Future Skype owners settle lawsuit with Joltid
Another legal drama is coming to an end as the Silver Lake-led investor group that will acquire a majority stake in Skype has reached an agreement to settle the lawsuit brought on by Joltid. Owned by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, Joltid has sued eBay and Skype in September for allegedly breaching a licensing agreement regarding the peer2peer technology used by Skype's service.
Since the lawsuit threatened the $1.9 billion deal though which eBay will sell to Silver Lake and its partners 65% of Skype, the investors stepped in and managed to clear things up. To be more specific, through the settlement, Niklas Zennstrأƒآ¶m and Janus Friis will join the investor group, contributing Joltid software and making a capital investment in order to get a 14% stake in Skype. This will see Skype secure ownership of Joltid's p2p tech, thus finally ending the current litigation.
"We are very pleased to have the litigation resolved," said Silver Lake Managing Director Egon Durban. "We remain confident in a great future for Skype, and we look forward to working with Niklas, Janus and the other investors as partners to help the company achieve its full potential."
Once the acquisition deal is closed, later this quarter, Silver Lake and other investors will hold 56% of Skype, eBay will have 30%, while Zennstrأƒآ¶m and Friis will own the rest.
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Twitter starts testing retweet feature
Project Retweet is starting to show results as Twitter has decided to active a retweet feature to a 'small percentage' of its users. Testers of this fresh function are getting a retweet button which enables them to quickly and easily forward a tweet they think it's worth sharing with their followers.
Retweeting is already possible via third-party clients but the micro-blogging site is working on implementing this feature in order to provide a more complete service. If this initial test round works well then Twitter will gradually enable it to more and more users until everyone will have it. There's no rush apparently.
Picture courtesy of thenextweb.com.
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Adobe release five critical updates for Shockwave
Adobe have issued a wide bundle of security updates, most notably fixing five critical flaws in the Shockwave media player. No word as yet has been given on whether these exploits are out in the wild, but everyone (and we are talking hundreds of millions of users) who has Shockwave installed are urged to upgrade to the latest version - 11.5.2.602 - immediately, as four of five said flaws allow hackers to remotely execute code.
The flaws were discovered by VUPEN Security (a vulnerability research corporation).
"We discovered four critical vulnerabilities affecting Adobe Shockwave Player, a technology installed on 450 million internet-enabled desktops." said the firm. "These issues, reported to Adobe a few weeks ago, are caused due to memory corruption and invalid pointer and index errors when processing malformed Shockwave content, and they could be exploited to remotely compromise a vulnerable system when a user visits a specially crafted web page, e.g. using Internet Explorer or Firefox."
The fifth, equally serious flaw is a boundary condition that could lead to denial of service issues with the software.
Strangely enough though, these flaws are actually a positive sign for the level of security in Adobe products. No more than a few weeks ago Adobe was pledging to reduce the amount of time it takes to patch flaws from months to weeks... and with the speed of delivery of this update, we can suggest that their new targets are being met.
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Best Buy staff to install Google Mobile on customer handsets
Best Buy have announced that they will now offer the service of installing Google mobile applications on smartphones that are sold in store - stepping up their customer service to snag back prospective customers from their competition.
Staff on hand at retail stores will install the "Google Mobile App" on all compatible smartphones through the "Walk Out Working" program, which is a free in-store phone setup.
The application can easily be downloaded from m.google.com, but users can often run into problems with either compatibility for their handset or issues connecting with their data package - something that Best Buy say they want to help with. The application generally offers faster Google searches from any phone on which it is installed, and includes key features such as search by voice.
"We know that consumers want smartphones and, increasingly, they want to use applications. The challenge is that people still need help understanding what is available to them and how they can bring it to life on their device," said Scott Moore, VP of Marketing for Best Buy Mobile.
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uSocial sells viewers to YouTube businesses
uSocial, an Australia-based internet firm has started a service recently that is geared toward YouTube users, offering essentially to sell 'views' - that is to say, a larger number of clicks on their videos - for which it promises that the viewers are real people.
"Starting in packages of 5,000 views to be delivered over around a week, we'll begin delivering you quality targeted viewership from real traffic sources around the web, and from within YouTube itself." the company said in a statement. "Not only will this deliver you instant, quality traffic to your videos, as well as the web site you're promoting, but you're also going to be showing up better in YouTube searches as time goes on. All targeted YouTube views we deliver are real people and not some kind of fake bot or script traffic, so there is no risk in having your account banned by YouTube. And that's our guarantee."
uSocial has had a similar system for Digg voting for some time now - and more recently has had controversial arguments with social networking sites Facebook and Twitter over selling friends and followers. Regardless, the company says that YouTube is their obvious extension of their existing expertise and services.
