Google+ Users Self-Employed, Students, Still A Bunch Of Dudes

Earlier this month, we showed you a data visualization from the folks over at Bime concerning the demographics of Google+ early adopters.

That analysis was based on a little over 4.4 million Google+ users, a little under a fifth of the reported total users at the time. What it found was that the landscape was dominated by men, by a huge margin of 71.2% to 27.8%. Other interesting stats included to overwhelming population of engineers and Google employees using the social network

Bime has updated their dashboard, this time including a voluntary sample of over 10 million Google+users. Even with Google opening up the registration to allow many more users, the male/female ratio remains basically unchanged. The girls have yet to flock to Google+.

Okay, the dynamic has shifted a little bit. Instead of 72-28 in favor of the guys, the figure is now 70-30. Come on, gals, it’s looking like an awkward middle school party in here.

Here’s what has changed in the last few weeks:

First, the occupation landscape has shifted. Back in July, users overwhelmingly identified themselves as engineers, developers, and designers. In August, the largest occupation has shifted to student.

In July, the company with the largest percentage of Google+ users was, unsurprisingly, Google. Now, the largest employment group identified by users is “self-employed.” New entrants into the top companies list include Sony, HP, and strangely enough, Subway.

One interesting stat to emerge is the number of inactive users on Google+. Apparently, 83% of users are classified as inactive. To be fair, reports have stated that a high percentage of Twitter users are classified “inactive” as well. No extra details about what constitutes “inactive” are given.

The prevalent stat, however, continues to be the male dominance of the social network in its early stages. That gender distribution has to level out, right?

Check out the visualization below -

Source : webpronews

IBM develops electronic brain

Scientists developing the microprocessor believe that in being able to re-wire itself, this technology could begin to learn like the human brain. These cognitive computers could then be used for researching human behaviour and monitoring the environment.

IBM's project leader, Dharmendra Modha, said they are trying to recreate emotion, perception, sensation and cognition in the microprocessors.

The SyNAPSE system uses two prototype ‘neurosynaptic computing chips', which have 256 computational cores, the electronic equivalent of neurons, according to scientists.

One chip has 262,144 programmable synapses, while the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.

In humans and animals, the process of learning is down by forming and strengthening synaptic connections between brain cells and while a machine cannot solder and de-solder its electrical tracks, it can simulate this by strengthening the signal on more important information and paying less attention to others.

IBM has just been awarded $21m by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue work on the SyNAPSE project.

Source : itp.net

YouTube, Google+ Let Users Have Video-watching Party

Google+ users can now have a video-watching party on YouTube.

That means if you want to participate in making the latest viral video even more infectious, you can do it by combining the power of Google+'s Hangout and YouTube's video-sharing functions.

Since the beginning of Google+, early adopters of the new social network have been raving about its Hangout feature, some even calling it G+'s "most interesting and useful feature." Hangouts have been so well appreciated that soon after Google+ went live, Facebook made a counter move and announced its Skype-powered in-browser video chat service.

For Google+ users, taking advantage of the new YouTube feature is simple.

While watching a YouTube video hit "Share" under the video pane, then "Watch with your friends: Start a Google+ Hangout." From there, you'll be asked to install the Google Voice and Video Plugin if you don't already have it. Then it's just a matter of choosing the Circles you'd like to include in your video-watching party.

If you haven't been invited to Google+ yet, you'll have to wait to use the new YouTube function. Google's social network is still in "field trial" and its floodgates haven't yet been opened to the masses.

Imagine sharing a video of one of your kids performing in a school play with your parents who live in another state and watching their reactions via web cam. Or, see your skateboarding teenager showing off video of the latest trick he mastered to young cohorts across town and getting to hear and see their appraisals without having to wait for comments to post on Facebook.

Considering nearly everybody uses YouTube to some degree, the new share option just might propel more people to accept some of those unused invitations and get on Google+.

What's your take? Can you see yourself watching YouTube videos collaboratively with others in a Hangout?

Source : computerworld

Cyber attack hits 350,000 Epson Korea customers

SEOUL — Epson Korea Co., Ltd. said on Saturday hackers had breached the personal data of its 350,000 registered customers last week, the latest in a series of cyber attacks involving a huge number of victims in the country.

An official at the South Korean affiliate of Seiko Epson Corp. said the company has reported the case to the communications regulator. It said personal information, including phone numbers, email addresses, names and coded data of customers registered on its website had been compromised.

"We are still investigating the case and tracking down the attackers," said the official, who declined to be named.

South Korea has recently drawn up an intensive cyber security master plan after a wave of hacking attacks against its government agencies, companies and financial firms exposed the vulnerabilities of networks in the world's most wired country.

