Smartphones verdrängen immer schneller einfache Handys. Im abgelaufenen dritten Quartal 2012 waren bereits knapp 40 Prozent der verkauften Mobiltelefone Smartphones, wie die Marktforschungsfirma Gartner mitteilte. Vor einem Jahr war es erst gut jedes vierte Handy gewesen.
Der Onlinekommunikationsdienst Skype hat eine gravierende Sicherheitslücke geschlossen. Dies teilte der zum Softwareriesen Microsoft gehörende Dienst am Mittwoch Abend mit. Skype hatte nach ersten Berichten über den Vorfall die fehlerhafte Funktion zum Zurücksetzen von Passwörtern deaktiviert. Sie wurde inzwischen wieder online geschaltet.
Dies könnte der Wendepunkt in der bislang trüben Börsenkarriere von Facebook sein: Nachdem am Mittwoch eine wichtige Haltefrist für Belegschaftsaktien ausgelaufen war, blieb der befürchtete Kursrutsch aus. Im Gegenteil: Die Aktie schoss im frühen New Yorker Handel um 10 Prozent auf bis zu 22,09 Dollar hoch.
Im Kampf um die Fernsehzuschauer kontert UPC Cablecom die jüngste Offensive der Swisscom. Der Kabelnetzbetreiber hat die Verschlüsselung für 55 Sender des digitalen TV-Angebots bereits abgeschafft. Ursprünglich war die Abschaffung erst auf Anfang nächsten Jahres vorgesehen.
Der japanische Elektronikkonzern Panasonic treibt seinen Sparkurs weiter voran und baut noch in diesem Geschäftsjahr 10.000 Arbeitsplätze ab. Zudem trenne sich das Unternehmen bis Ende März von Vermögenswerten in Höhe von umgerechnet rund einer Milliarde Euro, sagte Finanzchef Hideaki Kawai am Mittwoch in einem Interview mit der Nachrichtenagentur Reuters.
Nach der Deutschschweiz und der Romandie weitet das Swiss IPv6 Council seine Aktivitäten nun auch auf den italienisch sprechenden Teil der Schweiz aus. Am 29. November findet der erste Member Anlass im Supercomputing Center in Lugano statt, wie die Schweizer Vertretung des Internationalen IPv6 Forums mitteilt.
Nach dem Verlust der Marktführerschaft bei Handys baut der finnische Hersteller Nokia das Geschäft mit Navigationssoftware weiter aus und bietet diese künftig auch für mobile Geräte anderer Hersteller an.
Die Tamedia lanciert mit "Open Development Projects" einen Ideenwettbewerb nach dem Vorbild bekannter «Hack Days» von Grossunternehmen aus den USA und Deutschland. An einem zweitätigen Workshop sollen die Teilnehmenden ein Konzept zur Umsetzung eines Online-Projektes erarbeiten.
Samsung schließt eine gütliche Einigung mit dem iPhone-Hersteller Apple in dem weltweit ausgefochtenen Patentstreit derzeit aus. Samsung habe keine Absicht zu verhandeln, wurde der Leiter des Bereichs IT und mobile Kommunikation, Shin Jong Kyun, am Mittwoch von der nationalen Nachrichtenagentur Yonhap zitiert.
Die Telekom Austria Group hat in den ersten neun Monaten des heurigen Jahres gut verdient. Der Nettogewinn legte von 68,7 auf 180,1 Mio. Euro zu, das operative Ergebnis (Ebit) wurde von 208,8 auf 388,1 Mio. Euro angehoben. Der Ausblick bleibt unverändert, die Dividende soll bei 0,05 Euro je Aktie liegen, teilte der börsenotierte teilstaatliche Konzern am Mittwoch ad hoc mit.
The is building, and with it comes the annual question about whether employees should be able to shop online during work hours. This year, far more companies are being tolerant, CIOs say. Last year, 60 percent of CIOs polled said their to online shopping sites. Today, only 33 percent block access to retail sites, according to survey data from IT staffing specialist Robert Half Technology. More than half (55 percent) said their companies allow access but monitor for excessive use, and another 10 percent said they allow unrestricted access to online shopping sites. (The remaining 2 percent of respondents said they don’t know.) There’s a need for flexibility during the hectic holiday season, and more companies are recognizing that and allowing some online shopping at work, “within reason,” said John Reed, senior executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a statement. Meanwhile, according to Deloitte’s annual holiday survey, 45 percent of consumers intend to shop online as part of their 2012 gift-buying sprees.
