Silverlight change.

Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing strategy on the Silverlight web technology. When first announced Silverlight was portrayed as a rival to Flash and key to getting Microsoft software running on many different devices. Now Microsoft is slowing Silverlight development and turning its attention to web standards such as HTML5. Silverlight will remain as a way to get apps running on Windows phone 7. The strategy shift emerged as a result of an interview that Bob Muglia, Microsoft's head of servers and tools division, gave at the company's Professional Developers Conference. In that interview, he said Silverlight was still "core" to Microsoft but the company was looking to other technologies such as HTML to get its software running on devices people use to get at online sites and services.

Mr Muglia clarified his comments in a blog post saying that exploding use of e-readers, tablets and different sorts of smartphones now made it "practically impossible" to get something like Silverlight running on all those devices. Like Adobe's Flash, Silverlight acted as a wrapper that, once installed on a machine, allowed that device to run code written for it. Many sites used it as a way to present rich video and multimedia to visitors. Silverlight also made it easier for developers to hook into the many back office systems Microsoft produces to help enrich the services that could be put online. Mr Muglia said the shift on strategy was not a "negative statement" but a recognition that the industry had changed. The furore kicked off by Mr Muglia's comments also led Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer to underscore the software giant's commitment to Silverlight technology in a statement of his own.

Despite this, many of the comments on Mr Muglia's blogpost took the software giant to task for the change. Developers described themselves as "betrayed", "disappointed" and "demoralised" by the decision. Others said they felt they had wasted the time they had invested in learning to use Silverlight and others said they would now consider changing to rival technologies. Many pushed for more clarification on the future of Silverlight and when the next version of the software will be available. Microsoft has only said it would talk about a release date for Silverlight 5 "in the coming months".

Our Core expertise lies into custom application development using Microsoft .NET technology. We would like to share with you our expertise http://goo.gl/1QVH

Oracle to buy e-commerce software maker for $1B.

Oracle has agreed to buy e-commerce company Art Technology Group for about 1 billion dollars in a move designed to expand the range of services the business software giant can offer its customers. According to an announcement Tuesday, Oracle said it will pay 6 dollars a share for the company, which counts among its clients Best Buy, AT&T and Continental Airlines. The price represents a 46-per-cent premium to Art Technology's share price prior to the announcement of the deal.

The deal came as Oracle and its rivals like HP and IBM have intensified their acquisitions as they seek to offer a complete range of technology services to their customers. Oracle is currently involved in a fractious court battle with SAP over the illegal use of Oracle software by an SAP subsidiary. The case, which began Monday in Oakland, California, also threatens to worsen relations between Oracle and HP, whose current CEO Leo Apotheker, is the former boss of SAP and could be called to testify.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Google sues the U.S. government.

Intensifying efforts to build its e-mail and cloud computing business, Google Inc. has taken the federal government to court to change a bidding procedure that it says favors rival Microsoft Corp. Google, which has been battling Microsoft across the country to gain a foothold in the $20-billion office software market, sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, alleging that it excluded Google’s bid to offer the e-mail system to the 88,000 employees throughout the agency. According to the lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the department specified that in replacing its older e-mail system, it would  consider software from Microsoft only.

For several years, Google has been battling to win territory in the global market for office and e-mail software, a sector Microsoft has long dominated with its Outlook and Office products.  The division of Microsoft that sells Office software, its largest unit, recorded nearly $19 billion in revenue this year. To distinguish its offerings, Google has long touted its Internet cloud, an approach that stores customers' e-mail and documents in Google’s remote data centers rather than on servers operated by businesses themselves. The cloud approach allows major customers to save money by outsourcing their own in-house e-mail systems. But Google has run into difficulties in its attempts to loosen the tight grip that Redmond, Wash., software giant Microsoft has on the e-mail market, which includes decades of relationships with some of the world’s largest businesses and government agencies.

Earlier this year, Google was frustrated in its efforts to offer its Google Apps e-mail product to the state of California, which ultimately chose Microsoft to serve e-mail to the state’s 200,000 employees. Google, which had been engaged in a long discussions with the state over the contract’s security and usability requirements, ultimately opted not to submit a bid and complained about what it saw as a pro-Microsoft bias in the bidding process. The state expressed regret that Google did not submit a bid.

In the case of the Interior Department, Google alleged that it was in effect prohibited from making a bid in the first place and that department officials had quietly been opening the door to Microsoft before the bidding process even began. The suit cites an April meeting between Google executives and William Corrington, the department’s chief of technology. The company contended that Corrington “informed Google that ‘a path forward had already been chosen’… and there would be no opportunity for Google to compete because its product was not compliant with DOI’s security requirements.”

Our Core expertise lies into custom application development using Microsoft .NET technology. We would like to share with you our expertise http://goo.gl/1QVH

Google Android becomes No. 2 mobile OS.

In the smart-phone market, BlackBerrys got squeezed last quarter. Google Inc.'s Android overtook Research in Motion's BlackBerry as an operating system in the third quarter, and Apple Inc.'s iPhone surpassed the corporate stalwart as a handset, according to a report on U.S. sales by market research company NPD Group.

The Android operating system, which runs on nearly 100 separate devices, was in 44% of the phones bought during the quarter, NPD said. Apple’s iPhone was well behind, at 26.2%, while RIM's BlackBerry phones fell to 22% in the third quarter from 28% of units sold in the second quarter. In last year's third quarter, Android’s operating system was in only 3% of phones, while RIM's system held sway in 46% of the market, according to NPD. Apple also is taking a bite out of BlackBerry by selling 14 million phones in the third quarter, compared with 12 million by RIM. Of the nation's five best-selling handsets, the iPhone unseated the BlackBerry Curve 8500 as No. 1 during the third quarter, with LG Cosmos coming in third. Two popular Android phones, the Motorola Droid X and the HTC EVO 04, ranked fourth and fifth, respectively.

Michael Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity, a global capital markets research company, said that Apple's and Android’s successes come down to more phone applications and greater support from AT&T and Verizon. When the iPhone 4 becomes available for Verizon users in the first quarter of 2011, it could dent Android’s popularity, he said. I think when it becomes more accessible, quite a few consumers will switch to the iPhone and potentially slow down the growth of Android phones, Walkley said.

Nokia's Symbian continued to lead the market with a 37 per cent share, while Android had 17 per cent of the market. It has surpassed Research In Motion, Apple and Microsoft this year. Growing popularity of Android phones -- made by companies including Motorola Inc, HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics -- puts Google in a good position as handsets look set to surpass computers for browsing the Web.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Data Broker compromising Facebook Security.

Facebook Inc. said that a data broker has been paying application developers for identifying user information, and that it had placed some developers on a six-month suspension from its site because of the practice. Some "apps," the small programs that let users play games or share information with each other on the social-networking site, were sending users' Facebook ID numbers to third-party marketing or data firms, in violation of Facebook's privacy policies. An ID can be used to look up a user's name and other publicly available information on the social network and link it to their use of the app. Such information can be used by companies that build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities. Facebook didn't identify the data broker that was buying user IDs. But it said it had reached an agreement with RapLeaf Inc., which it described as "the data broker who came forward to work with us on this situation." It's unclear whether Facebook is implicating RapLeaf and neither company responded to questions.

