Archive for April, 2009

I’m a gadget addict.

Leaks are always hardest when they hit at home. Now we know how Apple feels. The party responsible for the leak has been penalized severely (whipped with wet spaghetti), so believe us when we say this kind of thing won’t ever happen again. Anyway, so long as the cat’s out of the bag, we may as well give you a few more pics. What you see is a prototype, equipped with an Intel Atom processor and a 12″ capacitative touchscreen. Looks a little different than it did last time, doesn’t it?

I want one. Now.

Rumors are rising, but does anyone really think this (if true) is surprising?

With anticipation high for a new iPhone this summer, rumors are rising after a recent Apple purchase from Samsung. Apple bought 100 million 8GB NAND flash chips, which DigiTimes says points to increased storage for the iPhone.

Flash-chip suppliers Hynix, Intel, Micron and Toshiba may also have had a part in the Apple purchase. The order fueled rumors that Apple is building a bigger-memory iPhone, likely with 32GB of storage, to share shelf space with the 8GB and 16GB iPhone 3G models already on the market.

Did anyone think they wouldn’t raise prices too?

One day after iTunes upped the price for some of its DRM-free digital downloads to $1.29, Amazon.com and Wal-Mart have also increased their prices to $1.29 and $1.24, respectively.

Get this. When Windows 7 is released, users will be able to downgrade back to XP or Vista, but those who purchase Windows 7 won’t be able to upgrade from XP to Windows 7.

Windows XP is turning out to be the operating system that will not die. Microsoft had planned to phase out the OS a while back, but extended its life because Windows Vista is too resource-heavy to run on low powered computers like netbooks, which are taking the world by storm right now. You can’t walk into a store and buy a retail copy of Windows XP anymore, but you can purchase a netbook with the operating system, and under some circumstances you can purchase a computer that normally ships with Windows Vista and have it downgraded to XP for no additional cost.

Weird. Microsoft is so weird. It’s almost as if you need membership cards to understand their way of thinking.

The endless stream of Twitter news appears to have paid off for the micro-blogging site. Global visits to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up 700 percent from the same time last year, according to comScore. Of that, about 4 million visitors were in the U.S.–a 1,000-percent increase. In the past two months alone, global Twitter traffic jumped by more than 5 million.

And people wonder why they keep seeing the fail whale, and now that Oprah is on her way to the Twitterverse, I bet you’ll be seeing more and more people in need of lipo6 black just to fit in with all those fail whales.

No wonder I can’t find a job.

This morning’s news about the latest unemployment statistics was dismal and quite sobering. The U.S. has lost 5 million jobs in the past 16 months, and the unemployment rate has hit a 25 year high, reaching 8.5%. Our own TechCrunch layoff tracker reports nearly 320,000 tech jobs lost since August. While jobs are being shed at an unprecedented rate, job listings are also being affected, both in tech and general employment sectors.

Apparently Sun thinks it’s worth more than IBM was offering. I’m not sure how much that is, but what now?

After weeks of negotiations, I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks.

The deal’s collapse raises questions about Sun’s next step, since the I.B.M. offer was far above the value of the Silicon Valley company’s shares when news of the I.B.M. offer first surfaced last month. Sun, an innovative pioneer in computer workstations and Internet-era software, has struggled in the marketplace in recent years.

Awesome news. It’s pretty obvious that someone who follows more than a few hundred people has absolutely no interest in what you have to say anyway.

You may have run across certain Twitter users who follow you back right away, as if they have some sort of autofollow feature turned on. They do, actually, but not for much longer. Autofollowing has never been available to everyone, it was only turned on for users who sent a special request to Twitter’s support team. Now, Twitter’s getting rid of it entirely.

IBM (IBM.N) cut its offer for Sun Microsystems (JAVA.O) to $9.55 a share after a thorough vetting and may soon unveil details of its largest- ever takeover, a source with knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.

But the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deal, said that price was not final, although IBM had decided Sun Micro was worth less than thought after a weeks- long due diligence process.

There’s a lot of that going around isn’t there?

Survey says…

Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It’ll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity.

The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.

That makes sense to me.