Late last month, hackers who the state-run Korea Communications Commission alleged were from China attacked the Nate Internet portal and the Cyworld blogging site, both run by SK Comms, accessing the personal information of up to 35 million users in the country's biggest cyber attack so far.

In April, state-funded Nonghyup, a giant commercial bank, suffered a massive network failure that affected millions of customers. Seoul prosecutors at the time blamed North Korean hackers for the incident. The secretive North, still technically at war with the South since a truce pact ended the 1950-53 Korean War, denies the accusation.

HP, Microsoft, Apple and the future of the PC

Hewlett-Packard’s announcement this week that it’s discontinuing its TouchPad line and intends to spin off its PC business is another sign of how rapidly the market for personal computers are being destabilized by tablets and smartphones.

Microsoft has seen weaker Windows revenue this year, a result of a decline in overall PC sales. The Windows division is the Redmond software giant’s second biggest source of revenue. The PC trend is not new. IBM sold off its business in 2005, and other PC makers have struggled over the years.

According to IDC research, computer makers are expecting to ship only 4 percent more PCs in 2011 compared to 2010. Meanwhile, tablets are selling briskly, according to a New York Times article Saturday:

Global sales are expected to more than double this year to 24.1 million, according to Forrester Research. More than two-thirds of those tablets, however, are sold by Apple. Sales of its iPad pulled in $9 billion in just the first half of the year, or 30 percent more than all of Dell’s consumer PC business in the same period. The joke in Silicon Valley is that there is no tablet market, only an iPad market. (That was also true of Apple and the iPod market.)

Speedy Firefox 7 Enters Beta

Mozilla last week released a beta of Firefox 7, putting the lighter-weight browser in front of a large number of users for the first time.

According to Mozilla, Firefox 7 uses significantly less memory than Firefox 4 through Firefox 6, cutting consumption by as much as 50% .

The savings come courtesy of a two-month-old project dubbed "MemShrink" designed to drive down Firefox's memory consumption and close "memory leaks," bugs that prevent memory from being released to the system when tabs are closed. Over time, those bugs can degrade the browser's performance, or in extreme cases, cause it to crash or lock up.

In a blog post ten days ago, Nicholas Nethercote, the Mozilla engineer who manages MemShrink, said that Firefox 7 "uses less memory..., often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less" than earlier versions.

Nethercote also claimed that the memory changes make Firefox 7 faster than its predecessors.

The appearance of Firefox 7 in Mozilla's beta channel starts the clock ticking toward a September 27 release of the browser. Mozilla now rolls out new versions every six weeks, adding features to each edition as they're completed rather than waiting for numerous changes to accumulate.

Other improvements in Firefox 7 highlighted by Mozilla include faster synchronization of passwords and bookmarks between copies of the browser, quicker rendering of HTML5 Canvas-based animation on Windows PCs, and a new optional add-on that provides Mozilla with performance data.

Firefox 8, next in the series, will sport some additional memory bug fixes, said Nethercote Tuesday, including one that decreases consumption on very large web pages.

Mozilla said Thursday that it will launch Firefox 8 to the "Aurora" channel some time today. That edition is slated to ship in final form on November 8.

Five months ago, Mozilla shifted to a faster release cadence and a multiple-version program that offers Aurora, beta and release editions -- listed in increasing order of polish and stability -- for testing and evaluation.

The beta of Firefox 7 can be downloaded from Mozilla's website. Users who have been running earlier betas -- such as the one for Firefox 6, which shipped three days ago -- will be automatically offered version 7.

Fujitsu IS12T Mango phone ready to launch August 25th, already accepting preorders?

When we first learned of the Fujitsu IS12T, the world's first handset sporting Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango," it was rumored to be showing up in the second half of August. Our hopes were crushed, however, when the company officially stated that it should be available the following month "or beyond." Sure, a September launch would still be on right on time (given Microsoft's intent of releasing the update this fall), but wouldn't it be nice to see something come out ahead of schedule? Chin up, folks -- the Au KDDI store in Nishi-Kasai tweeted that the IS12T will be released this coming Thursday and isalready accepting preorders. And there's more to the story: even though Nanopho reports that multiple locations are busy taking reservations, Au's official site is still sticking to its guns about the phone's September release. Given the tug-of-war taking place between the stores and their corporate boss, next week may turn out to be quite interesting.

HP's Latest Fiasco: The Vanishing $99 TouchPad

It wasn't quite the seen you'll find for the iPhone 5 debut, but about 30 or more bargain hunters showed up at San Francisco's Best Buy hoping to snatch up a cheap HP TouchPad on Saturday. Internet reports indicated that the TouchPad devices had sold cheaply in Canada, and other big box stores like Fry's had sold out. The going price: $99 for the 16 GB version, $149 for the 32 GB TouchPad.

