Rumor of a Mini iPad from Apple to compete Fire

In November last year, Steve Jobs had quashed all rumors on Apple making iPads lesser than its 10-inch diagonal as anything below that would not allow to create great apps for the tablet. Jobs further had said that 7-inch screens had only 45% space compared to the larger iPad, which was not sufficient enough for the tablet apps.

The decree of Steve Jobs of not making any tablet below the 10-inch mark might be ignored in future by Apple.
According to Digitimes, Apple is planning to launch an iPad of 7.85-inch, within final quarter 2012, for coping with market competition from the Kindle Fire.
The report further mentions that AU Optronics and are going to provide the displays for this device.
Even the DisplaySearch analyst, Richard Shim speaks on similar lines of planning the 7.85-inch iPad late in 2012.
The statement had however been made before the arrival of Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire. In fact, a recent statement from Amazon has said that the Kindle Fire was the hottest selling tablet these days, having already registered sales of millions of units. The demand of the Kindle Fire has also been continuously increasing, as per Amazon.

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In partnership with Bharti Airtel RIM launches BlackBerry Curve smartphone priced at Rs 19,990

In partnership with Bharti Airtel RIM launches BlackBerry Curve smartphone priced at Rs 19,990.

Research In Motion has finally revealed the most anticipated the next generation BlackBerry Curve smartphone priced at Rs. 19,990 in India today.

"The BlackBerry Curve series has been extremely popular in India and we are excited to launch the all new BlackBerry Curve 9360. This next generation BlackBerry Curve features a stunning new design along with a significant performance upgrade and an unmatched mobile social experience. It provides an ideal upgrade path for our existing Curve customers as well as the millions of feature phone users in the Indian market.” said Frenny Bawa, managing director, India at RIM.

The phone is quite stylish and designed with a comfortable and easy keyboard for fast, accurate typing and an intuitive optical trackpad for easy one-handed use.

The phone also aprons GPS and Wi-Fi support, as well as a 5 mega pixel camera with flash and video recording so that memories can be captured and instantly shared on social networks. Also the microSD/SDHC slot supports up to 32 GB memory cards for additional media storage.

To support the new BlackBerry 7 operating system, the new BlackBerry Curve 9360 smartphone features an upgraded processor, display and memory.It also comes with built-in support for NFC (Near Field Communications).

Also, in another development, RIM has partnered with Bharti Airtel to introduce the phone in India.

Now Airtel’s postpaid customers in India can avail special offers upon purchasing the BlackBerry Curve 9360 smartphone. As part of this offer, first time users of BlackBerry services can sign up for an exciting trial offer from Airtel that promises the Rs.299 BlackBerry plan free for a period of 2 months as well as special prices for local calls at 20p and 5p SMS to any one BlackBerry customer of choice for 1 year.

"We are confident these offers will deliver a compelling proposition for our high value customers looking to leverage their mobile devices for everything from exchanging messages, checking their emails, catching the latest in entertainment or staying connected with friends and family on social networks,” said N Rajaram, chief marketing officer, consumer business, Bharti Airtel.

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Facebook changes: Fact and fiction

Facebook has made a lot of modifications to its network and is planning a lot more. But, as often happens when the social network makes major changes, users are confused about what is and isn’t changing. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new, what’s in the cards, and a couple of busted myths:
News feed and ticker: The News Feed is now more curated, with stories that Facebook deems relevant pinned to the top, recent stories of import further down the page and all the “Julie commented on John’s post” or “John just earned the blue ribbon in Farmville” updates relegated to a real-time feed that runs along the right side of your homepage. Users will also be able to do more than “like” things on their news feeds and friends’ walls. Developers will have all verbs and nouns to choose from in the future. Now you theoretically could do anything from the fairly basic (watch a movie) to the off-beat(high-five a kitten?) through the network.

The Timeline: Pretty much everything Facebook users see and do will change in some way. Your profile, for example, is going to become a personal history, scrapbook, autobiography and news center.
Called the Timeline, the new profile will likely encourage people to put up content that predates their time on the social network. You’ll be able to guide visitors to your profile through your life via an actual timeline on the right side of the page, so they can quickly click to the days of your misspent youth or just see what you’ve been up to since you got your last job. The further back you go, the more content Facebook will hide from the main timeline.
Apps: Users also will be able to add apps that publish content to users’ Timelines automatically. Right now, apps ask users if they want to publish information to their wall before each post, such as when a user reaches a new milestone in a game. Now, Facebook will publish stories with a single permission agreement — for example, users using Spotify will agree to hook their account to the service once, and it will post to their walls every time a track changes.
Some apps, such as The Washington Post’s Social Reader, or Hulu will let you consume news and media content right from Facebook and tell your friends what items you’re reading, watching, or listening.
Is Facebook going to charge a fee?: No. Facebook isn’t going to charge a fee and likely never will. Restating what the company has said since it began, a post to the company’s main page definitively denied the rumor, saying: “We have no plans to charge for Facebook. It's free and always will be.”
Likes and comments: Another viral status that’s been going around is the assertion that users have no control over the sharing settings for their own likes and comments.
“Please do me a favor. Hover your cursor over my name here, wait for the box to load and then hover over the "Subscribed" link. Then uncheck the ‘Comments and likes’ choice”...Then repost if you don't want your EVERY MOVE posted on the right column for everyone to see,” the statuses read.”
Likes and comments on Facebook posts are tied to the privacy of the original post, according to Facebook’s settings. So while it’s true that unsubscribing from someone’s “comments and likes” will keep those posts from showing up in your ticker, users should know that the privacy of those actions is dependent on the root post.

