Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.

In terms of challenges, as I mentioned on the March financial results conference call, RIM is going through a significant transformation as we move towards the BlackBerry 10 launch, and our financial performance will continue to be challenging for the next few quarters. The on-going competitive environment is impacting our business in the form of lower volumes and highly competitive pricing dynamics in the marketplace, and we expect our Q1 results to reflect this, and likely result in an operating loss for the quarter.

Group Policy Settings Reference for Windows Server "8" Beta and Windows "8" Consumer Preview: This spreadsheet lists the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the Administrative template files (admx/adml) delivered with Windows Server® "8" Beta.

ON JULY 9th users of hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide will be mystified. They will no longer be able to access websites, e-mail servers and other resources despite an active internet connection. The indirect culprit is the DNS Changer Trojan horse, a piece of malware which tweaks operating-system settings on computers and residential internet routers so as to redirect traffic to certain sites and rack up advertising fees. But it is America's Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) that is the proximate cause of the disruption.

Just over two months ago, Chrome sponsored the <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/pwnium-rewards-for-exploits.html">Pwnium</a> browser hacking competition. We had <a href="http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/03/pwnium-great-exploits-fast-patches.html">two fantastic submissions</a>, and successfully blocked both exploits within 24 hours of their unveiling. Today, we'd like to offer an inside look into the exploit submitted by <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/googles-chrome-browser-on-friday/">Pinkie Pie</a>.

The analysis, from online advertising network Chitika, finds that those stodgy old PCs still produce just under 80 percent of Web traffic, with smartphones accounting for 14.6% and tablets making up 5.6%.<p>
Other findings of note: Windows Phone now accounts for a third as much traffic as BlackBerry devices. Undoubtedly its market share is far less than that, but its more powerful browser and larger screen likely make it more conducive to Web surfing.

People who own tablet computers spend more time and money on the internet than anyone else in Britain. This is according to research commissioned by Total Media into how tablet technology has, and will, affect the population in terms of media consumption and behaviour. The quantitative study of more than 1,000 nationally representative respondents identified that 79% of tablet owners mostly use the device at home, with a further 33% saying that the tablet has affected their behaviour in the home.

"what actually really got me into technology was a gift I received on my 16th birthday. I got the Diamond Rio MP3 player, one of the first on the market. It had 32MB of storage and was tiny. I started looking into how a CD was encoded into an MP3, I learned about signal compression. I went into engineering at Princeton and did a PHD at Santa Barbra in computer vision."

Fascinating as the chorded keyboard is, its confinement to the ghetto of “crackpot technology” is but a symptom of the underlying disease: <a href="http://www.loper-os.org/?p=316">the total victory of the technological business model which caters primarily to the unskilled</a>.

• Globally, nearly all smartphones and tablets are corporate-liable devices, including most BYOD smartphones. Their purchase price or monthly voice/data services fees of $42 per user on average are paid for, in part or in full, by employers.<br />
• Organisations report plans to buy more Android than iOS corporate tablets in the next 12 months, a warning shot over the bow of iPad current business tablet dominance.<br />
• Microsoft Windows mobile devices barely show on the radar for corporate support and purchase plans. Microsoft and its partners must start addressing businesses and mobile worker needs.<br />
The average replacement cycle for business smartphones has shortened considerably to 1.1 years. RIM, whose smartphones still enjoy solid corporate support, must battle to retain customers who revisit smartphone decisions every year.

Acknowledging that its attempts to market a business-class Android tablet are over, Cisco Systems executives Thursday said the company is halting investments in the fledgling Cius product line.<p>

"[We] will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet," said Marthin DeBeer, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Video and Collaboration Group. "Instead, we're going to continue leveraging other people's tablets and move to deploy Jabber, as well as our other software on top of that," DeBeer told CRN.

The arrival of our mini-heatwave appears to have tricked some of our national newspapers into thinking “silly season” has arrived. Both The Sunday Times and The Daily Mail have led with front-page splashes about Google’s Street View data harvesting – both based on a report by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that we and many others reported on when it was published over a month ago.<p>

It’s not the newspapers’ late arrival to the story that has me pounding my keyboard in frustration, however. It’s the sensationalist exaggeration of the Street View data collection that has triggered a sudden spike in my blood pressure.

But [Scott] Widdowson is a specialist. He’s one of 10 reverse-engineers working full time for a stealthy company funded by some of the biggest names in technology: Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, and Ericsson. Called the Rockstar Consortium, the 32-person outfit has a single-minded mission: It examines successful products, like routers and smartphones, and it tries to find proof that these products infringe on a portfolio of over 4,000 technology patents once owned by one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies... In the last two months, Rockstar has started negotiations with as many as 100 potential licensees. And with control of a patent portfolio covering core wireless communications technologies such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 3G, there is literally no end in sight.

