Facebook Messenger for Mobile updated with Voice messages, Voice calls are in testing

 Are You a Facebook user having a smartphone running iOS or Android then you have an update to your fb messenger app.
Facebook begin this year with two major upgrades to its Messenger app for Android and iOS.

One is, now you can send voice messages to your friends.

Users can tap the “+” button then hold the “record” button to record a message. Releasing the button immediately sends the message. Sliding your finger off the button cancels the message.

The second feature is VoIP (Voice over IP) calls.
VoIP calls feature is not available to all users at the moment as the company is still testing its functionality, It is available only to Canadian users with iOS devices.

As promised by Mark Zuckerberg (Killer Stuff in Mobile on the way), the company is focusing on mobile communications.

Recently Facebook opened up its messenger app to non-users using their name and phone number. This is all to stand the competition from other messaging services like WhatsApp.

Facebook also recently launched Poke, a SnapChat competitor that lets users send photos, videos or text messages that disappear after several seconds.

With this new VoIP calls feature Fb is going to challenge the mobile networks because calling is default action done through phones.Even Though internet data plans are largely dependent on Mobile Networks, This is going to have an affect in some part.

For a company like Facebook where communication is something that has to be worked on seriously, strategies have to be made to make interaction better.

The 1st IPhone 6 Concept Design

It has not been long since Apple Released its iPhone 5 and now Concepts of the iPhone 6( if that is indeed what they are gonna call it) are making their rounds.

Federico Ciccarese, an Italian designer, has come up with a series of stunning renders for the iPhone 6, which seems to resemble that of a Nokia Lumia which indicates a significant change to the phone's external design and operating system. 
Fedrico say he was inspired by a re-imagined look and feel of the operating system with a concept he calls iOSX, which is a fusion between iOS and the Mac OS X.
Since it should be several months before the next iPhone is released, there haven't been many rumors yet about how the device will look but it should increase over time. One analyst recently predicted that the next iPhone would come in more screen sizes and more colors, the latter of which is something that is already available for the iPod and iPod Nano. 

Will Apple answer the design concept or will the blow our minds with something even more intresting... only time will tell. What Do You think of This Mock-up?

Andriod Gingerbread Dominates

Boasting a mere 47.6% near that of a 50% Androids Gingerbread Still Dominates Android Distribution based a data from a 14 day period ending on December 3, 2012. Ice Cream Sandwich holds  a 29.1 mark putting it second place.

Unfortunately for developers who have to keep all these versions in mind, even the ancient Android 2.2. or Froyo is still very alive and present on 9% of devices, while Android 2.1 Eclair powers 2.4% of all Android devices.

What make of these Stats?
Check Out More at Android Developers.

Canonical announces Ubuntu OS for Smartphones

Ending a long time rumor Canonical announced that it is going to release smartphone version of its OS Ubuntu.

This OS is currently the number three desktop operating system with 20M users, and about 30,000 downloads per day. 2012 was a great year for this popular Debian-based Linux distribution with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as the most popular release in the history of Ubuntu.

"We expect Ubuntu to be popular in the enterprise market, enabling customers to provision a single secure device for all PC, thin client and phone functions. Ubuntu is already the most widely used Linux enterprise desktop, with customers in a wide range of sectors focused on security, cost and manageability," said Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical. "We also see an opportunity in basic smartphones that are used for the phone, SMS, web and email, where Ubuntu outperforms thanks to its native core apps and stylish presentation."

Smartphone interface is entirely based on Ubuntu's unity interface which was made default interface since 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) release.

Every edge of the phone has an interesting purpose...

Swiping up the left edge brings the app launcher similar to in desktop. Using top edge you can search your phone and the internet. A swipe from the right edge takes you back to the previous app you are in. Swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone reveals app controls. 

I personally think this option enables faster switching between apps than any other smartphone. And also the global search feature enables easy finding of content, apps and different products.

The OS will have both web-based HTML-5 apps as well as native apps.

Ubuntu OS has support for both ARM and x86 processors. This means it could be made to run on most, if not all, of today's Android-powered smartphones without too much effort.

The OS starts with a artistic welcome screen.

