United Nations to launch its first space mission

Facebook is eager to manage its carbon footprint and is sharing the efforts it's making towards ecological sustainability by releasing the data from its green initiatives over the last year. In the spirit of Facebook’s openness and transparency, we are sharing our carbon footprint, energy mix, and energy use for our data centers. As Facebook expands, we need more data centers to power our platform, more office facilities for our employees, and more energy for both. This growth will have an impact on our carbon footprint and our energy, which is why we remain laser focused on maximizing efficiency...

When you embrace social media as much as the London Games have, you've got to accept that there'll be the odd disaster here and there. Even the most pessimistic organiser wouldn't have predicted the number of disasters there have been so far. The latest incident saw former Google China chief and web celebrity Kai-Fu Lee sharing the personal details of Team USA swimming coach John Leonard to his 15-million Sina Weibo followers. Lee apparently shared the coach's details after Leonard called 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen's record-breaking performance in the 400 metre individual medley "impossible". Lee initially defended his...

Digg relaunched today. How ‘bout that. There’s not much to say, except that it looks and works a little different thanks to Betaworks, the company that acquired Digg in early July for US$500 000 (give or take a few million in equity). Oh and there’s also a new iPhone app. We could have ended the article here, the smell of apathy lingering, but to tell you the truth, we’re glad to see the original social news curation site being given a new lease on life, just one day after it was previewed to the public. Six weeks after it was rebuilt...

Think you can just open a brand page, randomly include "like us on Facebook" in your company's website and then sit back and say you're "doing" social media? That won't be possible -- at least, not for much longer. Much has been said about the importance of engaging with social media users -- it's not a one-way channel, and fans and followers won't be happy if they don't receive a reply quickly (or no reply at all). A tweet or comment is starting to become the minimum response people expect from brands on social media. According to technology research...

Well now, here's something to nibble on. New research suggests that Apple now 85% of the global tablet market -- around 20% more than research company Gartner predicts it will have by the end of this year. The research, from web-monitoring company Pingdom uses data from global web usage on tablets. And it makes for some sorry reading for anyone in the anti-Apple brigade. The Cupertino-based tech giant's tablet is completely dominant, laying claim to around 85.7% of the market. Android devices meanwhile only make up around 13% of the global tablet space with BlackBerry's PlayBook and various...

This is interesting. South African budget airline Mango is set to give passengers on its planes free access to Facebook and Twitter in-flight for the month of August. Using the in-flight Wi-Fi provided by Wireless G, passengers will be able to get their social media fix at 30 000 feet. If you're feeling left out because you're desperate to get onto Google+, you'll be able to access using the regular in-flight Wi-Fi service at half the usual cost. According to WirelessG CEO Carel van der Merwe, the promotion is to celebrate the end of G Connect's Beta testing on...

If you are into digital, you've got to love the social web. Social media provides a way to get new clients, interact and nurture relationships, and a place to reach your target audience. This all sounds good, but in reality, too much of a good thing isn't always the best. Many people on the social web consider social media as their diary online. They post and say almost everything that goes on in their lives. Do you share all your secrets with everyone online? When you are bored, do you call up your clients and tell them that you are...

Reporting on SEO can be tough, but only if you don’t know what you are doing. Make sure that your SEO company is providing comparative reporting, or if you are an SEO company, make sure you're transparent. First you need to decide what proper reporting means to you. Is your focus purely brand exposure? Impressions? Or, is it lead generation? Or perhaps it’s a number of factors. For any SEO company to be successful it needs to ensure that clarity is evident in its reports. Factors that could influence your reporting negatively include seasonality, markets, and global changes, so make...

Ever wanted to take a photo with your webcam and get it sketched in sand by a robot at a museum in London? Well, your dream could come true... if you're a Google Chrome user. Thanks to a new API in the new version of Chrome, web apps will be able to 'see' and 'hear' you. According to an official blog post, the browser update includes the getUserMedia API, which allows you to grant web apps access to your webcam and microphone without a plugin. This allows experiments like Google's Sketchbot access to your camera, so it can capture...

Twitter has issued a statement apologising for its suspension of UK journalist Guy Adams. Well sort of. The social network maintains that it followed most of its own procedures properly when it decided to suspend Adams after he tweeted the email address of an executive at US broadcaster NBC: That said, we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up. The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with...