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Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Geographic and Local Services, joined in 1999 as the company’s 20th employee. During a recent 22-minute interview on Digg Dialogg, Mayer was asked “What do you think Google’s biggest mistake has been during your presence there?” Mayer’s answer pertained to three products: Wave, Dejanews.com, and Gmail. “Wave. Certainly there are things we’ve learnt from that, certain things we would have done differently,” Mayer said without any hesitation (this one we’re not really too surprised about). “Shutting down Dejanews.com at 11am on a Monday morning, and not having anywhere to post to or browse usergroups was perhaps a mistake,” she also admitted (Dejanews was a discussion group website on the Usenet network which Google shutdown and silently archived to its Google Groups service). “Launching Gmail on April Fools day was widely misinterpreted,” she added as a final thought (Google often “launches” ridiculous products on April Fools, so many thought Gmail was a joke until they realized it was still around the next day). ...

Details of Intel’s upcoming Sandy Bridge-based i3 processors have leaked out, and there’s one particular model that has caught people’s interest: it features a tiny TDP. Specifications for the Core i3 2100T chip were obtained by Fudzilla from an unnamed source, and reveal an interesting chip for Intel’s lower-end range: featuring two 2.5GHz processing cores and HyperThreading support for up to four simultaneous threads, the Core i3 2100T also packs a beefy 3MB of shared cache. ...

Jared Smith: It’s here! It’s here! It’s really here! Fedora 14 has been officially released! Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release approximately every six months. Fedora 14, codename Laughlin, is now available for download. Join us and share the joy of free software and the community with friends and family. ...

Google Scribe may not seem very useful, but it’s one of the features that could significantly improve virtual keyboards from mobile phones. Instead of showing suggestions from a dictionary, Google Scribe can provide contextually-relevant suggestions. Scrybe is a free Android keyboard that uses Google Scribe to generate suggestions. It’s not developed by Google and it uses an unofficial Google Scribe API, but it’s an interesting application. ...

Avira started shipping the Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Avira AntiVir 10 yesterday! This Service Pack fixes plenty of minor bugs we found in version 10 and thus makes AntiVir 10 more stable. Also, the developers added some optimizations to improve the speed a little. After installing SP1, all currently known issues should be gone. Since yesterday at 11:30 O’clock a product update is available for AntiVir Personal Free, Premium and Premium Security Suite in English and German over the automatic update. ...

Let’s take a look in the Email I got from Google right now: Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year. Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case. ...

Browser Total Market Share Microsoft Internet Explorer 59.26% Firefox 22.82% Chrome 8.47% Safari 5.33% Opera 2.28% Opera Mini 0.95% Netscape 0.63% Konqueror 0.06% Flock 0.05% ACCESS NetFront 0.05% Playstation 0.03% Mozilla 0.03% Obigo 0.01% Danger Web Browser 0.00% Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer 0.00% Blazer 0.00% WebTV 0.00% BlackBerry 0.00% ANT Galio 0.00% Lotus Notes 0.00% iCab 0.00% MaxThon 0.00%

Nokia C7 firmware is updated to 012.003 V1.06. The firmware is available for 059D9B9 : T-Mobile NL NL v1 Silver white 059D188 : 3 UK GB White\Silver v1 059D7V3 : Country Variant Sweden SE 059D9M6 : Country Variant Sweden SE Frosty Metal_COLOR 059F2S7 : Country Variant Finland FI MAHOGANY_BROWN_V1_COLOR 059F2S5 : Country Variant Finland FI CHARCOAL_BLACK_V1_COLOR 059F320 : Country Variant Bulgaria BG FROSTY METAL V1 059F3R5 : Country Variant Bulgaria BG CHARCOAL BLACK V1_COLOR 059F3Q4 : 3 DK DK Frosty Metal_COLOR 059F191 : 3 DK DK Charcoal Black The update is available via Nokia PC suite or Nokia OVI Suite. And you can also download it via OTA. ...

At the latest PDC conference, only a very few mentions of Silverlight were observed. It seems that Microsoft is betting on HTML5 as the future for cross platform development. They even claim that Silverlight is now a Windows Phone development toolkit (read this article from ZDNet). So it is really safe to continue your developments on this platform ? The interest of Microsoft to buying Adobe is now more clear, as I think Adobe will be best positioned for generating HTML5 interfaces, mixing Flex and Dreamweaver experiences.

Avira TechBlog: Adobe warns of a new vulnerability in Flash Player and in Reader. The problem is within authplay.dll and the corresponding .lib in the Unix versions. It allows attackers to inject malicious code like Trojans with specially prepared documents or Flash objects. The company works on a patch which it plans to release on the 9th of November. Until then, deleting the authplay library helps to prevent a successful attack. Flash or Reader will crash then when a file requests the services from authplay, but this is clearly better than having an infected system.

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered hiring Apple CEO Steve Jobs as the company’s first CEO, according to a new documentary. After interviewing a dozen unsuitable candidates during Google’s early years, Page and Brin went to meet Jobs, a personal “hero” of theirs. The pair then asked investor John Doerr, “Why can’t he be our CEO?” The anecdote comes from an episode on Page and Brin from the Bloomberg documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers.” Earlier this month, the Bloomberg series, which looks at “today’s most influential leaders,” aired an episode on Jobs. ...

Adobe have published details of a critical vulnerability the following applications. Adobe Flash Player 10.1.85.3 and earlier versions Adobe Reader 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions Adobe Acrobat 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions The vulnerability could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against Reader and Acrobat 9.x. Adobe is not currently aware of attacks targeting Flash Player. ...

Gmail has just added a new “Labs” feature that should save you some time if you’re the type of person that tends to plow through your e-mail inbox in bunches. As the name implies, the new “Auto-advance” option (that can be enabled under “Settings” > “Labs”) lets you automatically move to the previous or next conversation after archiving, deleting or muting an individual e-mail message. While that might sound like expected behavior, up until today, Gmail simply took you back to your inbox after taking any of those actions, meaning you essentially needed to scroll back down to wherever you were in your attempt at e-mail triage. ...

Mashable: Facebook is rolling out a new breed of Pages called Friendship Pages that pull together the public wall posts, comments, photos (based on tags) and events that two friends have in common. The Friendship Pages feature was cooked up by Facebook software engineer Wayne Kao and then brought to life in an internal hackathon event. The Pages are designed to the tell the story of two friends on Facebook through their shared activity. ...

Mozilla Labs has been working hard on browser-based audio and video — not just for playback, but also for recording. Labs’ newest creation, called Rainbow, lets developers access your hardware’s video and audio recording capabilities with a few lines of JavaScript. The files created are all in open-source formats, including Theora, Vorbis and Ogg (support for WebM and other formats are planned in the product’s roadmap). Once media is captured, files can be accessed via the DOM with HTML5 File APIs. ...