In a surprise speech at Microsoft's BUILD developer conference, CEO Steve Ballmer laid out what he believes to be the company's seven main product areas. Some of them are obvious but there are a couple the average user may not have even heard of. According to Yahoo! Finance, the key product areas outlined by Ballmer are:Smartphones (via Windows Phone) PCs and tablets (Windows) Living room entertainment (Xbox) Cloud computing (Windows Azure platform) Productivity (Office and Office 365) Search (Bing) ERP and CRM (Dynamics) ...

Facebook has added a subscribe button that lets you follow people's public updates regardless whether or not you're friends with them. This new button follows in the style Twitter and Google+.Facebook claims the subscribe button will give users more control over their News Feed in terms of what and how much of their friends content they see."Until now, it hasn't been easy to choose exactly what you see in your News Feed. Maybe you don't want to see every ...

Facebook intends delaying its long-awaited IPO until late 2012, according to the Financial Times.The newspaper, citing people "familiar with the company" says the public debut will be later than the April 2012 date many are expecting.Facebook's IPO is expected to be one of the world's biggest, following recent private share sales which saw the company valued at more than US$66.5-billion.The newspaper's sources believe that Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is deliberately holding the company from ...

Internet giant Google will allow the owners of Wi-Fi hotspots to opt out of sharing data that helps pinpoint the locations of smartphones. The move is widely seen as an attempt to appease European officials who have expressed concerns around privacy.Google uses publicly broadcast data from Wi-Fi access points to quickly figure out where smartphones are located.The process is designed to provide information such as the mapping of routes and finding out what kind of retailers and attractions ...

With additional reporting by Michelle Atagana and Steven Norris.If you don't know who Chris Anderson is, you don't really understand the internet. He's one of the great technology thinkers of our time who has given us new ways of understanding how the medium has influenced business and society, and where it is all going.Anderson is the editor of Wired Magazine, an authority on tech culture, trends and innovation. Time Magazine called Anderson one of the world's 100 most influential thinkers.The ...

When Vodacom SA announced that it would be throttling the speeds of Blackberry users in South Africa, the company experienced a phenomenal backlash of complaints. In the face of the backlash Vodacom has backed off from its initial plans.The retreat was led by CEO Pieter Uys who tweeted:There is also an official release from Uys on Vodacom's Facebook page:I'm very concerned that the steps we were planning to put in place were interpreted as punishing normal users. This is ...

We have a real obsession with labels in our society. We like to put people into nice little boxes and categories, so we can package them, pop them on a mental shelf, and not worry about them. And we tend to do this far more with women than with men. The ancient literary trope of "maiden, mother, crone" seems to be alive and kicking online. And I, for one, am sick of it.A literary metaphor for representations of the female ...

Startup Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle is a must read for entrepreneurs and policy markers alike. This incredible book details how the country's 5 000 startups have driven the once emerging market to a leading position in a number of fields.In the emerging markets context, though, Brazil is rising as a growing market where startups and SMEs are making their mark. As one of the top ten countries globally for entrepreneurship, Brazil is growing its share of startups ...

Microsoft has given audiences the most detailed view yet of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system. The preview came in the form of a two and a half hour presentation at the Washington based software giant's BUILD developers' conference, which runs through to Friday.Leading the presentation team was Windows division president Steven Sinofsky. In his presentation, Sinofsky stressed, as he has on the Windows 8 development blog, that the new OS is about reimagining Windows."From the chipset to ...

Software as a service (SaaS) has changed the way we're using computers, with the applications and services we use increasingly moving online. People are checking their email online, doing their word processing online, and even running their entire businesses online.This service is worth billions and by the end of 2011, will be worth even more according to a report from research house Gartner. In fact, the research firm's statistics suggest SaaS is now worth US$12.1-billion. By 2015, North American ...