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Although the Windows Phone platform unquestionably represented a quantum leap forward in Microsoft mobile technology, underneath its slick interface and app support beats the heart of an outdated OS.

While iOS was developed from OS X and Android from Linux, Windows Phone 7 was built from an already dated platform called Windows CE. Starting with an existing mobile OS allowed Microsoft to develop Windows Phone into a finished product very quickly, but a lot of work would have been required to make it suitable for a modern tablet.

Last year Microsoft began detailing their plans for the touchscreen tablet market. While their vision does include Windows Phone's Metro interface, it is built on their next generation desktop OS. Windows 8 is essentially the culmination of work began at least a decade ago to redesign Windows for servers. The goal was to divide the OS into many separate parts which could be selectively installed.

The same changes which make it possible to minimize Windows' footprint on a server also proved useful in optimizing Windows for tablets. Combined with the touchscreen friendly Metro UI and new strategies to keep hardware in an idle state whenever possible, they make it possible for Microsoft to finally create a modern mobile OS.

IDC has released their annual report on the mobile phone market. As expected, Nokia and Samsung came out the overall leaders, with Apple finishing the year in third place.

While Apple moved fewer than a third as many units as Samsung, and a quarter that of Nokia, as the only vendor in the top five who exclusively makes smartphones, their showing was quite impressive. By contrast, Nokia's ability to retain the top spot, despite a sharp decline in Symbian smartphone sales, demonstrates just how dominant they remain in the feature phone market.

But perhaps the most impressive company last year was ZTE. The Chinese phone manufacturer maintained the fifth position, moving more than 66 million handsets and narrowing the gap with fourth place LG Electronics. While LG's sales plummeted more than 18 million units last year, ZTE improved by nearly 16 million handsets. ZTE's 17.1 million unit performance in the last quarter of the year was nearly a match for LG's 17.7 million.

With all the furor over SOPA and PIPA in recent months, the signing of the ACTA trade agreement last October by the US, Japan, and a handful of other countries has largely been ignored.

The Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement resulted from efforts by the entertainment industry to mandate copyright law via international agreement. It was written in secret, with the input of movie and recording industry lobbyists, but with the general public provided information only via leaks from various parties to the negotiations.

According to US President Obama, ACTA isn't actually a treaty, and therefore requires no ratification by the US Senate. In the EU, the process of approving ACTA is now in full swing. Thanks in part to the significant publicity generated by SOPA and PIPA protests, officials from several EU governments are coming under fire for supporting ACTA.

According to the latest figures, Ice Cream Sandwich is now on 1 percent of Android devices.

The software update, Google's largest yet for the mobile operating system, was released in December alongside the launch of the Galaxy Nexus.

While adoption is slow, it is important to note that the OS is seeing much faster growth than its tablet predecessor, Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Also, there are very few devices that have the update, most notably the aforementioned Nexus and the Transformer Prime tablet.

Gingerbread (2.3) remains atop the list at 58.6 percent, followed by Froyo (2.2) at 27.8 percent.

Honeycomb has 3.4 percent share and the very old Eclair (2.1) still has 7.6 percent share. 1.6 percent of users still have Android 1.5 or 1.6, which were released in 2009.

In an effort to shut down illegal sports streaming sites before the Super Bowl on Sunday, American prosecutors have taken down 16 popular sites including FirstRowTV.

Thousands of users use the sites to watch NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and Fifa streams, not to mention pay-per-view events like UFC or boxing.

One man, 28-year-old Yonjo Quiroa of Michigan, has been arrested and charged with being the operator behind 9 of the sites. Authorities say Quiroa made over $13,000 profit from the sites through advertisements.

The list of the sites taken down is: firstrow.tv, firstrowsports.com, firstrowsports.net, firstrowsports.tv, hq-streams.tv, robplay.tv, soccertvlive.net, sports95.com, sports95.net, sports95.org, sportswwe.net, sportswwe.tv, sportswwe.com, xonesports.tv, youwwe.com and youwwe.net.

Last year, days before the Super Bowl, as well, U.S. authorities took down 10 similar sites. As with all piracy-based activities, if you take down one, many more will just pop up to take its place, as is expected after the demise of firstrow.

VeriSign, the registry for the .com and.net top-level domains, has admitted today it was hacked repeatedly in 2010.

More surprisingly, top-level managers were not notified about the data breaches until 2011, added the company in its statement.

Says the company in their recent 10-Q SEC filing: "In 2010, VeriSign faced several successful attacks against its corporate network in which access was gained to information on a small portion of our computers and servers."

It is unclear what data was compromised or lost.

VeriSign also noted that "given the nature of such attacks, we cannot assure that our remedial actions will be sufficient to thwart future attacks or prevent the future loss of information."

David Choe, a graffiti artist who was hired by Sean Parker to paint the walls of Facebook's headquarters, is about to be worth $200 million.

Choe was given thousands of shares as payment for his work in 2005, even though he reportedly called the site "ridiculous and pointless." Choe will be one of 1200 employees, advisers and investors that will become millionaires or billionaires when the social network goes public in April.

The social network will raise $5 billion in its IPO, with a value of almost $100 billion, far and away the largest public offering, ever.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg will see the biggest payday, with his 28 percent share of the company. Depending on the final value of the company, Zuckerberg will be worth somewhere in the $25-30 billion range.

Despite their years of lawsuits and complaints against Facebook, the Winklevoss twins will see a large windfall as well, thanks to their 1.2 million shares received in an early settlement with Mark Zuckerberg.

The Huffington Post has announced today that it will be launching its own online video streaming network.

The news comes one year after the company was acquired by AOL for over $300 million.