Under the agreement, Rap Leaf agreed to delete all Facebook user IDs in its possession, and also agreed "not to conduct any activities on the Facebook Platform" in the future, according to Facebook. In its post, Facebook said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for data brokers "because they undermine the value that users have come to expect from Facebook." While the apps weren't selling or granting data brokers access to data that users had set to be private, "this violation of our policy is something we take seriously," Facebook said. Facebook didn't specify which app developers it had suspended, but said it affects fewer than a dozen, mostly small ones. Facebook also said it was adding a mechanism so app developers that need to share a unique identifier with outside parties, such as content partners, can do so in an anonymous fashion. This new function will be released next week, and will be required of all apps by Jan. 1, 2011. The Journal investigation also found that MySpace and some of its popular apps were transmitting identifying information to outside advertising companies. Asked whether MySpace had found any app developers were selling user IDs, a MySpace spokesman said the company was "taking appropriate action" against developers that break its privacy rules.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Blekko slashes the Search Engine.

Google Inc.'s dominant position in Web search isn't deterring other entrants. The latest, Blekko Inc., hopes to attract users by narrowing search results. The start-up, which formally is starting its service Monday, hopes to limit the number of spam or low-quality websites that show up for searches in categories such as health, cars and personal finance. Gaining a significant share in search—a market that generates more than $10 billion in advertising revenue annually in the U.S.—is a long shot. But some Internet analysts have voiced praise for Blekko.com, which has raised $24 million from venture-capital firms and well-known angel investors Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen.

The problem with Google, according to Blekko and some industry analysts, is a proliferation of search results of dubious quality. Sites listed often are filled with content whose source is unclear. Blekko, while using a Google-style search algorithm, relies on users to select which websites should appear in results for certain queries. That way, users can narrow searches to a slice of the Web—for example, a collection of hand-picked sites that are politically liberal, or those devoted exclusively to baseball. Queries that Blekko identifies as being health-related, for example, are limited to 76 authoritative information sources.

On the other hand, while Google might return some less-reliable sources, its results attempt to offer direct advice that a cold sufferer can use. Blekko's sources, while more authoritative, also feel more academic, addressing studies on zinc's effectiveness or why vitamin C may not be effective. Over the past few months, users in a private test of Blekko have created more than 3,000 collections of sites that people can search through by typing a so-called slash-tag and topic next to their search query. For example, typing "bottles/wine" limits searches only to wine sites such as WineSpectator.com. Blekko automatically triggers such limited searches for queries it identifies as being related to health, colleges, lyrics and several other popular topics. Mr. Skrenta said Blekko's initial goal is to identify the 50 best sites on the Web for the top 100,000 search categories. Its use of volunteers to identify those sites is modeled after Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

Google in 2008 tried to give users more control over which sites turned up in their search results, with a feature called SearchWiki that allowed users to rerank, delete or add results for their own searches. The feature was abandoned this year in favor of allowing users with a Google account to mark search results they like with a star. There have been many attempts to directly challenge Google, with Microsoft Corp.'s Bing gaining some traction in recent years. Google powers nearly 70% of U.S. searches, while Bing handles nearly 20% and IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Ask.com accounts for nearly 4% of the market, according to comScore Inc. Some start-ups have found the going tough. Cuil, a search company started by former Google engineers, was shut down in September after a two-year run and $33 million in funding. But others are pressing ahead, including start-ups that rely on users to create content and organize information on the Web. Entrants in that category include Quora.com, which began service publicly in June, and Mahalo.com, which opened in 2007.

In the 1990s, Blekko's Mr. Skrenta cofounded NewHoo, a human-edited directory of the Web that was later sold to Netscape and renamed the Open Directory Project. Today Google occasionally uses the site to fill information gaps in some of Google's search results. Blekko—which takes the name Mr. Skrenta gave to his personal computer in college—employs 22 people, including former Google and Yahoo Inc. search engineers. He says his goal for the company is to become the No. 3 search engine.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Discovery space shuttle launch with a new passenger.

When space shuttle Discovery blasts into space next week, there will be an unusual passenger onboard. A 300-pound humanoid robot named Robonaut 2, or R2, will hitch a ride along with the six astronauts who are making their way to the International Space Station. With its gold helmet and shiny metallic visor, R2 looks a little like a toned-down Metroid from the popular Nintendo video game, but it’s solely made up of a torso, two arms and two five-fingered hands. The idea is that R2 will be an astronaut’s assistant, helping out with routine tasks such as holding tools and vacuuming air filters.

Initially, R2 will be deployed on a fixed pedestal inside the space station, NASA said. Next steps include a leg for climbing through the corridors of the space station. Once fully built, NASA envisions R2 assisting astronauts during space walks, lending a hand with mechanical fixes to the outside of the space station. This might enable us to eliminate the astronaut’s space walks altogether, said Brandi K. Dean, a NASA spokeswoman. Space walks are very dangerous and it would be beneficial to have a robot do that sort of work. R2 was jointly developed and built by NASA and General Motors engineers at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. But some of engineering know-how and robotic innards came out of California locations, such as Malibu’s HRL Laboratories, Woodland’s JR3 Inc. and Santa Clara’s Cirexx International Inc.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Microsoft's Push Into Gesture Technology.

Microsoft said on Friday that it was buying Canesta, a small Silicon Valley company that specializes in gesture-recognition technology. Interest in this technology has surged because it lets people control computers and other devices through hand movements and other bodily gyrations, in similar fashion to the systems depicted in futuristic films like Minority Report. Canesta makes chips that, when coupled with a digital camera, give all manner of devices a sense of depth perception for the world around them, letting them “see” in three dimensions. Neither company disclosed the financial terms. Next month, Microsoft will begin shipping Kinect, a $150 add-on for its Xbox gaming consoles, which uses gesture recognition to allow people to play games with body motions instead of controllers. Players flick through menus with waves of the hand and then move to make their on-screen avatars run, jump, duck, swing and dance. The 3-D technology in Kinect is from PrimeSense, a Canesta rival.

In a recent interview, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, discussed the company’s plans to advance the gesture technology well beyond video games. “I’m excited to be way out in front and want to push the pedal on that,” Mr. Ballmer said. Using Canesta’s technology, Microsoft and its partners could equip PCs, televisions, cars, cellphones and other devices with gesture recognition features. Canesta has spent 11 years building chips that process images and information about distances to give devices some 3-D oomph. Honda has invested in the company with the hopes of putting 3-D sensors into cars that could help them to detect obstacles. It could also use the technology to see the size and body shape of a person in a seat and adjust the way an air bag inflates.

Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company that manufactures laptops for many of the major brands, has also invested in Canesta and expects to build laptops this year with 3-D camera modules. Manufacturers use the technology to give robots on their assembly lines some visual smarts. We have a really broad mission to enable everyday devices with the ability to see, and enable natural user interfaces across all kinds of devices, said James Spare, chief executive of Canesta, who is a former Microsoft executive. There is no other company more committed to natural user interfaces than Microsoft, Mr. Spare added. Canesta’s investors have poured about $60 million into the company over the years.

Analysts have described PrimeSense’s technology as cheaper to put in place than that of Canesta. However, they have also said that Canesta should be able to build less expensive and more sophisticated products over time because it designs a very specialized type of chip geared toward the 3-D recognition jobs. Last year, Microsoft acquired 3DV systems, a company with similar gesture recognition technology. That deal coupled with the Canesta purchase may prevent competitors from acquiring these 3-D abilities and cut off potential intellectual property squabbles. Canesta has secured 44 patents in this area and has more pending. Historically, Microsoft has worked with chip partners like Intel and Nvidia rather than building its own products, so the Canesta purchase is something of a shift.