We have taken the T. E. Lawrence Studies website offline, because anonymous analytics cookies – used to understand how visitors use the site so that we can make it work better  – do not comply with EU privacy law. This law has now been implemented in the UK (though not, according to media reports, in some other parts of the EU).

The big question is whether TouchWiz legitimately adds to the Galaxy S III or if Samsung would’ve done users more of a service by delivering untampered Ice Cream Sandwich instead. There’s no doubt that Android 4.0 marked a vast improvement in native UX over earlier iterations, and we’re big fans of ICS’ simple UI too. Third-party reskins inevitably lead to delays in OS upgrades – and Samsung has a mixed track record for that anyway – while users new to the skin generally have a steeper learning curve.<p>

On the flip side, those coming from an earlier Samsung device should be able to dive straight in, and will probably find at least one or two improvements in the Nature UX that work to their advantage. It’s the cleanest version of TouchWiz so far

Our minimum shareholding in B4RN is £100, and that is too much for some people, and we have been asked if we could allow smaller donations. We had a think, and we put a donate button on the site where you can donate anything you like, from a pound or a dollar to a million…<p>
Then, during a conversation with Ken Fallon on a radio podcast the idea of sponsorship was born. The plan so far, is that for a donation of £5 you can sponsor a metre of our fibre duct. In return we put your name on a metre of duct and take a photo of it. Your metre of the B4RN network with your name on it will be buried on a Lancashire upland farm for posterity, and your generosity will enable another metre to be laid in our community network.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting around Saturn and its various moons since 2004. In that time, it's collected thousands upon thousands of awe-inspiring images of the ringed planet and its satellites.

After the fourth or fifth time of being hammered after an article appeared in Google News, I finally discovered a pattern I should have seen earlier. Our access logs were full of requests from many different IP addresses asking for the same page repeatedly within a few seconds. That in itself wasn’t unusual for traffic generated by Google News, but more peculiar was the user-agent identifier — that’s the bit of text a browser sends that tells a server what its maker and version are.

“One of the chief drivers for phablets is the amount of time people use their smartphones for web browsing, reading articles and newspapers on the go, or simply navigating their journeys,” says senior analyst Joshua Flood. “The larger screen sizes make a significant difference to the user’s experience when compared to conventional-sized touchscreens between 3.5 to 4 inches.” Additionally, new phablet-styled devices provide an attractive two-in-one device proposition and are beginning to see the competition between these larger smartphone form factors and smaller media tablets (less than seven inches).<p>

Phablets are defined as having a touch screen size between 4.6 to 5.5 inches. Global shipments for phablets will increase by a factor of 10 in 2012 from 2011.

Google's 7-inch Android tablet is real — it's even being passed around inside the Googleplex.<p>

That's what I'm hearing from Googlers who have seen the device. Backing up what's been rumored for months on CNET, Digitimes and other sites, I'm hearing that this device is aimed squarely at Amazon's Kindle Fire (which runs Amazon's tailored version of Android). It's likely to start in the $200 to $250 range, have a higher resolution screen, and perhaps a camera.

Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store.1 We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch.

Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.<p>

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Yahoo has <a href="http://axis.yahoo.com">just announced Axis</a>, a browser extension thing and mobile app that “redefines what it means to search and browse the Web [sic].”

Striking is the sheer volume of takedown notices Google receives: in just the last month, it processed over 1.2 million requests for Search alone, from 1,296 copyright owners and 1,087 reporting organizations. That scale allows it to present trends in the data that might not otherwise be apparent. For example, even in the case of notorious "pirate" sites like The Pirate Bay, Google has received takedown notices for less than 5% of their indexable pages.<p>

On the other hand, this report also provides a clearer look into the abuse of copyright tools. Google explains that it's complied with 97% of takedown requests received between July and December of 2011, but also provides examples of obviously invalid copyright requests it's received.

Mr. Caspar asked [in spring 2010] to see the hard drive [with the Wi-Fi data collected from Street View]. Google said handing it over could expose it to liability for violating German telecommunications law, which prohibits network operators and other data managers from disclosing the private communications of their clients.<p>

This made no sense to Mr. Caspar, who explained that as data protection commissioner [for Hamburg] he was empowered to receive the data. Finally, in autumn 2010, the company yielded and gave Mr. Caspar the hard drive. By this point, Hamburg prosecutors had opened a criminal investigation.<p>

Google was equally resistant with the American authorities.

