Author: Rahsheen on Black Web 2.0

Almost a week ago, Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 was made available for MSDN/Technet subscribers. Today, Neowin reports that this latest Windows update will be made available for everyone else.

There are two primary features to look out for in this release that, while they may not be important to your average user, will be very important for those running virtual machines and Windows Server 2008 R2.

The first feature is RemoteFX which runs on Windows Server 2008 R2. This will allow high-quality video and 3D applications to be viewed in a remote desktop session. A big change in virtual and remote computing.

The second feature updates HyperV in Windows Server 2008 R2 with “Dynamic Memory.” This allows a dynamic memory allocation to a virtual machine based on its actual resource needs.

Keep an eye on your Windows Update to get the download and check the Windows Server Division blog for all the techie details.

via Neowin.net

Day 19 of the 28 Days of Diversity series brings us another awesome technology guru. He has decided to strike out on his own and build the company he’s always wanted to work for. His company, Marveloper, straddles the worlds of Game Development and Social Media Marketing.

My passion of technology helped me at my job at Dell. This is a love my father has put into my heart when he brought home a Tandy TRS-80… yes I am that old.

Read more about Donald Harris and his thoughts on closing the digital divide at SocialWayne.com.

We also need to realize that the digital divide is a multi-faceted challenge and there isn’t necessarily a “one size fits all” solution. Economics and infrastructure are key barriers but social, cultural and political factors come into play as well. So the digital divide has different implications in each community.

Rumors are flying as many speculate the imminent refresh of the Macbook Pro lineup this week. AppleInsider reports that some stores to expect ‘sealed packages’ early this week.

More specifically, the Mac maker this weekend began informing some of its larger European resellers that they could expect delivery of sealed product pallets to their brick-and-mortar stores as early as Monday, which coincides with one of ten federal holidays (President’s Day) in the United States.

As usual, Apple is being super-secretive and has given strict warnings to retailers against basically opening, touching, or breathing on or near these shipments until an official announcement is made. A person familiar with the situation says that Apple is being vocal about yanking reseller licenses from any dealer who gets too nosy ahead of the official announcement.

Also of note is the 3-5 business day delay on shipments for Macbook Pros in the US, with Europeans waiting even longer.

Apple’s major European distributors ran out MacBook Pros near the top of the month, regional resellers have not been able to place new orders for the notebooks for over two weeks, and Apple has not shipped a single unit of its own to the channel during the same period of time.

via Apple Insider, GigaOM

We’ve talked about Near Field Communication (NFC) a number of times. Visa and Bank of America began experimenting with contactless payments last year. There was talk of an Apple mobile payment network tied to iTunes. More recently, RIM announced their support for NFC in future handsets.

“As we have seen, the adoption of different approaches to NFC will only serve to fragment the market,” continued Bernabè. “By uniting around a single standardised approach to mobile NFC and by collaborating across the entire ecosystem, our industry will continue to develop the compelling services that customers demand.”

This is about much more than paying for your latte with a tap of your phone or checking into a Foursquare venue without launching the app. NFC is gaining momentum fast. According to Frost & Sullivan, the total payment value for NFC globally will reach more than €110 billion in 2015. Starting with your SIM card as the secure element to provide authentication, security, and portability the GSMA will develop the necessary certification and testing standards for global interoperability of NFC services.

“As we have seen, the adoption of different approaches to NFC will only serve to fragment the market,” continued Bernabè. “By uniting around a single standardised approach to mobile NFC and by collaborating across the entire ecosystem, our industry will continue to develop the compelling services that customers demand.”

via TNW, GSMWorld

J.C. Penney Gets Google Slapped for Spammy SEO Tactics

J.C. Penney had the search game on lock. They dominated a massive amount of relevant keywords and even took over top positions from brands like Samsonite luggage. How did they do it? They cheated. Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media, an expert in online search, had this to say:

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

They definitely should have known better and their response once they got caught is nothing short of ridiculous. A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie Brossart, says they didn’t do it and seem to put the blame entirely on the shoulders of their SEO firm SearchDex.

“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.”

via NY Times

Block Sites from Google Search Results

Google is serious about cleaning up their search results and getting rid of all these content farms. Their most recent move involved an extension for the Chrome web browser that lets you remove any site from your search results.

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we’re exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

I won’t name names, but I’m sure there are a few sites that keep popping up at the top of your search results that have no value whatsoever. Now, with a single click of your mouse, you can get rid of those spammy domains forever and help Google zero in on the most troublesome. Download the extension and start blocking sites now.

via Official Google Blog

Apple Subscription Service Doesn’t Sit Well with Rhapsody

Apple’s new digital subscription service may be great for magazines and newspapers who really have no other method for distribution or gaining customers, but the 30% cut that Apple wants to take isn’t going to work out so well for other types of subscription services. Namely stuff like Hulu, Netflix, and Rhapsody. Netflix saw a dip in their stock after the announcement while Rhapsody has issued a powerful statement against this move by Apple.

