I was browsing around Technology related sites as I do nearly every morning and came across some strange changes over at Techcrunch.
You will noticed from the image above Techcrunch has made some big changes to their advertising. Techcrunch was the leader in 125 x 125 advertising in the early days and now this format seems to be used nearly every blog, however Techcrunch has since removed the 125 x 125 ads from the top of their sidebar and placed them below each article.
By placing the 125 x 125 ads below each article this will decrease the visibility of these ads and also decrease the click through rate of the advertisers. Has Techcrunch decided that its difficult to sell 125 x 125 advertising? or have they just simply decided it is much easier and more profitable to add Google Adsense to the top of their sidebar, so they can gain more clicks and a higher margin on their advertising costs?
Less than a month ago, FourSquare, a location based social network commonly used to post your location on Twitter, announced that they were getting an update every second from their users. So that works out at around 600,000 updates per week. Not bad for a small start-up. However, in less than thirty days their user rates have doubled.
They shared with the world yesterday, via a tweet that they were getting over a million updates per week. 1.2 million to be exact.
That is a phenomenal increase in user ratings which most companies can only dream of achieving. I’ve noticed this increase myself on Twitter and am strongly considering using the service. After all, it’s more fun than our standard geo-location tweets, more social and have cool games to go along with it!
Facebook have told us that over the past few months they have been looking for ways to improve the user interface, and mores specifically the navigation. Obviously, given that it’s a social network, Facebook have developed a new method of seeing what’s new in your circle of friends.
“In the top menu, you will find your newest notifications, requests and messages. For example, when you receive a Facebook notification about someone writing on your Wall or tagging you in a photo, you’ll see a red bubble appear in the left-hand corner near the search bar. When you click on the icon, you’ll see a drop-down menu with your most recent notifications.”Said Jing Chen
The menu to the left of your profile has also been changed around to make it “Easier for you to communicate with and discover content from your friends”. By clicking on News Feed, Messages, Events or Photos you can instantly view the most recent content from your friends as seen in the screenshot above. You can also use the new ‘Friends’ feature to look for new friends who are connected to you via others.
Also, they have made the Game and Application section much, much better. They’re making it easier for you to organise your apps and also find new ones via the “Games” and “Applications” buttons on the home screen.
“You will also start to see counters next to the applications you have bookmarked on your home page. Counters will notify you when you have a specific action to take, so that you never miss your turn in a game or an update from a friend in an application.” she said.
You can bookmark your favourite applications using the “Add Bookmark” button in an application, and then you’ll have one-click access to them from the left-hand menu beneath the Applications and Games dashboards. Click the “More” link to see all of your newest bookmarks.”
It’s good to see that Facebook are continually updating their UI and making it more user friendly.
Sometimes it’s nothing, but often there is something new about to come out. The Apple store is now down globally. What can we expect when it comes back online? New Macbook Pros?
Check back at 08:30 ET (as is the norm) to see who got it right.
Since the iPad was officially unveiled over a week ago now, everyone been praising some of its aspects and slamming others. I know quite a few people who aren’t too pleased with paying hundreds of dollars for an “oversized iPad”. Regardless of what you think of the price, it won’t really matter for Austrians.
3, the popular mobile network, will be offering a 333 Euro ($455) discount on the iPad once you take out a data plan at thirty euro a month. We’re not too such exactly what the European price will be for the iPad, but judging from US prices, this discount means you could hand over fifty Euro on the day of purchase and then pay thirty Euro a month for the next two years. But that thirty Euro ain’t for nothing. You’ll be getting a portable broadband modem which will create a WiFi hotspot around you. Thus you can surf the net on your WiFi iPad wherever you are!
This deal isn’t too bad, particularly in the short run. However, as a warning to all our Austrian readers, I’d think long and hard about how much you really need an iPad both now and two years down the line, because once you’re in, you’re in.
According to AppleInsider, Apple released an update on Friday evening to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
The only distinguishable change noted in documentation, those people say, was a request by the Mac maker for its developers to add iCal and printing functions to their evaluation efforts, alongside AirPort, QuickTime and graphics drivers. A prior emphasis on VoiceOver was reportedly not extended to build 10D548.
The beta will also include tweaks that aim to enhance the performance of Apple’s 64-bit Logic pro audio suite. Other bundled improvements include better compatibility with third-party printers and OpenGL-grounded applications.