The stylus with haptic feedback, comes with a built-in haptic actuator and a short-range wireless receiver. The vibration commands are sent via tiny wireless transmitters built into the bezel of your iPad.

Like Google's press images for what it calls "Project Glass," the glasses Brin wore while walking down King Street were lens-free with a small, clear prism-like display mounted above the right eye. It wasn't clear if the glasses were completely self-contained, or if they were wired to what appeared to be a smart phone in his left hand. Brin, who has been seen sporting the headgear before, wasn't using them at the moment, though - he said they were out of power.

In the end, the conclusion is that a ‘modern browser’ according to Google is a browser which sends ‘Chrome’ as its UA string and supports Flash or the Web Audio API.<p>

Can we instead on production sites standardize on something like “this site requires (experimental) features not yet present in your browser” (Thanks @getify for the idea) and a link to instructions on how they can update their browser, or if it is a browser specific feature, information about the feature and why it isn’t yet supported in their browser of choice.

The Guardian has led the way in API-based development since 2009 and now its spinoff hyperlocal social network&nbsp;<a href="www.n0tice.com">n0tice</a> has <a href="http://about.n0tice.com/2012/05/22/announcing-n0tice-org-the-open-journalism-toolkit/">launched its own set of API tools</a> to entice users and brands to build things using its content and functionality.

I got a London call last week from Bob Apfel, a Brooklyn neighbor (and fellow Oberlin College graduate).<p>

"Two weeks ago," he began. "I completed the debt restructuring of Greece."

Smartphones powered by the Android and iOS mobile operating systems accounted for more than eight out of ten smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2012 (1Q12). According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the mobile operating systems held shares of 59.0% and 23.0% respectively of the 152.3 million smartphones shipped in 1Q12. During the first quarter of 2011, the two operating systems held a combined share of 54.4%. The share gains mean that Android and iOS have successfully distanced themselves from previous market leaders Symbian and BlackBerry, as well as Linux and Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile.

The American wireless industry is increasingly taking a page from the airlines, adopting irritating fees and surcharges while curtailing the perks and rewards that used to come with customer loyalty and family plans that routinely run into the hundreds of dollars.<p>

Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all have a nasty surprise in store for customers who have not upgraded their smartphones in the last year or so: the equipment upgrade fee.  Sprint and AT&T both charge $36 per phone, Verizon Wireless now charges $30, T-Mobile $18.<p>

Verizon customers are especially peeved because that wireless company used to reward loyal customers with a $50 credit off any new phone at contract renewal time. Today, instead of getting “New Every Two” discounts, Big Red will charge you $30 for every new phone when you renew your contract.

Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment.

Google Inc's Android mobile platform has not infringed Oracle's patents, a California jury decided in a high stakes trial fought by the two Silicon Valley giants over smartphone technology.

As part of the restructuring, HP expects approximately 27,000 employees to exit the company, or 8.0% of its workforce as of Oct. 31, 2011, by the end of fiscal year 2014. The company is offering an early retirement program, so the total number of employees affected will be impacted by the number of employees that participate in the early retirement plan. Workforce reduction plans will vary by country, based on local legal requirements and consultation with works councils and employee representatives, as appropriate.

The HP-popularised memristor device is a form of ReRAM – resistive RAM – and is fairly expensive to make. Metal oxide-based ReRAM technology promises to combine minimum memory speed with NAND non-volatility and be able to provide higher capacities than NAND, which is thought will cease to be usable as process geometries go down past 10nm. ReRAM dies will need less electricity to run and will take up less space than equivalent capacity NAND.

When Apple shipped Mac OS X Lion 10.7, the “Library” folder located within every user’s home folder, which had previously been visible to users in the Finder, was made invisible. To access the Library folder, users must now hold down the option key while selecting the “Go” menu in the Finder.<p>

This is probably a good move for the vast majority of Mac users, but for folks with even a small amount of interest in tinkering with the configuration files and caches of various applications, it’s an outright nuisance.

It took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users will be in Asia. The third billion will be harder, and might not be reached until 2040.

The Space Hijackers had been using an altered version of the 2012 logo on their site and their Twitter page.<p>

The Olympic organisers are notoriously prickly about branding, but also about protest, and laws introduced after London won the right to host this years games could potentially <a href-"http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/11/olympic-ideal-puts-money-before-democracy/">place restrictions</a> on protest for the duration of the Olympics and Paralympics.<p>

It could be argued that the logo in itself was a justifiable reason for the suspension: but you have to seriously ask: is anyone actually going to confuse the Space Hijackers account for an official Olympic account?

