Apple denies battery problem with iPhone

Technology giant Apple rejected reports Friday that overheated batteries had caused some of its iPhone devices to explode in users' hands, blaming incidents in France on "external pressure".

French authorities have opened an investigation into the safety of the cult smartphone, following claims by several users in France and elsewhere that their iPhone screens had shattered in a dangerous manner during use.

"As of today, there has been no confirmed incident linked to battery overheating in the iPhone 3GS, and the number of cases we are investigating amounts to less than a dozen," the firm said in a statement to AFP.

"The iPhones with broken screens that we have been able to analyse so far show, in all cases, that the cracks were caused by an external pressure upon the iPhone," the company added.

Apple's commercial director in France, Michel Coulomb, was due to meet the country's consumer affairs minister Herve Novelli later in the day to discuss the probe launched by a state safety agency following consumer complaints.

Apple has sold 26 million iPhones and 200 million iPods around the world.

Ten French consumers have come forward to say their iPhone screens exploded or cracked without explanation, according to an AFP tally, including a case in mid-August in which a teenager was said to have suffered an eye injury.

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Facebook buys social media start-up FriendFeed

Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, said it will buy FriendFeed, netting a group of prized ex-Google engineers in the fast-growing Internet business.

FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs. The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 mn in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed on Monday, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.

Facebook's big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang.

"These guys now how to build scalable, social applications," said Owyang.

In a statement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he admired the FriendFeed team for having created a service he described as simple and elegant.

"As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use," said Zuckerberg.

FriendFeed's four founders are former Google Inc employees who count well known products like Gmail and Google Maps among their accomplishments.

Facebook said the founders will hold senior roles on its engineering and product teams.

FriendFeed had talked with Facebook "casually" for a couple of months, and that it became clear that the teams were "cut from the same cloths," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor told Reuters in an interview.

He declined to say whether FriendFeed had been in talks with other companies.

One bridge between Facebook and FriendFeed might have been Matt Cohler, Facebook's former management vice president. He joined FriendFeed backer Benchmark Capital last year.

Asked what role the connection played in the deal, FriendFeed's Taylor said the decision to be acquired by Facebook was made entirely by the team at FriendFeed.

Facebook has more than 250 million registered users. In May, the social networking company announced a $200 million investment from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies that pegged the value of its preferred shares at $10 billion.

Facebook has said its revenue is on track to rise 70 percent this year, and board member Mark Andreessen has said the company will bring in more than $500 million in revenue in 2009.

But Forrester's Owyang said that Facebook must make the content generated within the site more accessible to the public instead of only to closed networks of Facebook friends, so that the company can sell more ads.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced changes to its privacy controls to allow people to make their status messages and posts viewable to a broader Internet audience.

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Facebook is world's fourth most trafficked website

Social networking website Facebook continues its rapid rise and has already become the fourth most trafficked website in the world, technology blog TechCrunch has reported.

In June this year, Facebook attracted a total of 340 million unique visitors globally, trailing only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sites, the report said, citing latest results from market research firm comScore.

According to the report, Facebook grew 157 percent in the past year alone, gaining 208 million visitors. The social networking website surged past Amazon in August last year in terms of worldwide unique visitors. In the first half of this year, it beat eBay, AOL and Wikimedia Foundation sites.

Facebook still has some way to go before it catches up to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, each of which has between 240 million and 500 million more monthly global unique visitors.

Facebook itself officially acknowledged in July that it now has 250 million active registered users worldwide.

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5 tips for blogging your way to success

Chances are, your blog is not going to land you a book or movie deal like Julie Powell or make you a superstar like
Perez Hilton.

But it can bring you personal satisfaction, give you an outlet for expression, help you connect with others and even assist you with leveraging a business. Along the way, you may even come across a little fame. Here's how:

• Blog about what you are passionate about, said Jennifer McLean of blog search engine Technorati. Coming up with fresh and interesting content is easier. And if you're only blogging for money or fame, readers will pick up on it, she said.

• Make sure you post frequently, said Gretchen Rubin, who blogs about happiness. "That is a sign of vitality on a blog." And have a clear idea of what you are blogging about. Blogs do better when you have a focus.

• If you are an aspiring author, show that you have a loyal following, said Brooke Warner, senior editor at Seal Press. "When someone says I get 25,000 unique visitors a month, we pay attention," she said. "They have readers and either their story or writing is really good."

• Develop your unique voice. Powell, who blogged about cooking all the recipes in a Julia Child cookbook, had a "unique hook — nobody else had done that," said Ellen Gerstein, vice president of marketing for John Wiley & Sons. She also brought a lot of humor to her blog.