Our Core expertise lies into custom application development using Microsoft .NET technology. We would like to share with you our expertise http://goo.gl/1QVH

Google - Place Search

Google is making another move to give consumers quick access to information about local places by rolling out Place Search, which clusters search results around specific locations. For example, if a consumer searches for a museum in Los Angeles, the results will show each museum with relevant snippets of information and links from across the Web, making it easier to compare options. A red pin marks the location of each museum on a map. These results will begin to appear automatically when Google figures out a consumer is looking for local information. The rest of the time, consumers will be able to click on Place Search through a link in the left-hand panel of the search results page. The idea is to give consumers a quick and comprehensive view of a place in one search, instead of having to perform eight to 10 searches to get the same information, said product manager Jackie Bavaro. For example, when visiting a new city, a consumer might search for a list of restaurants and then search for details about each one. With Google Places, the consumer can scan the results from one search, which can include photos or snippets of reviews.

Google has developed technology that better understands real-world locations by connecting hundreds of millions of websites to more than 50 million places, Bavaro said. Place Search is not yet available on mobile phones but should be in the near future. The new feature, which is rolling out over the next few days, is part of a major push for Google to give consumers faster, easier ways to find local information and to give advertisers better ways to reach them. Google recently launched Boost, a location-based advertising product for local businesses built on Google Places that initially is available only in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. The ads show up when users search for local businesses. Google also unveiled a new format for "hyperlocal" mobile ads.

Google is battling Facebook and other technology titans for local and mobile advertising dollars. It recently put its vice president of search products, Marissa Mayer, in charge of location and local services. The promotion of the company’s 20th employee, first female engineer and one of its best-known executives signals that Google is intensifying its efforts. The stakes are high: Local businesses are expected to spend $35.2 billion on online advertising in 2014, up from $19.6 billion this year, according to BIA/Kelsey. Google, which nearly bought Yelp this year, has been improving its local business listings. Google Places offers information on local businesses plus reviews from such sites as OpenTable and Zagat. Local businesses can update their listings with special offers. They can also pay to have their listings stand out in search results or on maps.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Yahoo with an e-mail face-lift

Looking to get people to spend more time on its website, Yahoo has redesigned its free e-mail service, calling it the biggest overhaul in five years. Yahoo says the new version that begins to roll out Wednesday will run twice as fast and include several new features. One of those features is the ability to connect e-mail accounts to Twitter, making it possible to see new Twitter updates and to post to Twitter directly from e-mail. Yahoo already has that feature with Facebook. Yahoo e-mail users will also be able to play videos and look at pictures without having to leave their inbox. Yahoo announced that it planned to make big changes to e-mail at an event at its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters last month.

Yahoo's estimated 273 million e-mail users can decide if they want to switch to the new version during a testing period that will last until the end of the year. All e-mail accounts will automatically switch over next year. Yahoo is trying to hold onto its e-mail users because they tend to visit frequently, giving Yahoo more opportunities to show them ads. Millions of Web surfers are increasingly using popular services such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate. Yahoo also faces stiff competition from Google's Gmail, which now has an estimated 193 million users, according to ComScore. Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail have also introduced a number of upgrades to their e-mail services.

Our Core expertise lies into custom application development using Microsoft .NET technology. We would like to share with you our expertise http://goo.gl/1QVH

LimeWire slapped with permanent injunction

Five months after finding LimeWire and its former chief executive liable for inducing users to violate the record companies' copyrights, a federal judge on Tuesday ordered the company to pull the plug on its file-sharing network. Although both sides agreed to the terms of the permanent injunction that District Judge Kimba M. Wood signed, neither got what it really wanted out of the months of talks. LimeWire wasn't able to obtain the licenses it needs to start an authorized music service. And the labels didn't get a check from LimeWire and former CEO Mark Gorton to compensate them for almost 10 years' worth of infringements. And so the lawsuit continues to play out like a movie we've all seen before, with a court ordering the network's operator to do everything in its power to stop users from coming back. At some point in the future, LimeWire might have a legitimate service to offer them, but they'll probably be long gone by the time it does.  Not that people who used LimeWire for free downloads would have been eager to sign up for a paid service witness what happened to iMesh when it shifted abruptly from free (and illegal) to paid. And it's hard to fault the labels for wanting to shut off the spigot of bootlegs flowing out of LimeWire as soon as possible, rather than waiting until the licensing negotiations were finally completed. Yet the labels also demanded that LimeWire settle all the legal issues -- including the industry's multimillion-dollar damage claims -- before they would agree to terms on licenses. That proved to be an insurmountable hurdle. Unless a settlement on damages is reached before then, Wood will hold a hearing in January on how much LimeWire should pay.

One interesting thing about the service LimeWire wants to launch is that it wouldn't be based on the LimeWire network. According to Jason Herskowitz, vice president of product management, the company has nearly finished work on a service that integrates cloud-based music streams into users' personal music collections. The point is to give people a single interface that lets them play and discover music from either source, as well as to download new tracks from LimeWire. Herskowitz says that existing subscription services in effect force users to ignore the collections they assembled over the years. And while they work with an increasing number of smart phones, their libraries of online songs don't work with iPods that can't connect to the Net. LimeWire wants to lighten the impact on iPod users by letting subscribers download a number of MP3s each month in addition to streaming songs to their connected devices. It's hard to judge how good an offer that would be, though, because the number of free MP3s and the amount of the monthly fee is still being negotiated. It's worth noting that the latest iteration of the Napster subscription music service as well as Microsoft's Zune Pass service bundle free MP3s with their streams, but neither one has drawn a mass following. On the other hand, LimeWire's file-sharing software had many millions of users -- its software had been downloaded an estimated 200 million times. That base could provide a huge head start toward mass adoption for the new service, if it proved to be compelling.

The injunction, however, appears to put the kibosh on that kind of shortcut to legitimacy. Among other things, it requires the company to disable all functionality of its current software and provide users a tool to uninstall it. Again, I understand why the labels want to stop the infringements. But offering users a legitimate LimeWire alternative concurrently with the shut-down would have done more to reduce infringements in the long run than simply telling them to take their piracy elsewhere.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Security compromised for Popular Websites due to New Firefox add-on.

A Seattle software developer is stirring anxiety with a new add-on program for the popular Web browser Firefox that allows amateur hackers under the right circumstances to gain access to accounts on popular services such as Facebook and Twitter. The program, called Firesheep, makes it far easier to intercept browser cookies used by those sites to identify users. Hackers can then log into those sites posing as those users. It only works on a shared wireless network, according to a programmer, who unveiled the program at a hacker conference in San Diego on Sunday to draw attention to security vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities could always be exploited by experienced hackers and as such are old news. But Butler's program puts that capability in the hands of amateur hackers, bringing renewed attention to the issue. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy, the programmer wrote. The fix is for websites to fully encrypt all of their communications with consumers, not just some of them. That is the default setting on Google's e-mail service, Gmail, a spokesman said. A Facebook spokesman said it's working on full encryption and hopes to offer that feature to users in the coming months. As always, we advise people to use caution when sending or receiving information over unsecured Wi-Fi networks, he said. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, emphasized that Firesheep is an add-on for Firefox created and distributed by a third-party developer. It demonstrates a security weakness in a number of popular websites, but does not exploit any vulnerability in Firefox or other Web browsers, Beltzner said. He suggested that Firefox users protect themselves by installing another add-on program: ForceTLS add-on.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

On Time, In Budget Project Delivery is our USP. Read more - http://goo.gl/Va6S

The new episode in the Digitalised Hollywood.

