Latest news

Investment bank Morgan Stanley has added their say to the ever-growing iPhone 5 rumor pool.

The bank says the next-gen iPhone, which will likely be released in October, will include a quad-mode LTE/4G chip from Qualcomm allowing for fast data access no matter what carrier you have.

Additionally, newer touch panel tech will mean the iPhone 5 is thinner. The company could use new casing materials, as well.

Says the MS analyst (via Insider): "What is clear about iPhone 5 is that Apple and its supply chain are positively surprised by the demand for iPhone 4S, which increases confidence in strong sales for iPhone 5 later this year. Overall, the supply chain looks for stronger than market growth for both the iPhone (50%+ y/y vs. market 20-30%) and the iPad (20-40% growth, higher with a lower priced iPad 2)"

Furthermore, the bank says the upcoming iPad 3 will go on sale in March with much upgraded features including a quad-core processor, LTE 4G support, and a high-resolution Retina Display at 2048x1536 resolution.

The BBC has confirmed they are considering charging viewers to watch TV shows from its digital archives.

If implemented, the new "pay-per-view" scheme would charge viewers to watch content after its time on the iPlayer has passed. The BBC says it is considering the plan as a way to make up the cost of making the millions of hours of shows available online.

The idea has already been met with hate, from license-fee payers who already pay £145.50 a year for access to BBC's shows.

Says a BBC spokesperson (via Guardian): "We never stop future-gazing at the BBC and there are always a number of new ideas under discussion. Any such ideas would need to be developed in conjunction with the industry and with rights-holders and they would certainly not lead to a two-tier licence fee."

The plan would only be a small fee and would not be implemented until 2016, if BBC chooses to go that way.

News Corp. billionaire CEO Rupert Murdoch has come clean on how his company "screwed up" after buying social network MySpace.

Says the CEO on Twitter: "Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer - we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons."

The company purchased MySpace for $580 million in 2005, right at its peak. The company then quickly saw its prized possession disintegrate. From 2010 to 2011 alone, MySpace traffic fell 48 percent to 35 million unique U.S. visitors. The company had an operating loss of $165 million in 2010 and likely saw a similar number in 2011.

Although you will be very hard pressed to find someone who still uses the site for the reasons it was started, the social network still brings in significant traffic, and was purchased by Specific Media for $35 million last year. The company is a very large ad-targeting firm and could likely make nice business off one of the most trafficked sites in the world.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has expanded its antitrust investigation into Google, adding the Google+ social network to the probe.

FTC investigators are looking into whether Google promotes its own services higher in search results and if they do, whether that practice violates antitrust laws.

The news comes just a week after Google started its "Search, Plus your World" feature, which shows photos, news and comments from Google+ in Google search results. If you have a Google+ account, you will see personal info from friends and circles when you enter a relevant search result.

Google said, at launch, of the new product: "We believe that our improvements to search will benefit consumers. The laws are designed to help consumers benefit from innovation, not to help competitors."

One major critic, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, had this to say: "Google's job as a search engine is to direct searchers to the most relevant information on the Web, not just to information that Google may have an interest in. Google has faced a lot of accusations that it's favoring its own services. Most allegations haven't held up. This is different. Google is suggesting to people that they may want to follow social media accounts -- but not all social media accounts, just Google's."

Amazon has revealed last year's best-selling PC games, both physical and through digital distribution.

Speaking to Joystiq, the giant e-tailer's list had very little surprises in the physical copy market, although the digital distribution list did offer a surprise at the top.

Leading the physical list, as expected, was Call of Duty: MW3. The game brought in over $1 billion in revenue, and is a blockbuster by any standard. On the digital side, COD was not as popular, placing in 8th. Following behind COD in physical sales were non-surprises like Just Dance, Skyrim, Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham City.

The leader on the digital side was more surprising, with the list being led by Square Enix's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the third game in the series. The game, while popular, was critically panned for the most part for being "too boring."

Full lists here:

According to Skype's VP of products Rick Osterloh, a Skype app for Windows Phone devices is coming soon.

The exec noted that the company is actively "working on a Windows Phone product that will be coming out soon," after being asked during CES.

Microsoft, which now owns Skype, has kept updates on the video/voice calling service quiet since the acquisition. The company had initially called for a late 2011 release date for the app, but that timeline passed without any mention.

The Verge says, through its own sources, that the initial Skype 1.0 app will not be fully featured. The "deep" Windows Phone integrated app will not come until Microsoft updates the operating system to "Apollo," which is likely Windows Phone 7.6.

According to a new report by iCrossing, Facebook's current growth rate will propel them to 1 billion users by August 2012.

The company recently confirmed it hit 800 million active users, just a few months after confirming 750 million. It is unclear what Facebook defines as "active," however.

