Yes, you read right…

According to The Inquirer, Google is close to acquiring Valve for an undisclosed sum! But why? What plans does the search behemoth have for a games platform? Maybe they’re simply branching out into markets offering healthy revenue (and gaming has to be one of the healthiest).

Based on ease of use, Steam is an ideal platform for many users. Currently, there are around 15 million active users, downloading over 440 games — now that’s a seriously lucractive market and a feat that’s unrivaled in the sector. Can you see the dollar signs appearing Googles eyes?

Next question - how long after an acquisition will we start to see adverts from Google? Or maybe Google sees Steam as yet another method of distributing content…for a fee, of course.

Popularity: 59% [?]

But not until 2010!

Ok, I admit that it’s some way off but I’m pleased that Mozilla has finally decided to take aim at the mobile market.  The latest info comes as Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, laid out her plans for the coming two years.

Other plans include making more internet data public and developing existing products to be more effective.

Baker is also committed to expanding the role of Firefox and growing its market share, at thet same time as developing new browser technologies such as Aurora.

This isn’t new news. Mozilla is already working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser but no delivery dates have ever been announced. Baker’s current stand is that she will not commit to an explicit timeline. So, in line with current policy, expect the Mozilla mobile browser release ‘when it’s ready’!

Popularity: 66% [?]

The end of the joys of driving?

There’s not a day goes by without our glorious government attempting to ruin our lives and turn us into mindless automatons. Maybe I’m being a little harsh here. After all, just because the speed limiter trials have been hailed a success it doesn’t mean they’ll be fitted in our cars. But then again, what would be the point of testing them?

The Department for Transport has stated they will will now work with vehicle manufacturers, local authorities, insurance companies and others to “…consider what steps should be taken to support the future availability of the technology.” Sounds ominous!

The speed limiter system has three working modes:

The first warns the driver when they are breaking the speed limit on a current stretch of a road. The second mode will apply the brakes automatically when the vehicle is speeding (this mode is voluntary) and the third mode is mandatory; no speeding will be allowed at all.

It’s hoped that, by implementing the system, a large number of the current deaths and injuries on the roads will be avoided.

An obvious shortcoming of the mandatory system is the need to accelerate out of danger - the system would stop you breaking the speed limit which seems dangerous in itself!

Whilst I applaud the attempt to reduce car related deaths and injuries this probably isn’t the way forward. How will the DoT police cars that aren’t fitted with the device? What about boy racer who decides to circumvent the device?

Here’s a final thought; who will be responsible in the event of a speed limiter malfunction that causes death or injury? I bet that event will send our elected morons running for legal cover!

Popularity: 24% [?]

It would be fair to say that most social networks are making hard work of generating revenue from ad networks. The likes of FaceBook and MySpace have been trying hard to pull in some serious cash from advertising - to no avail.  Considering these two social media monsters are having a hard time you’d think that other companies wouldn’t even bother going down the advertising path until a fix had been found. Think again…

LinkedIn thinks they’ve cracked it. Most social networks are hard pressed to sell ads for more $1 CPM (hint; now might be a good time to advertise on FaceBook etc) but LinkedIn have pitched in with ads starting at $30 CPM rising to $76 CPM (text ads from $12 to $20 CPM).

How do they do it? They’ve entered into a deal with Collective Media whereby select sites can target LinkedIn users when they visit a partner site. When a user visits LinkedIn a cookie is placed in the users browser. This will be used to identify them as a LinkedIn member when they visit a partner site. Personal information will be removed, but members will be grouped into different, targetable categories - laser focused advertising delivered to users. The system does allow users to opt out of the program.

Nothing new, you might think until you consider the membership of LinkedIn. Typically, most users of LinkedIn are there to use the business networking aspects of the site, with many being in senior, decision making positions.

Is this really the future of socia networks?

Popularity: 24% [?]

Google Dominates

We all know that Google pretty much owns search, for now. One day, a new competitor will capture users imagination and knock Google of the perch but in the meantime the search giant is building up its empire. A report from comScore yesterday revealed the latest figures for online video viewing - guess what? Yeah, Googles YouTube won. Sorry, did I say ‘won’? I meant annihilated the competition! Nearly half of all the video views were served by Google.

In July, figures show that over 11 billion videos were watched online with Google accounting for 5 billion of those views. Googles closest rival was Fox Interactive (think MySpace TV) with only 445 million views. Microsoft trailed into third place with almost 283 million videos.

The figures for unique visits were equally impressive: Google with 92 million unique viewers in July, Fox Interactive on nearly 55 million viewers, and Yahoo in third position with 32 million unique viewers.

The current expectations are that Google will win everytime, but not to this extent. These figures are real slap in the face, especially for Fox Interactive who forked out $580 million dollars for MySpace. Time for a new plan of attack from Fox, Microsoft and Yahoo before it gets too embarassing.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Alongside contextual ads, of course!

Google announced yesterday that they are expanding historical newspaper archives that users can search online. Google will scanning the archives of a number of partnering newspapers then making the results available on Google’s News Archive Search.