The Star Trek Meeting attendees in Hollywood brought smartphones — gadgets far more powerful than the videophones imagined by the “Star Trek” writers 40 years ago. Bob Orci brought something the writers back then could only dream of: an iPad. Mr. Orci, meeting with the producers J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Bryan Burk, and his fellow writer Alex Kurtzman, jump-started the discussion with an iPad slide show, showing stills from the first film, snapshots of potential locations and a photo of a suggested actress for one of the roles. On the woman’s photo, he had used his iPad to paint on a Vulcan ear. When you’re carrying a little TV around, you bring the power of imagery to places that you don’t normally have it, Mr. Orci said in an interview. When Apple introduced the iPad six months ago, ushering in an era of tablet computing, experts predicted that tablets would transform the habits of groups of people like college students (who would carry digital textbooks) and doctors (who would manage patient records). They can add Hollywood to the list of those affected.

The iPad is the must-carry accessory on sound stages this season, visible behind the scenes of television and film shoots and in business meetings. When Paula Abdul, the former “American Idol” judge, wants to preview her new dance show for prospective sponsors, she turns on her iPad and pulls up a YouTube video. When Julie Benz, a star of “No Ordinary Family” on ABC, has downtime between shoots, she plays Angry Birds, the popular physics-based puzzle game. It’s perfect for the long hours here, Ms. Benz said in her trailer on the Walt Disney Studios lot this summer. All this acclaim amounts to free advertising for Apple, which has rarely if ever given away its products to A-list customers. And the use of iPads inevitably ends up inspiring story lines that millions of people see. On the NBC show The Office this month, when one character asks what time it is, another character pulls out his iPad, like an oversize pocket watch. The iPad’s most prominent appearance in prime time came in April, just days after it was put on sale, on the ABC sitcom Modern Family, when one of the characters desperately wanted an iPad for his birthday. Eyebrows were raised because Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, is on the board of ABC’s parent, Disney. An Apple spokeswoman said the company does not pay for product placement, and an executive producer of Modern Family, Steve Levitan, said the iPad story originated with the show’s writers.

Mr. Levitan happens to be an avid iPad user, sometimes posting to Twitter from the tablet. According to the Nielsen Company, Apple products have popped up about 2,438 times on television programs through September of this year. Some of those are news programs: iPads are visible on the set of the Fast Money talk show on CNBC, and Glenn Beck sometimes brings his to Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show. Hollywood’s converts to the iPad say it can drastically reduce the amount of paper that is wasted on script rewrites. The actress Dana Delany, who will star in Body of Proof, a coming ABC drama, said she now has revisions sent to her digitally. I think it’s the greatest invention in years, Ms. Delany said. Mr. Orci’s iPad has served as the daily call sheet with the day’s instructions; acted as a map in an unfamiliar location; and allowed him to keep tabs on Fringe and Hawaii Five-0, two shows he helps produce. Oh, and it woke me up in the morning with its alarm, he said. His one complaint is that the screen is hard to see in the sun. There are some iPhone and iPad apps made especially for the entertainment community, like Rehearsal, which helps actors learn their lines. John Carroll Lynch, who appeared in the A&E series The Glades last summer and will appear in “Body of Proof” next year, swears by Rehearsal, which was created by the actor David H. Lawrence XVII.

We have an extensive experience in the field of mobile application development which is wide spread across every mobile OS. Click this Link to learn about our expertise http://goo.gl/C1mm

Disadvantageous Computing.

New tricks under hackers hat to Blend search terms with infected links, are you safe from these?

It has been observed the business owners now reciprocate to the significance the way search engine optimization, can transform their sites popularity and click-through rates. But they are not aware that someone else in the seamy underside of the cyber-world is ready to take advantage of this. High-tech security researchers warn that the bad guys are taking advantage of SEO to boost the page rankings of infected sites and spread malware for their financial gain.

Hackers are aware that all users trust Google search results implicitly, Now they are inflicting a new code to that system. This new attack technique called SEO poisoning. The idea is uncomplicated, they use SEO fundamentals to get a malicious site high up within a popular search term's results, trick searchers into clicking to the site and then hit them with something like a scam offer for fake antivirus software or a drive-by download. The attack scheme has surged in popularity among hackers in the past year. Search topics ranging from the BP oil leak to World Cup mania have all returned top results littered with infected sites.

Business owners and their employees need to be vigilant about the potential for such attacks: Make sure to have antivirus software and keep the operating system and applications updated. Security companies also offer free browser plug-ins that automatically sense whether a site is malicious and warn you directly within your search results.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

'we failed badly' - Google Street View

Google is strengthening its privacy controls after its mapping service 'Google Street View' mistakenly gathered e-mail messages and passwords from unsecured wireless networks. The company is also improving training for workers, including engineers, in areas like product management and legal affairs, and strengthening compliance procedures, Google said in a blog post. In addition, Alma Whitten, Google’s engineering leader on privacy, was named director of policy for engineering and product management. Google has faced investigations by authorities in the United States and many other countries for the way it gathered data with its Street View service. The company first disclosed the security breach in May. These changes will significantly improve our internal practices (though no system can of course entirely eliminate human error), and we look forward to seeing the innovative new security and privacy features that Alma and her team develop, Alan Eustace, senior vice president, engineering and research, said. That said, we’ll be constantly on the lookout for additional improvements to our procedures as Google grows, and as we branch out into new fields of computer science.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Record 5.2 million iPhones activated in US.

A record 5.2 million iPhones were activated in the last quarter by AT&T, which holds exclusive rights to the hit device in the US, the telecom giant said Thursday. The record-setting sales mark beat the previous record of 3.2 million iPhones that AT&T sold in the prior quarter, when Apple's iPhone 4 first hit the market. Apple announced record revenue and profits thanks largely to the huge demand for its SmartPhone, as it sold 14.1 million units around the world in its third quarter.

The strong iPhone sales helped AT&T achieve record revenue of 31.58 billion dollars and profit of 12.34 billion dollars. With rumors swirling that Apple could soon launch the iPhone on the largest US mobile network Verizon, AT&T appeared to confirm speculation that its days of iPhone exclusivity may be numbered as it heavily promoted competing smartphones in its financial presentation. Products from Google Android, Research in Motion's BlackBerry, HP's webOS, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and Nokia's Symbian were shown, as well as an Amazon Kindle, but no iPhone

We have an extensive experience in the field of mobile application development which is wide spread across every mobile OS. Click this Link to learn about our expertise http://goo.gl/C1mm

Tech giants invest in social web.

Facebook, Amazon and Zynga will invest in a fund to help entrepreneurs develop applications and services for a new era of the social web. The lion's share of the sFund's $250m (£160m) will come from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Details were announced at an event at Facebook's California headquarters. There's going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way, said Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. We think that every industry is going to be fundamentally re-thought and designed around people. That was a view backed by KPCB partner John Doerr, best known for investing in Amazon, Google and Netscape. These social networks are going to go from a half a billion people to billions of people connected on the planet and so represents an extraordinarily exciting time on the internet. Think of it as a quarter-billion-dollar party. The third great wave of the internet is mobile and social together. It's going to be tectonic, added Mr Doerr.

