Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Nokia buys out Symbian to create Google rival

With the change in the licensing of the Symbian operating system, something great is going to happen. Nokia has a huge userbase of the operating system, but it is not alone, by using this technology. Maybe some smaller competitors will have a chance to profit out of this change.




Nokia has announced plans to buy out its fellow shareholders in Symbian, the British mobile phone software developer, to create a free mobile phone operating system to compete with rivals such as Google

The Finnish mobile handset maker will pay €264 million (£209 million) for the 52.1 per cent stake in the London-based company it does not already own, buying out Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung.


In addition, Nokia said it will establish the Symbian Foundation, together with other technology and telecoms heavyweights from across the industry, to create one free, open mobile software platform.










Nigel Clifford, chief executive of Symbian, was one of the main speakers during the press conference. He stressed that Symbian is the most widely used mobile-software platform on the planet. "The first 100 million devices took eight years to ship," he told the press conference. "The second 100 million took just two years."

Asked why Symbian is going to give away its licences now, after 10 years, he said: "What we are doing is releasing the deluge that will come from an ecosystem here. In the past, phone makers had to think about which user interface and operating-system combination they would use, then there were developers who had been faced with licence arrangements. This is epoch-making and very different from anything that has happened before."










Of course the entire move is also a clever pre-emptive strike against (most prominently) Google's open source Android OS though it is also likely to rankle feathers at Apple and Microsoft. Ambitiously, the entire unified Symbian OS is also scheduled to go completely open source inside two years with "selective components" at launch.





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Blackjack

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Monday, June 23, 2008

What Privacy Policy?

I don't like, when my private data is shared with third party companies... How about You?




In response to a survey answered by 500 privacy and 900 marketing executives in industries ranging from health care to financial services, more than a third of marketing execs said they don't place any limits on the data they share with third parties, such as e-mail marketing agencies or online advertisers. By contrast, 75% of privacy officers believe that their companies limit the sharing of customer data.

More specifically, 80% of marketers said their organizations share e-mail addresses with third parties, compared with 47% of security and privacy officers. Other examples: 65% of marketers said they would distribute a customer's cellphone number, while 47% of privacy execs believe their companies banned the practice. Forty-five percent of marketers believe their companies shared credit card data, compared with 32% of privacy officers, and 29% of marketers believe their firms distribute social security numbers, compared with 7% of privacy professionals.


That disconnect may be one source of the annoying spam that plagues inboxes. Just 44% of marketers surveyed believe their organizations were in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act, a law that requires marketers to request permission to send email messages, disclose the messages' source and offer an opt-out function. Forty percent of marketing execs who responded weren't sure whether their companies followed the law.










Paul Bates, managing director of StrongMail UK, said: "Businesses have a moral, ethical obligation to keep private, personal customer data safe and secure.

"They should not be handing it out to third parties in the hope of making a fast buck. If they choose to do this, and then lose customer data, then they should at least be obliged to admit it."







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Government "Strike Teams" Invade Homes, Harass Flood Victims Perspective: How we went wrong on identity

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Wii firmware update causes outrage




Nintendo's latest Wii firmware download has outraged buyers of Datel's Freeloader device after it was revealed that it renders the add-on useless.
Datel's Freeloader device, which sells for around £10, allows Wii users to play games from any region on any machine.
After Nintendo launched its latest 3.3 firmware update last week, news soon emerged that the download stops the add-on from working.







Digital Spy was told by a 'disgruntled gamer': "I have spent good money buying imported games to play on my Wii and this firmware update has now stopped me from playing any of them.
"I am furious with Nintendo for forcing me to stop playing games I have spent a lot of money on. Surely this is not the way they should be treating loyal followers of the Wii."





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Paris/Nintendo

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots




From the first time you lay eyes on Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4, it's tempting to take him as a metaphor for the game as a whole. Here we have an old warhorse taking one final outing, seemingly out of place in the new world, with a few new technologies at his disposal, but weighed down by aging parts and an awful lot of baggage. And its true that there will be times when MGS4 feels oddly antiquated, and times when you'll wish it could have left a few old, bad habits behind. Yet, all the same, that doesn't stop it being an exceptional game - one of the few must-have titles on PS3, and one of the finest on any platform so far this year.





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