The latest contender in social networking emerged from stealth mode this week, offering yet another forum to share and compare opinions in a social stream of your acquaintances and the web at large. Hush-hush development of the Swipp Social Intelligence Network has been going on for two years, but its appearance this week may have been hastened by of Graph Search, which like Swipp gathers and shares information about people, places, and things. Swipp offers a graphical representation of its participants' opinions about a variety of topics, such as a movie or a restaurant, a city or a celebrity. Your rating on a 10-point scale (+5 to -5) contributes to a graphical map of those opinions, which can also be sorted by gender, location and other factors. Using Swipp requires a Facebook account, although Swipp's developers are quick to point out the differences between Facebook and Swipp. They say that Swipp gives its users greater control over their own content. Downloading and reusing material, for example, will be easier than Facebook, they say. Swipp's API will be more open, too.
The white case and bright green trim of One Laptop Per Child's laptops have made them among the most recognizable in the world, but what's the story behind the choice of colors? Last week, Nicholas Negroponte, former head of and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, explained the backstory. The newest version of the OLPC is a 7-inch tablet, are designed to bring computing and education to children in developing countries. The origin of the color scheme dates back to late 2005, just after the first OLPC prototype was shown to reporters at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. "After the Tunis meeting, I was asked to go to Nigeria and present to President Obasanjo and his cabinet," said Negroponte. The MIT professor arrived and was ushered into a meeting room with a large table. Seated along one side were many of Nigeria's government ministers, and on the other was a lone Negroponte, he recalled. The former president's seat was empty, as those gathered awaited his arrival.
The global cloud computing market will continue to grow in 2013 as enterprises look to reduce costs and boost innovation, according to analyst firm Ovum. In its "2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing" report, Ovum has forecast that public, private, and hybrid cloud models are evolving and becoming enterprise grade. According to Ovum Software UK senior analyst Laurent Lachal, the emergence of will also take place this year.
Facebook recently sent a legal notice to users that may appear daunting at first glance, but before you relegate it to the trash bin you ought to take a look at it – it could mean cash in your pocket. The notice is meant to notify some of its U.S. members that their names, profile pictures, photographs, likenesses, and identities were unlawfully used to advertise or sell products and services through Sponsored Stories without obtaining those members' consent. " is targeted advertising that uses information about your friends to sell stuff to you. ) resulting from those allegations of unlawful use of its members' content, the social network is proposing to pay $20 million into a fund to be used to pay members who appeared in the sponsored stories.
recently and it appears the video sharing service that lets you post clips up to six seconds long is already a hit with users. Vine is a completely public and compelling medium that gives you a brief window into what people all over the world are seeing, or the kinds of things they’re thinking about. You can share the brief videos on Twitter and Facebook. Just like Facebook’s Instagram turns regular people into creative photographers, Vine encourages anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch to make video montages. And unlike other platforms where it might take minutes or more to get your video fix, Vine makes it simple and fast to create and consume it -- perfect in a world where our digital attention span continues to shrink. It takes a bit of ingenuity to create a good vine, and that’s what Twitter intended, saying last week that “constraint inspires creativity."
Hackers working under the name of the Anonymous hacktivist collective hit a U.S. government website on Saturday, replacing its home page with a 1340-word text detailing its frustrations with the way the American legal system works and a threat to release "secrets" gathered from U.S. government websites. The website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which establishes sentencing policies for the federal court system, was offline for much of Saturday as a result of the attack. "This mornings cyber attack on the Commissions website brought it down temporarily, but the site now has been restored," the commission said in a brief statement issued on Saturday evening. "The Commissions publications, training materials, and federal sentencing statistics are again readily accessible to visitors to the site." The site and timing of the attack was not random, according to the message that replaced the home page before it was taken offline.
Google's Transparency Reports, released every six months, are interesting not just for what they for Internet user data, but also for what they do not reveal. Transparency reports are basically a biannual compilation of requests Google receives from governments around the world for Internet user data. The reports, which have been generally lauded by privacy experts, are an effort by Google to keep users informed about the data requests and how often it complies with them. The company's latest report, , shows that the U.S. government again led other nations in submitting the most requests for user data with Google. In the second half of 2012, the U.S. put in 8438 requests for Internet user data, up 6 percent from the 7979 requests it placed in the first six months of the year. Between 2011 and 2012, U.S. data requests from Google increased by more than 30 percent.
In the latest example of how Africa is becoming an important battleground for Western and Asian tech competitors, Web services giant Baidu will face off against Google following the Chinese company's move last week to bring its mobile browser to the continent in a deal with France Telecom's Orange unit. Baidu joins other Chinese companies including telecom equipment vendors Huawei Technologies and ZTE in seeing Africa as a promising market. Baidu's announcement with Orange follows Google's move last year to enter a deal with South Africa's giant telecom operator Telkom's cellphone network unit 8ta, to offer free Internet access to mobile phone subscribers who cannot afford typical data-usage costs. In Baidu's case, the deal with Orange is its largest international expansion to date. The deal covers 20 countries in the region, where Orange has more than 80 million subscribers. Orange will pre-install Baidu's mobile browser for users of Android-based mobile phones in Africa and the Middle East.
Intel, in partnership with integrated communications provider Safaricom, announced a new entry-level smartphone designed for developing markets this week, dubbing the device the "Yolo." The device is powered by an Atom Z2420 SoC, a 1.2GHz chip based on a 32nm process and boasting support for 1080p video and 8MP image capture. The Yolo will be an -based device, though the company did not indicate which version of the mobile platform would be used. It will also have a 3.5-inch screen, HSPA+ capability and support for global roaming. [ MORE MOBILITY: ] Aysegul Ildeniz, Intel's regional director for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, played up the Yolo's potential appeal to African customers.