• Spend time on marketing, said Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net, a blog with tips for bloggers. With millions of blogs afloat on the Web, writing posts isn't enough to attract followers, he said. Focus on writing guest posts for other blogs or networking, for example.

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Clean cause: Now, Twitter for shitters in India

Shit is not a dirty word. After all, we spend six months to three years on the toilet seat in a lifetime . It is about time we cut through the crap and give 2.6 billion people on the planet a chance do the same. That’s exactly the aim of Twitter for Sh-tters , which is using the power of the current darling of social networking , Twitter, to raise money for building toilets in India.

The idea is simple. Every day, Twitter users like you and me around the world, are asked to spend the day tweeting to try and get their followers to donate. With every $400 raised, Wherever The Need, an NGO based in the US, UK and India, builds an eco-sanitation toilet for Indians, 660 million of whom still defecate in the open.

Apart from the money raised, the bigger purpose of Twitter for Sh-tters (T4S) is to make people, especially the youth, talk about sanitation, says David Crosweller, UK director of Wherever The Need (WTN). T4S has ‘‘ daily dumpers’ ’ who can tweet about ‘‘ whatever crap they want’ ’ to take this long-avoided topic and, pardon the expression, step right into it.

‘‘ The thinking behind the T4S campaign was that if we could start young people talking about the benefits of sanitation then, in the midterm , it may become less of a taboo subject and we may actually be able to start having a sensible debate,’’ explains Crosweller.

And it is more than just talking about toilets. There are 16 different aspects that sanitation and water affect . One of the main concerns is mortality from intestinal illness — Unicef says 1,000 Indian children under five die of diarrhoea and other sanitation-related diseases every day. Sanitation brings other benefits too like general improvement in health, better agricultural output and a massive saving — ‘‘ India could save at least $3 billion per year by installing eco-sanitation toilets’ ’ — in national balance of payments.

Shit, it seems, is really serious business. Which is why Dave Prager started blogging about it. What started with Poop Report, ‘‘ your number one source for your number two business’’ , ended as a book published two years ago. And Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International, made an award-winning career by building more than 1.2 million household toilets and 6,500 community toilet blocks that serve 15 million people in India since 1973.

Despite these efforts, according to the 2001 Census, only 18% Indians use toilets. About 78.4% of the rural and 13.6% of the urban population still practices open defecation. Remember the famous scene in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ where the young protagonist jumps into a swamp of shit? To avoid such scenes in reel and real life, the UN has set a millennium development goal of halving the number of people who currently have no access to basic sanitation facilities by 2015. Will you give a shit?

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Hacker attacks silence Twitter, slow Facebook

Twitter and Facebook said they suffered service problems from hacker attacks on Thursday, raising speculation of a coordinated campaign against the world's most popular online social networks.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours on Thursday.

Facebook members saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles, which the social networking site said was related to an "apparent distributed denial of service attack."

Facebook was working with Twitter and Internet search company Google Inc to investigate further, said a person familiar with Facebook but who was not authorized to speak to the press.

Speculation swirled on the Internet that other social networking sites had also come under attack, after relatively lesser-known site LiveJournal said it too had been targeted by hackers on Thursday. But those rumors could not be confirmed.

The incidents follow a wave of similar cyber attacks in July that disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea's spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Twitter's blog that the site was the victim of a denial-of-service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website's servers with communications requests.

"We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Stone wrote.

A separate Twitter status Web page said later on Thursday that the site was back up, but that Twitter was continuing to recover from the attack.

Google said in an emailed statement that it was in contact with some non-Google sites that were impacted by Thursday's attacks to help investigate.

"Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the statement said.


ANTISOCIAL ATTACKS

Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don't pay demanded fees, according to security experts.

Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.

Twitter, which lets users publish short, 140-character messages to groups of online "followers," is one of the fastest-growing Internet companies.

The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over- year, according to comScore data.

Security experts said a single group could have been behind the problems on Twitter, Facebook and the other sites as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once.

"History would tell us that it's probably the same attacker or group of attackers that is launching both attacks," said Kevin Prince, the chief technology officer of security services provider Perimeter eSecurity.

A representative for blogging website LiveJournal said the site was also affected by a cyber attack for about one hour on Thursday morning.

While the company "can't be 100 percent sure that it was the same attacks as on Twitter, Facebook, et al, it would be a huge coincidence if they

aren't tied to one another," said LiveJournal representative Tim Smith.

