Facebook IPO destroyed investor confidence in social networks, says Vkontakte CEO
Pavel Durov, the outspoken founder and CEO of popular Russian social network VKontakte says the site's initial public offering has been indefinitely postponed due to a chilling effect caused by the Facebook IPO, which has been called the worst performing IPO of the last decade.
VKontakte (VK) is not nearly as large as Facebook in membership, but it has remained one of the top 50 most popular sites in the world for several years, and is Russia's fourth most-popular site altogether.
Is Intel Inside iPad, iPhone a pipedream?
Intel CEO Paul Otellini told investors this month that Apple could build its iPad and iPhone lineup on the Atom family of microprocessors any time it wants to. And he’s going to do everything in his power to make that prospect so enticing that Apple can’t refuse. Pipedream? Not hardly.
Now, I understand why some of you would consider this to be pure fantasy. Intel has been trying to pry its way into the smartphone and tablet markets for five years now, and until this year the company has had little to show for it.
Space Invaders OpenGL is all retro fun
If you’ve played a few PC-based recreations of Space Invaders then you’ll know they can be, well, more than a little basic. And that’s a shame. Sure, we know the 1978 arcade original wasn’t exactly a visual feast, but that’s no excuse for the basic graphics and dull soundtrack you so often see in more modern versions.
At first glance, it didn’t look as though Space Invaders OpenGLwas going to do much to change our views. A portable game, its single executable is only 662KB in size, which doesn’t exactly leave much room for extras. (To put that in perspective, Civilization V’s music files alone require more than 1,500 times as much hard drive space.)
Why aren't you reading this story on Samsung Galaxy S III?
If you live in parts of Europe, the Middle East or Asia, arguably the hottest smartphone on the planet is selling out fast, and, whoa, it's not iPhone 4S. May 29 dawned on the continent to a new day for Samsung smartphones and sunset for Apple's flagship, which is oh-so similar to the one released in early 2010. Buyers looking for freedom from the walled garden or simply stunning software innovation can choose to "think different", borrowing the long-discarded Apple marketing phrase.
Twenty-six days ago, I asked: "Is iPhone 4 obsolete?" Nearly 2,000 of you answered "Yes" -- that's 65 percent -- by saying you will buy Galaxy S III. Now remains the question: How many of you planning to buy, really will do so?
Here's an iOS app for our UK readers -- HMRC Tax Calc
How much tax are you going to be paying over the coming year? It’s not always the happiest news, but it’s the sort of things that it is certainly best to know in advance -- rather get the bad news now than get a nasty surprise further down the line. HMRC Tax Calc is a free app for iOS from HMRC which can be used to work out how much tax you’re going to be paying from your wages each week or month as well as showing you what this means for your annual tax bill.
The app is designed for people whose tax situation is fairly simple -- if you have anything other than a tax code of 810L or a National Insurance letter A, you’re going to have to look elsewhere to have your tax calculations done for you. All you need to do it tap in your gross pay or wages along with how many hours a week you work, and everything else will be done for you. At a glance you can see how much of your earnings are tax free and where all the rest goes.
VisiPics quickly finds duplicate photos
You started off with good intentions, creating a neat image library where all your digital photos are properly organized in sensibly-named folders. But the organization probably didn’t last. It’s all too easy to drag and drop images to other folders, resave them in other formats or resolutions, maybe rework them with minor edits, and before you know it your hard drive is cluttered with a host of duplicate (or very similar) images.
Locating these files manually can be tricky, but fortunately there are some very capable tools around which can do most of the hard work for you. And VisiPics is one of the most interesting. It’s not been updated for a very long time (the current release dates back to 2008), but the program worked just fine on our Windows 7 test PC and still has the power to clean up your photo library.
TED Notepad is more intelligent
If you’ve tried a few Notepad replacements before then you’ll know they’re usually aimed at a fairly technical audience. And so top-of-the-features-list will be items like “code folding” or “syntax highlighting”, which is fine if you’re a developer, but not quite as interesting for everybody else.
TED Notepad is a little different. It’s not short on developer-friendly options -- it’s easy to play around with indents, search and replace supports regular expressions, you can even add custom scripts or programs to process text according to your own rules -- but you don’t have to get into these complexities, unless you really want to. And so the program is just as appealing to regular users who want something like Notepad, but a little more powerful.
Take one of these 27 downloads out for a spin
May is coming to a close, and as June beckons there are still countless software releases to keep track of. If you’ve had trouble keeping up with everything, this handy roundup is here to bring you up to speed.
