Jittery global markets and the worst round of US trading since 2008 could not stop the surge of professional network LinkedIn.According to the New York Times, in its first earnings report since shares in the company were opened to everyday investors, LinkedIn's revenue has more than doubled in the second quarter to US$121-million, from US$54.9-million a year earlier."In the second quarter, we saw record levels of members, unique visitors and page views, while revenue growth further accelerated," says ...

Google has released Google Maps Navigation for South Africa for Android phones. Maps Navigation integrates features from Google Maps with satellite navigation and uses a phone's internet connection to provide turn–by-turn navigation. Phones must be running at least Android version 1.6.Not only is it free, feature rich and increadibly useful, but Google has added a real kicker with this product in that Maps Navigation can still do its thing if your phone loses its internet connection.Read more on Gearburn

The much-anticipated new generation of Sony's PlayStation handheld gaming console, Vita, will not hit shops outside of Japan until well after the all-important festive season shopping stampede. So scratch that one from your letter to Father Christmas.It will go on sale by the end of this year in Sony's home market, followed by releases in the US and European markets in early 2012 said Kazuo Hirai, executive vice president. Timelines for developing markets were not announced.Read more on Gearburn

Hackers have shown how to turn mobile payment service Square into a convenient tool that allows criminals to pump cash from stolen credit card numbers.Adam Laurie and Zac Franken of computer security firm Aperture Labs used home made software and an easily bought iPad audio wire to trick Square in a way that could be a bonanza for crooks. Laurie could type credit card numbers into his laptop, which converts to sound data sent to Square, where the transaction registers ...

A religious court official in Indonesia has blamed social networking site Facebook for a rise in teenage pregnancies and under-age marriages, a report said.Siti Haryanti, a secretary at the religious court in Mount Kidul, a town in Central Java, said young couples were having sex after meeting online and she had seen the number of under-age marriages increase in the past year."During trials, we've repeatedly asked under-age couples whether they got acquainted via Facebook. And they admit [they did] and ...

First, a little disclosure. I never really wanted to like Apple, or use any of its products. Sure, the allure was there, all the cool kids sitting at the street-side cafes were using Apple products after all, but I managed to resist throughout. The iPhone 4 changed all that.Now with that out of the way…Apple will disappear. We'll talk about the glory days, arguably the period we're living through now, where it defined entire product categories out of thin air. ...

Social media is seemingly everywhere and just about every man and his dog is using it in some way or another. What is it, though, that has made social media so popular and the platform that the masses have truly embraced?Second to that, how can you use social media as a platform to ensure that your business is where the masses are and is saying the right thing?Why does social media rock?The answer is shockingly simple.Yes, there is ...

Google's Realtime Search function is set to make a comeback, but with no tweets or Facebook status updates. It will, instead, be limited to updates from Google+, Mashable reports.Realtime Search was an additional feature of Google's traditional search until it was given the boot in July.Realtime allowed a user to see updates from various social networks and freshly updates from websites as they were posted live. Though there were some 17 sources for Realtime, however, it was primarily powered ...

With websites continuing to proliferate unabated, small businesses find themselves grappling with the question of how to reach an increasingly fragmented audience in the most cost effective way. In an emerging market like South Africa, for instance, Facebook delivers some 60 percent of the online population on a single platform. Small wonder then that, for many businesses, it has become the logical choice when it comes to online advertising.A number of small business owners, however, still mistakenly perceive ...

Google's top lawyer accused Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and other companies of using "bogus patents" to wage a campaign against the internet giant's Android mobile platform.In a blog post titled, "When patents attack Android", Google senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond said Google's rivals were seeking to "make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices"."Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation", Drummond said.He said 550 000 Android devices were being ...