Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

A week ago, in a letter to the European Commission, News Corps complained that Google is a 'platform for piracy' with 'cynical management'. Today, having gathered together its ammunition, Google responds with a letter of its own. Although News Corp's letter was signed by CEO Robert Thomson, Google's reply starts with the salutation "Dear Rupert" -- addressing CEO Rupert Murdoch -- and the search giant picks apart the complaints levelled at it. One of New Corp's key complaints centered around the idea that Google is riddled with pirated material, and "unlawful and unsavory content", and this is one of the first ideas that Google shoots down.

Countering accusations of being a platform for piracy, SVP Global Communications, Rachel Whetstone, points to the 222 million copyright infringing websites that were delisted last year. The existence of copyright protecting ContentID technology to help detect infringing footage on YouTube is also cited, as is efficiency in weeding out inappropriate contents such as sexual images of children.

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Whenever news comes from BlackBerry it feels like a voice from the past calling. Today is no different as the company announces the launch of the BlackBerry Passport, a square-screened phone designed with the corporate market in mind. This might be a phone aimed at business users, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a little joking around: CEO John Chen quipped that the Passport is harder to bend than the iPhone 6 Plus.

The most striking feature of the handset is the 4.5 inch display with its 1400 x 1400 resolution with 453PPI, but nestling beneath this is the Passport's second most interesting feature: the three-line, touch-enabled physical keyboard.

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It's important for any business to establish an online presence, and this is certainly true in emerging markets. It's something recognized by Google, and the company is teaming up with Endurance International Group to help SMBs in Africa and Southeast Asia to launch online ventures.

Google's reputation online precedes it, but Endurance might not be a name that's overly familiar. The company provides hosting, and the new partnership with Google is set to benefit businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia and Malaysia.

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People are slowly but surely coming round to the idea of SaaS (Software as a Service), and this is particularly true for businesses. Microsoft is making something of a success of pushing monthly or annual subscriptions for Office 365, but there's still a massive untapped market -- small businesses who are simply not in a position to make additional financial commitments each month. GoDaddy is helping to wipe out this obstacle by offering a package aimed at getting small businesses up and running online for just $1 per month; and the package includes Office 365.

As this is GoDaddy, it should come as no surprise that there is a web-focus to the package. For $1 a month, businesses can bag themselves a custom domain and take advantage of the Website Builder tool as well as site hosting. On top of this, there's round the clock support and $50 worth of Bing credit to help with online promotion. This is already a great value deal, but throwing Office 365 into the mix is going to be too much for many businesses to resist.

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It's almost as though we are entering that time of the year when people start thinking about Christmas presents. Game consoles -- like the Xbox One -- are likely to feature pretty high up on wishlists the world over and, out of the blue, there's a raft of Xbox One news spilling out.

It is quite some time since the wraps were taken off the console, but today is the day it finally launches in India. The version with Kinect is available for Rs 45990 (around $755), with the Kinect-free version costing Rs 39,990 (around $655) -- so compared to other parts of the world, the Indian version of the Xbox One is relatively expensive. It will be interesting to see what sort of an impact this has on its popularity.

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When Apple acquired Beats Music earlier in the year, there were obvious fears that the service would shut down. While this type of rumor is often well-founded, it seems fears were misplaced on this occasion: Apple has no plans to shutter Beats Music. A company spokesperson made a statement to the Guardian making it clear that suggestions that the subscription music service is to close down are "not true". But could the brand end up being eaten by iTunes?

Beats Music has not been a runaway success. It has subscribers, but not all that many. With Apple's backing there is a chance that its popularity could increase, but it can be difficult to shake off the reputation of an old name -- Beats Music has singularly failed to reach the celebrated heights of Beats Electronic's headphones. Having spent $3 billion on Beats Music and Beats Electronic, it would be strange if Apple just gave up on a portion of its investment.

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Seven years after its inception, online image editing service Aviary has been acquired by Adobe. The Photoshop stalwart is no stranger to the cloud, but this latest purchase seems to indicate that the company is looking to expand further in this arena. Pay a visit to the Aviary website and the Adobe branding is already in place -- there's also a new entry on the Aviary company timeline that has been updated to reflect the acquisition. The Adobe-branded Aviary website makes clear the thinking behind the move: "accelerating delivery of mobile apps that integrate with Adobe Creative Cloud".

It seems that the main reason for Adobe's interest in Aviary is the fact that the ornithologically-named firm has developed a number of mobile SDKs. Aviary is already a popular tool, and Adobe is understandably keen to monetize the popularity of cloud apps and mobile services: Aviary is a ready-made package that encompasses both of these ideas perfectly. An announcement by Adobe explains that "the acquisition accelerates Adobe's strategy to make Creative Cloud a vibrant platform for third-party apps, through a new Creative SDK".

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Part of the point of Facebook, in addition to making it easier to keep in touch with people, is to keep abreast of news. The social network's algorithms are such that you don’t just see a chronological stream of updates from the people, companies, and pages you follow -- stories can 'surface' in a seemingly random order, and may appear some time after they were actually relevant. Facebook is aware that it can deliver posts in something of an untimely fashion, and it's now going to do something about it. It makes a change from forcing users to display their real names...

