Ian Barker

Facebook has announced that it's introducing verified pages to help users find the authentic accounts of celebrities, businesses and other high profile subjects. Verified pages will have a blue check mark next to the name both at the top of the page and in search results.

Given that Facebook has long been plagued by fake pages and that Twitter has had verified accounts -- marked by a blue tick, funnily enough -- since 2009, it's perhaps surprising that the social network has taken so long to make this step. On its official blog announcing the news the company says, "Facebook proactively verifies authentic Pages and profiles, but if you believe that you're being impersonated you can always report a fake account."

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Speaking at the D11 conference in California, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside has confirmed the existence of the company's long-rumoured X-phone. The device is to be called the Moto X and is set to launch in October.

This is the first major product launch from the company since it was bought by Google in 2011. Woodside teased delegates saying, "It's in my pocket but I can’t show it to you." He did confirm that the phone will be packed with sensors so that it will be able to detect when it’s taken out of a pocket or when it’s travelling in a car, for example, allowing it to adapt its behavior. No details of exact specs have been released.

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Symantec has dropped the PC Tools range of security software, leaving the Australian company that it acquired in 2008 to concentrate on its system tuning products.

Buying PC Tools gave Symantec a budget brand with the Internet Security, Spyware Doctor and Spyware Doctor with Antivirus products slotting in below the more upmarket Norton range. Now as part of Symantec CEO Stephen Bennett’s restructuring of the company, the PC Tools security products are being quietly streamlined out of existence.

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European operators have been asked not to go ahead with the launch of the HTC First planned for this summer. The phone comes with Facebook Home which replaces the standard Android screens with its own social media interface.

Home has been available for download to other Android devices too but hasn't proved popular with users. UK mobile operator EE has issued a statement making it clear that Facebook is behind the decision not to launch saying, "Following customer feedback, Facebook has decided to focus on adding new customisation features to Facebook Home over the coming months. While they are working to make a better Facebook Home experience, they have recommended holding off launching the HTC First in the UK." Orange in France has made a similar statement.

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We’re used to the somewhat spooky way that websites track our every move. Notice how the adverts on various sites reflect the products you’ve been viewing elsewhere? You only have to look at a CD on Play and Amazon will be trying to sell it to you within hours. We’re used to the GPS tracker on our smartphones monitoring where we are all the time and pointing us towards local attractions too.

Well now this technology is starting to spread to other devices too. The BBC has used the Thinking Digital conference to trial a perceptive radio. Developed by the BBC's Future Media North Laboratory, the radio uses information about where you live to change the listening experience by referencing local places or weather conditions. It also monitors the background noise at your location so it can decide whether to boost certain sounds to enhance the listening experience. The idea is to provide an "immersive" broadcast that can reconfigure the content for each listener.

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Do you say "gif"or "jif"? I’ve always been in the gif camp but Steve Wilhite the inventor of the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) says it should be pronounced "jif". Speaking to the New York Times in the run up to being honored with a lifetime achievement award at the Webby Awards he said he was "annoyed" that there was still debate about how the acronym should be pronounced.

The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations, but there’s long been debate about which one is correct, there’s even a Gif Pronunciation Page dedicated to the argument. It suggests that the reason for the "jif" sound is to associate it with the popular brand of peanut butter -- a staple of programmer diets. Of course this only works in the US, here in the UK we think of Jif as a brand of lemon juice or a defunct product for cleaning the sink.

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Any old security suite can protect your PC with a firewall and an antivirus product so the big players are increasingly looking for new angles to try to get us to buy their products. BullGuard’s flagship offering already has parental controls, spam filtering and PC tuning tools, so the latest release -- out today -- goes for the personal protection approach.

No, it doesn’t come with a goon in a dark suit and sunglasses to follow you around. It offers safeguards against identity theft and data leaks, plus it has social media protection. As an added bonus the amount of online backup space included with the package is increased to 25GB.

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Despite Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's promise not to "screw up" Tumblr following its recent acquisition, the move has caused some disquiet in the user community.

Posting on Tumblr, of course, many users are worried about the impact advertising may have on the Tumblsphere, others that Yahoo will change the ethos of the site. There was disquiet about rumors Yahoo would push to make it more family friendly by filtering content too -- around 1 in 6 Tumblr pages is reckoned to contain porn. Despite assurances, and the fact that the circulating message about the clean up has been exposed as fake, there's a lot of distrust out there.

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The first stage of developing an app involves no technical skills at all, it's also the hardest, and that’s coming up with an original idea. There are already thousands of apps out there so you need to make sure that what you’re proposing hasn't been done before. Or at the very least that you have a new and original twist on an idea that will make it stand out from the crowd.

It's important to note that just creating an app isn't going to make you money, research by Canalys in 2012 showed that some two-thirds of apps received fewer than 1,000 downloads in their first year. The store pages have many thousands of "zombie apps" which still appear on the websites but never get downloaded.

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Research company IHS iSuppli has released figures showing that solid-state drives are set to claim 33 percent of the storage market by 2017. Over this time total worldwide sales of SSDs are expected to rise from 31 million units in 2012 to 227 million.

The growth is being driven by demand for ultrabooks and other slimline systems which need powerful, compact drives. Sales should also be helped by the falling price of flash memory and the faster performance and lower power requirements of SSDs. Increasing numbers of systems being launched with convertible and touch screen formats is likely to push things further too.

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As has been widely rumored over the last few days, Yahoo has paid $1.1 billion for blogging platform Tumblr. In recent times this is the most paid for an Internet acquisition since Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion last year.

Founded by David Karp in 2007 from a bedroom of his mother's New York apartment, the attraction of Tumblr has always been its clean interface and ease of use, which allows people to be up and blogging within minutes. The service has around 217 million users worldwide and is the 24th most popular site in the US according to research company Quantcast.  The company employs 175 people and claims to have more than 100 million blogs.

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Computer giant Dell has seen its net profits fall by 79 percent to $130 million in the first quarter of this fiscal year. This highlights the shift in consumer demand away from traditional PCs towards tablets. The company reports a decline of 9 percent in PC sales although revenue from software, services and new technologies was up by 12 percent.

Commenting on the results chief financial officer Brian Gladden says, "We made progress in building our enterprise solutions capabilities in the first quarter and are confident in our strategy to be the leading provider of end-to-end scalable solutions. In addition, we have taken actions to improve our competitive position in key areas of the business, especially in end-user computing, and it has affected profitability".

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Along with a number of major employers, e-skills UK  -- an organization dedicated to inspiring future talent in IT -- is developing a new apprenticeship scheme to build cyber security skills.

The scheme highlights the need to attract a new generation of talent into an industry where at the moment only 7 percent of security professionals are aged under 29. It will give youngsters an opportunity to start a career and earn a wage whilst working towards an internationally recognized qualification.

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The Google I/O keynote has revealed some major changes to Google+. Highlights include a new multi-column stream aimed not only at providing a cleaner design but also at offering greater depth to the user experience.

The columns are customizable so that you can organize them to show the things that are most important to you. Tiles of information can be flipped to show alternative details and thanks to clever landmark recognition technology you can click on a picture to find more information about the location.

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F-Secure has released its latest mobile threat report for January to March 2013. Highlights include an increase in threat families and variants of almost 50 percent over the previous quarter, and that Android is still the most targeted mobile OS.

Android threats accounted for 136 of the 149 detected during the period, the other 13 being aimed at Symbian. No threats were reported for iOS, Blackberry or Windows Mobile. The report notes a particularly worrying trend towards the commoditization of malware, either by making premium rate calls or stealing bank details. 114 out of 149 threats found were profit motivated. The authors state:

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