Apple reportedly listed no known issues with build 10D548, which now weighs in at 773MB as a Delta distribution.
Google Chrome has fast become one of the worlds most popular internet browsers. Most people dont know that you can now get Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux.
I have been having a huge amount of trouble getting my iPhone applications to sync with iTunes. Finally, in a moment of desperation, I righted clicked on my iPhone and chose the option “Transfer Purchases” and to my suprise and glee I successfully moved my applications onto to my computer.
To transfer applictions to iTunes from your iPhone:
Right click on your iPhone in the left hand explorer bar
Select “Transfer Purchases”
You should see a progress bar in iTunes and your phone should read “Sync in Progress”
If everything went as planned, all of your applications that were purchased on your iPhone should now appear in iTunes
The Pirate Bay was first ‘censored’ in Italy in the summer of 2008, when ISPs were ordered to prevent millions of Italians from accessing the world’s largestBitTorrent tracker.
The Pirate Bay chose to appeal the decision and eventually won the court case. The Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement and the block was lifted temporarily as the case was appealed once again.
A few weeks ago the Supreme Court reviewed the case and ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.
This week the case once again appeared before the Court of Bergamo where it was decided that all Italian ISPs will have to deny their customers access to The Pirate Bay.
Pirate Bay lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus, Giuseppe Campanelli and Francesco Micozzi told TorrentFreak that the Court followed the same reasoning as the Supreme Court, and deemed it unnecessary to bring the case before the European Court of Justice.
According to the two lawyers The Pirate Bay is still considering whether to appeal this decision or not, but that will not prevent or delay the block. “We don’t know when Italian ISPs will begin to re-apply the Pirate Bay filters, but we think that this will happen very soon,” Micozzi commented.
Aside from appealing to the Supreme Court, the Pirate Bay’s legal team is also considering bringing the case before the European Court of Justice.
It is doubtful that the verdict will have a strong impact on the piracy rate in Italy. The proposed DNS-filtering scheme can be easily bypassed by Pirate Bay users and there are hundreds of alternative torrent sites that can replace The Pirate Bay.
A bit of an embarrassment for Mozilla Firefox – and it comes at a a bad time too, right when they’re loosing their dominance in the browser world as Chrome catches up.
Mozilla has been known as a very safe browser as compared to its old enemy, Internet Explorer. In fact, many people used it for just that reason. So the last thing Mozilla needed was reports of Malware in two ad-ons which were available for download from their website.
“Two add-ons in the experimental section of addons.mozilla.org were found to be containing malware,” Mozilla said on its security blog. “These were not originally detected with the anti-malware scanning tools that we have been using. We have since increased the number of scanning tools, and will be taking additional steps to minimize the risk of further incidents.
It is thought that well in excess of 4,000 downloads of the ad-ons have taken place since they were first released in September. So are you one of the thousands of people who inadvertently infected their own machines? Well if you downloaded Sothink 4.0 and all versions of Master Filer then there’s a good chance you are. These installed Win32.LdPinch.gen and Win32.Bitfrose.32.Bitfrose Trojan respectively. So if you have downloaded these, I suggest running a scan of your system ASAP.
Its been well-known for decades that robots are replacing humans in many work-fields. The most obvious would be in manufacturing such as in car plants or food factories. But what about the humble barkeep? Could his days be numbered too?
Well students from Middlesex University think so. They recently showed off their Heineken Bot at the Kinetics Art Fair in London the other day. What the little beer toting fella does is wheel around in a pre-programmed path and serve people glasses of Heineken whenever they want one as you can see in the video below.
He’s basically just a walking keg with a few sensors but I think this is really cool. It might be a few more years before these things are common place (that beer looked a little too foamy for my linking in the video), but I like the principal of Robots serving us beer. Hopefully it’s not just a ploy to get us all drunk and take over the world during our epic hangovers!
Pingdom is a great service and they have put together another great viral article.
Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.
There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut.
Sometimes it’s nothing, but often there is something new about to come out. The Apple store is now down globally. What can we expect when it comes back online? New Macbook Pros?
According to 
Google Chrome has fast become one of the worlds most popular internet browsers. Most people dont know that you can now get Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux.
The Pirate Bay was first ‘censored’ in Italy in the summer of 2008, when ISPs were ordered to prevent millions of Italians from accessing the 