'Hopes and dreams'

The sFund will provide financing, advice and relationship capital for a new generation of start-ups to deliver on the promise of the social web. Amazon will help businesses get access to the company's web services platform for one year, as well as provide business and technical support. Facebook will contribute access to its platform teams, beta APIs, and new programmes like Facebook Credits. The essence of the sFund is similar in concept to KPCB's $200m iFund aimed at companies that create applications for Apple's iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. That fund, which started in 2008, has invested in 14 start-ups so far. The sFund will be led by Bing Gordon, a partner at KPCB and former chief creative executive at Electronic Arts. The main focus will be on social start-ups in all industries from consumer to enterprise and from health to mobile. It will not invest in direct competitors to Facebook, Amazon or social gaming company Zynga. We intend to be very loyal to the people we are working with. Our hopes and dreams get kind of enmeshed with theirs said Mr Gordon. The companies we will invest in will be the Zynga of health, the Zynga of education, different kinds of commerce, of social utility, of finance. There is an opportunity to build Zynga-sized companies that will scale up. Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the internet, the race is on.

'Facebook effect'

For Google, which harbours social ambitions of its own, the creation of the sFund could be seen as a blow to the search giant. It is aligning everything against Google, said MG Siegler of the technology blog TechCrunch. I am sure the sFund will say they will be okay to fund things built on Google's upcoming social graph but it will be a long time before any of those companies pop up. This really does bolster the Facebook effect here. Asked why Google is not taking part in this fund, Mr Doerr, who sits on their board, told reporters, Google is still developing their social strategy. Stay tuned. At the event the sFund's first investment was announced. Cafebots closed a first round of $5m. The company is involved in what has been termed friend relationship management. They did not make any comment because they are in stealth mode. Other companies that KPCB said would have made the grade for the sFund were ones that the venture capital firm had invested in.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Windows Phone 7 looks promising.

Microsoft is re-entering the already crowded smart phone market with a new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7. LG, HTC, Dell and other manufacturers will begin rolling out phones running the new OS on Nov. 8. Initially, five phones will be launched in the U.S. on carriers T-mobile and AT&T. Microsoft is working with Verizon and Sprint to launch phones on their networks. Microsoft has long been a participant in the smart phone space, starting with early Pocket PC phones. But Windows Phone 7 is a total reworking of Microsoft's previous efforts. The new OS incorporates the Zune media player and has popular features familiar to iPhone and Android phone users. The new interface, evolved from Zune, uses tiles instead of icons that display information as well as launch applications. It's a conscious attempt by Microsoft to integrate content into the look and feel of the OS. Special tiles, called hubs, link content based on familiar themes. For instance, the People hub combines Facebook feeds, text messages, maps and contact information into one space. The Music + Videos hub combines all media apps and content, while Pictures does the same for photos.

The web browser is a mobile version of Internet Explorer 8 (without flash, though Microsoft and Adobe are working on that). Where Microsoft may be able to stand out is in Windows Phone 7's integration with Bing, Bing maps, Outlook, and especially with Xbox Live and the ubiquitous Office suite of applications. For users who want (or need) to work on documents in the Word environment, spreadsheets in the Excel environment and presentations in the PowerPoint environment, Windows Phone 7 may be their best mobile solution. And for gamers, this is the closest Xbox Live integration available in the smart phone market. One of the first phones to feature Windows Mobile 7 is the HTC Surround, which will be available from AT&T. Similar in height and width and slightly thicker than Apple's iPhone, the Surround's hardware gimmick is a slide-out surround sound speaker panel that, in essence, makes it a Zune boombox. Compared with the typical smart phone, the speaker is an improvement when playing songs or games. But for the best sound it’s hard to beat the headphones, although the external speaker makes the Surround a great speakerphone.

Overall, it's a fine phone, with good sound and reception and all the things consumers expect from high-end smart phones: 3G speed, 480 x 800 WVGA touch-screen, 16 GB internal storage, 5 megapixel camera with flash and 720p HD video recording, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and e-mail (and Exchange integration). The bigger story, though, is Microsoft's re-entry into the already crowded smart phone market with yet another OS to compete with Apple's iOS, Google's Android and Research in Motion's Blackberry OS. A new app store is being launched, called Marketplace. (For developers, an SDK and programming tools are already available, and apps can be written in the Xbox development environment XNA or using Silverlight/C#/XAML.) It's a big push on Microsoft's part and a clear signal that Microsoft is taking mobile seriously. At this stage of the game, it'll be interesting to see if the reigning leader in desktop computing can take on the big boys in mobile.

We have an extensive experience in the field of mobile application development which is wide spread across every mobile OS. Click this Link to learn about our expertise http://goo.gl/C1mm

From Applie: iLife 11, FaceTime, Mac OS X Lion, Mac App Store, new MacBook Air models.

Apple introduced a lineup of new Mac hardware and software. There were two new versions of MacBook Air ultralight laptop Launched. CEO Steve Jobs invited an audience to imagine, What would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? (Some Apple users watched a Web video feed). The result is a pair of laptops no thicker than .68 inches, almost as thin as some smartphones. They use flash memory for storage instead of mechanical hard drives. The two new Airs, first a 2.3-lb. model with an 11.6-in. screen, starting at $999 with 64 gigabytes of flash storage, and second a 2.9-lb. version with a 13.3-in. screen, priced at $1,299 can stay asleep in standby mode for 30 days, with active battery life of five to seven hours.

The iPhone and the iPad's influence also surfaced in updates to Mac OS X. Jobs demonstrated a Mac version of the iPhone and the iPod touch's FaceTime video-conferencing software, now available in beta form at Apple's site for computers running the current Snow Leopard release of OS X. The next version of OS X, Lion, not due until next summer, will lean much more heavily on the iPhone and the iPad's iOS software. It will add a Mac App Store--which Jobs said will also emerge for Snow Leopard within 90 days.

The Mac App Store, unlike the version on Apple's mobile devices, won't be the only way for developers to offer software to users. It should offer simpler installation than even OS X, where all you normally have to do is drag a program's icon to the application folder and may make it easier for smaller software shops to reach customers in return for Apple taking its usual 30 percent cut of the proceeds. It was also mentioned that developers can begin submitting programs to the Mac App Store by next month made it clear that this, like the iPhone's App Store, will be a curated environment, subject to Apple's sole control.

Lion will also show a family resemblance to iOS in its support for multi-touch gestures, as expressed in touchpads on laptops and in mice instead of through screens. Jobs explained why touchscreens don't work in regular computers: After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. Lion will also offer full-screen modes for applications that work better with a user's undivided attention. One of them led off Apple's demo: iPhoto 11, the flagship product of its just-updated iLife 11 multimedia-creativity suite, available today for free on new Macs and $49 for everyone else. The updated iPhoto is even more of a social animal than the 2009 edition. Now, after uploading photos to social-media sites like Facebook and Flickr, you can see what reaction they've met from friends without leaving iPhoto. New slideshow, photo-book and letterpress cards aim to give people more excuses to spend time sorting through vacation or baby pictures.

Apple representatives also demonstrated, at considerable length, the 2011 versions of iLife's iMovie video editor and Garage Band music-recording program. But while such iMovie 11 audio and video-tweaking features as a Movie Trailer option looked impressive and seemed somewhat approachable, even easy video editing is time-consuming work. Garage Band, meanwhile, remains less-than-relevant for the silent majority of users who only play music through headphones or speakers, not their own instruments. Apple's event led off with a recitation of numbers touting the continued growth and relevance of Apple's Mac business. COO Tim Cook said that the Mac amounted to a third of Apple's revenue in its last fiscal year, or about $22 billion. Cook followed up by touting the consistent growth of Mac market share, once a topic the company preferred to avoid. It's now up to 20.7 percent of the U.S. consumer market, he said, citing NPD research. That's yet another way the iPhone folks bear little resemblance to the operation once routinely described as beleaguered Apple Computer, Inc.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Microsoft Agrees to Unbundle Software in Deal With City

New York City has put the squeeze on Microsoft, negotiating a bulk software purchasing deal that should lower technology costs for the city and give government workers access to more modern applications. Instead of having dozens of agencies buy business software from Microsoft, New York has signed a citywide, 100,000-person deal that it says will save $50 million over five years. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, were set to announce the agreement Wednesday morning at City Hall. The agreement required some concessions on Microsoft’s part. Usually the company sell licenses to bundles of business software products. But with New York City Microsoft agreed to charge only for the software that workers actually use. The move from Microsoft comes as it faces increased pressure from rivals like Google, I.B.M. and a host of start-ups in the office software market. We took advantage of the competitive moment, said Stephen Goldsmith, deputy mayor for operations. Google, in particular, has been aggressive in its march on Microsoft Office’s turf. It sells online versions of similar software, and charges simply $50 per person, per year. Los Angeles has been distributing Google’s software to about 30,000 of its city workers over the last year. But Microsoft’s agreement with New York covers a broader set of applications beyond office software that Google has yet to match.

