- Some 40 apps from a developer that inexplicably surged up the sales rankings of the App Store have been removed from Apple's online retail outlet, amid complaints from other developers and Web reports of suspicious activity. Over the weekend, offerings from developer Thuat Nguyen claimed 40 of the 50 slots for top-selling apps in the Books category. Many of the apps were in the top-selling charts despite having few user reviews, according to other developers who first spotted the problem. Writing on his blog, developer Alexandru Brie noted that his app, Self Help Classics, had fallen out of the top 50 paid book applications list after being in the top 20 for 18 months.
- It will take you longer to read a book on an iPad or Kindle compared to the printed page, according to a recent study. Dr. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group--a product development consultancy that is not associated with Nielsen, the metrics company--compared the reading times of 24 users on the Kindle 2, an iPad using the iBooks application, a PC monitor and good old fashioned paper. The study found that reading on an electronic tablet was up to 10.7 percent slower than reading a printed book. Despite the slower reading times, Nielsen found that users preferred reading books on a tablet device compared to the paper book. The PC monitor, meanwhile, was universally hated as a reading platform among all test subjects.
- YouTube has been forced to fix a flaw allowing hackers to bombard users with fake pop-up messages and redirect them to adult sites. Hackers placed code in the comments section, under targeted videos, that would run when people watched the clip. In some cases, a pop-up screen appeared reporting that the Canadian singer, Justin Bieber, had died in a car crash. Google, which owns YouTube, said that it had fixed the problem "about two hours" after it was discovered. "We took swift action to fix a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on youtube.com," a spokesperson said.
- Technology has helped the disabled in too many ways to count but the fine people at Virginia Tech, along with the National Federation of the Blind, are in the process of helping the blind do something many thought would be impossible: Next January, they will demonstrate the first street vehicle equipped with technology that allows a blind person to drive independently. Dr. Dennis Hong, Director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech, said in a statement that the object of the project was not to create a vehicle that would do the driving for a blind person, but allow a blind person to do the driving. "Three years ago we accepted the NFB Blind Driver Challenge to develop a vehicle that can be driven by a blind person," said Dr. Hong. "The challenge was not the development of an autonomous vehicle that could drive a blind person around, but rather the creation of nonvisual interfaces that would allow a blind person to actually make driving decision."
- HP said that in addition to printers and smartphones it would also use webOS operating system
he got as a result of taking over Palm on tablet personal computers as well as netbooks. The actual plans remain unconfirmed, but it looks like the company does have serious intentions when it comes to webOS. “With HP’s full backing and global strengths, I’m confident that webOS will be able to reach its full potential. This agreement will accelerate the development of this incredible platform with new resources, scale and support from a world-respected brand,” said Jon Rubinstein, former Palm 
chairman and chief executive officer who will now work at HP. HP’s global scale and financial strength plus Palm’s award-winning webOS 
experience, as well as its acclaimed Pre and Pixi smartphone product lines, enhance HP’s ability to participate more aggressively in the highly profitable, $100 billion smartphone and connected mobile device markets. Palm will be responsible for webOS software development and webOS based hardware products, from a robust smartphone roadmap to future slate PCs and netbooks, HP said. - LG Electronics announced Monday that it plans to release an Android-based tablet computer by the fourth quarter of the year. The South Korea-based company said in a press release it would use Google's open-source operating system but provided no pricing or technical details. The tablet is part of an upcoming line of about 10 smart devices and smartphones the company plans to release by the end of the year, the company said. The company's press release said the first tablet it would release would be based on the Android operating system, so it's unknown whether the new tablet would replace or compete with the UX10, a Windows 7-based tablet the company previewed at Computex 2010. With the entry, LG will join a growing number of hardware makers using the open-source operating system for smarthphones and tablet PCs. Cisco Systems announced plans in late June for an Android-based tablet called Cisco Cius, which would retail for less than $1,000 and be geared toward business users.
- Apple is reportedly waiving the restocking fee on the iPhone 4, should consumers, frustrated by the iPhone 4's faulty formula for displaying signal strength, want to return the new smartphone. AT&T, however, says its restocking fee is still in place for now. Apple is waiving its traditional 10 percent restocking fee for customers wanting to return iPhone 4
handsets, according to Computerworld, which cites an AppleCare support representative as confirming the new policy.
Calls to Apple's New York flagship store regarding the restocking fee, however, were redirected to a media help line, which was slow to offer a response. - Bob Sutor, Vice President of Open Source and Linux at IBM confirmed on his blog that the entire IBM company is moving to Firefox as its default browser. Though it seems like various users in the company have been able to use Firefox for quite some time, it looks like now they're going to be encouraging everyone to use it, and all new computers will be provisioned with Firefox as the default. Sutor has plenty of glowing praise for the open source browser in his blog post.
- No need to be alone today, you can rent your friend today. In the 21st century, you simply name it, and you can buy it. A new revolutionary rental website entitled www.RentAFriend.com gives you the possibility to have someone for lunch or even to be with you during your yoga sessions. Do you want to pay for a friend? We know now that Friends aren’t free. Rent a friend online is confirming this notion. The site has been online for only 6 months, and it is already reaping 100,000 hits a month. This is what Casey Stegall reports to Fox News. If you are ready to disburse $10 to $150 for a friend then you can choose from around 200,000 friends to join in the country. The site is reporting that you can rent a friend not only in the United States but also in Canada. There is no need to attend a party or social event alone, you simply rent a friend, and you can bring him or her to a restaurant or to watch a movie.
- The chairman of PC maker Lenovo says Apple is missing a tremendous opportunity in China and places the blame squarely on Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn't care about China," Liu Chuanzhi told the Financial Times. "If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble." iPhone sales in China have been restrained since the phone debuted there last October. China Unicom announced in December that it had sold 100,000 iPhones, a modest figure considering China Unicom's 144 million total subscribers. Sales are limited because China Unicom is currently the only carrier authorized to offer the iPhone for sale, although Apple has conducted on-again, off-again talks with China Mobile. The phone sells for $730 to $1,020, according to published reports, much higher than gray market smartphones and iPhone knockoffs.
Broadcast Sunday, July 11th, 2010
