Latest news

Tuesday court filing says Paul Ceglia's lawyers will be replaced.

Two law firms representing Ceglia in a lawsuit over ownership of Facebook Inc. have reportedly withdrawn from the case. Paul Ceglia claims that a contract he signed years ago when Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard student entitles him to a large chunk of Facebook.

Tuesday's court filing did not give a reason for the change in representation. The lawsuit gained widepsread attention because of the involvement of DLA Piper, an international law firm that touts 4,200 attorneys which commonly represents corporations.

Dennis Vacco, a former New York State attorney general, a law firm that also represented Ceglia, declined to give any comment on Tuesday's filing. Facebook has branded Ceglia an "inveterate scam artist," and claims that the contract is a complete forgery.

The case was originally filed in July of last year. Ceglia will now be represented by attorney Jeffrey Lake.

Twitter co-founder's mobile payment service gets 9-figure investment.

In the financing round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Jack Dorsey's Square service secured $100 million. Square enables people to use their mobile phones to accept credit card payments from others. Visa has previously invested in the company (though the sum was never disclosed).

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers sits on the Square board.

Mobile payment services are starting to roll out and everybody wants to get their share of the pie. Square is in a business where it has many competitors, and plans to use the new financing to accelerate its growth, according to Dorsey, who acts as CEO.

To use Square, you need to sign up to get a free Square card reader (shown in picture). The card reader attached to your phone or iPad. A free application is available for iOS (iPhone) or Android devices. There are no contracts, monthly fees or merchant fees, when you use a card with Sqaure there is just one 2.75 percent fee.

AT&T has revealed the first ever "Facebook phone" this week, the HTC Status.

The device is dubbed so because it has its own Facebook button underneath the keypad which will give users a chance to use a deeply integrated Facebook app.

For example, if you are listening to music, by hitting the Facebook button you can instantly share what song you are playing, and same goes for Web browsing and pictures. Simply hit the button to share the site you are on or upload the picture you just took.

When a friend calls, you will see their Facebook picture and current status on the home screen.

Says HTC (via BI):

HTC Status brings a Facebook experience to people who want to share their experiences with their friends faster and easier than ever before. With a dedicated Facebook share button combined with the hallmark HTC Sense experience, HTC Status makes it easy for people to stay connected to the things that are important to them.

MySpace has been sold to Specific Media for $35 million, ending the failed News Corp. era for the social networking site.

Specific Media is a large Ad-targeting firm that should make use of MySpace's remaining traffic.

As part of the deal, News Corp will keep a small equity stake and CEO Mike Jones will step down within the month.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. purchased the company for $580 million in 2005 and quickly saw it 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 last year.

Initial reports had News Corp. wanting to keep a 20 percent stake but it appears now that Murdoch wants the struggling social network off his books by the end of the year and will keep a much smaller stake, perhaps under 5 percent.

The company put itself up for sale earlier this year asking for $100 million.

One analyst is very bearish on the future prospects of 3D movies.

Analyst Richard Greenfield of BTIG has sent a note to clients this week, urging them to begin to sell any shares they may have in RealD, the company behind the 3D tech seen in most movie theaters.

Greenfield believes that RealD's projection of "75 percent of movies in theaters being 3D" is completely "disconnected from reality" and impossible.

The analyst believes that "consumers will increasingly reject 3D" and ticket sales will fall.

A main problem Greenfield sees with 3D films is how dim they are, especially when adding in special glasses. It has even been reported that Paramount asked exhibitors to brighten up their projectors for Transformers 3, but given that the request will cost more for exhibitors, it is doubtful we will see brighter 3D movies anytime soon.

Google gives social networking another blast with its most ambitious Facebook-killing attempt yet.

Google's failure to capitalize on the growth of social networking online has been notable over the past few years. Google's Buzz service, a sort of Twitter-mimic, was a failure and only seemed to annoy most GMail users. Google's position as the web's heavyweight giant is under threat as Internet users change the way they use the web, and the reasons why they do.

The failure of the search giant to really tap the new resource has been a put off for investors, and a frustration for a company that is accustomed to success. Enter Google+! Google revealed detailed information on its new social network experiment this week on its blog, and in a few videos which I've included here (warning: prepare for some cheese!).

The Google+ project aims to make it easier to connect with other users online, while maintaining the subtlety of real-world interaction. "In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it," Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President, Engineering at Google, wrote in the company's official blog.

