Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
Firefox gains 30 million users in eight weeks
October 27th, 2009 | 
Author: Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser has gained 30 million users over the past eight weeks, as it continues to gain on Internet Explorer.
Chief Executive John Lilly revealed the increase in user adoption in a Twitter post on Monday, and Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, confirmed it to ZDNet UK on Tuesday.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in the number of users for Firefox,” Nitot said. “Firefox checks for new versions every 24 hours, when it’s running, and when it checks, it pings the Mozilla server. We count the number of pings.”
Read more of “Firefox gains 30m users in eight weeks” at ZDNet UK.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10384402-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Communication, Entertainment, FireFox, Internet | 
Tags: browser, FireFox, Internet, Mozilla | 
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Google adds more personalization to Reader
Google has added new personalization features to Reader, its RSS feed aggregator, the company wrote in a blog post Thursday.
One new feature is dubbed Popular Items. Using algorithms, Reader will “find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions).” From there, the app will lump all those pieces in the new Popular Items section. Based on a user’s subscriptions and what someone is reading, Reader orders those stories by what it thinks a person likes best.
Reader’s recommendations have been moved to the app’s Explore section. Google also renamed it Recommended Sources. Like before, that feature will employ the user’s Reader Trends and Web History to find a list of feeds he or she might like.
To make it easier for users to find the information they’re most likely to care about, all Reader feeds now feature a sort option called Magic. According to Google, Magic “reorders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order.” Google said that the ranking is tailored to the user. The more the user clicks the “like” and “share” buttons on stories, the better the Magic sort will be.
Here is the Magic setting in action:
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
5 apps get you tweeting from the desktop
What’s better than posting tweets from Twitter.com? Just about everything.
Third-party Twitter apps are typically more powerful, crammed with managerial features that get you quickly viewing, sorting, replying to messages, and retweeting in a click or tap. They automatically shorten URLs to fit Twitter’s character limit, and help you post pictures through other services, like TwitPic and yfrog. Most of these desktop apps manage multiple Twitter accounts, are customizable, and are more attractive than Twitter online. They also tend to succeed in posting your tweets during times when Twitter’s site famously fails.
Convinced yet? Good. We’ve rounded up five desktop applications that help you post tweets and retweets to Twitter. Four run on the Adobe AIR runtime environment (Windows | Mac | Linux), which you need to download before you install the Twitter apps. But enough of the technical details–get tweeting!
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10363810-12.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Communication, Internet, social networking, Twitter |
Tags: apps, Communication, Internet, social networking, Twitter |
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Global broadband connections on the rise
One in five households worldwide will be wired up to the Internet by year’s end, according to new estimates from Gartner.
The number of households with fixed broadband connections is expected to reach 422 million across the globe this year, a jump of 10.5 percent over 382 million in 2008, the analyst firm said Friday. This number will further swell to an estimated 580 million by 2013.
Over the next four years, global broadband services revenue will also help offset declining voice revenue and account for 40 percent of the consumer fixed voice, Internet, and broadband services market worldwide, which is estimated to be worth $347 billion.
At the end of 2008, 21 countries had broadband connections in at least 50 percent of homes, Gartner reported. The disparity in broadband adoption was significant in Asia, where the region was home to both the world’s highest penetration of 86 percent in South Korea and the lowest at 1 percent in Indonesia.
Asian households, according to Gartner, will remain among the world’s most connected over the next four years. Broadband penetration for South Korea is forecast to reach 93 percent in 2013, while Hong Kong and Singapore will see 80 percent and 78 percent, respectively, of their households wired up to the Web.
Outside of the region, the Netherlands, Canada, and Denmark are expected to boast high broadband penetration rates of 88 percent, 81 percent and 78 percent, respectively.
In terms of growth, however, Brazil, Russia, India, and China will account for nearly half, or 47 percent, of the increase in consumer broadband connections over the next several years, Gartner said. China, alone, is expected to contribute 31 percent toward the total worldwide increase.
According to Gartner, fiber-based services will grow steadily over the next few years, with FTTH (fiber-to-the-home), FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises) and Ethernet connections accounting for about 20 percent of the global consumer broadband market by 2013.
Much of the growth will take place in developed markets such as Japan, South Korea and the United States. An exception to this is China, which is expected to account for the most number of new FTTH/FTTP/Ethernet connections, Gartner noted.
DSL connections, on the other hand, will remain the major contributor to worldwide household broadband connections. Traditional DSL access is expected to drop a few percentage points to just under 60 percent of all connections by 2013. DSL connections will see a 98 million increase within four years, led mostly by growth in emerging markets, according to Gartner.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10361744-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in broadband, Communication, Internet |
Tags: broadband, communications, Internet |
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Energy-aware Internet routing coming soon
Researchers have come up with a new way to route Internet traffic that could save big Internet companies like Google millions on their electricity bills, according to an article published by MIT’s Technology Review.
Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and the networking company Akamai recently published results from a study that suggest big Internet companies could save up to 40 percent on their electricity bills by using an algorithm to send Internet traffic to data centers where electricity is less expensive.
Data centers consume a lot of energy, which costs operators like Google and Amazon millions of dollars to run each year. And now as more digital information is “virtualized” and accessed in the cloud, centralized data centers are getting even bigger and are consuming even more energy.
Full Story…
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10312408-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Source :
CNETNews Energy-aware Internet routing coming soon http://bit.ly/4wlbfr