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.<p>

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

The team, led by Jeremy Elson in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research Redmond, set the new sort benchmark by using a radically different approach to sorting called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS). The team’s system sorted almost three times the amount of data (1,401 gigabytes vs. 500 gigabytes) with about one-sixth the hardware resources (1,033 disks across 250 machines vs. 5,624 disks across 1,406 machines) used by the previous record holder, a team from Yahoo! that set the mark in 2009.

It’s no <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/who_uses_pinterest.php">Pinterest</a>, but according to data from now Google-owned Admob, iPhone users were split pretty evenly along gender lines in February of 2010, with women accounting for 43% of iPhone owners. As for Android, that number was at 27% - less than a third. In 2011, a<a href="http://blog.hunch.com/?p=51781"> survey</a> of 15,818 Hunch users found that iOS users are more likely to be female, while Android users still trend male. But why?

Andrew’s tweet read:<br />

“Ryanair exhibit A. Looked up fare yesterday, total £123.00. Returned today and fare is £237.00. Flushed cookies. Fare back to £123.00.”<br />

What this means is that Ryanair has purposefully tracked when Andrew’s visited the site, looked at a specific fare and not made a booking. Usually this sort of thing is done for targeted advertising across other sites, but Ryanair it seems has something else in mind. The next time Andrew visited the site to look at the same fare he had look at previously, Ryanair had hiked up the cost. I assume this is to get a customer to worry that the cost will go up further and book a trip there and then.

I have just sent a letter to Eric Schmidt setting out these four points. In this letter, I offer Google the possibility to come up in a matter of weeks with first proposals of remedies to address each of these points.<p>

If Google comes up with an outline of remedies which are capable of addressing our concerns, I will instruct my staff to initiate the discussions in order to finalise a remedies package. This would allow to solve our concerns by means of a commitment decision – pursuant to Article 9 of the EU Antitrust Regulation - instead of having to pursue formal proceedings with a Statement of objections and to adopt a decision imposing fines and remedies.

Q: As strictly an online army of hackers, how powerful is Anonymous?<br />
A: Anonymous is kind of like the big buff kid in school who had really bad self-esteem then all of a sudden one day he punched someone in the face and went, “Holy s— I’m really strong!”

According to Michel van der Bel, COO of the Greater China region at Microsoft, sales of Windows Phones have accounted for 7% in China's smartphone segment recently, compared to a 6% share for Apple's iPhones.<p>

The strong sales enjoyed by Lumia phones at present are typical short-term results for the newly launched model, and it remains to be seen whether the sales momentum will continue, commented industry sources.<p>

Given that sales of iPhones totaled over five million units in China in the first quarter of 2012, it would be difficult for Windows Phone models to yield the same results in a quarter, the sources commented.

WoA (Windows on ARM) tablet PCs, based on estimated general BOM costs of US$300-350 for 10-inch tablet PCs and US$150-200 for 7-inch models, are struggling to meet vendors' price targets for competition against Apple and Amazon's tablet PC products because of the additional US$90-100 fee for Windows 8, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.<p>

The average price of tablet PCs has been dropping rapidly sine the launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire. But PC brand vendors, who are used to price wars, are nevertheless struggling to compete, because unlike Amazon they do not see additional revenues from post-purchase content sales.

<a href="http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-s-voice-leaked-for-all-ics-devices-20120520/">The S-Voice APK</a>, which contained services that were exclusive to the Galaxy S III, allowed owners of other Ice Cream Sandwich-powered smartphones to install Samsung's new voice assistant (its Siri rival) and perform commands on their devices.</p>
<p>It appears that in the last 24 hours, Samsung (and its partner Vlingo, the technology behind the voice functions) have begun detecting requests from non-supported devices and blocking them, displaying the message: "Network Error. Please Try Again."

Ironically, the vulnerability is introduced by a class of firewalls cellular carriers use. While intended to make the networks safer, these firewall middleboxes allow hackers to infer TCP sequence numbers of data packets appended to each data packet, a disclosure that can be used to tamper with internet connections.

Indeed, this is not just another too-clean looking and ultimately boring 3-D virtual tour of Egypt's famous archaeological site.<p>

"Many 3-D models of ancient sites have more to do with fantasy and video games than with archaeology. The colors, surfaces and textures are not researched and appear quite flat or unrealistic," Peter Der Manuelian, Philip J. King professor of Egyptology at Harvard University and director of the MFA's Giza Archives, told Discovery News.

A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.<p>

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other.

