Fab Friday : Web Filtering

The China government had announced it will (partially) back down over its controversial plans of internet monitoring filter software "Green Dam Youth Escort".

The software is supposed to protect Chinese web users from "harmful content", and was to be made mandatory with all PC shipments in the country from July 1 this year.

Fab Friday : EC Report

Close to half of Europeans use the internet every day but one third have never used the web, according to a new report published by the European Commission.

The study, which took a deep dive into the digital landscape in Europe over the last five years, demonstrated that new technologies are spreading fast across the continent but deep divisions remain and the elder and unemployed remain largely unaware of the existence of websites.

Fab Friday : Microsoft + Yahoo

Last February, when the news of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal first broke, people were sceptical about it. Yesterday, the deal was closed.

Yahoo shareholders have transfered $2.9 billion to Microsoft shareholders. Yahoo knocking $2.91 billion off their market cap while Microsoft adding $2.94 billion to their market cap.

So net/net about $30 million in new value was created by the market. All of that plus Yahoo got Binged.

Fab Friday : Skype Headset

Skype is great, but it’s also kind of frustrating if you’re talking to someone that has a crappy microphone. Recently, the company unveiled the FREETALK Everyman headset, a USB super wideband audio headset.

While the goal was to ensure great call quality, Skype also notes that this headset is a cheap headset that anyone could use, anywhere and anytime.

Fab Friday : It's 250 Million

It was only three months ago that Facebook announced that it had reached 200 million users worldwide. On July 15, 2009, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network has passed 250 million users.

Facebook’s offical user count is now 250 million. Wow!

Fab Friday : Google Searches

Different markets have different needs for marketing products or services. But that doesn’t take away the weirdness of a company like Google advertising its core product (online search) by using ink that was printed on paper.

Apparently, Google India ordered some targeted quarter-page advertisements to appear in a variety of city supplements of a leading English-language daily newspaper in India.

Fab Friday : MJ Chart

Google was inundated with people looking for news about Michael Jackson on 25th June 2009. This is a chart showing the volume of search queries for the deceased pop star. Searches peaked right around 3 PM PDT, as people all over the world were trying to find out information about his passing.

Fab Friday : Web Collapses

Love him or hate him, everyone on the planet knows him. And that caused big problems for a lot of huge websites with the news of his passing.

As reported, Twitter had hundreds of thousands of tweets came in about Jackson in a very short amount of time. Various reports had the AOL-owned TMZ, which broke the story, being down at multiple points throughout the ordeal. Then it was the LATimes, people rushed there, and that site went down.

Fab Friday : Goodbye Yahoo Gallery

Today brings news of another service shutting down: Yahoo Gallery. Come July 14, it will be no more.

Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps, it never really took off.

Fab Friday : Cheap Phones

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will rise to north of 700 million units, up 22% from this year. The report goes into the various schemes that help ‘connect the unconnected’, or the estimated 3 billion people that do not own mobile phones.

Apparently, the key lies in drastically reducing the cost of handsets that can be used by low-income users.

Fab Friday : MDA Rocks

The MDA rap done by the senior management of Singapore's Media Development Authority.

It is supposed to be more of an education video for visitors of the MDA website to increase awareness of MDA and their purpose.

It’s accidental success (or major failure as view by some) had led a lot more people know of MDA’s existence.

Fab Friday : Google Earth Businesses

Now, Google Earth is adding something more practical. It will let you see businesses and related information on both its desktop and iPhone apps.

By adding a “Businesses” layer to Google Earth, you’ll be able to see businesses by default when you start the application. Google Earth will list businesses like restaurants, bars, banks, gas stations, and grocery stores. As you zoom in further to the map, you’ll see more businesses.

Fab Friday : YouTube Minute

YouTube is the most popular site for video on the web, and has revolutionized the way we view videos. Today brings another amazing stat about the site: Every single minute, over 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube.

Think about that for a minute. In that minute, nearly a days worth of footage will have been uploaded. And the pace is quickening. Now it’s 20 — soon it will be 24.

Fab Friday : Intel Fined

The European Commission has announced that it has fined Intel a record €1.06 billion for abusing its dominance in the market for computer chips to exclude its biggest rival AMD by paying computer manufacturers and retailers to postpone, cancel or downright avoid using or selling the latter’s products.

E.U. regulators first began investigating Intel in 2001, after AMD filed a complaint in Brussels the year before.

Fab Friday : Goodbye GeoCities

Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year. Yahoo bought GeoCities at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion.

The closure of GeoCities spells the end of an era.

Fab Friday : Robot Density

There are 1 million industrial robots around the world (as of Dec 2008), and Japan has the highest density with 295 robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers.

Singapore and Korea are second and third respectively on the chart, but significantly behind Japan in numbers.

Fab Friday : The @ Symbol

In 1971, the @ symbol was assigned an important international role, as the critical connector in e-mail addresses.

A 30-year-old computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson, looking for coding to send the first ever e-mail, surveyed the keyboard on his Model-33 Teletype and chose @ - which is apparently centuries old and has served various different functions - because it was unlikely to appear in a person's name.

The @ symbol has since became an instant emblem of the digital age.