Alan Buckingham

Thanksgiving is now over for those of us in the United States and Black Friday is well under way. While we won't know retail sales figures for the number one shopping day of the year for a few days, we do now have a staggering figure from the holiday itself. Thanksgiving was a big day for photo-sharing service Instagram. In fact, it was the single biggest day in the service's history.

Instagram, which became popular with iPhone users and then expanded to Android before being purchased by Facebook, has grown steadily, but the recent holiday provided a huge boost to the service and I am proud to say that my daughter and I were both contributors to this monumental moment (my humble contribution to the record is posted above).

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For many of us Nintendo represents our youth, but the company has stubbornly stuck around from those heady days of the 80s and even has managed to keep relevant while others like Atari and Sega have faded from sight. In fact, the Nintendo Wii still continues to be a popular console worldwide and now the company has outed the new Wii U and, with this console, Nintendo wants to compete with Xbox for control of your living room.

Over the past few days we have seen announcements from Netflix. Amazon Video and Hulu that each makes services available for the Wii U. Now, on Thanksgiving Day here in the United States, YouTube has decided to jump on the bandwagon as well.

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Tablets aren't really new and they weren't invented by Apple. Yes, Apple may have perfected the art and Amazon and Google gave us choices, but have these devices really matured to the point of surpassing notebook computers in the market already? It depends on when you ask an analyst that question.

If you asked NPD DisplaySearch in July then you would have been told this monumental event would occur in 2016. If you asked that same question today the answer would be much sooner -- happen this Black Friday.

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Like it or not, Windows 8 is here to stay and Microsoft wants to make sure developers are ready to provide users with all the apps they desire. To that end, the company has announced a series of online and in-person developer camps in an effort to increase the population of the Windows Store.

In an email sent out recently by Microsoft, the company brags that its new OS allows developers to "code once and have a great app experience that scales across devices from tablets to all-in-one PCs". The company attempts to further entice coders with the fact that the new Windows Store offers a "higher profit potential" than other app stores, which amounts to an 80% revenue share if you reach $25,000 USD or more in total sales. Indie software developers who oppose the new centralized Windows software distribution ecosystem are unlikely to take much comfort in that fact. Analytics firm VisionMobile recently did a survey which found the average monthly take for a centrally-distributed app was between $1,200 and $3,900 per month, depending on the platform. The new Windows Store, however, is a new frontier for this type of app store.

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Microsoft's Ben Rudolph caused a stir during the Consumer Electronics Show back in January. He showed up with his Windows Phone and challenged speed tests -- to show people with other devices how fast the Microsoft mobile OS was. With that humble beginning the "Smoked by Windows Phone" phenomena was born.

That whole concept certainly paid off in media attention with Rudolph going on mini tours of Microsoft stores, exportation to Nokia stores in other parts of the world and a whole advertising campaign launch. In fact, Rudolph states that the company, along with Nokia, ran "over 250,000 challenges in 54 countries".

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Paul Otellini joined Intel way back in 1974 when he was fresh out of University of California, Berkeley. He eventually rose to the position of president and CEO in 2005, but now plans to step down after seven years leading the company.

His May 2013 may seem a long ways off, certainly this is a bit more than a standard two-weeks notice, but Otellini picked the date for a very specific reason. May is when Intel holds its annual stockholders' meeting.

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The other day we talked about the plan to release a new Spybot - Search & Destroy app today. Well, version 2.0 is now officially available and packs a host of new features, most of which we already knew about thanks to beta versions and a company announcement.

Before you try to explain that you have Windows Defender, McAfee, Norton or whatever else, let me explain something. No security program is perfect. They all miss the occasional spyware, rootkit, or virus. Having more than one antivirus running on your computer is a very bad idea, but having a second program such as malware catching app is not.

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You may think you don't need additional security on your Windows 8 machine because it comes with Defender built in. Think again, because no single program is capable of finding and blocking every threat out there. One of the best complements to any Windows PC is third-party software that is capable of scanning, blocking and removing troublesome problems like spyware and malware that get into your system.

One of those third-party scanners, Spybot - Search & Destroy from Safer-Networking, is set to release its complete version 2.0 next Monday, The software is currently available in its third release candidate revision, which you can download in FileForum right now if you want to get a quick look at what to expect on Monday.