A denial-of-service attack on Twitter would be particularly effective since "it's going to be very visible to a huge population of people who have now, to some degree, become dependent on this next-generation, real-time service," said Gibson.

Some Twitter users appeared to be taking the incident in stride.

"It's just an annoyance. Remember Twitter was down in 2007 and 2008 all the time," said Robert Scobble, a commentator on the technology industry who boasts 93,000 "followers" on Twitter, referring to a period when Twitter's rapid traffic growth occasionally led to several service disruptions.

For lawyer Zabi Nowald, it was just another day -- Twitter or no Twitter -- as he headed to work in downtown Los Angeles with a laptop in one hand and a Blackberry in the other.

"None of my friends do Twitter; none of my employers do," said Nowald, 27. "It affects my life zero. I lost something I never had."

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Microsoft Finalizes Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 Code

Microsoft on Wednesday finalized the code for its Windows 7 client OS and Windows Server 2008 R2, sending both products to manufacturing on schedule.

outlined in a blog post Tuesday how its various sets of customers can get the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version of the client OS either August 6, 7, 16, or 23, depending on who they are.

As far as Windows Server 2008 R2's RTM goes, Microsoft's partners will get the code in the next few days, according to a blog post by Microsoft.

Customers with enterprise agreements and volume-licensing agreements will get it sometime in September, followed by the general availability of both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 on Oct. 22, Iain McDonald, general manager of the Windows Server division, said in an interview Wednesday.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are built on the same kernel and networking stack, but that doesn't mean Microsoft expects all customers to upgrade to both of them and deploy them together, he said.

To some customers it will make sense to do so, but if it's not part of a company's upgrade cycle to move to both systems it won't be the end of the world, McDonald said. "I want them on our platform more than I need them on our latest version," he said.

However, there are some features of Windows 7 that will run better if deployed on its complementary server release, McDonald said. One example of such a feature is Direct Access, which allows someone working independently of a corporate network to turn on a Windows 7 PC and have it automatically connect to a corporate network without deploying any application or signing in to the connection, he said.

There are some key differences between the latest Windows client and server releases and the previous release cycle. It's the first time since the Windows NT server release and the Windows 2000 client OS release that Microsoft has not doubled the requirements of the hardware systems the OSes run on, McDonald said.

"We did some things behind the covers to make things run great and pulled these off without the need to double the system requirements," he said, something people will particularly notice with Windows 7.

Microsoft also looped partners into the feedback and testing process of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 sooner than ever before, a move that could be particularly important to the adoption of the client OS.

Windows Vista, the current Windows client release, was skipped by many business customers and also took a hit in the consumer market due to the emergence of netbooks as a popular replacement to the full-sized PC. Windows Vista did not run well on netbooks, which run XP or Linux.

Philip Osako, director of product marketing for Microsoft OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partner Toshiba, said Windows Vista's performance on netbooks was not considered as Microsoft was building that OS. However, with Windows 7, Toshiba tested the performance of the OS on netbooks as well as full-sized PCs, and Microsoft took the company's feedback under serious consideration.

Microsoft also specifically added new features to Windows 7 based on feedback from Toshiba and other partners, which should bode well for its adoption, Osako said.

For example, Toshiba advised Microsoft that since many people were still running Windows XP, the company should include a feature in the OS to ensure application compatibility between that OS and Windows 7, he said. As a result, Microsoft created the Virtual XP mode feature of Windows 7 that allows older Windows applications to run on Windows 7 as if they were running on XP, Osako said.

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Google offers Moon’s 'guided tour'

Google marked the 40th anniversary of the first human footstep on the moon by adding virtual lunar exploration to its free online Earth map and imagery service.

The moon joins Earth, Mars, and Sky in an options list in an upper tool bar on the main Web page at earth.google.com. Aspiring lunar explorers will need Google Earth 5.0 software, which can be downloaded free.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the first person to walk on the moon, joined Google, X Prize Foundation, and NASA officials in Washington, DC, for the launch of Moon in Google Earth.

"Forty years ago, two human beings walked on the moon," said Moon in Google Earth product manager Michael Weiss-Malik.

"It's now possible for anyone to follow in their footsteps. We're giving hundreds of millions of people around the world unprecedented access to an interactive 3D presentation of the Apollo missions."

Moon in Google Earth meshes "Street View" style panoramic photographs and NASA video taken on the surface of the moon to create a virtual moonscape.

Apollo programme astronauts Jack Schmitt and Aldrin provided narration for online lunar tours.

"This tool will make it easier for millions of people to learn about space, our moon and some of the most significant and dazzling discoveries humanity has accomplished together," said X Prize Foundation trustee Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer.

