Latest news

In early May, Microsoft sued Salesforce.com, claiming the company had been actively infringing on nine of the software giant's patents.

The complaint was significant as it targeted patents relating to customer-relationship management (CRM), which is the bread and butter of SalesForce's business.

Microsoft was seeking for an injunction on the features used in SF's software that infringes on the their patents.

Today, the companies have settled the suit, although details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Salesforce says with the agreement both companies will be covered by each other's patents.

Adds Microsoft: "We are pleased to reach this agreement with Salesforce.com to put an end to the litigation between our two companies. Today's agreement is an example of how companies can compete vigorously in the marketplace while respecting each other's intellectual property rights."

As promised last month, the iPhone Dev-Team has now released their iPhone 4 unlocking tool, Ultrasn0w, which can be used by U.S. owners tired of being stuck on AT&T.

The carrier unlock required a complete rewrite of the software because of Apple's new baseband OS for the updated phone.

It is important to note that users who unlock their iPhone 4 can use T-Mobile's cell network but not its high-speed 3G data.

Ultrasn0w 1.0 comes with instructions, courtesy of RedmondPie:

How to: Jailbreak iPhone 4 on iOS 4.0.1:
-Step 1: Unlocking requires that your phone is jailbroken on the latest firmware. Follow the complete guide posted here to jailbreak your iPhone 4 on iOS 4.0.1 / 4.0 using JailbreakMe 2.0.

How to: Unlock iPhone 4 (Any Baseband) on iOS 4.0.1:
-Step 2: Once you are done with the jailbreak, you can now unlock your iPhone on any baseband using Ultrasn0w 1.0-1 from Cydia. To do this:

-Start “Cydia” on your iPhone.

-Touch on “Manage” tab on the bottom.

Barnes & Noble has said this week, somewhat surprisingly, that it plans to put itself up for sale after suffering large losses in the battle for leader in the digital books market.

After the news, shares of the company jumped as high as 27 percent, finishing the day up 19 percent.

Founder and largest shareholder Leonard Riggio said he would consider being part of an investment group that could purchase the company.

The news appears to signal that the company is in desperate need of strong decisions that may not be so easy as a public company.

Says Forrester analyst James McQuivey: "They might feel they want to buy the company back now and take it public later and reap the windfall. But there aren't a lot of investors who will be that certain about the probable outcome of that bet."

The company has now formed a "special committee of four independent directors to consider all options for increasing shareholder value."

While the company remains the top brick-and-mortar book store in the world, it has faced increasing pressure from Amazon and Wal-Mart.

In October 2009, billionaires Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the creators of the Kazaa P2P client as well as Skype, announced that they had developed and financed the unlimited music subscription service Rdio, and the company has now made the service available to all.

Separating the service from others like Rhapsody is the fact that Rdio allows users to listen from anywhere in "the cloud," including through their phones, instead of needing to download DRM-laced music locally.

Furthermore, Rdio has many social networking features connected to Facebook and Twitter. Rdio uses subscriber's online social networks to recommend songs, as well. If a bunch of your friends like a certain artist, Rdio will likely recommend it to you.

Rdio has over seven million tracks available from the major labels and thousands of indies.

The service charges $10 per month for unlimited access to music on a computer or your smartphone. For $5, you can get browser-only access.

Rdio is available on BlackBerrys, Android devices and the Apple iPhone.

T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide owners will begin receiving an OTA update for their Android operating system tomorrow, but it is not the highly anticipated Android 2.2 Froyo upgrade.

Along with optimizations comes some nice bug fixes as well, including a fix for an issue that has been quite annoying to me as an owner; the inability to receive MMS when connected to Wi-Fi.

Says T-Mobile: "Beginning August 4, T-Mobile will send an over-the-air (OTA) update to myTouch 3G Slide customers, which will provide a number of benefits, including increased battery performance and enhancements to software features such as Faves Gallery and Genius Button. The update will be sent to customers in staggered waves beginning August 4 and we anticipate all customers will receive it by August 19."

The improvements to Battery Life consist of "Updates to the T-Mobile online contact backup connection, which will improve battery life."

Users will now be able to send and receive MMS messages when connected to Wi-Fi.

Motorola and Verizon will soon unveil a new tablet with a FiOS digital pay-TV service included, trying a new method to differentiate itself from the growing number of tablets expected to hit shelves this year.

The 10-inch device will run Android 2.x and can launch as early as "this autumn."

Motorola is a long-time partner of Verizon, creating TV set-top boxes for the FiOS service.

Market leader Apple has sold over 3 million iPad tablets since launch in early April, but HP, RIM, Microsoft, Samsung, Lenovo and LG have all promised tablets by the end of the year, running either BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows 7 or Android operating systems.

According to AppleInsider, the second generation iPad tablet will likely have a camera, a feature shockingly missing from the first version.

Citing a document of Apple's iPad management policies, the site says there will be an ability to disable the use of the camera. As we know, there is no camera on the current generation model.

Additionally, the site cites a recent job listing from Apple for a "Performance QA Engineer, iPad Media" wherein the description says "we are looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks."

Applicants can then "build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines."

The second generation model iPad will likely offer a front-facing camera with FaceTime video conferencing support.

In less than one year, Windows 7 has surpassed Vista in global usage, however both still pale in comparison to the aged Windows XP.

Vista was released in 2007 to extremely harsh critical reviews. The operating system left many concerns of application compatibility, stringent hardware requirements, and who could forget about the UAC?.

Windows 7 was released in September 2009 to high critical review.