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Sony Music to acquire music publishing rights for Sony/ATV JV

NEW DELHI: Sony Music plans to invest heavily in acquiring songs and music publishing rights to expand the Indian business and revenue of its recently formed joint venture with the US-basedSony/ATV Music Publishing. 

After signing the strategic JV for setting up the India operations of Sony/ATV, Sony Music is now looking at investing in publishing rights acquisitions to grow the business in India and drive its revenues, a top official said. 

Sony/ATV Music Publishing, co-owned by Sony and trusts formed by late Michael Jackson, is among the world's largest holder of music publishing companies and owns or administers copyrights by famous artistes from the likes of Beatles and Bob Dylan to Shakira and Lady Gaga. 

According to the just completed structure of the JV, the business revenues in India will report into the Sony Music India business and the earnings from International repertoire will be reported back to Sony ATV UK. 

The overseas earnings from Sony Music India's repertoire will however be reported into Sony Music India. 

As part of business transaction contracts Sony Music is negotiating for the Sony/ATV business, the publisher may get 8 per cent of retail price on digital sales. 

"However, the rates and revenue shares will be same for Indian and international works when used overseas," said Shridhar Subramaniam, President, Sony India & Middle East. 

Subramaniam said that Sony Music India will start collecting mechanical royalties on physical and digital sales, performance income from live and broadcast and also develop synchronisation Income when songs are synched to movies, TV shows or commercials. 

Similarly Sony ATV will do the same with Sony Music India's assets in the global markets. 

Sony/ATV's Senior Vice President, International, Guy Henderson said there were significant revenue opportunities for Indian songs worldwide. 

He said that Sony/ATV would offer Indian artistes a great platform with its global administration and sales network. 

The New York-based music publishing firm Sony/ATV last week announced an exclusive joint venture with Sony Music Entertainment for foraying into the Indian market. 

Sony Music India is one of India's largest music companies with significant interests in Hindi and Tamil soundtracks as also in pop and international music. 

Sony/ATV is now focusing on Asian and Latin regions. It is estimated that music publishing in India will become a Rs 500 crore market in 3-4 years time. The recorded music market in the subcontinent in comparison will be about Rs 1,300 crore in size.

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The Power Of Social Media

Social networking is what some information technology academics consider to be a disruptive technology or having disruptive impact, rendering existing products, services and business models obsolete.

Although social media have not yet made any product, service or business model obsolete, the phenomenon is certainly challenging many norms, and its current and future impact is and will be profound on all aspects of life. In particular, social media are supplanting traditional media as news and entertainment outlets. A number of recent events, locally and internationally, have highlighted the possible future legal and political impact and the difficulty that society is having with this particular technology.

The Friday, July 15 edition of The Gleaner, on its front page, questioned whether the widespread popularity of social-networking sites in Jamaica could undermine key elements of the justice system. Using the Khajeel Mais case as reference, legal experts wondered whether the widespread use of Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) could taint a potential jury pool and deny an accused person his constitutional right to a fair trial. In this case, the identity of the up-to-then-unnamed person of interest was widely circulated and discussed on Facebook and BBM.

Viral effect

The director of public prosecutions, Paula Llewellyn, commented that if the name of a suspect is released prior to an identification parade is held, the integrity of the process can be compromised and can "provide a legal basis to totally undermine" a prosecution. There were also rumours of other high-profile persons being involved in the unfortunate shooting. As we all know, rumours are not new; however, social networks add the viral effect to rumours, giving them a wider circulation. As it relates to legal considerations, another recent case further afield is worthy of discussion and contrast.

On June 15, Vancouver Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup finals to Boston Bruins. Vancouver is an intensely passionate ice hockey city; in fact, all of Canada is. As a result of the loss, a post-match riot ensued. Persons with smartphones took photos and videos of rioters looting and smashing cars and posted them on YouTube and Flickr. Many of these pictures and videos were posted with the express intention of identifying illegal or potentially illegal activity.

According to one commentator, this went beyond citizen journalism to engagement in citizen surveillance. The commentator continued: "I don't think I want to live in a society that turns social media into a form of crowd-sourced surveillance. When social media users embrace Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs as channels, identifying and pursuing criminals, that is exactly what we are moving towards."

This discussion was part of a blog and it elicited numerous comments both for and against the use of social networks for citizen surveillance. These two cases, one in Jamaica and the other in Canada, highlight the paradox of technology - social media or otherwise - some person will use and view the use of technology in laudable terms, while others will not.

The impact of social networks on politics is even more interesting and paradoxical. Facebook provides a forum where information can be quickly and efficiently published, and this feature takes on particular importance where these forums are absent from day-to-day political life or where individuals' liberties are curtailed.

We have seen in Egypt and Tunisia where social media were used to circumvent government dominance of the media sector and the restrictive freedom of association laws. Governments in these and other countries, like Iran and China, have restricted or have made attempts to restrict the use of social networks in their domain. These attempts have been met with criticism and virtual self-righteous claims from the West of repression, restriction on freedom of speech, freedom of expression and being undemocratic. Now contrast these events and reactions with the recent riots in Britain.

Media reports have strongly suggested that participants in the recent British riots used social networks, particularly BBM, as their premier method of communicating. They outmanoeuvred the police by using BBM and other social media to tell protesters where the police were and where they should avoid.

Without making any attempt to determine the motivation for the riots, British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to temporarily block social network platforms. Subsequently, on August 24, British officials met with representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry to discuss ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest. The governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other countries engulfed in the Arab Spring did characterise the protesters as rioters and the situation as civil unrest without making any attempt to determine the motivation for the 'riots'.

