Tech Blog

[#1]

Apple

Executive Leaves After iPhone Trouble
Mark Papermaster, the Apple executive in charge of hardware for the company’s flagship iPhone , has left the company in the wake of widely reported problems with the antenna of the recently introduced iPhone 4.

In five years, Apple has switched places with Dell as the student laptop of choice

Shares of Microsoft ( MSFT ) dropped nearly 2.5% in the opening hour of trading Wednesday thanks in part to a downgrade by Global Equities Research's Trip Chowdhry that included this bulletpoint:

• 70% of incoming University freshman students are coming with Macs, which is up ~10% - 15% y-y. Microsoft is failing to connect with the new generation of users

Online

A Simple, But Effective, Way to Beat Internet Censorship

A new tool will join the censorship circumvention arsenal this September.

Feed Over E-mail (FOE) sends restricted content, in the form of RSS feeds, via email. The tool can't help a user browse censored sites or obtain large files. But its creator, Sho Ho, says that FOE could be particularly hard to block and could work in concert with other circumvention technologies. Ho, who is a researcher with the federal government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, gave a talk about FOE yesterday at Defcon, a hacker conference that takes place annually in Las Vegas.

Bing’s Bringing Sexy Maps

Over the last few weeks a few of you lucky ducks got to experience a new map type we were flighting. Around 10% of users were seeing our new maps in all its aesthetic glory. Today, we’re releasing it to everyone. The new map type has two experiences that differ between the AJAX version of Bing Maps and the Silverlight experience

Wave Goodbye To Google Wave
Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.

Wave, a real time messaging platform, was unveiled in May 2009 to an enthusiastic crowd of developers at the Google I/O event in San Francisco. It would “set a new benchmark for interactivity,” said Sergey Brin .

Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

Gaming

Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games
We’ve just learned that Google has agreed to buy Slide for $182 million, in a deal to be announced Friday. And sources also tell us that this is not the last move Google is going to be making to cobble together a serious social gaming and apps strategy to counter Facebook.

As we previously reported, Google invested in Zynga to form the cornerstone of Google Games, which Eric Schmidt somewhat confirmed will launch later this year.

Hardware

No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment

A few weeks ago I decided to mosey over to a local Manhattan coffee shop for an afternoon cappuccino.

After placing my order I sat down at a table and pulled out my eBook reader.

I barely made it a sentence into the e-book I was reading before an employee of the coffee shop came by, stood over me and said, “Excuse me sir, but we don’t allow computers in the coffee shop.”

Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S.
Sales of Google Android phones in the U.S. are rising so quickly, the devices have outsold Apple handsets for the first time on record. New smartphone subscribers choosing Google phones accounted for 27 percent of U.S. smartphone sales, the Nielsen Company will announce this morning, nudging past the 23 percent share held by Apple. But Android isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon: Canalys today estimates that Android handset sales grew 886 percent worldwide from the year ago quarter .

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Your Turn
So, did I miss anything? What online story really got you going this week? Link to it in the comments!

[#2]

A few items that I came across.....

• http://www.pcworld.com/article/202689/Want_GPS_Nav igation_In_Your_Glasses.html
• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2367496,00.as p

[#3]

Great finds, thanks! GPS Glasses -- what will they think of next?