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Perhaps the new Office 2013 has been a bit overshadowed by the hype around the launch of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, but a new version of the Office suite is a big deal for both consumers and businesses. A public preview version was released several months ago and last month the software officially reached RTM.

Now Microsoft has pushed out the first trial version of Office 2013 to their TechNet web site. This trial is only for the Professional Plus version of the suite. The download includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, and Lync. Customers will find some interesting new features like a new Start page for each app and also an Office Store. This latest Office suite also features integration with the SkyDrive cloud storage service and Office 365 as well.

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Microsoft has clearly begun to focus more heavily on the cloud for both businesses and consumers. The company has integrated Skydrive into both Windows 8 and Office 2013, and even some recently announced SharePoint features included SkyDrive integration into the social and collaboration app for business. Now, today, it has rolled out two more improvements to the cloud storage service.

Along with the brand new features that were rolled out today, Microsoft's Mike Torres, Group Program Manager for SkyDrive apps, couldn't help tooting the company's own horn a bit by trumpeting that SkyDrive has doubled in usage -- "in the last 6 months, you have doubled the amount of SkyDrive storage being used." This is too vague to indicate any real numbers of storage or users so that will remain open to interpretation for now.

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This may have been planned or it may be just a hasty way to put yesterday's security woes behind, but today Skype announced one month of free unlimited worldwide calling. Regardless of the motivation behind this offer, it's a nice gesture for those users not already paying for an account and also, perhaps, a way for Microsoft to entice future paying customers to the VOIP service.

Skype already does a lot for free account holders simply by allowing no-charge Skype-to-Skype calls, but calling a landline or wireless phone means upgrading to a paid account. Now the company offers one month of Skype-to-landline and Skype-to-wireless calls free of charge. The equivalent plan would normally set you back $13.99.

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Users are becoming accustomed to Adobe security flaws these days. After all the company did occupy five of the top-10 spots in the recent Kaspersky report. While the "occasional" Flash bug can be dealt with, having one's user information stolen is a whole different story, but that is exactly what sources are claiming and Adobe is confirming by shutting down the service in question.

"Adobe is currently investigating reports of a compromise of a Connectusers.com forum database. These reports first started circulating late during the day on Tuesday, November 13, 2012. At this point of our investigation, it appears that the Connectusers.com forum site was compromised by an unauthorized third party. It does not appear that any other Adobe services, including the Adobe Connect conferencing service itself, were impacted".

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We already know that Facebook is a pretty popular social network and Windows 8, if Steve Ballmer is to be believed, appears to be off to a good start, but what if you combined that cool new Start screen with the Facebook timeline? Then you would get the new Cover Creator just released by Microsoft.

The company posted the new app today accompanied by a very brief description -- "It’s a new Facebook app from the Windows team that connects to your social stream to create a new Cover Photo. It’s fast and easy and has a degree of customization so you can pick and choose which photos and apps appear in certain tiles."

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A password reset vulnerability that was reported by TNW prompted Skype to scramble to protect its users from having their accounts compromised today. The Microsoft-owned communications company issued a zero day fix on Wednesday which protects users with multiple Skype accounts attached to a single email address.

"Early this morning we were notified of user concerns surrounding the security of the password reset feature on our website. This issue affected some users where multiple Skype accounts were registered to the same email address. We suspended the password reset feature temporarily this morning as a precaution and have made updates to the password reset process today so that it is now working properly. We are reaching out to a small number of users who may have been impacted to assist as necessary. Skype is committed to providing a safe and secure communications experience to our users and we apologize for the inconvenience."

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You may know Citrix for collaboration and support software like GoToMeeting and GoToAssist, but the company is a lot more than just those two apps. It also is into virtualization services and has even got into the cloud business recently with services like XenServer, CloudGateway, CloudPortal and more. Back in 2011 Citrix purchased the domain Cloud.com. So far the company has quietly sat on the URL, but now it appears the company has something in mind.

The domain was created way back in 2000 and is currently registered through 2017. For now, Citrix isn't giving much information about what it has planned and the site's Twitter account has been silent since April 3rd. At that time, Citrix proclaimed: "We're hiring Ruby on Rails Ninjas for an awesome new product. Any candidates out there? Drop us a note". Citrix is tweeting through their @cloudstack address, indicating that Cloud.com may have something to do with that service.

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