Shuttleworth confirmed that universal version of smartphone OS will be available in April 2014 with Ubuntu 14.04.

2012 Most viewed Articles on Wikipedia

Wikipedia The worlds largest community-written encyclopedia is no doubt a great source of information with more than 4M articles in English only and an overall 5.7+ B visits a year.

The most interesting thing is Wikipedia is a Non-profit organisation under WikiMedia which survives purely on donations.This online encyclopedia collected $20M in 2011 with Google as its biggest contributor of $2M. In 2012 it raised tp $25M.

Do you want to know what are the most viewed articles in 2012 ?
Here are the top 10 viewed articles

Page name                              View count

1. Facebook                             32,647,942

2. Wiki                                    29,613,759

3. Deaths in 2012                     25,418,587

4. One Direction                       22,351,637

5. The Avengers (2012film)      22,268,644

6. Fifty Shades of Grey             21,779,423

7. 2012 phenomenon                20,619,920

8. The Dark Knight Rises          18,882,885

9. Google                                 18,508,719

10. The Hunger Games             18,431,626

Here is a list of 100 articles Toolserver

PSY's Gangnam-style becomes Youtube most-viewed video of all time

South Korean over-night pop sensation Psy's "Gangnam Style" on Saturday became YouTube's most-watched video of all time passing Justing Bieber's "Baby" by recording more than 805M views. Now it is 810,795,387  and counting. Recently it was awarded the Guiness world record for the most likes in its youtube official account(Currently it has 5,394,454).

Choose the right tablet for you. [Infographics]

What tablet is right for you?

With so many tablets on the market, there's sure to be one that fits your needs and your budget, but how do you find the one that's best for you?

'TITAN' The fastest Supercomputer on Earth with 20 petaFLOPS

Oak Ridge National Laboratory on 29th Oct2012 made operational the worlds fastest Supercomputer ---the Titan supercomputer is a Cray machine made of nearly 19,000 processing units stitched together with 710 terabytes of memory.

Claiming the first place it made 'Sequoia' second-most-powerful supercomputer with a crunching performance of 20 petaFLOPS.
i.e this machine can perform 20 thousand trillion calculations per second.

The Cray Titan is expected to be number 1 on the TOP500 list November 2012 update in a supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City.

DNA: The New Digital Data Storage Device

From photos and videos to text to tweets, Worlds digital data is more than doubling every two years.To accumulate this exponential growth we really need a challenging storage medium.Surprisingly, Researchers found that DNA can accommodate this growing need.  

DNA, What is known to be the building block of life can now be used as a Digital storage medium.Without doubt DNA can fix this issue with its two amazing features

 it is long lasting and
 it is very much denser medium to store data.

Gauss: Stuxnet Like Worm Spotted Stealing Banking Information

A new cyber weapon which is believed to be linked with Stuxnet,Duqu,Flame in its operation (i.e to  target Iranian nuclear facility) has been discovered which was aimed at stealing financial information from customers of a series of Lebanese banks.

Like Flame, Gauss is also discovered by ITU (International Telecommunications Union) as part of its mission to maintain world cyber-peace.
Kaspersky said

“Gauss is a nation state sponsored banking Trojan which carries a warhead of unknown designation”. Besides stealing various kinds of data from infected Windows machines, it also includes an unknown, encrypted payload which is activated on certain specific system configurations.

It shares some functionalities with Flame, such as the USB infection subroutines.

Kaspersky made some analsys on this Trojan and released a technical paper  which contains several details about the worm.

New Google Search to affect Copyright offenders

Google today announced that it will update its search Algorothm to ignore or lower the search results of web domains with high number of copyright removal notices.

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site.

Since last year the company has been gathering data(complaints) from Copyright owners.  Couple of months back Google published this data in its Google Transparency Report .

At this moment the Top 10 affected domains are ..

Metro UI: Call It Windows 8 UI?

There has been news going around that due to a naming dispute with a European partner (Metro Group) that Windows New Layout For Windows 8 can no longer be referred to as a Metro UI but "Windows 8,", according to some sources. It's said that references to "Metro design" will be replaced with "Windows 8 Design", thought not yet confirmed by Microsoft Executives publicly.So the Metro interface on Windows Phone is now known as the "Windows 8 interface" on Windows Phone.