Microsoft tends to sell licenses to bundles of products like its Office suite, which includes Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel. Many city workers, however, only use Word to create documents and Outlook for e-mail. Under the new arrangement, New York will put workers into three different categories based on how many different applications they use, and Microsoft will charge for the software accordingly. The city plans to save additional money by using online versions of Microsoft’s software and storing some information for about 30,000 workers at Microsoft’s data centers. This embrace of cloud computing means the city will need to buy less computing hardware and that people can work together online on projects. We need to dramatically extend technology tools throughout our work force, Mr. Goldsmith said. There are a large number of individuals that don’t even have e-mail access. Gail Thomas-Flynn, a vice president at Microsoft who focuses on state and local government work, downplayed the changes in licensing terms and competitive threats. It is really an opportunity to work with the city in a new way in terms of innovation, Ms. Thomas-Flynn said. She also declined to address directly whether other cities can expect similar deals, saying only that New York is setting the pace. Some corporations and governments have been reluctant to embrace cloud computing when it comes to handling sensitive information. In this case, Microsoft would be in charge of protecting some of New York’s data rather than having the city’s own technology administrators in total control.

We have an extensive experience in the field of mobile application development which is wide spread across every mobile OS. Click this Link to learn about our expertise http://goo.gl/C1mm

MO 365: The New MS Revolution.

(Source: http://goo.gl/L83C) -- With the announcement of Microsoft Office 365, the productivity power of the cloud just got a turbo boost for customers of all sizes. The new service brings familiar applications, including Office desktop software and Office Web Apps, together with SharePoint, Exchange and Lync in the cloud, for the first time. Office 365 is more than a new brand. It’s a progressive approach to cloud applications, said Kurt DelBene, president of the Microsoft Office Division. We designed Office 365 to work for a business of one – or a business of one million and one. Any business will be able to transform the way it works with Office 365, and make it dramatically easier for people to connect to co-workers, partners, customers and the information that keeps business moving forward – instead of spending valuable time on technology management and maintenance. For example, The Starwood Hotel chain, which owns Sheraton, St Regis, W, Westin and other properties around the world, will be able to use Office 365 to change how its regional managers work together. Each manager oversees 70 to 80 properties, making it impossible to be physically present in all company locations. With Office 365, Starwood managers will improve the performance of their properties, using Web conferencing with collaboration and messaging technology. This will change how the company implements promotions, trains new employees, and shares its best practices, while saving money. Managers will be in multiple locations virtually, creating better customer and employee interaction and satisfaction.

Office 365 changes the rules

To date, only the largest businesses have been able to take advantage of modern, enterprise-caliber IT solutions. Office 365 changes that. No longer will enterprise technologies be reserved for traditional office workers and the larger organizations that can afford their own data centres. Instead, organizations of all sizes and people in all types of jobs will use enterprise-grade collaboration tools, social networks and unified communications to improve the way they work – and never again be trapped behind the firewall or on applications from last decade. In a few clicks, a small business can get enterprise-caliber productivity applications, an expansive capacity to grow, and a team of IT and security experts on its side. It’s not realistic for a small company to acquire these resources on its own, but delivered at scale; customers can get these solutions at a dramatically lower cost – saving 10-50% over comparable alternatives. Any type of business can use the cloud service too. At The HerbFarm, a Northwest restaurant ranked regularly as one of the best in the United States, the manager of guest services doubles as the IT lead. With Office 365, he’ll be able to focus on his day job and let Microsoft focus on the technology – all while enabling better collaboration. For example, the team will be able to communicate more efficiently between a sous chef at the local market and a team at the restaurant to set the day’s menu based on the freshest produce and fish available at the moment. A delicious meal will be prepared for customers in real time – helping a local chef create a world-class dining experience.

Office 365 means speed and scale

There are moments in time when technology transforms the workplace, and this is one of them, said Chris Capossela, senior vice president, Microsoft Office Division. By bringing Office, one of the most popular and widely used applications of all time, completely into the cloud era with Office 365, we are throwing down the gauntlet. When it comes to the cloud, we are all in, and we are bringing our very best with us – the very best applications and the very best partners. Customers will be able to use our technology even more quickly, said Capossela. That’s great for customers, because we’ll get constant input that we will use to improve and update Office 365, making the feedback cycle much faster and more direct, ultimately improving our solutions in the cloud and on-premises. Companies can also scale their infrastructure, fast. If a business makes an acquisition, opens a new store or holds a holiday promotion, it can rapidly expand its infrastructure in days, not months, and use only what’s needed. Milk Link, a co-op dairy of 1,500 British farmers, has a diverse workforce that includes remote workers, employees from acquisitions, and people in different roles at various farms, processing plants and distribution centres. Using Office 365, the dairy will have the ability to pay only for the technology it needs. Some workers will have basic e-mail; others will have mobile applications; and still others will have full versions of Exchange and SharePoint, according to the requirements of different jobs.

Fast forward

Office 365 is not just good for Microsoft and its customers; it’s good for partners. Partners can open new doors, provide more complete services to customers customize and enhance applications, and create recurring revenue streams. Office 365 will be available worldwide next year. Over time, the Office 365 family will expand to provide new services to new audiences. Later next year Microsoft will introduce Office 365 for education for students, faculty and school staff. Dynamics CRM Online will also join the Office 365 family of services next year, giving customers a more complete business productivity experience. Because Microsoft is simplifying its productivity services under the Office 365 brand, Office 365 will replace the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Office Live Small Business and Live@edu. Microsoft is also opening a limited Office 365 beta program in seven languages and thirteen countries and regions around the world, including Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and United States at www.office365.com starting on October 19 at noon Pacific Time. Partners are central to our strategy with Office 365. A vibrant partner community is critical to ensure our customers get the most from Office 365, and that’s why we’re investing deeply to provide partners with a clear path to success in the cloud, said Capossela. Chapter one in Microsoft’s history was about putting a PC on every desktop. Chapter two was dedicated to transforming the enterprise data center. Chapter three is, without a question, devoted to bringing the power of the cloud to our customers and partners. What’s exciting is that we’re writing the story right now – and there’s so much more to come.

Our Core expertise lies into custom application development using Microsoft .NET technology. We would like to share with you our expertise http://goo.gl/1QVH

Apple's Approach Is Better Than Google's

Apple Inc. trounced analyst expectations yet again Monday while continuing its string of record quarters. Riding booming sales of its blockbuster iPhone 4, the company said it sold 14.1 million units of the smart phone during the new model's debut quarter, Apple reported an all-time-high $20.34 billion in sales. That handily beat Wall Street analysts' expectations of $19.3 billion.