The technology uses optical character recognition to scan and distinguish between headlines and text - basically, it’s an extension of Googles book scanning technolgies.

Unsurprisingly, the news archives results will run contextual ads from Google AdSense with click revenue will being shared with the original publishers. The service will initially launch with millions of articles which will extended in due course.

An interesting point to come out of this technology is Googles hope that the new offering will drive print subscriptions:

“This is built on scanning technology we built for Google Books, but with some new features.

We’ve already started this with books and maps, now we will do it with newspapers. Viewers will see it in their original context, can pan around and search. We will widen the user base and readership of news archives.

We already have News Archive search. You will see an interface similar to Google Books search. But our engineers have built in new algorithms to figure out [things like] what is a headline. As I mouse over the page, headlines are highlighted in blue, indicatingtheir clickability. When you click on something, it centers the story, and zooms in. You can do a snapback to the original article. In the sidebar, in addition to sponsored links we have related articles you can click on.”

Looks like another massive money spinner for the kings of search!

Popularity: 29% [?]

Doubles Market Share in A Year

The economies of the world are falling apart but Blackberrys market share is up (to the tune of 17.4%) according to Gartner. Admittedly, the market is still dominated by Nokia, which shipped 15.3 million handsets although their figure fell from 50.8% a year ago to 47.5%.

RIM sold a total of  5.6 million smartphones during April through June, that’s up from 2.5 million a year ago. Key growth areas for RIM have been outside their main business market.

Nokia won’t take this lying down. Expect them to add functionality to the N-series multimedia phones (if they don’t they’re going to lose even more market share).

Credit Suisse said it expects Nokia’s smartphone market share to fall to 41.6 percent in 2009, hurting profit margins.

Gartner said global smartphone sales growth almost halved from the first quarter to 15.7 percent.

Although current economic trends have hurt smartphone sales badly the launch of the iPhone 3G has reinvigorated the market - everyone is buying it!

To add even more hardship for Nokia, it’s been announced that HTC sales have more than doubled over the past year, hitting 1.3 milliion sales and pushing HTC up from seventh place to third position in the market.

With figures like these you’d hardly believe that the economists of the workd are predicting doom and gloom!

Popularity: 47% [?]

Share price down, down, down!

Recently, the share price of Yahoo was hovering the $34 mark - in part, thanks Microsoft’s attempt to buy up the internet giant.  Yesterday, the price dropped to a five year low of $17.75 - that’s around $23 billion less for the share holders to pad their wallets with!

This doesn’t look good for Jerry Yang - I reckon he’ll be replaced in the very near future but as to when this will happen, who knows! If prices continue to fall at their current rate I’m betting he’ll be gone by the end of November. The Yang farewell march may already be planned but with no formal announcement - look at this way, the Icahn attack dog has been quiet for a while now. Maybe a deal has been done to keep both sides of the table happy.

As to who will fill  Yang’s boot nobody knows but some pundits are betting on Dan Rosensweig returning which, if true, would be one the better decisions the board has made.

Popularity: 47% [?]

…out of hell - apparently!

The target time for booting is under 15 seconds for a ‘very good system’! Tests on machines running Vista have shown a third of the machines starting up in 30 seconds or less (you only need 64Gb RAM!).

Michael Fortin, Lead Microsoft engineer said: “From our perspective, too few systems consistently boot fast enough and we have to do much better…” Really?? I’ll let him continue “…Obviously, the systems that are greater than 60 seconds have something we need to dramatically improve – whether these are devices, networking or software issues… there are also some system maintenance tasks that can contribute to long boottimes.”

The bottom line here is that clean installs produce the fastest boot times, end of.

The problems apparently come from device and driver installation but Windows 7 will try to increase the number of drivers initialised in parallel meaning a faster boot - theoretically.

Finally, the pointy finger is levelled at the user; you and me. Having too many applications running at startup and scripts running will definitely slow your boot time - now you can tell you IT support department that it really is their scripts that make Windows slow; Microsoft said so!

There you have it. Windows 7 will be faster and better than the previous version so put your rose tinted glasses back and starting humming a little ditty.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Apple rapidly gaining ground

Figures released yesterday by Symbian show second quarter sales of 19.6 million units sold. Good news for Symbian until you consider that 159 Symbian based units have been released in the past 6 months compared to just one from Apple!

More interestingly, the figures show that Symbian’s growth was only 5% for the past year which isn’t great when figures show Apple are shifting 800,000 units per week! That’s not to say Symbian is by any means dead. The open source OS still holds the biggest market share of all but, at the same time, faces increased competition from Apple and RIM. With Google throwing their Android OS into the ring Symbians position could change - but not anytime soon.

The main contender at this moment is Apple. The iPhone 3G’s sales hit 6 million units since launch and climbing.

So, could Symbian be knocked off the top spot? If Apple continues to ship the iPhone 3G at current levels then they could conceivably take the top spot in about a years time. Factor in the Android question and Symbian could be trailing in an even shorter space of time.

But Nokia’s decision to open source Symbian may just give the OS the boost it needs to keep the top spot.

Popularity: 23% [?]