This past week saw the release of WikidPad 2.1_01, a wiki-style text editor that can be used to capture thoughts and ideas -- stored locally or exported as an HTML file to upload to the web. If you need to store reminders of things you need to do and appointments you need to attend, PNotes 9.0.107 is a great sticky note tool that may be able to help you out. There’s also PNotes Portable 9 for anyone who likes the idea of running the same program from a USB drive. If pictures are more important to you than words, Juicebox 1.0.2 can be used to create a stunning gallery to show off your digital photos -- all in HTML5 glory.
Smartphones put privacy on the tsunami hazard map
Now, finally, the tide of public opinion on Internet privacy begins to flow in the other direction. Consumers are becoming more hesitant to share their data and are less tolerant when those with access to their data violate trust. That presents a tremendous threat to some of the titans of our day -- and an equally monstrous opportunity for others. Apple, Google, are you listening?
Honestly, I’m amazed that the issue was ever able to germinate and flower, particularly here in the United States, a country that distinguishes itself on the right to privacy. And a country that spent much of the last century wringing its collective hands over the Orwellian nightmare that awaited us down the road of technological advancement.
Get organized with WikiPad
Wikis are normally all about group collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. WikidPad is a simple text editor that allows you to construct a custom personal wiki on your own PC, perfect for organizing thoughts, ideas, to-do lists, contacts and more.
How does it work? Suppose you need to buy a few birthday presents for someone. Just enter BirthdayPresents in the start page, and because that’s a mixed-case “wikiword” it’ll be automatically underlined; double-click it and a new page called “BirthdayPresents” will appear in the navigation pane. You can click this and enter new text there; you might add subpages below that one with, perhaps, possible present ideas; and if you type BirthdayPresents on some other page then it’ll automatically act as a link to your new page.
Over-allocation kills cloud savings
When it comes to the cloud and Amazon Web Services, IT administrators often buy far more than they need and fail to adjust to realities once they have a good understanding of their deployment's needs. These are the findings of Cloudyn, a cloud cost management provider.
Cloudyn estimates that some cloud adopters are wasting on average 40 percent of their annual expense on AWS resources they don't use. The reasons why vary: resources are often over-allocated, instances are left running after they are no longer needed, or even failing to take advantage of Amazon's own cost-cutting offerings.
Get Serif PagePlus 11 for free while you still can
Serif is a name long associated with powerful yet easy-to-use software, and these are both terms that applyto PagePlus 11. This is an extremely powerful desktop publishing application capable of producing professional looking newsletters, brochures and other documents using a series of design tools.
If you have been put off using DTP software in the past because you have found that it is either too complicated for day-to-day use, or too simplistic for quick projects, this could be the program you have been looking for and you can get a copy for yourself without having to part with any money. Serif PagePlus 11 originally sold for $99.99.
Match technology purchases to your specific needs
Second in a series. In part one of this article we covered how to create and manage purchase requirements. In part two, we describe a way to evaluate products against those requirements, to find the one that best matches your needs.
One way of evaluating products is to rate how well they meet the individual requirements, and express that rating as a numerical score. Tally the individual requirement scores to calculate a product score, which is a single number that expresses how close a product is to your requirements. Rank products based on these scores, and the highest scoring product is the one that best matches your specific requirements.
Sorry, you can't mail your iPhone or iPad overseas 'til next year
The United States Postal Service has put a ban the international shipment of lithium-based batteries (Lithium Metal, Lithium Alloy, and Lithium ion.) This ban includes electronic equipment with lithium batteries permanently installed such as mp3 players, tablets and smartphones, and will stay in place until January 1, 2013.
Because of the issues that Lithium batteries have with short circuiting, overheating, and exploding, special regulations have been placed on their transport for the last five years.
Web Page Saver lives up to its name
A couple of weeks ago we wrote about wpic, a console tool that could easily save a complete webpage as an image. But while this works well, it seemed a little basic, and is probably best used within scripts if you needed to automate the saving process. If you were also interested in the core idea, but wished wpic had more features, though, Web Page Saver might appeal: it can also save webpages for you, but takes the idea to the next level.
The program’s simple GUI allows you to enter up to five URLs, for instance, which can then all be saved in the same operation. (You need to enter the protocol, though -- http://my.domain.com, not just my.domain.com -- for this to work properly.) And it can also import URLs from text or CSV files, which may be handy if you often need to capture the same groups of sites.
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