The strange thing about this article is that I honestly didn?t know that Facebook didn?t have an app for the iPad. Well that is all going to change, it has been said that in the coming weeks Facebook is going to launch a free iPad app that has been designed and optimized for the iPad tablet. The app has been in production at Facebook for almost a year, going through several design iterations, and is now in the final stages of testing, according to these people, who declined to be named because they were discussing confidential product plans. Apple also plans to help Facebook promote the new application by featuring it prominently in the App Store, said a person familiar with the plans for the app.
On May 23rd at a developers conference in Japan, Microsfot CEO Steve Ballmer refered to the next Windows as Windows 8. He also stated that it will be out sometime next year. This is what Ballmer had to say according to a transcript from Microsoft.
?We?re obviously hard at work on the next version of Windows. Windows 7 PCs will sell over 350 million units this year. We?ve done a lot in Windows 7 to improve customer satisfaction. We have a brand new user interface. We?ve added touch, and ink, and speech. And yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there?s a whole lot more coming. As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8. Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors.?
Although later it came out that Ballmer?s statement wasn?t really what it seemed to be, a Microsoft spokesperson had this to say after the statements made by Ballmer.
?It appears there was a misstatement. We are eagerly awaiting the next generation of Windows 7 hardware that will be available in the coming fiscal year. To date, we have yet to formally announce any timing or naming for the next version of Windows.?
Did Ballmer get too excited and let the cat out of the bag too early and this is just Microsoft doing some back steps? I personally think Ballmer is on point but knowing Microsoft 2012 could be 2013. Although I always feel Microsoft seems to rush their OS?s to markets.
When people read from time to time they may come across a word they have never seen before and would like to know what that means to bring some sort of context to sentence or part of the story. Well now with the Google eBooks Web Reader you can look this stuff up without losing your place or even looking away from the page. Here is a breakdown of these three nice features.
Translate
You can also translate a single word or several sentences of content into dozens of languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, by selecting the “Translate” option. As with definitions, you’ll see the translated text displayed in the pop-up window.
Define
Click ?Define? and the pop-up now displays a definition of the word via Google Dictionary, without leaving the page you?re on in the Google eBook. Click on the audio icon to the left of the word you want defined to hear the definition pronounced aloud. If you decide you do want to leave the page, select ?More? to go to the Google Dictionary page for the word, which provides additional information like usage examples and web definitions.
Search
By selecting one of the search options, you can search for the selected text in other places within the ebook itself or across the entire web.
?Search Book? brings up all the instances in which the selected text appears in the ebook. You can also access the search options by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Web Reader. Click on a search result to jump to that section.
?Search Google? and ?Search Wikipedia? open up a new browser tab displaying the search results for that text on Google and Wikipedia, respectively.
Google Chrome has a flexible URL bar. Some applications and users may not really need it and there is now an option to kill it. The effect is a 30 pixel gain in vertical space and transforms the standard viewing window in Chrome into a full-screen view. The downside: There is a security issue as users will not always notice the URL and are now much more exposed to phishing attacks, for example and not aware whether they are on a secure or unsecured website.
Instead of showing a URL bar permanently, the user will have to double-click a tab to see a shortened version of the URL that is displayed with a hover effect, if you move the mouse pointer away from the field, the URL bar disappears. The feature has to be enabled via a flag in a recent Canary or nightly build version of Chrome 13. To activate the hidden URL bar, users will also have to right-click a tab and select ?Hide the toolbar?. Besides killing the URL bar, the new feature also moves the tools menu, hides any extension and introduces new back/forward buttons. To open a tab URL bar, click the tab once.
Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn Corp. and its three main venture backers will own a combined stake of $5.14 billion. It has been a long road for the founder and it has been eight years leading up to this day, the first IPO by a major US social networking site.
?Any solid returns like this are clearly a great thing and there?s been too few of them in the past decade,? said Eric Risley, founder of Architect Partners, a technology merger-and- acquisition advisory firm in Menlo Park, California. ?This was not an overnight success by any means.?
The shares went from $49.25 to a major $94.25 at around 4pm NY time. At the closing price the market value of LinkedIn was around $8.91 billion.
A report from Context is showing that the 64GB iPad 2 is still the most popular version of the Apple tablets even though Android devices are beginning to make in-roads to Apple?s majority market share. Six weeks since the launch of the 64GB 3G model that in Europe alone accounted for a third of all the iPad 2 sales and the Wi-Fi only 16GB model was second in popularity. Apple’s iPad devices comprised a whopping 80% of tablet devices sold in the first quarter of 2011. However, this figure represented a 5% decrease from the previous quarter, highlighting the growing popularity and number of Android devices.
“Apple defined the tablet market with the launch of the iPad in May 2010, but the signs are that the hegemonic presence in the market will face a strong challenge this year,” said Salman Chaudhry, mobile computing analyst at Context.
With new Android devices coming out it will be interesting to see if Apple can continue the domination in the market. Time will only tell how long the market share will hold.