Google+ targets your relationships and interests in an intuitive way. It recognizes that not all relationships we hold with other people are the same. The information we share with certain friends and family can be vastly different to what we'd consider appropriate to share with others.

Hacktivist group 'Anonymous' has released data stolen from Viacom's computer networks as well as user data taken from a Universal Music Group affiliated website.

Furthermore, the group released data from various governments around the world.

The news comes just days after the LulzSec group posted its farewells, after 50 days of hacks that included multiple strikes on different Sony entities and the FBI, SOCA and other authorities.

LulzSec then moved to join Anonymous, with the combined group calling themselves "AntiSec," aimed at taking down "corrupt governments" and "corrupt" corporations, which they argue are all of them.

The group had faced some heat recently from other Web-based groups like "Web Ninjas" and "The Jester," each of which promised to reveal the personal details of the group just like the group did to many innocent users.

For now, LulzSec's legacy will be that of 50 days of chaos and hactivism and an arrest on a lowly IRC chat operator with Asperger's.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer came under intense scrutiny at the company's recent shareholder meeting, with the masses demanding he resign after three years straight of mounting losses.

The CEO of course did not resign, but did note that he took a 16 percent pay cut for the fiscal year, down to $4.27 million.

PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai, long expected to be Stringer's eventual successor, explained that the company's top priority is to reverse the losses in its TV business, which has now lost money for seven straight fiscal years with an anticipated eight straight next year. Sony's fiscal year ends on March 30th each year.

Despite taking the pay cut, Stringer was awarded about $3.5 million worth of Sony stock options, as his usual bonus.

The company posted a loss of $3.21 billion for the most recent fiscal year, mainly due to the tsunami and earthquake disaster in Japan in March. The hacker attacks on the PSN also cost the company $170 million, mainly thanks to security updates and compensation packages it offered afterwards. It is unclear how much revenue they lost in the weeks the service was forced offline.

Acer America announces forthcoming U.S. launch of Acer AC700 Chromebook.

The AC700 (pictured) is the first in Acer's planned line of products that will run Google's Chrome operating system. The company says its first Chromebook is ideal for savvy mobile consumers, educational institutions, and business people that spend most of their time on the Internet for cloud computing such as using web-based email, uploading photos to sites like Flickr and Picasa, and keeping up-to-date on the latest news and events.

Powered by a dual-core Intel Atom processor, the AC700 boots up to Chrome in less than 10 seconds, and resumes almost instantly. It features an 11.6-inch HD Widescreen CineCrystalTM LED-backlit LCD, and a HDMI output to watch content on high-definition televisions and other displays.

The Intel Atom N570 dual-core processor and 2GB of DDR3 memory provide the performance to speed through the web, access files, enjoy video and more. It has a 16GB SSD for storage, has two USB 2.0 ports and a 4-in-1 card reader that accepts popular flash storage.

Acer InviLink Nplify 802.11b/g/n Wifi Certified will keep customers connected to the Internet. To support this always-on connection, the Acer AC700 provides excellent battery life of up to six hours with its 6-cell battery.

Zynga, the social gaming behemoth, is filing for an IPO that will value the company at upwards of $20 billion, a new record for "social" media sites and a high for U.S.-based game companies.

The company is behind hits like CityVille, FarmVille, Live Hold Em Poker Pro and Empires & Allies, each of which have multi-millions of active users. CityVille, for example, has 88 million monthly users on Facebook and Zynga games have a total of 271 million active monthly users.

Last month, the professional social network LinkedIn IPO'd and saw huge gains its first day before falling 50 percent over the next three weeks. Having since recovered some, the company has an $8 billion market value despite never having seen a profit. Streaming music service Pandora IPO'd earlier this month and now has a $2.8 billion market value despite never having seen a profit, either.

Zynga is looking to raise about $1.5 billion with its IPO, which would value the company somewhere between $15-$20 billion, higher than Activision Blizzard ($13.26 billion) and Electronic Arts ($7.5 billion).

The company is insanely profitable, already, and made $400 million net profit on $850 million in revenue in 2010. Analysts expect the company to make around $500 million net profit on revenue of $1.5 billion in 2011. The company primarily makes money from the sale of virtual goods (upgraded farm equipment in FarmVille, millions of poker chips in Live Hold Em, etc) since their games are all free.