Reads iCrossing's note: "Using a process of linear regression on the data from the end of 2008 onwards we expect Facebook to hit a billion active users around August 2012. Looking from the data from 2006-mid-2008 it looks like Facebook was growing at an exponential rate, however more recent data suggests it's growing in a linear fashion."

Facebook's growth rate has stopped in nations like the U.S. and U.K., where the market has been saturated. Chances are if you haven't signed up for an account since 2004, you don't want one. In other nations, like India and Brazil, growth is exploding, with year-over-year figures almost doubling. Growth is expected to continue its lightning paced growth in the developing nations, each of which have large populations and expanding Internet populations.

If the projection proves correct, 14 percent of the entire planet will be using Facebook by the end of the summer.

The White House has formally responded to a pair of online petitions against SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act).

The petitions were posted to the White House website, using a feature called 'We The People,' which was created for just that purpose. Between them, they have attracted more than 100,000 signatures. While agreeing with many of the sentiments expressed by SOPA's critics, the response seems to whitewash one of SOPA's worst provisions.

It was written by Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinol, whose position was PROTECT IP), U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff Howard Schmidt.

The White House response addresses, in general terms, the issues of censorship and online security. These are the two areas most often cited as concerns by SOPA/PIPA opponents:

A UK college student targeted by the US government for alleged criminal copyright infringement lost his initial bid to block extradition to the US.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, wants Richard O'Dwyer extradited for operating a website, called TV Shack, where links pointing to infringing streams and downloads from other websites were documented.

TV Shack was one of the first websites targeted by ICE as part of Operation In Our Sites, under which they have seized numerous domain names. They claim to have that right based on the use of domain names which fall under the authority of US-based Verisign.

Even though several of the domain names seized have been connected to individuals outside the US, so far O'Dwyer is the only person to face extradition in connection with the ICE operation. This is apparently a side effect of changes to the extradition agreement between the US and UK in 2003. Under the new rules, UK judges are not given the opportunity to evaluate or consider US evidence in their decision.

According to Bloomberg, the upcoming iPad 3 will go on sale in March with much upgraded features.

The tablet will see a bump to a quad-core processor, have LTE 4G support, and a high-resolution Retina Display at 2048x1536.

Manufacturing partners in Asia have already begun producing the device with expected peak volumes to be hit in February.

Retina Display, says Bloomberg, will "have pixels small enough to make the images look like printed material, according to the person. Videos begin playing almost instantly because of the additional graphics processing."

Apple has sold over 40 million iPads in just two years, making it the clear market leader.

Electronic Arts (EA) has announced this week that 2011 saw its digital businesses bring in over $1 billion revenue.

The gaming publisher has spent significant money moving towards a digital strategy and away from retail, and it finally appears to be paying some dividends.

EA spent billions purchasing "casual" and "social" gaming companies like Playfish, PopCap and Chillingo over the last two years and also recently launched its own digital distribution portal, dubbed "Origin." Additionally, the publisher started strategies like "Online Pass" and "Season Pass," which give you access to online features and bonus content for your games.

For 2012, EA says it will be folding its "EA Interactive Label" division into other divisions, meaning social and casual games will be part of the general company and not separate.

Social gaming giant Zynga also noted that they had hired former EA Interactive Label boss Barry Cottle to be executive VP of business and corporate development, joining two other experienced execs who left EA for Zynga in the last 3 months.

According to the latest NPD figures, the Xbox 360 was the lone bright spot for the video game industry in 2011.

Overall U.S. retail sales fell 8 percent year-over-year, while Microsoft's sales grew. Revenue for Microsoft came to $6.7 billion, up from $6.2 billion in 2010.

$4.6 billion of that figure came from software and accessories with the rest from hardware sales. Kinect sales were through the roof, reaching 18 million worldwide.

While they did not disclose the exact figures, NPD's Anita Frazier says the Wii and PS3 were "neck and neck for second place."

Overall, total retail sales fell to $17.02 billion, non-PC hardware fell 11 percent to $5.58 billion and non-PC software fell 6 percent to $8.83 billion. Accessories saw the biggest slide, down just over 11 percent to $2.61 billion.

CD Projekt RED, the developers behind the popular "Witcher" series, have ended their controversial methods of using law firms and torrent-watching private companies to find pirates of their games and sue them.

The devs, which are anti-DRM, lost most respect with gamers after deciding to go the route of the RIAA and other groups in their actions against pirates. The company, through the law firms, was sending letters demanding 900 euros to alleged pirates found via their IP addresses.

Regardless, the company has now flipped, and will no longer be suing alleged downloaders:

CD Projekt's CEO Marcin Iwinski says:
In early December, [a TorrentFreak] article was published about a law firm acting on behalf of CD Projekt RED, contacting individuals who had downloaded The Witcher 2 illegally and seeking financial compensation for copyright infringement. The news about our decision to combat piracy directly, instead of with DRM, spread quickly and with it came a number of concerns from the community.