Smacks of hypocrisy

Some will argue that the current position of the British government smacks of hypocrisy while others will argue that the government in a 'democracy' should use all means to protect civil liberties and prevent crime.

Jamaicans are expecting that there will be a general election next year, and the politicians from both parties have begun to exchange 'pleasantries' in anticipation. During the last general election, traditional media platforms such as television, radio and print, coupled with on-the-ground campaigns, were the main means of engaging potential voters. Not so this time around, both political parties will have to use YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media in their political campaign.

The recent BBM campaign encouraging citizens to wear black to protest against the Jamaica Public Service Company's billing system has provided sufficient proof of the power of social media to rally persons around a cause. If social media are referred to as Web 2.0, the use of social media in Jamaica's general election will be Polytricks 2.0. This should be interesting from several perspectives, including the level of sophistication in the use of the media by the political parties, and the fact that the Broadcasting Commission has no regulatory powers against actual or perceived bias.

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Prepare Your Business for Google+

Google+ just opened its doors to the world by enabling open signups and moving to the beta, testing phase. The nascent social network is still thin on features and ways for businesses to properly use it, but its minimalist approach has gained Google+ millions of users in a very short period.

If you've tried it out for yourself, you'll know that making your way around Google+ is a simplistic, uncluttered experience compared to that of Facebook.
Back in July, Google promised that business profiles and features would be coming later, and as we get a little closer to when they are supposed to be announced later in 2011, it's time to position your business to take advantage in advance.
What's Coming for Business in Google+?
Google is preparing Google+ for businesses, as Christian Oestlien, Product Manager for Google+, explains in the video below. Rich analytics and the ability to connect to AdWords will be among those features.


Advertising will likely happen when Google rolls out business features, as Oestlien has stated that AdWords will play a part in the new business features. The ability to extend an existing advertising campaign into Google+ where you can target your client's interests will be invaluable. This will also extend Google's ability to advertise to local users for businesses that only offer services within a specific geographic area, exactly as you can on Facebook.
Stake Your Claim on Google+
Google has asked businesses to hold off on claiming user profiles for their businesses on Google+ until it rolls out certain features. This means that companies will likely have their own pages as they currently do on Facebook. As soon as Google+ business features are announced, you'll want to claim your company's home on Google+ by tasking someone in your company to watch for the announcement and setting up your Google+ business profile as soon as it comes.
You'll also want to stick with your company's real name. While it will be tempting to grab other names, such as keywords related to your business or misspelled versions of your company name, I suspect this practice will very likely be against Google policy. In addition to being your home on Google+, your business profile will be a valuable back-link for search engine optimization purposes.
If you've logged on and noticed that someone has taken your company name, don't panic. What they have created is not a business profile, and those are likely to be a little harder to establish than a user profile. This person is likely not from Coca-Cola, for example. Google has been actively cracking down on people who aren't using accounts for personal use only, and you can expect to be shut down if you try.
Prepare a list of influential people in your industry that you can apply later to your Google+ business profile.


What Edge Will Google+ Have Over Facebook?
Google+ will have a hard slog against Facebook. It will directly compete with the social network that has consistently gotten it right, especially when it comes to business use. Facebook's recently launched business portal is a great all-in-one tool for businesses to manage their presence on Facebook.
Google+ also lacks Facebook's user base of 800 million, although the Google+ user base has blown through 20 million so far and is steadily increasing.
Google's biggest ally against Facebook is Facebook itself. Facebook users have been getting ornery about its massive makeover rolled out this week, to the point where many may look at Google+ as a viable, pared-down alternative. The new Facebook Timeline should be a big concern for all of those new hires in the marketplace who may not want their frat-party status updates resurrected for co-workers on Facebook to see.
There is also the issue of demographics. Google+ is young-adult rich. This is the golden demographic that most marketers want to reach, and being able to reach it through a campaign that can be tracked through Google Analytics is a very attractive value proposition. In addition, there are other tie-in services Google could build into its features for business, which we have covered here.

How Can I Prepare My Ad Campaigns?
You can start researching targeted ad campaigns and the keywords you'll need to use so that when Google+ for business is launched, all you'll need to do is push a button. The first businesses to get on the more competitive keywords on Google+ will likely reap some rich rewards.
Prepare Content for Your Profile
A Google+ business profile is likely to follow the model of the current Google+ user profile. Have a concise, one paragraph description of your company ready, as well as any company logos and product photos that you would want to add. Make sure that your "About" paragraph contains relevant keywords for your business, just like your website copy does.
If we follow the model of the current user profile, videos will be an option as well. If you don't already have a product or company video, consider shooting one, since this can set you apart from your competitors in Google+.
Get Comfortable With Hangouts and Huddles
Google+ Hangouts and Huddles appear extremely useful for videoconferencing and cloud collaboration, and as a webcast platform. While they aren't a replacement for services like GoToMeeting yet, they do a great basic job and may be expanded on in the future.
While we can't say exactly when the new business features will be announced, they're promised for later in 2011, which could mean anytime between now and the end of the year. Prepare your company to hop on as soon as you can.

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If you're going to make a Google doodle to celebrate what would have been Muppet master Jim Henson's 75th birthday, September 24, there's no point doing it by halves.
Henson didn't.
So Google worked with both the Jim Henson Company and the Creature Shop to allow everyone in the world to become a puppeteer for a day.
This delightful doodle lets you operate six new, engaging Henson characters digitally.

