1. Gorilla Glass 4 Announced!
(Image source: Corning)
Corning have announced their new Gorilla Glass 4 product. If you do not know what the heck Gorilla Glass is chances are if you look at your smartphone or tablet right now – Yup! That glass is Gorilla Glass! You rely on it every day, to flex and bend, to be scratch-proof and shatterproof. Well Technology improves all the time, and now with GG4 Corning reckon that this will be more impact resistant than ever!
- Gorilla Glass 4 is up to two times tougher than competitive glasses
- Gorilla Glass 4 survives up to 80 percent of the time
- Soda-lime glass, as deployed in today’s commercial devices, breaks nearly 100 percent of the time.
2. Firefox Forget Button (Mozilla News)
Mozilla Firefox Web Browser has now a special ‘Forget Button’ as part of the toolbar. Now you may already have a private browsing option, and a settings – privacy – clear cache arrangement. But what about you at the end of a browsing session just click FORGET! and what ever you have been ‘up to’ 😉 is wiped? Well now you can and here is how you do it!
Install and open Firefox – right click the tool bar – customize – and drag the ‘forget button to your toolbar say on the right hand side of the search box. Done! No need to thank me 😉
You are welcome!
Also in Mozilla news is that Firefox have signed an agreement to use Yahoo (powered by Bing) in the USA as their search engine. However Google search will remain in Europe and ROW as Google have a 90% search share in the EU! as an aside and while I am on the topic of privacy and Google it turns out that the French are fining Google a €1000 Euros a day (which is not even lunch money for Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin!). The French say if someone is being defamed in France they want Google to remove the links globally! The ‘right to be forgotten‘ is seen by some as outrageous(!), as if this were to set a precedent it could result in an almost universal internet history rewrite. Especially in other countries such as China or more oppressive regimes. So far Google have addressed 160000 URLs and 58% have been changed. Some may ask, well what is the problem? Well the right to be forgotten only applies in Europe. Those same links sat in Google servers on USA soil can remain untouched. So anyone with a VPN (virtual private network see Tor etc) can search Google.com and by-pass the EU ruling. The French have a particular ‘island mentality’ in regard to their language (L’academie Francaise), and privacy laws (especially their politicians who seem to avoid scandals that they would never get away with elsewhere in the press) and are stamping their feet over this issue. Google however have some pretty savvy lawyers and considerable internet power, if they pulled out of France altogether it could leave France rather lost and with œuf on their visage! ;o)
3. Facebook at Work
(Image source: cnet)
Facebook look like they have just about had enough of Linkedin and Google Docs, and have decided to do their own version, it appears that Facebook want to create an ‘alternative internet’ where you can rest, work and play (#”a Mars a day!” helps too – old ad joke) without EVER having to leave their sanctuary?
It looks like it is going to be known as ‘Facebook Pro‘ or Facebook at Work. The idea being that you can work with your colleagues on projects inside Facebook with all the tools and video conferencing you need in one place. Rather than the rather ‘mixed-bag’ of existing solutions like Hangouts, Evernote, Skype and Google Docs.
Knowing Facebook, this will happen. So look out for it! Originally reported by the Financial Times the news quickly spread and TechRepublic seems to have a pretty good handle on this – if this interests you check it (the links on this page) out.
4. Microsoft News
“But all of that changed just this week. It may have coincided with the annual WebRTC World conference down in sunny San Jose, but the real WebRTC news came from Microsoft and Cisco, both of which made good on years of promises with the introduction of Skype for Web and Project Squared, respectively. There’s a lot of work left to be done, but it’s all starting to come together for WebRTC. Microsoft’s Skype for Web essentially does what it says on the tin: Lets you make and receive voice and video calls from within the browser. Today, it uses a plugin. Soon, Microsoft promises, it’ll undergo the full switchover to WebRTC, as Mary Branscombe reports for PCWorld. If and when that switchover happens, it’ll mark a major validation point as a consumer service that millions of people use and love moves to the WebRTC standard.”
5. YouTube Music Key
The odd story of the week has to go to the proposed YouTube Music Key, a pay for Youtube music service. Most use Spotify these days as the peer-2-peer system keeps it quick, and some may ask why pay for ‘Key’ (as it will most likely be shortened to in future IMHO) when you can watch YouTube music videos for free (and ‘Skip’ the ad at the beginning)? Some have said that the bandwidth and increasing data roaming charges means most will not listen to music via video in this way from Youtube and reserve that for their home WIFI, so YouTube has high hopes to compete with Spotify, Amazon, Beats/Apple amongst others for a slice of this market. For more details and a the YouTube 6months free trial check out Gizmodo. You’ll be able to pay $10 (£6) per month for ad-free music and videos. Useful especially if you want to play Taylor Swift see the last post I made 😉 YouTube announced the other features of YouTube Music Key in a blog post”
Official Promotional Video
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