'Re-built from the ground up', but professionals are not impressed.

Apple recently released Final Cut Pro X, the newest version of its mega-popular Final Cut Pro series of video editing software. After its unusually low-key announcement, reviews started to flood in with many of them painting a less-than-rosy picture of the new 64-bit video editing suite.

The $299 Mac App Store product is just not as good as the previous version, Final Cut Pro 7, for many Mac users it seems. Various claims of Apple providing refunds to unhappy customers chave surfaced online since. AppleInsider documents one such case where an Apple customer sent an e-mail to the company saying that Final Cut Pro X does not meet the standards set by its predecessor.

An Apple adviser responded and admitted that Final Cut Pro X, "does not contain properties that were highly regarded in the last version." The customer was granted a refund for the sale.

Daily figure jumps by 100k in in about six weeks.

Google had revealed in December of last year that about 300,000 Android devices were being activated daily. That number jumped to 400,000 by May 10th. On Tuesday, Google's Andy Rubin announced that customers are activating half a million Android devices daily.

He said that Android's weekly growth rate is around 4.4 percent, but did not split the growth into smartphones and tablet PCs. Android smartphones are more popular than iPhones because handsets from Apple's biggest rivals, including Samsung, pack Android.

Similarly, the same handset makers are using the Android operating system for their tablet PC devices, and the mobile OS is only likely to grow in use.

NVIDIA shows off fastest Notebook GPU.

On Tuesday, the graphics chip-maker announced the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M, the fastest graphics processing unit (GPU) for notebooks. It is featured now in the Alienware M18x (pictured).

"The best game support. The best gaming features. The best gaming performance available anywhere. That's the essence of the GeForce GTX 580M," said Rene Haas, general manager of notebook products at NVIDIA. "With power like this, you can turn all the knobs to 11."

The Alienware M18x provides the option to use two GeForce GTX 580M GPUs in a single system, using NVIDIA's single link interface (SLI) technology. Also, the soon-to-be-launched Alienware M17x will pack NVIDIA Optimus technology which helps to boost battery life by intelligently tinkering graphics based on use (so a five hour full charge on Facebook, yet 100 frames per second for Call of Duty: Black Ops).

"Gamers aspire to experience games at their highest settings," says Eddy Goyanes, product marketing manager for Alienware.

"Alienware activates the technology designed to enable those aspirations. With the launch of the GeForce GTX 580M on the Alienware M17x, and a dual card option on the M18x, that synergy continues -- Alienware delivers the ultimate gaming experience."

New boards for AMD Llano A8 and A6 Accelerated Processing Units (APU).

Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. launched its latest series of motherboards supporting the new AMD A75 series chipsets, and the latest AMD A-Series APUs. Gigabyte A75 based motherboards offer DIY PC builders and integrators a new world of 3D and multimedia performance with the most scalable, and best value upgrade path imaginable.

The new boards features an AMD A75 "Hudson" chipset supporting the latest 32 nanometer AMD A-Series APUs. These processors are the first ever to combine a DX11-capable, high performance graphics processor with a choice of a dual or quad core CPU in one silicon die.

Using Gigabytes's Easy Tune 6 utility, users can overclock the AMD A-Series APU to gain further performance enhancements over stock settings. The AMD A75 series platform showcases AMD Dual Graphics technology, allowing users to further boost 3D graphics performance by adding an additional discrete AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 series graphics card to the system.

The boards feature Hybrid EFI technology (for booting from disks over 3TB), 3 Power Boost USB ports (speeds up charging times for connected devices) and High-end 108dB HD Audio.

1plusV sued the U.S.-based web search giant for €295 million, or about $418 million.

The lawsuit comes as the European Commission is probing Google for alleged anti-competitive practices. Google has been accused by several companies (including Microsoft) of abusing its dominant position by giving preferences to its own services at the expense of potential rivals in its search results.

In the United States, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also formally notified Google that it has opened an investigation into its business practices. 1plusV, which operates the ejustice.fr legal website, filed its claim with the Paris Commercial court on Tuesday.

"Between 2007 and 2010, no less than 30 vertical search engines created by 1plusV were blacklisted, some of which showed significant business potential," the complaint reads.

Google has not commented specifically about the case, only confirming that it just received the complaint itself.

British price comparison site Foundem, along with Microsoft, German price comparison service Ciao and 1plusV really kicked off the complaints against Google's practices in Europe.