News

Mashable: It looks like cross-browser, bookmark syncing service Xmarks won’t be going out of business after all. Just over a month after announcing that the service would be closing its doors and shutting down operations come January 2011, the company has announced that it is in the final stages of selling Xmarks to a new owner who is focused on keeping the tool running smoothly. Xmarks announced the news on its official blog, noting that exact details can’t be revealed just yet, but that the service is alive and “things are on track for a ‘new and improved’ Xmarks.” The Xmarks blog says that the Xmarks service will evolve into offering free and premium components. Details about what will be included in the premium offering are promised to come at a later date. ...

Mashable: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has sold 12% of his stake in the tech giant in a transaction worth over $1.3 billion. According to a filing with the SEC, Ballmer has sold 49.3 million Microsoft shares over the last three days, bringing his total ownership to 358.9 million shares, or approximately 4.2% of the company. Essentially, he sold 12% of his shares at a price between $26 and $28. ...

A perverted hacker who spied upon more than 200 women via their webcams and microphones, after infecting their computers with malware, was arrested earlier this year by the FBI after a two year investigation. The 31-year-old man broke into victims’ personal computers, and stole personal information. Threatening to share the private information with their parents and email contacts, the man pressured the young women (some of them still young teenagers) into providing him with risqué pictures and videos. ...

(CNN) — Facebook is the biggest name in social networking. But overnight, it got smaller. The font size on much of the site appears to have shrunk — a tweak that has folks complaining about their poor, News Feed-browsing eyes. By Wednesday morning, users had taken to Twitter to sound off on the change, mostly for the negative. “Eye doctors everywhere must love the smaller default font on Facebook this morning. Eyes squinting everywhere!” wrote Twitter user esilverstein. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.” ...

Google knows it’s going to have a tough time convincing users to switch to its TV platform. As a result, over the next few weeks, the search giant is handing out 10,000 free Google TV units to developers in hopes of “empowering the developers of the world to make Google TV an even better experience, through websites that have been built with the TV screen in mind.” 3,000 Google TV devices (specifically, Logitech Revues) were already given away to attendees of the Adobe MAX conference. ...

Mashable: There’s a new stocking stuffer for the social gamer on your holiday shopping list: Facebook Credits. Already available at Target stores, the social networking site is set to offer the credits -– which can be used for in-game purchases in games like FarmVille –- at Walmart and Best Buy too. Walmart will offer $5, $10 and $25 versions of the gift cards, while Best Buy will sell them in denominations of $10, $25 and $50. ...

Believe it or not, Google hasn’t forgotten about Feedburner. The RSS feed service has received an experimental new interface that better matches Google Analytics and looks like it might actually integrate into other Google AdSense and Webmaster tools. The interface doesn’t work for every component of Feedburner — if you need to access feed management or change certain settings, you can continue to use the old interface. The new interface — which is accessible via feedburner.google.com/gfb/ — shows real-time stats for clicks, views and podcast downloads from across your feeds. This is really powerful, especially if you use the Feedburner Socialize service to auto-ping Twitter when you publish a post. This can let you track how users are referred and what RSS clients are being used to access feeds. ...

Currently cyber criminals try to make fast money by spamming out emails in masses in Germany which allegedly stem from an Advocate specialized in copyright. According to the spam mails, the user was downloading copyrighted material. An IP address is in the email to proof that. To not call the attorney to action, the recipient of the mail is offered to send 100 Euros via a payment system called Ukash. Don’t fall for that social engineering, don’t pay! ...

Mashable: The Wi-Fi Alliance is about to drop a wireless connectivity bombshell called Wi-Fi Direct. It will enable device-to-device connections using current Wi-Fi standards. The Wi-Fi Alliance will begin certifying Wi-Fi Direct devices today. Communication between Wi-Fi devices isn’t specifically new. The Nintendo DS, for instance, has had device-to-device Wi-Fi interaction for some time, but the technology is proprietary. The Wi-Fi Alliance differentiates Wi-Fi Direct by certifying the standard, ensuring interoperability. Devices stamped with the Wi-Fi Direct certification don’t need wireless networks, as they essentially become micro-hotspots. This technology will conceivably allow devices like an Eye-Fi memory card to directly beam an image to a wireless printer. Since Wi-Fi Direct is largely software based, many recent devices should be upgradeable. ...