The social network is rolling out a couple of updates that will help to ensure that stories that appear in your News Feeds are more relevant. There have been complaints that Facebook is slow to start pushing trending topics -- be it sports events or big news stories -- and this is being addressed. Should friends of yours link to, or interact with, a story that is currently trending, it is "more likely to appear higher up in News Feed, so you can see it sooner". You may well have thought that this is how things worked before, but apparently this is not the case.

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Twitpic will no longer close on 25 September as the photo sharing service has found a buyer. There's not yet any word on who is behind the acquisition, but the takeaway news is that photos should be safe as Twitpic will live to fight another day.

Just a couple of weeks ago, founder Noah Everett posted the news that Twitpic was to close following something of a legal tussle with Twitter. But things have taken a turn for the better. After users scrabbled to download their images to ensure they were safe, it now transpires that the service is not going anywhere.

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Free's good, right? Who doesn’t like something gratis? Microsoft has -- sort of -- cottoned onto this idea and dropped the annual fee associated with the Windows Dev Center. The 'sort of' caveat remains because signing up for a Dev Center account is not completely free; there's still a registration fee of $19 to pay, but this is for a lifetime account -- no more annual charges. Announcing the move on the Windows blog, Todd Brix explains that "each of our 600,000+ registered developers will no longer need to pay any additional fees to maintain their account. It’s also a very good time for developers new to the platform to get a Dev Center account and start submitting apps".

Having paid the fee, developers are then free to submit apps to both the Windows Phone Store and the Windows Store. But this is not the only change that's coming to the Dev Center. In what is becoming something of a trend, Microsoft clearly pinned back its ears and made it easier to promote apps and provide offers to users. Improvements to in-app advertising means that campaigns can be more easily run on a global scale and pay outs are made faster.

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News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media behemoth, is the latest source of criticism of Google. Robert Thomson, the chief executive of the company -- responsible for the Times and the Sun in the UK as well the book publisher HarperCollins -- has written to the European Commission to complain that the search giant is "a platform for piracy". Thomson pulls no punches as he lays into Google, saying that the company was in the hands of a "cynical management" and was "willing to exploit its dominant market position to stifle competition".

The letter, addressed to Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, is bitter in tone as Thomson complains of Google's "egregious" practices. It is Google's dominance of the search market that is seen as particularly problematic. News Corps feels that Google's power "increases with each passing day" -- a claim that many have leveled at Murdoch's corporation in the past -- and fears that this "will lead to a less informed, more vexatious level of dialog in our society". But this is far from being the only accusation that Thomson fires at Google.

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When I first learned about the HooToo it sounded, frankly, a bit nuts. Pitched as an "all-in-one device charger, AC adapter, personal cloud, travel router, Wi-Fi hotspot, and wireless bridge" I was instantly intrigued, but fearful that this was going to be a device that promised the world and delivered little. Was I setting my expectations too low? Before we look at things any further, it's probably worth spending a moment or two decoding what it actually is. One of its more basic functions is a rechargeable USB battery pack complete with two outputs. But there's more to the TripMate Elite. Much, much more.

The 3.2 x 3.2 x 1.0 inch (82 x 82 x 28mm) black box is home to a 6000mAH battery that's perfect for powering up a dead mobile or tablet on the move, but the 7oz (200g) package has plenty more tricks up its sleeve. As it's a portable battery pack, it's hardly surprising to find a couple of USB outputs, one kicking out 1A, the other 1/2.1A. Equally unsurprising -- but no less useful -- is the battery level checker on the adjacent side; tap the button and four blue LEDs let you know the charge level. But what's that next to the charge lights? Internet and LAN indicators? Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

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Microsoft continues its recent trend of bringing exciting new features to rival platforms by adding Android Wear support to OneNote. The most recent version of Microsoft's note-taking tool -- suitably named OneNote for Android Wear -- and a new iOS 8-friendly version of the app is also due to launch today. If you've invested in an Android smartwatch (you'll have to wait a little longer for an Apple Watch version), taking a note is as simple as uttering "OK Google, take a note" -- but be prepared for a few weird looks when you try this out in a store for the first time.

To take advantage of the voice-activated features of the app, you will also need to have the main OneNote app installed on your Android phone or tablet. Forget the fact that your smartwatch doesn't have a keyboard -- notes can now be dictated to your wrist in a way that will not in any way make people who may be nearby think you're a little, er, strange. Or, as the Office Blog puts it, "we hope you enjoy using OneNote in a manner even Dick Tracy would envy!"

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Phishing scams are a problem around the world -- and it's likely that one or more was at least partly responsible for the Fappening -- but it seems that it is more of a problem in some places than others.

Just about all of us have received emails that contain malicious links, but analysis by Proofpoint found that web users in the UK are more than two and a half times as likely to receive phishing mail as those in the US. Germany fairs much better, receiving just a fifth of the number of scam emails as the UK. But these numbers are not the whole story -- phishing emails account for just a portion of unwanted emails.

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New figures show that global smartphone shipments for 2014 are set to be 19 percent higher than the previous year. Juniper Research reports that handset shipments are forecast to jump from 985 million in 2013 to 1.2 billion this year.

Smartphone popularity continues to rise, and this has been driven -- at least in part -- by the appearance of handsets with bargain basement prices. While the likes of Apple push premium-priced smartphones, emerging markets are lapping up handsets priced at $150 and under.

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