Our philosophy is simple too – an Apple-imposed arrangement that requires us to pay 30 percent of our revenue to Apple, in addition to content fees that we pay to the music labels, publishers and artists, is economically untenable. The bottom line is we would not be able to offer our service through the iTunes store if subjected to Apple’s 30 percent monthly fee vs. a typical 2.5 percent credit card fee.

On the heels of Apple’s announcement, Google launched it’s own payment system, One Pass, that enables publishers to set the terms for access to their digital content. Users can sign up for a subscription and view the content on any of their devices. It lets you set up just about any type of subscription and even offers payments within mobile apps. For those railing against Apple’s policies, Google One Pass could be the solution.

via Engadget, Official Google Blog

Obama Has Dinner With Steven Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt

We reported on this dinner yesterday, but now there are photos. You can see Obama flanked by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on one side and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the other. It looks like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer wasn’t invited, but that could be because he already met with Obama earlier this year. Of course, The Oatmeal has a hilarious take on why Ballmer wasn’t present. Steve Jobs, on medical leave and rumored to be in treatment for cancer relapse appears in one photo. It’s only the back of his head and his hand, so it’s hard to tell if he’s looking well or not.

The furnace repair Ogden ut carries out all work safely and professionally while aiming to cause minimum disruption to your home or business life.

You can keep an eye on The Whitehouse photo stream on Flickr for more pics. Search Engine Land has an extremely detailed breakdown of who attended, where they sat, and why they may have been there.

via The Next Web

It seems that Zynga is now valued at a whopping $10 billion while in the process of securing $500 million in funding. AllThingsD reports that the maker of Cityville is involved in securing funding and recourse factoring from Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price, and previous investor Kleiner Perkins.

According to Business Insider, this valuation means Zynga is worth more than twice what Twitter is and, more importantly, worth $4 billion more than gaming giant Electronic Arts. Zynga did not respond to requests for comment, but “unnamed sources” have also been cited by NYT confirming the $500 million and $10 billion valuation. These same sources also say that Zynga will be preparing for an IPO next year.

Zynga has been wildly successful in the social gaming sphere. They boast over 215 million active users playing their games each month. Last month, CityVille reached over 100 million active users, beating FarmVille which hovered around 57 million users at the time. Zynga has also joined forces with Google, helped launch the $250 Million sFund with Kleiner Perkins, collaborated on beats with Dr. Dre, and acquired the Flock social web browser.

via CNet

Once again, we’re hearing rumors of a Google music service. They began some time last year and have resurfaced occasionally ever since. With the impending launch of Honeycomb and the Motorola Xoom, we may finally see Google Music become a reality. Sanjay Jha, chief executive of Motorola Mobility, let it slip while speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona:

“If you look at Google Mobile services [via Android] today, there’s a video service, there’s a music service – that is, there will be a music service.” He added that the value of the upgrade to the Android system, known as “Honeycomb”, which will power the forthcoming Motorola Xoom tablet is that “it adds video services and music services”.

Both Google and Apple are rumored to be working on streaming music services. Google has allegedly been working on a service allowing people to store all of their music in the cloud for $25 a year, while Apple could be working on a cloud-based iTunes which would support an “iPhone Nano” device with minimal internal storage.

The Motorola Xoom, priced at around $800 in the US to compete with the highest in iPad, is the center of both Honeycomb and the Google Music launch and is expected to become available within the next couple of months.

via Ars Technica

According to some reports, President Obama will be meeting with tech titans Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who will soon relinquish his position to Larry Page), Apple CEO Steve Jobs and others. The private dinner is to be held tonight in San Francisco.

This comes along with reports that Steve Jobs is receiving treatment for cancer in the Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto, California. Jobs has always been private about his medical condition, even when announcing a medical leave of absence last month.

The National Enquirer, not the most credible source for news, allegedly has photos of jobs outside of the clinic which will be made public tomorrow. Critical-care physician Dr. Samuel Jacobson has been quoted saying, “Judging from the photos, he is close to terminal. I would say he has six weeks.” TNW has done some research on Jacobson, though:

We’ve done a little digging into Dr. Samuel Jacobson. Jacobson appears to be a Florida based pulmonologist (breathing doctor) – not Oncologist. Which would naturally make you wonder just how qualified he is to diagnose someone via a photo, especially outside of his speciality.

via The Next Web, Business Insider

Anil Chawla is a software developer and the founder of ExactByte, LLC. Anil started programming at age twelve and has been in love with computers and technology ever since. Anil was a software engineer in the Emerging Internet Technologies team at IBM. After nearly seven years in the corporate world, he decided to pursue his passion and start his own software development company.

Varsha Chawla works as a Product Manager at SAS in Cary, NC overseeing email and mobile marketing, Business Intelligence, and mobile BI products. In addition to attending key marketing and social media events and conferences, Varsha has been involved with local tweetups, the Social Media Club, and un-conferences such as BarCamp, ProductCamp, and AnalyticsCamps.

Learn more about Anil and Varsha Chawla and what they have to say about the digital divide at SocialWayne.com.

RIM CEO Jim Balsillie has said at his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that “many” of the company’s upcoming handsets this year will feature NFC technology. Near Field Communications is the technology which would allow for easy location check-ins and mobile payments.