Sales of the new iPhone rose more than 90% over the previous quarter, an increase that seemed to mute concerns that the company might have lost momentum after the phone stumbled through problems with its antenna shortly after its release. We are blown away to report over $20 billion in revenue and over $4 billion in after-tax earnings, both all-time records for Apple, said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, adding that, We still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year.

Apple also sold 4.19 million iPads, a nearly 30% increase over the 3.3 million the company sold in the tablet device's debut quarter. Shares of Apple’s stock rose $3.26, or 1%, to $318 during regular trading. Earlier in the day, the stock hit an all-time high of $319 a share, representing a 50% gain since January. The stock was climbing slightly in after-hours trading.

We have an extensive experience in the field of mobile application development which is wide spread across every mobile OS including  iPhone, iPad, Android, J2ME, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Brew. Click this Link to learn about our expertise http://goo.gl/C1mm

Our Support Services are the Back Bone to Our Clients Business.

Rigel Networks’ support services range from remote server maintenance services to data entry services for companies. We are powered by the superior technical expertise, customer management abilities and diagnostic skills to offer high quality support solutions to our valuable clients. Driven by outstanding experience and high quality IT support services, we are at our best to keep capital costs and operation expenditure down. We provide customized and world class customer technology support services to our clients to retain and build their customer base. 

Remote Server Maintenance Services

Designing Services

Help Desk Services

SEO Services

Web Hosting Services

Research & Innovation Services

Data Entry Services

Facebook apps leak users' private info.

Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook's rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users' activities secure. The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online—a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It's unclear how long the breach was in place. On Sunday, a Facebook spokesman said it is taking steps to "dramatically limit" the exposure of users' personal information.

A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared by a user's Internet browser or by an application, the spokesman said. Knowledge of an ID does not permit access to anyone's private information on Facebook, he said, adding that the company would introduce new technology to contain the problem identified by the Journal. Our technical systems have always been complemented by strong policy enforcement, and we will continue to rely on both to keep people in control of their information, the Facebook official said. Apps are pieces of software that let Facebook's 500 million users play games or share common interests with one another. The Journal found that all of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook were transmitting users' IDs to outside companies. The apps, ranked by research company Inside Network Inc. (based on monthly users), include Zynga Game Network Inc.'s FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille. Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user's friends to outside companies.

Most apps aren't made by Facebook, but by independent software developers. Several apps became unavailable to Facebook users after the Journal informed Facebook that the apps were transmitting personal information; the specific reason for their unavailability remains unclear. The information being transmitted is one of Facebook's basic building blocks: the unique "Facebook ID" number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person's name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with "everyone," including age, residence, occupation and photos. The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.

Defenders of online tracking argue that this kind of surveillance is benign because it is conducted anonymously. In this case, however, the Journal found that one data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms, the Journal found. RapLeaf said that transmission was unintentional. Facebook prohibits app makers from transferring data about users to outside advertising and data companies, even if a user agrees. The Journal's findings shed light on the challenge of policing those rules for the 550,000 apps on its site. The Journal's findings are the latest challenge for Facebook, which has been criticized in recent years for modifying its privacy rules to expose more of a user's information. This past spring, the Journal found that Facebook was transmitting the ID numbers to advertising companies, under some circumstances, when a user clicked on an ad. Facebook subsequently discontinued the practice. This is an even more complicated technical challenge than a similar issue we successfully addressed last spring on Facebook.com, a Facebook spokesman said, but one that we are committed to addressing.

The privacy issue follows Facebook's effort just this month to give its users more control over its apps, which privacy activists had cited as a potential hole in users' ability to control who sees their information. On Oct. 6, Facebook created a control panel that lets users see which apps are accessing which categories of information about them. It indicates, for example, when an application accesses a user's "basic information" (including a user ID and name). However, it doesn't detail what information friends' applications have accessed about a user. Facebook apps transform Facebook into a hub for all kinds of activity, from playing games to setting up a family tree. Apps are considered an important way for Facebook to extend the usefulness of its network. The company says 70% of users use apps each month. Applications are also a growing source of revenue beyond advertising for Facebook itself, which sells its own virtual currency that can be used to pay for games.

Following an investigation by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook in June limited applications to accessing only the public parts of a user's profile, unless the user grants additional permission. (Canadian officials later expressed satisfaction with Facebook's steps.) Previously, applications could tap any data the user had access to, including detailed profiles and information about a user's friends. It's not clear if developers of many of the apps transmitting Facebook ID numbers even knew that their apps were doing so. The apps were using a common Web standard, known as a "referer," which passes on the address of the last page viewed when a user clicks on a link. On Facebook and other social-networking sites, referers can expose a user's identity. The company says it has disabled thousands of applications at times for violating its policies. It's unclear how many, if any, of those cases involved passing user information to marketing companies. Facebook also appeared to have shut down some applications the Journal found to be transmitting user IDs, including several created by LOLapps Media Inc., a San Francisco company backed with $4 million in venture capital. LOLapp's applications include Gift Creator, with 3.5 million monthly active users, Quiz Creator, with 1.4 million monthly active users, Colorful Butterflies and Best Friends Gifts. Since Friday, users attempting to access those applications received either an error message or were reverted to Facebook's home screen.

The applications transmitting Facebook IDs may have breached their own privacy policies, as well as industry standards, which say sites shouldn't share and advertisers shouldn't collect personally dentifiable information without users' permission. Zynga, for example, says in its privacy policy that it "does not provide any Personally Identifiable Information to third-party advertising companies. A Zynga spokeswoman said, Zynga has a strict policy of not passing personally identifiable information to any third parties. We look forward to working with Facebook to refine how web technologies work to keep people in control of their information. The most expansive use of Facebook user information uncovered by the Journal involved RapLeaf. The San Francisco company compiles and sells profiles of individuals based in part on their online activities. The Journal found that some LOLapps applications, as well as the Family Tree application, were transmitting users' Facebook ID numbers to RapLeaf. RapLeaf then linked those ID numbers to dossiers it had previously assembled on those individuals, according to RapLeaf. RapLeaf then embedded that information in an Internet-tracking file known as a "cookie." RapLeaf says it strips out the user's name when it embeds the information in the cookie and shares that information for ad targeting. However, The Wall Street Journal found that RapLeaf transmitted Facebook user IDs to a dozen other advertising and data firms, including Google Inc.'s Invite Media.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu

Talk to Me: Speech Recognition on the Phone

There are many examples of NUI products in the marketplace today, for example the Windows Phone 7, launched last week. This upcoming technology is more than touch and gestures or context, things like your  location, speech and other technologies are all important components that enhances your ability to interact with technology naturally, depending on where you are & the device you’re using and what you’re trying to do. The touch technology with the Windows 7 Phone is amazing and it was always in the back of the minds that speech recognition would be key to future of technology, speech is a more natural interface — not least for safety but also convenience. Well, would you not agree if I propose that when you’re using a phone, speaking into the device is just natural. With Windows Phone 7, people can use their voice for dialing, search and launching applications. You literally hold the start button and say what you want, whether it’s to find a business, to call a friend or to open an application like your calendar.

The use of speech recognition in Windows Phone 7 is natural and makes sense from a safety and usage standpoint. The speech recognition technology has been prevailing in the market for a while its own forms. The application in Windows Phone 7 is the result of decisions Microsoft made about a year and a half ago when they formed a new group called Speech at Microsoft. This group combined the assets from Tellme and the Speech Components Group to focus on advancing NUI through speech recognition across Microsoft products.

