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. Knowing that the media would notice such a large transaction, Ballmer posted a statement on Microsoft’s website, saying that he sold $1.3 billion in Microsoft shares for financial diversification and tax planning. ...

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.” ...