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Google's Jim Henson doodle lets you be the puppeteer

By: Chris Matyszczyk September 23, 2011 6:00 PM PDT

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If you're going to make a Google doodle to celebrate what would have been Muppet master Jim Henson's 75th birthday, September 24, there's no point doing it by halves.
Henson didn't.
So Google worked with both the Jim Henson Company and the Creature Shop to allow everyone in the world to become a puppeteer for a day.
This delightful doodle lets you operate six new, engaging Henson characters digitally.

You are given a hand with which to operate each character. Click on that hand once, the puppet will follow your mouse pointer. Click twice and the puppet opens its mouth.
Yes, you can pretend that your favorite puppet is saying: "What the jumpin' blazes is going down there at Yahoo?!!"
Or: "Groupon? Ya lost any COO's lately?"
Or even: "HP? That's brown sauce in some places, right?"
Henson died aged 53 in 1990, yet his legacy, including characters from "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," has wafted merrily into cultural history.
Google's little homage is a fine tribute to a man who, apparently, began every one of his new creations with, well, a doodle.

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Dish unveils Blockbuster Movie Pass media bundle

Dish Network unveiled today the "Blockbuster Movie Pass," a bundle of services that includes streaming video; DVDs; Blu-Rays and games by mail; and access to premium movie channels. The catch: you need to be a Dish Network customer.

The service will launch October 1. Existing Dish subscribers can sign up for the package for an additional $10 a month. New customers who sign up for Dish's America's Top 200 package for $39.99 a month get access to the service for a year.
"More Americans are demanding an easier way to view their video," said Dish CEO Joe Clayton. "There is an easier way to have it."
The service could potentially breathe new life into Blockbuster, as well as drive subscriber growth for parent Dish. Dish subscribers, meanwhile, could be convinced to switch away from rival streaming service Netflix.
The timing couldn't be better, with Netflix dealing with the fallout from a price increase in its DVD-and-streaming plan and now scrambling to explain why it is splitting its DVD and streaming services into separate businesses. Over the past few months, the company has taken a beating from both consumers and investors. The backlash resulted in Chief Executive Reed Hastings issuing an apology.
Blockbuster has made steady progress since sliding into bankruptcy a year ago. The company, which still relies on brick-and-mortar stores to rent out its DVDs, was saddled with too many physical locations when the industry was moving to DVD-by-mail and streaming service. Sure, it offers DVDs by mail and a limited streaming service, but the customer base pales in comparison to that of Netflix. Satellite-TV provider Dish Network scooped up the company for $228 million, considered to be a bit of a head-scratching move at the time by Dish founder Charles Ergen.
Dish, however, was quick to revitalize Blockbuster, expressing confidence in the business and insisting that it would keep 1,500 of its stores running. Dish could also use the physical locations as another outlet to sell its core satellite-TV service. After Netflix raised its prices in July, Dish sent notices to media outlets "reminding" them about Blockbuster's low prices and digital download service.

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Facebook's colonization of the Web gains steam

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor says at F8 that the main goal for Open Graph is to keep things simple.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET) About a year ago I wrote about Facebook's growing dominance of the social Web casting a huge shadow over the Internet of people. At that time the service had 500 million users. In his F8 keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg said that as many as 500 million people used Facebook in a single day, with the total Facebook tribe approaching 800 million.
According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook had a 10 percent share of Internet visits in the U.S. for the week ending Sept. 17, followed by Google at 7 percent. Among social networks, Facebook garnered more than 65 percent share of visits, compared with YouTube at 19.5 percent for the same time period.

With the new Open Graph and other features, Facebook is not only capturing the data of your life and delivering new kinds of social interactions and experiences on line, but also deeply entangling (in the quantum sense, one object cannot be fully described without considering the others) a large portion of humans on the planet in its service.
Zuckerberg and team are moving as fast as they can to make Facebook a place where people can live online, with every application social and tied into Facebook's matrix, or platform. "The next five years are going to be defined by the apps and depth of engagement," Zuckerberg told the F8 crowd.
"All those activities people perform with these apps -- listening to a Bjork tune, reading about same-sex marriage laws, cooking Arroz con Pollo, running four miles, donating to Amnesty International -- will be stored permanently and made accessible (if the user allows it) on a greatly enhanced profile page that will essentially become a remote-control autobiography," wrote Wired's Steven Levy.
With Facebook's new kinds of apps, users can allow others to see what music they listen to and to view and their listening history, and join them in listening to a song, which is also great for the music services looking to sign up new paying subscribers.

Facebook's ongoing colonization of the Web, by continuing to innovate and offer more engaging services to its substantial base of users, will result in an increase of its share of visits, visitors, time spent on the service, and revenue. A more than $100 billion valuation is not out of the question.
Of course, any user is free to leave the Facebook world, and seek a home elsewhere--such as with Google+ or on other social platforms. But leaving the colony, where a person has spent "many months or years curating the stories of their life and sharing them on Facebook's platform," as Zuckerberg described his vision for the future, will become increasingly difficult as their Facebook interactions and entanglements grow more dense.

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iPhone 5 rumor roundup

As we wait for the official announcement of the next iPhone, we only can guess about what we're going to see. Apple, after all, always generates a ton of gossip in the absence of real details about upcoming devices. Some of the rumors about the new handset contradict each other--one camp suggests a minor update with an iPhone 4S, while another predicts a big update with an iPhone 5--but disagreement, after all, is often what the rumor mill is all about.

Since all that conflicting information can be hard to track, we offer this handy timeline of iPhone 5 rumors so far in 2011. We'll add to it as we go along, and please let us know if we've left any juicy tidbits out.