New NetApplications analytics show that Windows has 90.67 percent of the OS market, with XP the dominant leader at 61.87 percent. Windows 7 has now moved to 14.46 percent, just ahead of Vista at 14.34 percent.

In the United States, XP has 44.26 percent, ahead of Vista at 23.31 percent and Windows 7 catching up at 16.09 percent.

Overall Windows share fell from just over 92 percent last July, thanks to a small increase in Apple Mac sales and a large jump in mobile operating systems. Linux share fell to under 1 percent.

NTT DoCoMo has announced their complete purchase of the mobile video firm PacketVideo.

DoCoMo was already a 35 percent owner of the company, purchasing the rest for $111.6 million.

Last July, the company purchased its first stake for $45.5 million.

PacketVideo will continue run independently, keeping the same CEO, president and board of directors.

The acquired company was founded in 1998, becoming one of the earliest mobile video innovators. The company was one of the first to place video on mobile phones, as far back as 1999.

Currently, PacketVideo powers the video services for Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone India, TeliaSonera, Telstra, Rogers Canada, and Telus.

Wikipedia lawyer Mike Godwin recently sent a letter to FBI Deputy Director David Larson rejecting a demand that the community authored online encyclopedia remove an image of the FBI seal from their article on the agency.

You may already know of Mike Godwin from the many internet references to Godwin's Law, which states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Responding to an earlier letter from Deputy Director Larson, Godwin took him to task for using "creative editing" of US law as proof of authority over use of the seal.

The portion of the US Code in question, 18 USC Section 701, makes it a crime to manufacture, sell or possess a badge, identification card or other insignia used to denote an official representative of a US government agency.

Godwin noted that the statutory language, "badge, identification card, or other insignia" was altered to simply read, "insignia" in Larson's letter.

He went on to explain, "You will note that the phrase “or other” precedes the word “insignia”, both of which follow the enumerated items “badges” and “identification cards.” This constrains the definition of insignia to those objects which are similar in nature to badges and identification cards. This definition comports with case law interpreting 701."

According to the latest Net Applications data, Microsoft's Internet Explorer actually gained browser market share for the second straight month, gaining at the expense of rivals Firefox and Chrome.

For the month ended July 31st, IE grew its share globally by .42 percent, while Firefox dropped 1 percent and Chrome fell marginally by .08 percent.

Internet Explorer 8 saw the strongest growth of any individual browser version, moving up 1.38 percent to 42.16 percent.

Net Applications creates the figures based on browser usage, not installation or download numbers.

Overall, Internet Explorer has 60.74 percent of the market, Firefox has 22.91 percent, Chrome has 7.16 percent and Apple's Safari has 5.09 percent. Opera and others account for the remaining 4.10 percent.

View NetApps data here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&sample=32

RIM and AT&T have unveiled the latest BlackBerry smartphone today, the Torch 9800, RIM's first slider device.

The device has a 3.2" HVGA+ touch screen with 480x360 resolution and a 5MP camera with IS, auto-focus and VGA video recording.

On the inside is 512 MB flash memory and 512 MB SDRAM. Included are a 4 GB eMMC + 4 GB media card. The phone has a MicroSD slot with support up to 32GB.

As is standard now, the device supports Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and 3G.

Perhaps the most notable addition alongside the otherwise mediocre specs, is the upgrade to BlackBerry OS 6. BB OS 6 brings a WebKit-based browser which should significantly improve the Internet experience, long a complaint among BlackBerry fans.

The Touch will hit AT&T on August 12th for $200 with contract.

DivX has announced that Skyworth Group, a Chinese electronics company, will introduce DivX Certified digital TVs this year.

DivX certified DTVs are capable of playing MPEG-4 video, either from USB devices or streamed across a network if the TV has the necessary interface. They can also decode video encoded with a variety of other MPEG-4 tools.

According to a joint press release from the two companies, eventually Skyworth will be selling HDTVs with DivX Plus HD Certification, which among other things means support for Matroska (MKV) files.

The first DivX Certified TVs from Skyworth should be available throughout Oceania in August, and introduced soon after in Europe, Africa & the Middle East.

No date for the introduction of DivX HD Ultra Certified models has been announced.

Starting today, kiosks from Redbox will be offering Blu-ray discs for rental in addition to DVDs.

The discs, which will rent for $1.50 (plus tax) per night compared to $1.00 for DVDs, will initially only be available at a little more than half of their locations. As with DVDs, they can be returned to any Redbox kiosk.

The company expects to be stocking Blu-ray discs in all of their kiosks before the end of the year.

The initial selection of Blu-ray discs includes The Book of Eli, Bounty Hunter, Brooklyn's Finest & Green Zone.

With approximately 23,000 locations, Redbox is the leading operator of DVD rental kiosks in the US.

Last week, we reported that Sony's latest PlayStation 3 firmware update, version 3.41 was crashing some consoles and some users simply couldn't install the new update.

Sony denied the software was causing the problems, instead saying it was user's individual hard drives, if they were using manually installed drives.

At the time, the company said: "We apologize for any inconvenience you are experiencing with upgrading Internal Hard Disc Drive (for PlayStation3) on your PlayStation(R)3 computer entertainment system. The information available to our Consumer Services Department does not suggest that this is a problem PlayStation(R) owners are likely to experience when upgrading the HDD with 3.41update. Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) strongly supports the quality of its products and backs them with full confidence."

We ask that you update the previous HDD first to see if the update will go through. Then update from the thumb drive that is formatted in FAT 32 and has the 3.41 update downloaded."