"We are always looking at expanding our operations in the social marketing world and YouTube was the obvious next step." said uSocial's CEO Leon Hill. "Using several of our methods, we can get a totally unknown video in front of the eyes of potentially millions of people which can mean megabucks to anyone who's in business."
Google press spokespeople have declined to comment at this time, however, Google have explained that searches are "based on relevance to a particular query and cannot be influenced by third parties, beyond producing good content and ensuring it is labelled or tagged correctly."
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Steve Jobs named CEO of the decade by Fortune magazine
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple has been named by Fortune magazine the Chief Executive Officer of the decade, winning the rather prestigious title for innovations like the iPod, iTunes and iPhone, and radically reshaping the music, movie and mobile markets that we know today.
"The past decade in business belongs to Jobs," the publication wrote. "What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that, barely a year ago, it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But, by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back."
The effect that the man has had on Apple has been "stunning" said the article in question. In the year 2000 Apple touted a market capitalisation of some $5 billion, but now they are up at $170 billion (wow), with marketable securities (cash ready to spend) up at around $34 billion - more than household name Dell.
Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison told Fortune that Jobs is "irreplaceable".
He went on to say; "He's built a fabulous brand. He's got a wealth of products. Whenever he leaves, I hope he retires in good health and sails off in his yacht in the Mediterranean."
"But they're going to miss him terribly, because it's a consumer products company. The product cycle is so fast." he added.
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ION-based Eee PC 1201N said to reach Europe next month
Although we were hoping Asus would release it on October 22nd, it seems we have to wait until next month to get the Eee PC 1201N netbook which is powered by Nvidia ION platform. The upcoming Eee PC runs Windows 7 Home Premium, features a 12.1-inch (1366x768) screen, and according to a store listing it boasts a dual-core 1.6 GHz Atom 330 CPU, 3GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive (backed by 500GB of online storage) and a GeForce 9400M IGP.
The netbook also packs a 0.3 megapixel webcam, a multi-gesture touchpad, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, an SD card slot, and a 6-cell battery. The price tag for such specs would be around 500 Euro but lower-end versions, with a single-core CPU, less RAM and a smaller HDD, should also become available.
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Fraps 3.0.0 comes with a new look, DirectX 11 support
Ah yes, it's here, the 3.0.0 version of Fraps, the popular screenshot shooting/video recording/benchmarking software by beepa has been released and is awaiting download. This update brings a new look and feel, compatibility with Windows 7, DirectX 11 support and also includes:
- Stereoscopic 3D Vision video capture up to 1920x1200 for D3D9 games
- Force lossless RGB option to always capture video in pure form
- Ability to mix both game sound and external input such as microphone (Vista/Win7 only)
To get Fraps 3.0.0, the free edition at least, visit this page.
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EIZO releases the EV2334W-T 23-inch Full HD monitor
EIZO Japan has just rolled out a fresh, energy-conscious FlexScan LCD monitor, the 23-inch EV2334W-T. The widescreen display features a VA panel with a native resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, the EcoView Sense function which automatically switches the LCD to power save mode when it does not detect the user's presence for 40 seconds, and includes Auto EvoView for automatic brightness adjustments based on ambient lighting.
The EV2334W-T also has a 7ms (GTG) response time, a 3,000:1 contrast ratio, a maximum brightness of 300 cd/m2, and D-Sub, DVI, plus HDMI connectors. EIZO's monitor is backed by a five-year warranty and is priced at $550.
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Radeon HD 5870 2GB seen packing six DisplayPort outputs
Although not yet announced an interesting new Cypress-based card has popped up online, a Radeon HD 5870 boasting 2GB of GDDR5 memory, which is double the amount found on current models, and featuring no less than six Mini DisplayPort outputs. Dropping the dual DVI and HDMI ports for more DP connectors enables AMD to offer a top notch, DirectX 11 solution that supports multi-monitor configurations of up to six displays via the ATI Eyefinity technology - pretty sweet if you can afford the setup.
Apart from the I/O change and extra VRAM, the new card also comes with an 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connector, as opposed to the 'regular' HD 5870 which makes use of two 6-pin plugs. The 6DP Radeon HD 5870 packs 1600 Stream Processors and has stock GPU/memory clocks of 850/4800 MHz.
The Eyefinity-crazy card's price is yet unconfirmed.
Pictures courtesy of pcpop.com.
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