Launching in "the summer," the HuffPost Streaming Network will have 12 hours a day of original programming, with the plan to expand that to 16 hours a day by the end of 2013.

Says founder Arianna Huffington: "The HuffPost Streaming Network will go live on every platform -- computer, smartphone, tablet, Over-the-Top TV -- with the goal of creating the most social video experience anywhere. The network will be built around segments spotlighting the biggest, hottest, most engaging stories HuffPost is covering at any given moment."

In 2011, the Huffington Post saw record traffic, at 36.2 million unique monthly visitors.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ray William Johnson may be the first YouTube millionaire that isn't already a famous musician.

Under the name RayWJ, the 30-year-old now has 1.5 billion views of his videos on YouTube, and is expected to be bringing in about $1 million per year from YouTube's ad revenue share and from sales of his merchandise.

Johnson is famous for ranting about other videos (somewhat like the shows "The Soup" or "Tosh.0") and for bringing in famous comedians to guest star in videos. The viral star's twice-weekly show averages around 10 million views per week.

Because of his popularity, RayWJ is a YouTube partner that makes somewhere between $3000 and $9000 per every 2 million views.

For now, Johnson still calls his videos a "hobby."

Check some of his video's here: RayWJ

According to one report, the upcoming iPad 3 will launch very early March for release at the end of the month.

Additionally, the same report says Apple is planning a separate "unusual media event" for next week, with an unknown reason. Loop Insight, on the other hand, has since refuted the claim on the media event. For now, it will remain strictly speculation.

The iPad 3 is expected to be slighter thicker than previous models in order to have an high-resolution Retina Display at 2048x1536.

Furthermore, the device will house a larger battery that could add an extra 5 hours of battery life. Finally, the most anticipated update is the quad-core A6 processor and the ability to connect to AT&T and Verizon 4G LTE.

A custom version of the XMBC media center has made its way to the $35 version of the Raspberry Pi computer.

The Raspberry Pi, a mini-computer created by UK programmers, is expected to be available very soon, after a year of tweaking and development. What makes the computer so impressive (besides its price tag) is the fact that it can play 1080p HD video with no issues. The devices are intended to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools or at home. The company is looking to promote the Python programming language, alongside Basic and C among others.

For $35 you get a 3.3-inch wide board with a 700 MHz ARM11, 256MB RAM, HDMI-out, SD card slot, a USB port, ethernet, audio jack and Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU.

Raspbmc is available here, along with active discussion with its developers: Raspbmc.com

No wonder they just replaced the CEO.

Just a day after appointing Kaz Hirai as the new CEO of the company, Sony has posted an operating loss of $1.2 billion. The loss was larger than expected.

Sony saw the loss on $23.4 billion in revenue for the year, which was down 17 percent to fiscal 2010.

For the entire fiscal year, Sony is now projecting a loss of $2.9 billion, over double its forecast from last year.

During the quarter, Sony had to take a large loss "primarily due to an impairment loss on the shares of S-LCD, which were sold in January 2012, and the recording of a valuation allowance on deferred tax assets at Sony Ericsson."

To make matters worse, Sony cut its forecast on PS3 sales to 14 million from 15 million and digital camera sales from 23 million to 21 million.

Google has been ordered to pay 500,000 euros in damages for offering Google Maps free of charge in France.

Bottin Cartographes sued Google, alleging they were offering Google Maps for free to push competitors out of the market. Once their competition is gone, Bottin claims, Google plans to begin charging for the service. Despite the fact their allegation seems to run counter to Google's standard business model of using free services to generate ad revenue, a French judge agreed.

Google has vowed to appeal the ruling, which even Bottin's lawyer called "a decision without precedent," according to a report from AFP. In addition to the damage award, Google was ordered to pay a 15,000 euro fine.

Google has been criticized around the world by companies in various sectors for allegedly abusing their dominance in search to give their own services an unfair advantage. However, this seems significantly different from the standard complaints because of the wild claim that Google plans to begin charging users once they eliminate the competition.

Although Samsung is still barred from selling the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany, the newer Galaxy Tab 10.1N will remain available for now.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1N was designed to work around the ban on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 which was ordered last year, and upheld by a higher court late last month. However, Apple has also filed a lawsuit over the 10.1N, alleging infringement of a patent on displaying lists and documents on a mobile touchscreen device.

Despite Samsung's initial victory in keeping the Galaxy Tab 10.1N on the market, German patent expert Florian Mueller, of the FOSS Patents blog, suggests Apple may have a solid case if they appeal. "It's relatively surprising that the Munich court doubted the validity of that patent," wrote Mueller. "Judge Lucy Koh in California deemed that patent both valid and infringed."

He went on to explain:

Have you been looking for a way to make Blu-ray (BDMV) or AVCHD discs from your home videos or TV captures? Do you have Blu-ray discs you want to backup, but want to strip out titles or audio streams to make them fit on a single layer BD-R?

If the answer to either question is yes, you might want to take a look at MultiAVCHD, and our recently added guide can help you get started. MultiAVCHD is a free (donationware) program which uses a number of free programs, including Avisynth, FFDShow, and TSMuxer, to create BDMV or AVCHD discs.

Currently our MultiAVCHD guide is far from complete. Instead of creating a guide covering everything it can do, we decided to start with the basics and ask you what else we should include. Since being published last month, we have already expanded the guide once. We would be happy to let you know what else we can add for you.

MultiAVCHD Quick Start
The first section of Create AVCHD and Blu-ray Discs With MultiAVCHD, is a Quick Start guide. It covers installing MultiAVCHD and the necessary helper applications, setting some basic options, and creating a new disc using your own videos. These could be videos you've captured with a DVR or computer TV tuner or videos from a digital camera or smartphone.