Welcome to the Weekly Tech Update with me, Mike Walmsley. It’s a look at everything that has happened in the world of technology, the Internet, Search Engines and social media over the last week. This week I have stories about Google, Facebook, Pinterest and much more…

Technology

LTE is the technology that gives you superfast mobile broadband with speeds comparable to ordinary broadband via a landline. At the moment here in the UK the only mobile network offering LTE is Everything Everywhere. Their network currently covers 10 cities with 6 more due to be added by the end of the year. Other operators are chomping at the bit to get access to those oh so important frequencies so that they can roll out their own LTE services. Ofcom have announced that these frequencies will be auctioned early next year and expects that the new networks should be up and running by the middle of 2013. Ofcom believes that the auction could raise in excess of £2 billion pounds.

I saw a nifty little gadget this week. It’s called the Tinke and is from a company called Zensorium. The Tinke attaches to your iPhone via the connection dock and then you put your finger over a sensor and it measures your heart and respiratory rate among other things. The Tinke will be released at the end of this month and should retail for around £100. If you know an iPhone owning fitness freak or maybe an iPhone owning hypochondriac then this could be a perfect gift for them.

Internet

Google has launched its online music store in the UK. The rival to Apple’s iTunes can be accessed via the Google Play website. There is not much variety as with iTunes but many of the prices are cheaper. Google already allows you to store your music in the cloud and digital music is a perfect medium for online sales.

I thought I would tell you about an email that I received this week. It claimed to be from Linked IN and told me that I had a new person join my professional network. I knew that this was not from Linked In as I have not requested to connect with anyone on Linked In for months. The email also contained a link that tried to send users to a website somewhere in Russia, the link may have contained malware. I just wanted to make people aware of this scam and if you go to my blog you will find some useful tips on how to protect your email account.

Search Engines

It has been about a year since Google started to encrypt the search queries of those people who are signed into Google. This has an implication for anybody using an analytics package for their website as these search queries cannot be tracked. According to a new study this affects 39% of searches. I have checked this against the stats of my own website and mine is pretty constant at 35%.

Yandex the Russian search giant have just released an iPad app. I have downloaded and tried the app. It is easy to use and I found that most queries will produce similar results to Google though often not quite in the same order as Google.

Social Media

Facebook has faced something of a backlash from page owners who have seen the reach of their posts drop since Facebook introduced “promoted posts”. The reach is the number of people that have the status placed into their newsfeed. The greater the reach the more people have seen your message. Facebook have now launched a separate “Pages Feed” that can be seen in the left hand menu of the desktop version of the site.It will then show you the number of updates that are waiting for you to see. The feature is still being rolled out so you may not see it yet. Many page owners are complaining that they are being forced to pay to get their message seen. While I see where these companies are coming from perhaps they need to think about how to create compelling content for their page that encourages users to come back regularly.

There are reports that Pinteret was affected by a bug yesterday. Some users found that their personal boards disappeared. Pinterest had made a number of changes to the site earlier in the day and the temporary outage may have been connected to this. Pinterest appears to be back to normal for everybody again now so you get pinning!

And finally, Rockstar games released a new trailer for Grand Theft Auto V. This latest version of the game will be set in Los Santos, based on Los Angeles, and is set for release in Spring 2013. I’ve not played a video game in years but I suspect I might be ordering a new console early in the new year! You can see the trailer on my blog.