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RIM announces new BlackBerry Bold

T-Mobile USA said it will carry the BlackBerry Bold 9900 later this year.

Research in Motion is under pressure to update its high-end phones as it's losing out to iPhones and phones running Google Inc.'s Android software. Last week, the company cut its earnings and sales forecasts for the current quarter, saying it's selling fewer and cheaper phones than expected. Its stock plummeted. The fall continued Monday, with the shares losing 55 cents, or 1.1 percent, to $48.10.

Like the original Bold, launched in 2008, the 9900 has a keyboard under a 2.8-inch-screen in landscape orientation. It's thinner than before, at just 10.5 millimeters, making it the thinnest BlackBerry yet.

RIM calls the new software BlackBerry 7 OS and says it provides an easier and faster user experience, with an updated Web browser.

The new phone will come in two versions: one for the type of network used by T-Mobile USA and AT&T, and the other for the type used by Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Wireless. T-Mobile USA is the only carrier to announce that it will carry the phone, so far.

RIM demonstrated the phone on the first day of its BlackBerry World conference in Orlando, Fla.

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ISRO develops India's fastest supercomputer

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has built India's fastest supercomputer in terms of theoretical peak performance —220 trillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).

K. Radhakrishnan, ISRO Chairman, inaugurated the supercomputer, SAGA-220, at the newly established supercomputing facility, named after Satish Dhawan, of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre here on Monday.

Space scientists are using SAGA-220 (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) for solving complex aerospace problems.

The supercomputer was fully designed and built by the space centre using commercially available hardware and open-source software components. The system uses as many as 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 graphic processing units (GPUs) and an equal number of Intel Quad Core Xeon central processing units (CPUs), supplied by WIPRO, with a high-speed interconnect.

With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS, respectively, the theoretical peak performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS. The GPU-based system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU-based system in terms of cost, power, and space requirements.

An official release said the supercomputer cost about Rs.14 crore. The system was environmentally green and consumed only 150 kW of power. This system could be easily scaled to many PetaFLOPS (1,000 TeraFLOPS), it added.

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Sony executives bow in apology for security breach

TOKYO — Sony executives bowed in apology Sunday for a security breach in the company's PlayStation Network that compromised the personal data of some 77 million accounts on the online service.

"We deeply apologize for the inconvenience we have caused," said Kazuo Hirai, chief of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation video game unit, who was among the three executives who held their heads low for several seconds at the company's Tokyo headquarters in the traditional style of a Japanese apology.

Hirai said parts of the service would be back this week and that the company would beef up security measures. But he and other executives acknowledged that not enough had been done in security precautions, and promised that the company's network services were under a basic review to prevent a recurrence.

Hirai said the FBI and other authorities had been contacted to start an investigation into what the company called "a criminal cyber attack" on Sony's data centre in San Diego, California.

Sony said account information, including names, birth dates, email addresses and log-in information, was compromised for players using its PlayStation Network. Hirai asked all users to change their passwords.

Hirai reiterated what the company said last week -- that even though it had no direct evidence the data were even taken, it cannot rule out the possibility.

He said data from 10 million credit cards were believed to be involved, and that Sony still does not know whether information was stolen.

Sony has added software monitoring and enhanced data protection and encryption as new security measures, he said. The company said it would offer "welcome back" freebies such as complimentary downloads and 30 days of free service around the world to show remorse and appreciation.

"I see my work as first making sure Sony can regain the trust from our users," Hirai said.

The network, which serves both the PlayStation video game machines and Sony's Qriocity movie and music services, has been shut down since April 20. It is a system that links gamers worldwide in live play, and also allows users to upgrade and download games and other content.

Hirai said Sony suspected it was under attack by hackers starting April 17.

According to Sony, of the 77 million PlayStation Network accounts, about 36 million are in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Americas, while 32 million are in Europe and 9 million in Asia, mostly in Japan.

Pressure is mounting on Sony to restore services and compensate players.

U.S. lawmakers have sent a letter to Hirai demanding answers by May 6 about the security breach and Sony's response.

Hirai said he had read the online version of the letter and would answer the questions as soon as possible.

Last month, U.S. lawyers filed a lawsuit against Sony on behalf of lead plaintiff Kristopher Johns for negligent protection of personal data and failure to inform players in a timely fashion that their credit card information may have been stolen. The lawsuit seeks class-action status.

Hirai said the network problems would not hurt or delay Sony's product plans, including a tablet device that looks like Apple's iPad, an upgrade to the PlayStation Portable and a gradual global rollout of the Qriocity service.

Hirai also denied Sony had purposely held off on releasing information about network problems, a criticism that some have expressed.

He said the service was shut down to prevent damage, and that time was needed to find out what had happened and who was responsible.

But Yoh Mikami, a writer specializing in electronic security in Japan, said Sony's network business had suffered a serious blow as people were seeing its reliability as plunging. He said Sony also waited too long, more than a week, to tell users what had happened.

"What became clear today is that Sony didn't even know its server had a vulnerability," said Mikami. "Sony's crisis management came too little, too late."

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Experts: Apple should've addressed concerns sooner

NEW YORK — Apple should have responded much sooner to concerns about location data stored on its iPhones, even if the company didn't have all the answers ready, marketing and crisis-management experts say.

The company took a week to deny that the phones track the precise location of their owners, as some users and privacy watchdogs had feared.

As soon as it started selling the devices, Apple should have said how it uses, or doesn't use, location data, said Joe Marconi, a DePaul University marketing professor and author of "Crisis Marketing: When Bad Things Happen to Good Companies."