Credit: ZDNET

New Mac Virus Detected

A new Mac OS X exploit was discovered Friday morning by Kaspersky Labs which propogates through a zipfile attachment. The attachment tricks the Mac user into installing a variant of the MaControl backdoor via point-and-grunt. Embedded in the virus is an encrypted IP address belonging to a server in China which is believed to be a C+C server.

Microsoft debut into tablet business with Microsoft Surface:Specs [Video]

Microsoft, the company which ruled the PC business by providing Operating systems(Windows) and ubiquitous application software is now entering into the tablet space with its own hardware, Where there is a huge competition with world-class makers.

The company made the debut by unveiling Surface tablet computer. Microsoft Surface tablets will come in two versions. There will be Windows RT model with an ARM-based processor for light weight and long battery life, and an Intel powered model with which can run all Windows 8 apps, as well as software designed for earlier version of Windows.

Stuxnet Origin Confirmed: Developed by US and Israel Governments to take off Iran's nuclear development

[NYT]: US officials confirm Stuxnet was a joint operation of US-Israeli governments to sabotage the computer systems at Iran’s nuclear facilities according to current and former US officials.
This Operation was code named Olympic Games.

 NYT reports:
From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.


Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

Read More

Google Glass Trackpad spotted in a demo by Sergey Brin [Video]

On promoting the company's sci-fi-inspired eyewear 'Project Glass', Sergey Brin( who has been working seriously on the project from an year ) appeared on The Gavin Newsom’s Current TV talk show Wednesday, May 23 along with his wife, Anne Wojcicki.

On the show, Brin demoed how the Google Glass interface is navigated.

Sergey also told Newsom that Google X is now his primary focus at Google. His team has been working on the glasses for two to three years, and Brin as been involved for the past year. Brin also explains why Google is working on the technology: “The idea is that you want to be free to experience the world without futzing with a phone.”

Apple's Tim Cook on Steve Jobs at D10 [Video]

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive making his debut performance at the D: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. spoke about the companies former CEO Steven .P Jobs

Flame :The most complex cyber threat ever discovered

Like Duqu and Stuxnet, Flame is one of the massive cyber wepon ever discovered which was specially designed to perform cyber espionage as well as retrieve valuable and important information (read: steal) without you knowing it.
This malware was identified when  UN’s International Telecommunication Union came to experts at Kaspersky Lab for help in finding an unknown piece of malware which was deleting sensitive information across the Middle East.

This new malware is known as Worm.Win32.Flame, Flame for short.

Researchers says " It’s big and incredibly sophisticated. It pretty much redefines the notion of cyberwar and cyberespionage."

"Flame is a huge package of modules comprising almost 20 MB in size when fully deployed. Because of this, it is an extremely difficult piece of malware to analyze. The reason why Flame is so big is because it includes many different libraries, such as for compression (zlib, libbz2, ppmd) and database manipulation (sqlite3), together with a LUA virtual machine. "

Read More at The Flame: Questions and Answers

Facebook Camera for iPhone with Instagram features

After a $1b acquisition agreement with a free photo sharing company Instagram, Facebook has launched a photo sharing smartphone app called Camera(Presently only for some apple products).

The app allows users to take multiple pictures and share them at once rather than uploading them one at a time. And also ,users can -and share- videos much more easily than with the regular app.

This app includes many of the filters and tweaks similar to Instagram.
Download at itunes

"When you launch the app, you'll see a feed of just great photos from the people you care about," Facebook reps wrote in a press release. "You can swipe to see more of any album or tap to enlarge an individual photo." Facebook Camera is currently available on the iPhone; versions for Android and other mobile operating systems may follow.

Facebook's Growth And Reach At A Glance: Infographics

In just a few years, Facebook has grown from an idea hatched at Harvard to a worldwide social media phenomenon potentially valued at about $100 billion. Review key moments on Facebook's road to growth, see where it's most popular, and compare how much the shares held by Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives could be worth once the company goes public.