Google's smartphone operating system Android has passed Nokia's Symbian and become the global smartphone market leader, market research company Canalys said Monday.In the fourth quarter of 2010, 32.9-million phones running Android were shipped compared to 31-million handsets running Symbian, according to Canalys.Based on shipment figures, Google's percentage of the smartphone market share leapt from 8.7 percent in 2009 to 32.5 percent, while Nokia's shrank from 44 percent to 30.6 percent."But Nokia did retain its position as the leading global smartphone ...

I love this quote from Debra Ellis of Target Marketing: "Not since the Pony Express have there been so many obstacles to getting mail delivered. Bandits, rugged terrain and wild animals have been replaced with blacklists, spam filters and apathetic recipients."To drive home this fact, a report by ReturnPath Reputation Benchmark Report states that the presence of just one spam trap can drop your deliverability rating by up to 53%.While email marketing newbies can be forgiven for ...

Online anonymity is an issue fraught with emotion. It often inspires passionate arguments from both sides and opens windows into the deeper and darker aspects of our societies. So what, exactly, is the big deal?Firstly, it is important to clarify exactly what online anonymity is. It is very closely related to the issue of personal privacy. While the matter of personal privacy online relates to companies using so called ‘private’ data for advertising profiling purposes (to give one example), personal ...

The New York Post reports Mustafa Fteja of the city’s Staten Island borough is suing Facebook for half a million US dollars, after the social networking site cut off “his access to friends and family around the world, as well as to personal memories and photos”.The 39-year old said he has asked Facebook for months to provide an explanation, but has received no response to date. "You call, they don't answer the phone. You write, they don't reply," he said, ...

People all around the "twitterverse" have been bragging about signing up for an exclusive invite to a site that does... well, hmn.... what it does is still unknown.But the site in question, Hipster, is a placeholder that has been generating some serious online buzz. Click onto the site and all you get is a beautiful picture of a city (if you are in the United States, your city specifically). You are welcomed by the rather cryptic message "Something cool ...

South African internet users in January were more interested in finding out about last year’s Matric results than SA’s latest overseas cricket tournament, reveals Google Zeitgeist -- a tool that provides insight into search trends."Matric results 2010" tops the list of fastest rising searches in SA over the last 30 days, while ‘cricket sa’ and ‘cricket’ claim third and fourth position respectively.Education seems to be a focus for the new year, with UJ (University of Johannesburg) coming in ...

Over the past few years, social media has ballooned from being a small, emerging niche into a major force in the online marketing and advertising space. However, those who lived through the dotcom boom-and-bust cycle can't help asking whether we are about to see another bubble burst.After all, the hype about social media has quickly become inflated, more brands are throwing resources into interacting with customers on social media, and there is still no real clarity about how most social ...

Free Press, the non-partisan lobbying organisation, reports that US companies are involved in providing technology that helps the Egyptian government monitor protesters on the internet and mobile phones.Free Press issued a statement that claims:"Boeing-owned, California-based company Narus sold Telecom Egypt, the state-run internet service provider, 'real-time traffic intelligence' equipment, more commonly known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. DPI is content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from internet users and mobile phones as it ...

In an exclusive interview with CBS News's "60 Minutes", WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday detailed a plan to release a deluge of secret documents should the whistleblower website be permanently shut down.Assange said his group had a "system whereby we distribute encrypted backups of things we have yet to publish.""There are backups distributed amongst many, many people, 100 000 people, and all we need to do is give them an encrypted key and they will be able to continue ...

In a sign of official unease about the unrest in Egypt and the fact that it could spark calls for reform at home, Chinese censors are apparently blocking online discussion and sanitising news reports on the subject.Keyword searches on the protests returned no results Monday on microblogs and the reader comment function on news reports about Egypt was disabled on major portals as China's pervasive censorship apparatus swung into full gear.News coverage of the demonstrations against the 30-year rule of ...