As Google grows, so too does government surveillance of its users. , which discloses the number of government requests it has received to hand over user data or remove public information. For the last three years, Google has issued these reports on a semiannual basis, and each time, the number of requests to hand over user data has risen. Since the start of 2010, the United States has sent more requests for user data than any other country, a trend that continues in the latest report. Between January and June, the U.S. government sent 7,969 requests for user data. No other country came close. (India, in second place, submitted 2,319 requests.)
Web content is great, when you don't mind visiting a multitude of Web sites in order to peruse all that you want to see. Wouldn't it be great if you could grab the content you wanted to read and put it in one place, almost like a virtual newspaper? You can, with Paper.li, another tool in the growing online curation space. , Paper.li is a free, cloud-based service, though Paper.li also offers a Pro version ($9 per month) that allows businesses of any size to add their own branding and remove ads. To use Paper.li, you'll need a Twitter or Facebook account, as you must sign in with one or the other, and you need to enter an email address as well. Then, you're up and running. Creating an online paper is easy: You simply enter the title, add a subtitle if you'd like, and then choose the frequency. You can choose to daily updates, a morning and evening edition, or a weekly paper. So far, so good. But Paper.li stumbles a bit when it comes to finding and selecting content sources for your paper. The three-column layout is attractive and seems to make sense, at first. The left column is organized by topics (such as news, business, entertainment, and more) and includes links to your accounts. I had signed in with my Facebook account and found that Paper.li didn't then let me access my Twitter account. I could access general Twitter info, using the search tool, but not tweets and other information specific to my own account. The company says this is because they don't currently link the accounts, though they plan to merge the sign-in process in the future to make it simpler.
Looking for a job? Now you can leverage one of the sites that you use the most, Facebook, to help in your hunt. for U.S. users, which has aggregated more than 1.7 million job listings from job search sites that were already using Facebook to reach recruits, including Jobvite, BranchOut, Work4Labs, and Monster.com. The social network first announced plans for a jobs app last October as a joint venture with the Labor Department. The two launched the Social Jobs Partnership, a group that includes the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, and the Direct Employers Association. U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis in a statement said “the foundation of an industry-supported open-source job-posting schema” is “helping America get back to work.”
Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the lousy stock firmware your routers shipped with. Apart from smartphones, routers and wireless base stations are undoubtedly the most widely hacked and user-modded consumer devices. In many cases the benefits are major and concrete: a broader palette of features, better routing functions, tighter security, and the ability to configure details not normally allowed by the stock firmware (such as antenna output power). The hard part is figuring out where to start. If you want to buy a router specifically to be modded, you might be best served by working backward. Start by looking at the available offerings, picking one of them based on the feature set, and selecting a suitable device from the hardware compatibility list for that offering. In this piece we've rounded up five of the most common varieties of third-party operating systems, with emphasis on what they give you and who they're best for. Some of these are designed for embedded hardware or specific models of router only; some are designed as more hardware-agnostic solutions; and some are intended to serve as the backbone for x86-based appliances. To that end, we've presented them with the more embedded-oriented solutions first and the more generic-PC oriented solutions last.
This is an updated, Firefox-oriented version of a post I wrote several months ago. If you're a Firefox user and Kindle (or Kindle app) owner, today's your lucky day: You can now send Web pages directly to your mobile device. has branched out to a browser. (it's also available for Chrome, with a Safari version coming soon), then navigate to any Web page you want to save. You can also select text on a page if you don't need the whole thing.
's Office 365 service has suffered two email outages within a week of each other that affected some customers in North and South America that stemmed from different causes but ended in the same result: failed email delivery. The first outage Nov. 8 stemmed from an overwhelmed antivirus engine and the subsequent backup that caused the service degradation. The second on Nov. 13 resulted from the failure of unspecified network elements, routine maintenance and increased load that combined to degrade service, according to the posted by Rajesh Jha, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office division. He didn't say how many customers were affected or where they were located other than somewhere on the two continents. Both outages affected just Office 365 Exchange Online mail services. Affected customers are entitled to a service credit. Jha apologizes and promises a post mortem on the outages as well as an update on how the Office 365 service level agreement was affected.
IBM is planning to release on Dec. 14 a public beta of Notes and Domino 9.0 Social Edition that will no longer use the Lotus brand. IBM has decided to offer a public beta, the first in a long time for Notes and Domino, because of the importance of the release, Ed Brill, director of product line management and in charge of IBM's Collaboration Solutions, said This beta also signals the point where Notes and Domino will join IBM's other software products in sporting only the IBM name, which the company feels is a stronger brand than Lotus, according to Brill. The Lotus brand became part of IBM when the company acquired Lotus Development Corporation in 1995.