Most of the crowd had seen the notice on Best Buy's door indicating that there had been an error, and the TouchPad wouldn't be sold at all. Yet they waited to hear it from store workers. Sure enough, at 10 a.m. the outer doors opened, the crowd moved toward the door, and an employee clad in the usual Best Buy Polo shirt informed everyone that if they were there for the TouchPad, they were out of luck.

A disappointed group turned in mass and headed back to their cars.

It wasn't just the size of the group that differed from an Apple product launch. Most notably, there wasn't a Millennial to be found. The average age of the crowd seemed closer to 40. A swarm of German and Japanese luxury cars slowly left the Best Buy parking lot.

Discussions in the cars probably centered around whether they could find the device selling cheaply elsewhere, and about how HP had made yet another implosive mistake in its handling of the WebOS device shutdown.

Google lead July with 182.3M visitors

Google sites ranked as the No. 1 online property in July with 182.3 million visitors, according to a report from comScore.

Google was followed by Yahoo Inc. sites with 177.6 million visitors and Microsoft sites with 174.3 million.

ComScore said Google’s Ad Network also led the July ad ranking with a reach of 93.3 percent of Americans online, followed by Yahoo Network Plus with 87.5 percent, AOL Advertising with 87.2 percent, Yahoo Sites with 82.6 percent and ValueClick Networks with 82 percent.

The back-to-school shopping season got an early jump in July as some parents got a head start on buying school supplies. Traffic to Consumer Goods sites increased 13 percent to reach 25.6 million people. Staples.com Sites took the top spot in the category with 7.3 million visitors (up 30 percent), followed by Office Depot with 4 million (up 21 percent), QVC Sites with 3.6 million (up 5 percent) and OfficeMax with 2.5 million (up 32 percent).

Apparel sites also drew early back-to-school shoppers as the category grew 8 percent to 66 million visitors. Zappos Sites ranked No. 1 in the category with 8.4 million visitors (up 54 percent), followed by Limitedbrands with 6.4 million, Nordstrom.com with 4.9 million (up 44 percent), Nike with 4.8 million, and OldNavy.com with 4.8 million (up 4 percent). Other top apparel retailers in July included Forever 21, Inc. (3.6 million), Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (3.4 million), American Eagle Outfitters (3.1 million) and Gap online (2.6 million).

Google Maps Comes to 40+ New Country Domains

Google Maps announced today that it has just become available on over 40 new top-level country domains, including Mongolia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Venezuela and more. Country domains are an important point of access for users around the world, since the languages and results can be customized to suit the specific audience. Google Maps is now available in more than 130 countries and more than 60 languages.

Google also announced this week that Street View, its photographic interface for exploring places in three dimensions through Google Maps, is coming to the Amazon rainforest with the help of the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon. The Google LatLong team has had a big week of international news, and their addition of weather to Google Maps yesterday rounds out a pretty busy product week overall.

The countries with new Google Maps domains are highlighted in dark green:

Google has pushed several international expansions this summer across many of its services. The Chrome Web Store received expanded and better targeted support for international markets this month, and its improvements to the Google Search ranking algorithms, codenamed "Panda," rolled out in most languages. Google Plus, the new social network, is still dominated by people from the U.S., but as Google pushes tighter integration of Google Plus into all its services, the international expansion of properties like Maps will raise its profile.

Google Begins Verifying Google+ Accounts

Google has started adding small verification badges to certain Google+ accounts.

The badges initially appear as a small, gray, circular checkbox to the right of the account name, and then expand on mouseover to say “verified name.” Our Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan is among the first group of accounts to be verified like this, and here’s how the badge appears on his profile with the mouseover in place.

Google’s Wen-Ai Yu made the announcement Friday evening in a Google+ post and accompanying video. She explains that verification right now is focused on

• public figures
• celebrities
• people who have been “added to a large number of circles”

There’s no definition of “large number of circles” and, on a quick check, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to verification, either. I’m seeing the verified badge on accounts like Google’s Vic Gundotra, who has about 119,000 followers, and well-known social media author Brian Solis, who has about 22,000 followers.

Google’s Avinash Kaushik doesn’t have the verification badge — he has about 8,800 followers — while another Google employee, Chris Schrier does, even though he has about 4,500 followers — half of what Kaushik has. And a user named Adrian Rodriguez is also verified, even though he claims to only have about 100 followers (as he says in the comments on Google’s announcement).

In other words, it’s probably a waste of time to try figuring out the minimum level for verification. It’s equally pointless to try figuring out Twitter’s standards for verified accounts. In fact, the whole social verification scene is quite a mess these days.