Weblog

As promised, here is the follow-up to our previous coverage on the All Things Digital conference which took place last month in California and has featured such high profile tech industry voices as man-of-the-moment Steve Jobs, and also, later on, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Ballmer opened the last day of the conference, accompanied by his chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. For those who weren’t able to attend, there is now some very interesting video highlights available online over at Guardian technology. What’s most interesting for me here is the difficulty Ballmer has in keeping the discussion focused on Microsoft, and not simply discussing the innovations of successful rivals like Google and Apple.

There’s some interesting points from both Ozzie and Ballmer – as…

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One thing you can say about Apple is that they have pretty good timing when it comes to organising their product announcements and releases. Just as the iPad hype begins to dissipate (and the spectacular sales figures start to come in), Apple have released some more info on their next sure-fire mega hit; the iPhone 4.

As expected, the phone looks roughly like the iPhone 3G which we all knew would be the case anyway since the high profile debacle surrounding the lost prototype (if you by any chance didn’t already hear about this then check out our previous post on the topic). However, there are a number of significant changes under the bonnet which do distinguish the iPhone 4 as…

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There’s been a few really top bits of reporting from Techcrunch over the past day or so concerning the developing spat between Mahalo CEO, Jason Calcanis, and Facebook. In short, Calcanis has been extremely public in recent weeks with his dissatisfaction over Facebook’s account termination policies and procedures, claiming that his data continued to be online even after his account deletion.

Facebook responded with some excuse about third-party sites keeping this data online, and re-iterated that they themselves had actually deleted the data. Anyway, with both parties basically calling eachother liars, Techcrunch thought they’d do some actual research rather than merely report the mud-slinging match – and hence tested Mahalo’s policy on account termination.

Surprise, surprise – it’s actually harder to quit…

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Google’s recent experiment with changing the layout policy for its search engine didn’t last long. As most of you will have noticed, there was a brief period (less than a day) during which we had some pretty flashy images taking up the space around Google’s search box. And then, like a bad dream, it all went away and we were left with a strange sense of confusion as to whether it had really happened, or if we’d imagined it.

Well, judging by the amount of negative feedback Google’s backgrounds attracted on forums and blogs, I doubt that many will lament the technical problem which supposedly prompted Google to remove the feature. However, what has been most interesting for me during this…

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Four New York University students have raised over $200k to launch their privacy-conscious social network, Diaspora, intended as an alternative to Facebook for those becoming increasingly unhappy with the latter’s privacy policies. While it still very early days for Diaspora (they’re unlikely to overtake Facebook’s 500 million user mark any time soon), there can be no question that there certainly is a viable niche in the social network market for such a network as Diaspora – as their remarkably effective fund-raising efforts have shown (initial targets were a paltry $10k, exceeded 20 times over by the actual sum raised).

Furthermore, with the ‘Quit Facebook Day’ (organised by disaffected former users of the network) on May 31st seemingly attracting a reasonable number of…

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