"I believe that this educational tool is a critical step into the future, a way to both develop the dreams of young people globally, and inspire new audacious goals."

Moon incorporates images taken during Apollo missions and pictures from satellites.

Along with tours of the moon's surface, Google Earth's new feature shows "human artifacts" left there by space missions.

"We're excited to be a part of this latest chapter in Google's efforts to bring virtual exploration of the moon to anyone with a computer," said NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden.

The center is near Mountain View, California-based Google and has been collaborating with the Internet titan under the auspices of a Space Act Agreement signed in late 2006.

"With Google Earth, young explorers around the world can bounce around the galaxy in Sky, fly to Mars and now visit the moon from wherever they may be," Ansari said. "Outer space doesn't seem so far away anymore."

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Yahoo Home Page Gets a New Look

Yahoo today launched what some are calling a significant overhaul to its home page. Yahoo says the new home page is designed to help you stay on top of what is going on in your world, and on the rest of the planet. What the search company has really done, however, is tweaked its old design and added some new, more flexible features that just might pull more users into its sphere. This includes adding more personalized features and the ability to pull a wide range of third-party services into Yahoo in ways that weren't previously available.

Here's what's new:

My Favorites
The most significant change is in Yahoo's right-hand column, which has been renamed My Favorites. Under the old home page, this column was filled with Yahoo services including games, shopping, Yahoo personals and other features. The new design allows you to choose from a wide range of third-party sites and services, including Facebook, news sites, and e-Bay. Yahoo has also moved Yahoo Mail, Messenger, and other Yahoo service over to the "My Favorites" section. When you hover over any of these widgets, a display pops up with an advertisement and your information.

For me, the best functionality came with the Facebook widget. The widget is a full-functioning mini-Facebook, and looks a lot like the mobile version of the social network. It includes your full news feed, and links to your 'Events & Birthdays,' Profile, and Friends list. If you pull your cursor off the pop-out widget, the service will disappear after a second or two. A similar Facebook feature can also be embedded in your iGoogle account.

App Maker
In addition to the more than 65 widgets you can place on your new Yahoo homepage, you can also make your own. Just click on 'Add' at the bottom of the My Favorites list, and then at the very top of the widget list you can enter the Web address for anything you want to keep track of and give it your own name. If the import is successful, you now have a new widget on your home page.

Trend Setter
Taking its cue from Twitter's Trending Topics, Yahoo now features the current top ten favorite searches. The Trend Setter box is located on the top left of the home page, where users used to access their e-mail, messenger, games and weather under the old design.

Personalized News
The news tabs have moved down a bit, but now have a local news section. Just type in a U.S. City or Zip and Yahoo delivers news from local news outlets.

PC To Mobile Sync
This feature isn't available yet, but Yahoo says that soon your Yahoo mobile page will match the edits you've made on the desktop version.

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Sprint '4G' Hits Atlanta, Vegas, Portland In August

Not too surprisingly, Sprint's "4G" phone buildout is largely going to ride on the back of their spun-off Clearwire mobile WiMax venture. Sprint will essentially operate as an MVNO on the Clearwire network, offering a lot of gear that provides CDMA/EDGE, Mobile WiMaxm and Wi-Fi connectivity. Of course that means the Sprint next-gen broadband markets are likely going to mirror Clearwire's existing footprint, with networks commercially available in Atlanta, Las Vegas (which officially launched today), Portland and Baltimore.

With that in mind, it wasn't too surprising to see Sprint announce this morning that their faster 4G service will first be made available in Las Vegas, Portland and Atlanta starting in August after it first popped up in Baltimore last fall. According to Sprint, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Honolulu, Philadelphia and Seattle will also see service this year. A few smaller markets you may have heard of will come online in 2010, like Boston, New York and DC.

While Sprint's EVDO service currently has a 5GB monthly limit, the company website insists the new service will be "unlimited." That word has been abused enough in this industry for users to be skeptical until they see more serious deployment. As for speed, Sprint says that the service will "deliver peak downlink speeds of more than 10 Mbps and average downlink speeds of 3-6 Mbps." Last December Sprint announced the availability of the U300 modem, which provides users with data access to both their EVDO and Mobile WiMax networks.

With Comcast also planning to offer wireless broadband powered by Clear, there's going to be an awful lot of re-branding, cross-purpose marketing and co-habitation going on in next few months. That could wind up confusing consumers -- and will seriously test the new Clearwire network. All of this hinges on how quickly Clearwire can get things deployed -- the operator is promising deployment to 80 markets over the next eighteen months.

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