Tech Roundup: May 18, 2012

The biggest news of the week is, of course, the Facebook IPO. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell at NASDAQ yesterday, the IPO was set at 38 USD a share taking the market cap of the company to 104 billion USD. The first day of frenzied activity saw the share value fluctuating from 38 USD to the day's high of 45 USD before closing at 38.23 USD. Zynga, which is closely intertwined with Facebook, saw its shares plummet by 14 percent and trading was halted twice during the course of the day after the not so spectacular IPO debut by Facebook. Is this a bubble waiting to pop? With its user base already touching 900 million, the social networking titan has an uphill task to justify the valuation as it's clouded by reports of user saturation and its inability to monetize the mobile space so far.
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Virgin Atlantic has announced that passengers of its new Airbus A330 London - New York flights (most likely in Business Class alone) will be able to make and receive mobile calls. Made possible by a GSM service called AeroMobile, calls can be made anytime except during take-off and landing, and the charges would be as per international roaming rates.
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Close on the heels over the '4G' branding controversy in the new iPad, Apple has dropped the mention of '4G' in US, UK, Australian and several other markets and has instead listed the capabilities as 'Cellular' or 'Wi-Fi + Cellular'.
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Just when we thought Yahoo!'s problems were beginning to abate, CEO Scott Thompson's resume gaffe has thrown the prospects to disarray. The blunder, which falsely claimed him to be having a Comp. Science degree from Stonehill College, has been widely perceived as the reason for his ouster from the CEO post, though reports of him battling thyroid cancer have also been indicated as a possible contributing factor. In the interim, the company's global media head, Ross Levinsohn, will fill up his void.
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Apple is rumoured to announce a MacBook Pro refresh for 2012, with them sporting a thinner profile and Retina Display. That by the way brings me to the most amusing article I read this week. It had emerged earlier that when its voice assistant on iPhone, Siri, was asked 'Which is the best smartphone ever?', it offered Lumia 900 as a possible answer to the query (the source of which was Wolfram Alpha). But it seems Apple wasn't too happy with this and has tweaked the reply. Asking the same question now will elicit answers like 'the one you're holding' and 'you're kidding, right?'. Can't the company take this triviality in the right spirit rather than try to censor the answers? Talk about Reality Distortion Field!
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In what can be termed as a very welcome step, Wall Street Journal has reported that Google is all set to sell its flagship Nexus devices with multiple partners. This means OEM's could have a much earlier access to stock Android, and is perceived as a move to quell concerns of favoritism, considering its impending purchase of Motorola Mobility Inc.
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That Apple and HTC are engaged in patent wars is no new revelation. But this infringement by the latter (which Apple won back in December) has caused indefinite delay in the arrival of its flagship phones One X and Evo 4G LTE on American soil. The US Customs agency is reportedly investigating the patent issues as the shipments are being held. In a recent development, it is being reported that HTC's US devices use a custom Android version that comes with a workaround to avoid the offending feature.
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Android has become widespread indeed and is making huge inroads in the mobile operating system market share. On the other hand, it is also plagued by the contentious issue of fragmentation. But do you have any idea of how many different devices it's running on? Close to a mind-boggling 4000! This is the figure Open Signal Maps arrived at after a painstaking research of six months.
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I had already quoted from Forbes Tech mentioning that Apple's next iPhone will be a 4-incher (diagonally). This is now being officially confirmed by WSJ and Reuters, with the latter going on to the extent that it will have an exact 4-inch screen. Bloomberg also has reiterated the same, though it has added one juicy bit telling Steve Jobs was closely involved in the redesign before his death last October. An interesting departure from the previously held stance!
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Soon after Microsoft announced a revamped design for its Bing search engine, Google too has launched a search engine refinement called Knowledge Graph to its Google Search. Along with the conventional search results, it also provides other related information so that you can get what you are looking for with a fewer clicks than before.
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Monmouth in Wales has become the world's first Wikipedia town, wherein 1000 QRpedia codes have been erected at several places. These QRpedia codes (basically QR codes), when scanned via a mobile device, have the capability to deliver Wikipedia articles to the user.
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The Japanese variant of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III has been given a RAM boost of 2 GB while the processor has been downgraded to 1.5 GHz dual core processor. In comparison, the international model will sport a 1 GB RAM and a quad core processor among other features remaining the same. In other news, while its design may not have set things on fire (like what happened with Lumia 800 or the iPhone 4S or the new One X), that doesn't seem to be a major deterrent factor either. According to latest reports, the Galaxy phone has notched a record pre-order of 9 million units, even days prior to its official launch on the 29th of this month. Sammy has all the reasons to smile!
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Meanwhile, for all those Android fanboys who were awaiting the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone in India, here's some bad news. Samsung has taken to Twitter to announce (in response to a query) that the latest pure-bred Android phone will not be on sale in the country. Instead it has asked the smartphone lovers to wait for the next big thing! No big surprises there, they are prepping the launch of Galaxy S III. But I can't help wonder why they didn't resort to proper means to pass on the word.

In other news:
  • Google patents Project Glass Augmented Reality glasses design.
  • Google Chrome 19 is official with tab syncing across different computers and Android devices.
  • Facebook acquires Lightbox, a photo-sharing app for Android, weeks after its Instagram acquisition.
  • Twitter to implement 'Do Not Track' privacy feature for users.
Tech Roundup is a weekly recurring feature on the latest trends in Technology.

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