Some manufacturers feel the infrastructure isn’t yet there for NFC to be most useful and that the technology makes for bulky handsets but, with the speed that mobile is going, they may be playing catch-up in the end. Nokia and Samsung have embraced the technology along with Google’s Android OS. HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG have yet to create an NFC-enabled handset.

The word is that the next generation iPhone and iPad will also have Near-Field Communication support. Combined with Apple’s existing iTunes payment system and the fact that they they sell one of the most popular mobile handsets on the planet, this could rival the credit card companies.

via Pocket-lint

Windows Phone 7 Connector has gone from beta to gold. Finally, Mac owners have a native way to sync their Windows Phones and Zunes. There don’t seem to be any fancy new features, but the basics are really all that matter at this point:

• Sync music, movies, TV Shows and podcasts, from your existing iTunes library, to your devices*

• Sync photos and videos, from your existing iPhoto library, to your devices

• Retrieve photos and videos, taken on your Windows Phone, and automatically import them into your existing iPhoto library

• Browse and preview media items located on your devices

• Download and install operating system updates for your Windows Phone (as applicable)

* Only unprotected (non DRM) files are supported

Windows Phone 7 Connector is Microsoft’s first app made available via the Mac App Store .

via Engadget

Apple has decided to block jailbroken phones from accessing iBooks content. Apple Insider reports that those attempting to access iBooks content on their jailbroken devices get the following message:

“There is a problem with the configuration of your iPhone,” the error message in iBooks 1.2.1 reads. “Please restore with iTunes and reinstall iBooks.”

It seemed all was calm on the iOS Jailbreaker front, but it looks like Apple is not done. It’s been about a week since the latest iOS 4.2.1 Jailbreak, greenpois0n, was released. Pretty much any time an iOS version is released, the jailbreak follows soon after. This seems like an interesting way to control the problem.

Hacker “Comex” of the iPhone Dev Team explained via Twitter how the new anti-jailbreak measure works: “It seems that before opening a DRMed book, iBooks drops an improperly signed binary, tries to execute it, and if it works concludes that the device is jailbroken and refuses to open the book.”

It will be interesting to see if this is just a method for Apple to control pirating of iBooks or if this is just the first move in a larger battle. This would prevent pirating content, but the security measure even blocks legally-purchased content.

What happens when they add a similar “feature” to other standard applications?

via AppleInsider

Apple has launched a subscription service via iTunes that makes the Apple Store more appealing to publishers. Under the new plan, Apple makes 30 percent of the profit for attracting a customer to a publisher’s app. If a publisher brings in a new or existing customer, Apple gets nothing. Netflix shares fell almost 3 percent after Apple’s announcement.

Under Apple’s new plan, application publishers such as The New York Times, video service Netflix or music service Rhapsody that already sell subscriptions on their own would be required to offer those same terms to anyone signing up through Apple.

The problem for services like Netflix is that Apple can now take a huge chunk out of their revenue. If a customer wants to sign up for Netflix, they can set up a subscription on the Netflix website and Netflix gets paid. If that same customer decides to sign up via the Netflix app, Apple takes a third of that revenue.

“Our philosophy is simple,” Steve Jobs wrote in a statement. “When Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share. When the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing.

“All we require,” Jobs continued, “is that if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app.”

This announcement comes just weeks Apple announced The Daily, the first subscription product available via iTunes.

via Yahoo! News, CNET

It seems like the stylus has become a thing of the past. While many mobile devices are now touchscreen, most make you use your fingers to interact. For some, this is a blessing, for others it doesn’t go so well.

The latest device to enter the tablet wars is the HTC Flyer and, among other features, it includes a capacitive stylus with HTC trademarked Scribe technology. This makes for a ”groundbreaking pen experience” according to HTC.

The tablet has a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, 1GB of RAM with 32GB of flash storage. It runs at a resolution of 1024 x 600, features dual cameras, and is running Android 2.4. According to SlashGear, the HTC Flyer “feels more solid than the Galaxy Tab, with a high-quality, flex-free chassis.” It also features cloud gaming via an OnLive app.

HTC says Android 2.4 will feel indistinguishable from 2.3 for consumers. The primary reason the tablet runs 2.4 instead of the tablet-focused Android 3.0 is that there wasn’t time enough to customize Sense for the latest Android OS. HTC’s focus is on Sense and they want to make it clear that Sense is more important to them than the underlying platform.

via Engadget

Reports of Apple creating a smaller and more affordable iPhone started popping this week, but what’s more interesting is a report by Cult of Mac which has details on how Apple is going about accomplishing this.

Besides doing away with the home button, they had to figure out other ways to reduce the device’s size and cost. It looks like the solution was to get rid of the internal storage. According to their source, the device would depend heavily on cloud storage using technology from LaLa.com, who Apple acquired and shut down last spring.

“I’m talking strictly storage memory here,” said our source.

The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad.

These iPhone Nano rumors seem to indicate that the elusive iTunes-in-the-cloud service that many have been looking for will actually come to pass. An iPhone with no onboard storage which depends strictly on the cloud will have severe limitations, but these potential drawbacks may be worth it for many.

via Cult of Mac