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.
Technology
The main tech story in the last week has undoubtedly been the verdict in the Apple Samsung patent infringement case in the US. Apple claimed that Samsung had used various Apple patented technologies in both its mobile phones and tablets. Apple went on to claim that Samsung had deliberately made their phones look like an iPhone and that Apple had lost revenue through consumers buying a Samsung phone when they really wanted an iPhone.
The jury found in Apple’s favour and ordered Samsung to pay $1 billion in damages. Samsung say that they will appeal the verdict.
My thought is this, have you ever met anybody who has said that they bought a Samsung phone by mistake when they really wanted to buy an iPhone? No? Me neither.
Some better news for Samsung as they launched a slew of new products yesterday. They have announced a 10.1” tablet that will run Windows RT. There will be a new taller and narrower Galaxy Note running Jelly Bean, the latest version of the Android operating system. Most interesting is the Android powered camera. This is a digital camera that will allow you to install photo editing apps. It can also send images to a handset meaning that you can use the camera remotely if you want to be in the shot yourself.
Internet
Throughout the Olympic Games Virgin Media offered free wifi access on the London underground. Virgin say that during the games there were over 8 million updates sent to various social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The wifi service is currently available in 72 stations and this is expected to rise to 120 by the end of the year.
Amazon has released its own cloud storage solution in the UK. The service is called Amazon Cloud Drive and will give 5GB of storage to users for free and then has a tiered pricing plan starting at £6 per year for 20GB and moves up to £320 per year for a terabyte of data. This makes it very competitive when compared to other services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud.
Search Engines
Group M UK and Neilson have conducted research into who clicks where on search engine results pages. Perhaps the most interesting part of this research was the claim that women are more likely to click on paid for ads than men are. They also say that the older you are the more likely you are to click on a paid advert. So if you are aiming to sell Hormone Replacement Therapy then you might want to consider a Pay Per Click strategy.
Social Media
Flipboard, the app that draws in all your favourite social streams and presents them in a magazine style is introducing a new service known as Flipboard TV that will show clips from popular YouTube channels and will be organised into topics such as music, cooking and science.
Finally, Google is introducing a new feature over the next couple of days. If you are a Google+ user then when you are on the Google homepage you will get reminders in the top right of the screen about your friends birthdays. This is in addition to the little orange box that tells you how many notifications your Google+ account has.
While this may not be ground breaking it is yet another indication that Google are starting to understand social more and more and are starting to unify all their many products into one interlocking bundle.