Microsoft quietly revealed this week that it will kill off the Aero glass interface in Windows 8 and replace it with a flat, Metro-like Explorer that’s more in line with the company’s current design mantra. But this change isn’t just about obfuscation. It’s about the Windows team abandoning the very market that drove Windows’s success for over 25 years in order to chase a coming and potentially illusory market for tablet devices.

Apple Inc. is defending its voice-recognition software Siri - she of the iPhone 4S - against claims that it doesn't perform as advertised.</p>
<p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/03/12/so-sirious-iphone-user-sues-apple-over-voice-activated-assistant/">A cluster of lawsuits</a> seeking class action status in Oakland, Calif., allege that iPhone 4S commercials and company statements about the phone were false and misleading. Siri, they say, is brilliant on TV, but she's dim in reality…<p>The plaintiffs don’t say how the advertisements are misleading, or how their personal experiences relate to those advertisements, Apple said. And if Siri so disappointed them, they could have — but did not, apparently — avail themselves of Apple’s 30-day return policy, the company said.

Google said on Saturday that Chinese authorities have approved its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings, the last regulatory hurdle to a deal that would allow the world's No. 1 Internet search engine to develop its own line of smart phones…<p>A main condition of the deal is that the Android system remain free and open for five years, said a source who is familiar with the Chinese approval but not authorized to discuss it.

Britney Spears was Google's most popular search query -- followed by Paris Hilton, Christina Aguilera, and Pamela Anderson. (Yes! Pamela Anderson!)
<br />Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction was the most searched term to date on Lycos.<br />
people still used Lycos.<br /> 
The Howard Dean campaign was pioneering grassroots organizing and fundraising on the Internet.

Think about it: this may well be the only time Zuckerberg will take a company public. That moment of being in New York and ringing that bell is something many entrepreneurs dream about. And he’s forgoing it. Instead, he’s pulling an all-night hackathon with the team as I write this post. It may be posturing but, if that’s the case, it’s brilliant posturing.

When Microsoft announced at the launch of Windows Phone Tango handsets in China that passing the iPhone in China was just an interim goal on the way to overtaking Android, it did seem rather grandiose.<p>

It seems Microsoft was right however, with Michel van der Bel, COO Greater China Region at Microsoft saying that a mere 2 months after the launch Windows Phone 7 handsets already had a 7% market share in China, ahead of the 6% of the iPhone there.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

One of the greatest strengths of the web is that the the ease of linking allows innovative new apps to succeed without asking anyone else's permission - but up until now that hasn't applied to integrations between web apps. Web Intents is an emerging <a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html" target="_blank">W3C specification</a> inspired by Android's Intents system that aims to solve the problems of communications.</p>
<p>Here are some <a href="http://bleeding-edge-tlv.appspot.com/#12" target="_blank">slides that explain the main concepts</a> from a pervious talk.

France's data protection watchdog has set up a meeting with Google to closely examine its controversial privacy policy.<p>

The search giant consolidated 60 privacy policies into one single agreement in March. The EU expressed concern over the legality and impact of the change.<p>

France's information commission, the CNIL, said it was not yet "totally satisfied" with Google's explanation of the amendments.

Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:<p>

Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.

Roughly a year ago when we summarized the state of smartphones at the Appnation conference, less than 40% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. had smartphones. Today, one in two mobile subscribers has a smartphone and that figure is moving steadily upwards.<p>

By most measures, it has been the year of the App once again, driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS users who have more than doubled in a year and account for 88% of those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days. In just a year, the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped 28%, from 32 apps to 41. Not only is the 2012 smartphone owner downloading more apps, they are increasingly spending more time using them vs. using the mobile web — about 10% more than last year.

And, that leads us to the number one issue cited as a problem: developer support. Developers claim the platform is too troublesome because of device specific variations, but the reality is that it's just that developers don't think they make enough money to justify that work. This could be because of the single listing and therefore single purchase of apps [for both phones and tablets], but it's really just a vicious cycle where developers don't put enough support into the ecosystem, and so the ecosystem doesn't support developers.

While tens of thousands of cases had transferred from the CSCS system to the CS2 system, the correct arrears balance did not transfer with them. This was because the information had been archived and, on transfer to CS2, these balances were not picked up by the system, the NAO [National Audit Office] said.

In addition, a number of cases managed off the primary IT systems, on a separate clerical case database, did not have opening arrears balances entered onto that database. In compiling the accounts the commission has estimated that this would have led to an understatement of the overall arrears balance by £59m at 31 March 2011.

If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.

Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse.</p><p>

The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.</p><p>

The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users.