"The whole problem could have been a non-problem if Apple had done some kind of disclosure of this in some kind of a privacy statement," he said. "Apple customers are fiercely loyal in a way we can say few (others) are today. With that comes a responsibility."

In a list of 10 questions and answers published Wednesday, the company explained that a data file publicized last week by security researchers doesn't store iPhone users' physical locations — just a list of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding them.

Apple said the data help phones figure out their location without having to listen for faint signals from GPS satellites.

The company did acknowledge that the data are stored for up to a year because of a software bug. It promised a fix in the coming weeks to reduce the duration of the storage.

Larry L. Smith, president of the Institute for Crisis Management, a public relations company, said Apple should have said something sooner in some form, even if it didn't have all the details right away.

"To me there is no excuse to stonewall, to put off facing your customers, your partners, your shareholders, your employees," he said. "When there is a problem, or an issue has been raised, it's so counterproductive to put off responding."

Even a response of "I don't know; I will get back to you" is better than none, he said. "You are not always going to have immediate answers."

Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris would not comment on why the company waited to respond.

Speaking to The New York Times, CEO Steve Jobs defended the timing of Apple's response, saying that the company wanted to determine exactly what happened rather than rush to its public relations department.

"The first thing we always do when a problem is brought to us is we try to isolate it and find out if it is real," he said. "It took us about a week to do an investigation and write a response, which is fairly quick for something this technically complicated."

Jobs, who went on medical leave in January, said he was personally involved in writing Wednesday's response, as were other top executives, "because we think it is that important."

Despite all the hoopla, Smith said he doesn't expect Apple's latest blunder to hurt the company in the long run.

Apple quickly recovered from "antennagate," a problem with the iPhone 4's antenna design. It caused reception issues when people covered a certain spot with a bare hand.

Jobs apologized last July to people who were not completely satisfied with the iPhone 4, but denied there was an antenna problem that needed fixing. Even so, the company gave out free protective cases. "Antennagate" didn't seem to make a dent in the iPhone's popularity or sour Apple's devoted fan base.

And, Smith said, the "flap over data won't do the harm today that it might have done a few years ago when our attention span was a little longer. Somebody else will do something stupid tomorrow."

Companies that handle public relations crises well are not remembered long — that's the whole point. But Apple might learn from fast food companies such as Domino's Pizza and Taco Bell.

When video of a Domino's employee appearing to do disgusting things to food appeared on YouTube, Domino's responded by firing that person and the co-worker who recorded him. Later, CEO Patrick Doyle posted a video in response, saying the store had been sanitized "top to bottom" and that the company is re-examining how it hires workers "to make sure that people like this don't make it into our stores."

Taco Bell, meanwhile, spent millions of dollars on ads to counter a lawsuit that questioned whether the filling in its tacos was actually beef. The lawsuit has been dropped.

Smith said Taco Bell realized their taco customers were mostly men who bought it for the taste and price, not for its nutritional value.

Similarly, Apple might find that many users don't mind their location being tracked because this allows them to get directions, find nearby restaurants and use a slew of other apps and features of the iPhone. In Wednesday's statement, Apple said the data file in question helps speed location-based services.

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Manual Typewriters Bid Adieu

The last frontier of the manual typewriters, Godrej Boyce is all set to fade away from the market. The news of closure of facility in Mumbai, India, sent a wave of nostalgia in the countries across the world.

With the news hitting the market, a sense of romanticism with the manual typewriters was seen on Twitter and Facebook accounts of millions of people across the world. To the surprise of many, why such euphoria surrounds the manual typewriter when most of the people are hooked to computers all the time?

If company sources are to be believed, company had been producing 10,000 to 12,000 machines in 2009, but the number of orders started dwindling gradually.

Though the legendary manual typewriter is being used by an eloping clan of legal representative’s sitting outside courts, for instance, to draft pleadings, affidavits, and other legalese along with defense agencies and other government offices, presence of computers in many government departments have picked up simultaneously.

As Godrej Boyce has been working for the last six decades, General Manager Milind Dukle, claimed, “We're feeling very sentimental. We have grown up with our fathers using them, we grew up with the clickety sound of the keys in the background, so it's hard to say goodbye to the last machines”.

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Sony to reveal PlayStation hack probe

SONY will reveal details of its internal probe into a massive theft of personal data from PlayStation Network users.

The electronics giant said Saturday it would hold a news conference on the security breach of the online network, which may have involved the theft of credit card details and which it said this week was carried out by hackers.

The PlayStation Network and Qriocity streaming music service were shut down on April 20 after what Sony described as an "external intrusion" and remain offline as the company upgrades security and works with Federal investigators.

The United States, Britain, Australia and Hong Kong are investigating the hacking and theft of personal data from the network, which has 77 million users worldwide.

A US House of Representatives panel Friday sent a letter to Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America, with questions on the data breach.

"Given the amount and nature of personal information known to have been taken, the potential harm that could be caused if credit card information was also taken would be quite significant," said the letter from a panel of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which was posted on the Internet.

Sony has said users' credit card data was encrypted but could not rule out the possibility that card data was obtained by hackers.

The committee also asked Sony to explain why it believes credit card information was not taken despite being unable to determine the exact scale of the theft.

"The fact that encryption was being used on the credit card data is to be welcomed -- as it reduces the chances of stolen information being used for fraud," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Internet security firm Sophos, said on his blog.

"However, there still remains the question about just how strong the encryption is that Sony used."

Britain's Information Commissioner's Office said it had contacted Sony, while Australia's Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said he had launched an investigation.

"We're seeing more and more now information being held globally, and it's more incumbent upon organisations to make sure they do have strong security systems in place to protect that information," he told broadcaster ABC earlier this week.

Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner Allan Chiang said he was probing the breach and met with local Sony official Katsuhiko Murase who told him 400,000 Hong Kong PlayStation Network user accounts were involved.

He said Murase told him the account information compromised includes the name, address, country, email address, birthdate, PSN password and login, and PSN online ID of users, but there was no evidence credit card data was taken.

Sony is being sued in a US court by gamers who have accused the company of being negligent and breaching its contracts with PlayStation Network users.

The company has not indicated whether it has identified a culprit in the intrusion.

Internet vigilante group Anonymous had vowed retribution against Sony for taking legal action against hackers who cracked PS3 defences to change console operating software.

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Q&A on Playstation Network security breach

Q: What is the PlayStation Network, and what happened to it?

A: The PlayStation Network (PSN) is a proprietary network for owners of Sony's PlayStation 3 consoles to play online games with others. PSN also offers movies and TV episodes for rent or purchase, as well as downloadable games and game demos. "The idea is you create a profile and put your credit card number in and information about yourself, so when you want to get online it verifies your identity," says Chet Wisniewski, senior security adviser at network security firm Sophos. "If you decide to buy or rent anything, they have your credit card on record and can automatically bill you."

Sony shut down PSN on April 20 after discovering that sometime April 17 to 19, an illegal breach occurred. On Tuesday, Sony announced that users' personal data was compromised, including possible credit card information.

Q: How many people are affected?

A: Sony has sold about 50 million PS3 systems and has said that it has 77 million registered accounts in 59 countries. Customers don't have to enter credit card information; they can use prepaid PSN cards sold at retail.

Q: What can users now do to protect themselves?

A: Users should replace any credit card that was on file with PSN, change passwords on any other accounts that used the same password as PSN and subscribe to an identity theft monitoring service, says Paul Judge, chief research officer for security firm Barracuda Networks.

Q: Was Sony quick enough to inform users about the theft of their data?

Sony has not managed this crisis appropriately so far, by not taking immediate and full responsibility for the problem, says Susan Fournier, an associate professor of marketing at Boston University's School of Management. "Their statements to the press actually seek to deflect blame and indicate no ownership of what has happened."

Q: What price might Sony pay in lost trust and lost customers? Should it compensate users?

Still to be seen is whether Sony "has stored enough trust reserves to get it through this crisis," Fournier says. "It is hard to come out of this and feel that the company cares about me."

The PSN relationship with users is not a simple one. "I think Sony has what we would call a communal relationship based in trust and reciprocity," she says. "The 'appropriate compensation' here is more likely attention, caring, empathy (and) specific actions that fix the problem and prevent it from happening again."

In real world costs, Sony could be on the hook for millions. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach in 2010 increased to $7.2 million, with an average cost of $214 per compromised record.

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Windows 7 helps Microsoft boost OS share to 78.6 percent

Microsoft's Windows accounted for 78.6% of worldwide operating system revenue in 2010, up nearly a full percentage point, despite growth in Linux servers and Mac desktops, according to Gartner.

Gartner's new analysis adds up the revenue for both server and desktop operating systems worldwide, comparing Microsoft to IBM, HP, Oracle, Red Hat and Apple.

Windows has long dominated the desktop market, but has had a tougher fight on the server side. Adding the two segments together shows Windows grabbing $23.8 billion in 2010 revenue, up from 2009 when Windows accounted for $21.9 billion and 77.9% of the market by revenue share.

IBM, maker of Unix and mainframe operating systems, came in second place in 2010 with $2.3 billion revenue and 7.5% market share. Although Red Hat, the top Linux vendor, accounted for only 2% of share and Apple's Mac OS 1.7%, Gartner said Linux servers and Mac desktops are on the rise.

"Linux (server) and Mac OS were the fastest-growing subsegments in the server and client OS segments, respectively, while Microsoft maintained its leading position in the overall OS market," Gartner said.

Microsoft growth was "driven by positive Windows 7 adoption and [the] PC refreshment cycle."

Windows desktops accounted for $17.7 billion of OS revenue, and 96.6% of worldwide desktop share, followed by Mac OS at 2.8% and Linux at 0.6%.

Counting by revenue, rather than unit share, seems to help Microsoft's cause. Usage tracker Net Applications gives Windows 89.6% of share by number of users, while StatCounter gives Windows 91.6% of users with the rest going mostly to Mac and Linux.

On the server side, Windows earned $6.2 billion in revenue, for just over 51% of the market. HP's Unix systems took in 8.6%, IBM's Unix 8.5%, Linux on the whole took 8.4% and IBM's mainframe, 7.8%.

The small cost of servers running open source Linux naturally results in a revenue share that is much lower than its unit share.

An ongoing survey of the top million websites by W3Techs gives Linux and other Unix-like systems 64.1% of Web server operating system unit share, compared to 35.9% for Windows and nearly zero for Mac OS. Numbers like these have led people like Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin to brag that Linux powers the majority of Internet traffic despite its small revenue share.

The overall operating system market grew 7.8% to 30.4 billion in revenue in 2010, according to Gartner, with desktop systems leading the way.

One category Gartner did not include in its analysis is the mobile operating system. Usage of Android and Apple's iOS still account for a small portion of total OS use, but it is growing quickly due to proliferation of smartphones and tablets.

Net Applications, which lumps desktop and mobile operating systems together, found that Apple's iOS rose from 0.81% to 1.87% in the past year, while Windows dropped from 91.3% to 89.6%.