One of the first things this group focused on was changing the approach to advancing speech innovation. In the past, speech recognition had been constrained in part because of the way it was architected. Speech is very similar to search — the more it is used, the better it gets. Microsoft’s Tellme speech platform handles over 11 billion voice requests a year. It is the largest speech platform in the cloud harnessing datacenter storage instead of relying on device storage alone and is the most advanced speech learning platform. With volumes of search query data available, speech recognition is better, meaning it is closer to adapting to the way you really talk than requiring you to adapt to it. The results of this new approach are the capabilities we see today in Windows Phone 7, Ford Sync, the Kia Uvo, Bing for Mobile and Xbox Kinect. Already there are 2 million SYNC-equipped vehicles on the road, and with Windows Phone 7 now in market and Kinect set to follow, Microsoft is looking forward to speech taking its natural place and ushering in the NUI era.

We have an extensive experience in the field of mobile application development which is wide spread across every mobile OS. Click this Link to learn about our expertise http://goo.gl/C1mm

New Project Notification

Rigel Networks acquires a Mobile Application Development Project for Online Gifting.

RIM Tries Harder on Apps

Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) is making at attempt to surprise the world by attracting developers and applications who love their BlackBerry Smartphones. RIM is launching many new services and specialized development tools in the coming weeks that promise to make it much easier to code any software for the BlackBerry. The moves are part of the effort to win back customers opting for iPhones from Apple Inc. or mobile phones that run Google Inc.'s Android OS. Customer defections have impacted BlackBerry's commanding market share and fueling an investor unease that has pushed RIM shares down around 25% so far this year.

RIM's new tools and services aim to help developers. The software firm says that while RIM is very supportive, it is too hard to make money on its call-logging application, which it sells exclusively through BlackBerry's App World store. Customers can download a free version of Widality's program, but if they like the tool and want to purchase the premium version, which has added features, they have to first uninstall the free program, download the premium version from a website, reload their data, and pay through a PayPal account a complicated, time-consuming process that few people make it through. RIM's head of application development, says the company has worked the past two years to make Blackberry’s more developer-friendly. But RIM has its work cut out winning over developers who are new to Blackberry’s or who have written them off as too tough and time consuming to create software for.

PopCap developed games for Blackberry's as recently as a few years ago. But during the last year the firm has largely switched focus to iPhones and phones running Android because of their growing popularity and slick, powerful systems. Even with RIM's recent efforts, there are too many Blackberry's around whose operating systems and processors are too old and slow to make it worthwhile to spend scarce team time on them. Calgary, Alberta-based Widality which last month was bought by mobile-services firm Wmode Inc.—is hoping that new payment options RIM is planning to launch in the next few months will finally let it make decent money on its call-logging app, which tracks how much time was spent on calls and assigns it to clients or projects for billing at appropriate rates—features that have made it popular with lawyers and consultants. Widality used to charge $2.99 for the app until recently the minimum fee at the BlackBerry App World store—but found users wanted to try the software before they bought it. The firm switched to a free app with limited functions, but getting customers to switch to the premium app was tough.

The new options will let developers charge a subscription fee or let users buy extra features from inside the app—things the iPhone has long allowed. Widality is planning to ask users for a dollar or two each time they download a spreadsheet with logged calls, or $8 a month for unlimited downloads. A developer in U.K. says he's interested in a new advertising service RIM launched late last month. The service automatically matches apps with ads served from several big mobile-advertising networks. That's perfect for Maxbridge, which is just starting to experiment with apps for the consumer market—like one that lets users search train times and schedules. We want to put ads in, but we don't have an ad department, says Mr. Strange. The whole idea of trying to drive advertising to a free application was really scary to a small company that didn't have any contacts with ad partners. Mr. Strange is also planning to use a free analytics service RIM has slated for early next year, which helps developers understand who is using their apps and how. That's handy for the train-schedule app, since Mr. Strange recently added a feature that lets users search for the nearest station to a postal code—but he's not sure anybody needs or uses it.

RIM directed a free-lance developer California, to develop a new software package that would let him use common tools for building Web applications to create BlackBerry apps as well. Mr. Sanchez had written an app that supplies men with pick-up lines and hints. He'd adapted the app for iPhones and Nokia Corp. phones, as well as devices running Android and Palm operating systems, but couldn't get it working on Blackberry's. Mr. Sanchez says he has high hopes for the new software.

We have an extensive experience in the field of mobile application development which is wide spread across every mobile OS. Click this Link to learn about our expertise http://goo.gl/C1mm

Microsoft getting along with Facebook to strengthen social ties.

Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. join hands to improve the results of Microsoft's Bing search engine by involving peoples' social connections on Facebook, to stand above all against it rivals especially Google Inc. The companies described this agreement as strengthening and deepening an existing partnership, and this big step in improving the personalization of search results for everything from movies to restaurants. The deal could also give Microsoft a way to distinguish Bing from Google's market leading search engine. Microsoft's Silicon Valley office on Wednesday had an event with the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said Microsoft was more willing than others (Google) to take chances with its search engine. Further Mark said They really are the underdog here. What has raised eyebrows is the sharing of personal data between the two giants, this could possibly raise privacy concerns. Microsoft's Search Engine Bing would have access to all of the public information about Facebook users like their Facebook friends, names and photos, statuses etc. Mark further assured that all the information shared with Bing has already been made public by Facebook users, and also that Facebook users could opt out of the new services. Google has access to more limited Facebook data for its search engine. The spokesman at Microsoft said We're always interested in expanding the scope & comprehensiveness of our real-time and social search features, but don't have anything to announce at this time. Facebook executives said they were focused on their partnership with Microsoft at the moment, but didn't describe the relationship as exclusive.

The first examples of the collaboration, scheduled to appear Wednesday, will include a special box on Bing's search results that highlights websites to which a person's network of friends have previously indicated they liked on Facebook. Bing will also feature a service for finding people online—say, an old roommate. It will display Facebook profiles based the closest connections to a user's Facebook friends. Facebook and Microsoft executives said they expect to add further forms of integration between their sites in the future. In 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook for a 1.6% stake at the time. While search engines have traditionally determined the relevance of search results through mathematical formulas that rely heavily on linking between Web pages, Microsoft executives said personal connections like the ones found on Facebook can be more authoritative for certain types of searches. The best answers aren't going to come from websites, but from people—and most importantly from people who know something about you, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online audience business.

In an interview, Mr. Mehdi declined to say how much he thought the Facebook partnership could increase its share of the search market. I do think this can be a new era in the search game, he said. Bing is tapping into Facebook's instant personalization feature, which automatically connects a Facebook ID to another website. Users have the option to opt out of the personalization service both on Facebook's own privacy settings page, and on the top right corner of the Bing search page. Mr. Zuckerberg said 500 million Facebook users can already go and look up public information on Facebook users, so why shouldn't an application be able to do that to give you an awesome experience, too? Bing won't send information about searches back to Facebook, so a user's potentially sensitive searches won't get exposed to their friends. Microsoft won't be able to use the Facebook data to target ads on the Bing site. Microsoft has seen its share of U.S. searches rise since introducing Bing last year, but new research released Wednesday showed how far it still lags Google. Web traffic tracker comScore said Google's share of U.S. searches was 66.1% in September, while Microsoft's was 11.2%. Microsoft's Bing also powers the search results on Yahoo, which accounted for 16.7% of U.S. searches last month.

Rigel Networks' offers unmatched competence in designing and development of high performance and scalable web applications. Here is the bigger picture http://goo.gl/ZsDu