug fixes and security patches to have been released since the launch of the operating system, Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc has confirmed that Windows 7 users won’t be getting any new features if they choose to install the update. ...

In a CNN interview Monday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to questions about what Google knows about people by saying that if people don’t like having their homes photographed for Google Street View for the world to see, they can “just move.” The comment came during an interview on the Parker Spitzer show. “With Street View, we drive by exactly once, so you can just move,” said Schmidt, eliciting uncomfortable laughter from interviewer Kathleen Parker. “The point is, we only do it once. This is not a monitoring situation.” ...