Windows 7 seems to be on fire, selling 350 million licenses and becoming the fastest selling operating system in history, according to Microsoft. A PC World analysis, while not definitive, suggests that the 350 million licenses may actually be a step back for Microsoft, representing only about two-thirds of total PC sales, much lower than Microsoft's typical desktop share.

However, current usage patterns as tracked by Net Applications shows Windows share dropping only slightly, and that is largely due to gains made by mobile operating systems.  

iOS, which powers iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, is actually more widely used than Linux desktops, according to Net Applications. IOS share is nearly double that of desktop Linux and more than three times higher than Android's.

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Apple denies iPhone tracking claims

Apple has admitted that a bug in its software has allowed iPhones and iPads to collect data related to their location even when users turn off permission to collect it – but says it will soon remedy this oversight.

The admission follows a storm of controversy after the Guardian's exclusive revelation last week that the devices stored a file containing details from which a user's movements could be reconstructed.

In a statement on its website, the company says that: "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans ever to do so."

It says that the file discovered by researchers and described in the Guardian is not used for tracking of the phone or its owner. "The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and [mobile network] cell towers surrounding the iPhone's location, which can be more than 100 miles away from the iPhone." It adds: "We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon."

That will cut the amount of data stored from as much as a year's worth of location information to just seven days, the company says. That is likely to be roughly comparable with the store used on Android phones, which record the past 50 cell towers and 200 Wi-Fi networks that the phone has "seen".

That data is uploaded to Apple in an "encrypted and anonymous" form, it says.

It admits that a software fault means that if users turn off Location Services – which should prevent the upload – the data is still sent. "It shouldn't. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly," the company says.

Future versions of the file will be encrypted on the phone. That will allay fears that law enforcement and security services could copy the file and analyse it without a valid warrant.

Apple accepts some of the blame for the concern over the revelations, which have seen it threatened with lawsuits and put under focus from US lawmakers and potentially by European governments. "Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date," the company says in its statement.

The data is stored because it helps the iPhone to calculate its location, Apple says. "Calculating a phone's location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple."

Apple also insists that it cannot identify individuals from the data because the data about networks and Wi-Fi – which is reported to the company's servers – is anonymised and encrypted.

The Guardian approached Apple ahead of publication last week of its article detailing the findings by the researchers, but the company declined to comment at the time. Repeated requests for comment received no response until now.

Since then Apple has found itself under fire, with the US Democratic senator Al Franken writing directly to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why the phones retained the data, and attempts to file a class action lawsuit against the company.

Jobs himself was curtly emphatic in an email earlier this week in which he insisted "we don't track anyone" and that "the info circulating around is false".

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Sony may face global legal scrutiny over breach

Sony Corp. could face legal action across the globe after it belatedly revealed one of the biggest online data breaches ever.

In the United States, several members of Congress seized on the breach, in which hackers stole names, addresses and possibly credit card details from users of Sony's PlayStation Network, to push for tougher laws protecting personal information.

The staff of a House of Representatives subcommittee were directed to investigate the hacking incident.

Attorneys general, who act as consumer advocates, had begun investigating the matter or reviewing it with staff in several states, including in Iowa, Connecticut, Florida and Massachusetts, according to their offices.

One U.S. class-action lawyer said he was considering filing a lawsuit on behalf of consumers as soon as this week.

In Britain, a government watchdog said it had already launched an investigation of the incident, which put credit card information at risk.

Britain's Information Commissioner's Office said it had contacted the company and was investigating whether Sony violated laws that require it to safeguard personal information. The commissioner's investigation would depend in part on whether Sony stored user information in Britain.

While the Japanese electronics company pulled the plug on the PlayStation network on April 19, it did not tell the public about the hackers' attack until Tuesday.

The disclosure sparked immediate outrage among gamers and revived criticisms of Japan's corporate culture that plagued Toyota Motor during its huge automotive recall in 2010.

A Sony spokesman has said that after learning of the breach it took "several days of forensic investigation" before the company knew consumers' data had been compromised.

Sony said on Tuesday that hackers accessed personal details on 77 million users.

"This is a huge data breach and the clients who have called are really upset, not just because of the data breach but it looks like Sony sat on information for as much as five days," said Jay Edelson, an attorney at law firm Edelson McGuire.

Edelson's firm specializes in class-action lawsuits over data breaches. He said he would decide in the next 24 hours whether to file a lawsuit.

Sony did not immediately return a call on Wednesday seeking a comment.

U.S. SCRUTINY

The incident could give momentum for tougher policies in the United States.

U.S. Representative Mary Bono Mack of California said she directed staff of the House subcommittee for commerce, manufacturing and trade, which she chairs, to begin investigating the matter to determine if hearings are needed.

Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois said he would reintroduce legislation that would require companies to have reasonable security measures and Senator Tom Carper of Delaware said he hoped for a comprehensive cyber security bill this year.

U.S. regulators could get involved as well. The Federal Trade Commission has been known to pursue companies that failed to safeguard consumer data. It could investigate if it determines Sony failed to tell its customers about the company's privacy policies.

A spokeswoman for the agency declined to comment.

Sony reported the breach to the FBI's cybercrimes unit in San Diego, which is investigating, a person familiar with the probe told Reuters. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Sony may come under the toughest scrutiny from non-U.S. regulators, which have stricter consumer privacy laws.

"European countries are going to go crazy and be all over this," said Dan Burk, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. "They are absolutely obsessed about companies holding personal information."

Burk said subscribers will need to show they suffered damages as a result of the hacking for a U.S. lawsuit to have legs.

"If it was just hacking for fun, then it's going to be tough," he said.

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