Facebook, the world's largest social network, has rolled out a series of wide-sweeping updates. The updates come at the same time as Google+ is opening up to the world and include giving priority to important posts on the News Feed, larger shared images (plus the ability to upload larger files) and a real-time conversation ticker.Referring to the opening up of Google+ , Facebook product manager Keith Schacht said, "As Mark [Zuckerberg] put it, this is launching season. This is ...

Google + is now open to the world. This means that web users no longer have to wait for an invitation from existing members to join the world's fastest growing social network."For the past 12 weeks we've been in field trial, and during that time we've listened and learned a great deal," Google's senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post."We're nowhere near done, but with the improvements we've made so far we're ready to ...

Reed Hastings of Netflix has apologised for the company’s recent handling of a price increase to the streaming services. The new price hike ended the hugely successful US$10 monthly “all you can eat” subscription of DVD and media streaming, replacing it with a separate price for each. Customers can now select from US$7.99 for DVD or streaming, or pay US$15.98 for both products.Netflix relied on a low-level managed to announce this on its blog and the public feedback was brutal ...

Taiwanese mobile phone giant HTC is unleashing its latest smartphone, the “Rhyme” on the world. One of the smartphone’s unique new features is a flashing charm which can be attached to any object to show that a call is taking place, or that a message has come through.The Rhyme will be powered by the latest version of Android, known as “Gingerbread” and will cost US$200 through Verizon.Launching on 29 September in the States, the Rhyme is a “stylish” phone according ...

Apple and Samsung have been caught up in a patent war which has seen the two electronic giants facing up against each other in pitched court battles around the globe.Samsung’s latest manoeuvre involves the South Korean giant seeking to ban all sales of the iPhone 5, possibly filing lawsuits in South Korea and other unnamed countries. The patent wars between the two companies have centred around design and technology features of their smartphones and tablet computers.This has been seen as a ...

Hours after the official repeal of the US military's ban on "public" homosexuality, an American soldier has released an emotional video of him coming out to his father. The soldier has previously chronicled his experiences of being gay in the US military on the video-sharing platform.Since April of this year, the more than 8 000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and millions of viewers have been transfixed as the formerly faceless US soldier who says he's deployed in Afghanistan has ...

If you believe all the hype online and offline, your business is going to die a horrible, slow, excruciating death unless you join Twitter right now. Put down your coffee, stop reading this article and open up a Twitter account for your business. Just do it.If every major (and minor) corporation out there is setting up a Twitter account, surely it makes sense for you to be tweeting with the masses. If Richard Branson is doing it, then so ...

Steve Ballmer’s quote -- "for the cloud, we’re all in"; spoken in March last year, is rapidly becoming IT folklore. For most industry watchers it was construed as a declaration of war against Google, but it was also a clear recognition from Microsoft that the shift from client server to cloud computing was an irresistible force.There are those who criticise Microsoft for being late to react to big macro-technological trends -- the internet being one of the most obvious ...

Social media is seemingly the greatest marketing strategy since the advent of the thirty second radio spot. But where are we going to go from here and is this as good as it is going to get? What and where is the next giant leap in technology going to take us in this connected world of ever increasing augmented reality?Where are we now with social media?While businesses are doing their best to get to grips with the social media band ...

Collaboration is an important factor in the way a number of companies do business. But what if you need to collaborate with a colleague on the other side of the country, or even on the other side of the world? That’s where collaboration in the cloud comes in and, according to research house Gartner, it's on the rise.Gartner estimates that penetration of cloud email collaboration services (CECS) will stand at 10 percent by the end of 2014. By ...