Finally, Mozilla has released Firefox 4.0 mobile web browser for Android OS based phones. The new Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo mobile platform based devices offers tabbed browsing, bookmarks, Firefox Sync support and even Add-ons. Several nifty features have been added to the latest version of Firefox for Android and Maemo devices. Unfortunately, this new Firefox 4.0 doesn't support old ARM v6 CPU based phones and Adobe Flash.

Mozilla developers claim that the Firefox 4.0 is up to three times faster than the stock Android browser. Firefox 4.0 gets enhanced JavaScript engine with the JaegerMonkey JIT compiler to make the page loads faster and improve the overall graphics performance. New Streamlined interface is aimed to carry forward the minimalistic approach of the Firefox browser on the desktop. Hence, it keeps the user engaged in the web content with desktop browser features like Tabs, browser controls and bookmarks sync. 

Users can customize their favourite search engine and also easily access the history which is provided via the Firefox Sync feature that syncs bookmarks, tabs and sessions. Mozilla developers have added location-aware browsing support for HTML5 along with other aspects like device orientation, acceleration, desktop notifications and more.

New Save to PDF feature comes handy while you are on the move since it allows saving the websites as PDF files to view them offline later. Firefox 4.0 has social network sharing feature wherein you can share the text and images of the websites over the social networks by long tap on them. To know more about the new features in Firefox 4.0, click here.

You can download Firefox 4.0 for Android and Maemo devices from here. It's not surprising to see Firefox 4.0 since Opera released its Mobile 11 and Mini 6 version of mobile web recently.

source : http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Mozilla_Releases_Firefox_4_for_Android/551-114960-580.html

 

Nuclear safety agency official Hidehiko Nishiyama briefed journalists

Seawater near Japan's quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has a much higher level of radiation than previously reported, officials say.

In one section, radioactive iodine stood at 3,355 times the legal limit, said Japan's nuclear safety agency.
However, an official said the iodine would have deteriorated considerably by the time it reached people.
Meanwhile, the president of the Fukushima nuclear plant operator Tepco has been admitted to hospital.
Masataka Shimizu is being treated for high blood pressure and dizziness, a Tepco spokesperson said.
Mr Shimizu has barely been seen in public since the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March which damaged the Fukushima plant.
Engineers are battling to restore power and restart the cooling systems at the plant.
Tepco has been accused of a lack of transparency and failing to provide information more promptly. It was also heavily criticised for issuing erroneous radiation readings at the weekend.
Tepco officials have announced a news conference for 1500 local time (0600 GMT).
'Unpredictable' Earlier samples had put the iodine level in the sea at 1,850 times the legal limit.
The new readings were near reactor No 1 - 300m from the shore.
Much lower - but still elevated levels - of the same radioactive element have been found in seawater as far as 16km to the south.
The BBC's Mark Worthington in Tokyo says the discovery is the strongest indication so far that highly radioactive water is leaking into the sea.
Tepco and the safety agency say the exact source of the leak is unknown.
"Iodine 131 has a half-life of eight days, and even considering its concentration in marine life, it will have deteriorated considerably by the time it reaches people," Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of Japan's nuclear safety agency told a news conference.
Radioactive materials are measured by scientists in half-lives, or the time it takes to halve the radiation through natural decay.
Iodine 131 was blamed for the high incidence of thyroid cancer among children exposed to fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan discussed the crisis at Fukushima with US President Barack Obama.

• Q&A: Health effects of radiation

Mr Obama also pledged to help the people affected by the earthquake which damaged the Fukushima plant earlier this month, the Jiji news agency reported.

Workers at the Fukushima plant are trying to prevent radioactive water from seeping into the sea.
Highly radioactive liquid has been found inside and outside several reactor buildings.
Small amounts of plutonium have also been detected in soil at the plant - the latest indication that one of the reactors suffered a partial meltdown.
But, like the discovery of plutonium, the high levels of radiation found inside and outside reactor buildings are likely to have come from melted fuel rods.
Theories for the leak centre on two possibilities - steam is flowing from the core into the reactor housing and escaping through cracks, or the contaminated material is leaking from the damaged walls of the water-filled pressure control pool beneath the No 2 reactor.
The plutonium - used in the fuel mix in the No 3 reactor - is not at levels that threaten human health, officials said.

more : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12903072

The New York Times subscription service kicked in on Monday afternoon, requiring the most active readers to pay for full access to the publication. Initially, the paywall did not apply to e-book subscriptions, but Amazon announced that those who subscribe to the Times via the Kindle will also get access to the paper's site for free.

"Customers love reading the New York Times on their Kindles," Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content, said in a statement. "Given the Times' transition to a digital subscription model, we're excited to be able to offer Kindle subscribers online access to all the digital content available at NYTimes.com at no additional cost."
Amazon said the New York Times is the best-selling newspaper in the Kindle Store. The Times subscription service, also known as a "paywall," offers readers metered access to the publication, depending on the level of service. A $15 monthly fee buys unlimited access to the Times Web site and the premium smartphone app, $20 per month covers online access and the Times iPad app, and $35 a month buys access to the full range of the Times' digital products. All of this is available to print subscribers are no additional cost. Perhaps to hook more readers into subscribing, the Times is offering the first four weeks at a discounted rate of $0.99.
Non-subscribers can view up to 20 stories for free each month, and stories linked on Facebook or Twitter can be read at no cost.
A subscription to the Times on Kindle is $19.99 a month, pretty much the same as a subscription that includes iPad access, so it makes sense that these readers wouldn't have to pay more.
The paywall was announced earlier this month, and at the time, the paper said digital subscriptions did not include access on e-readers like the Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle.
Since the Times made its announcement, detractors have argued that there are too many ways to skirt the paywall, which the Times spent $40 million erecting.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Amazon.com wants to be more than a destination for shopping online — it also dreams of being a place where you can store your music, photos and videos and access them any time, from any computer.
The online retailer launched two new offerings late Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. The first lets you upload and store files like music, videos and photos on Amazon's servers, which you can get to from a Web browser on a Mac or PC. The second lets you play songs you've uploaded on your computer or on a smartphone that runs Google's Android operating software. The "cloud" in the services' names refers to the practice of storing content online and streaming it to a computer over the Internet.
Amazon's move is beating Google Inc. and Apple Inc., which are believed to be working on similar services that would allow consumers to access their content when away from their home computer.
While Amazon will charge for the Cloud Drive service, it's offering anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of free storage. That's less space than you'd get on the smallest iPod Touch, but it's a move that's likely to woo plenty of users who might later decide to pay for more storage space.
The Seattle-based company, which already runs an online storage service for companies called Amazon S3, decided to roll out a consumer cloud service to make it easier for customers to access digital content no matter where they are, Amazon music director Craig Pape said.
The offerings could also benefit Amazon's bottom line: The company realized customers were hesitant to purchase MP3s at work because they didn't want them tied to their office computer, Pape said, so Cloud Drive and Cloud Player may drive more impulse music shopping.
"At the end of the day we're trying to delight customers, but we're trying to sell more music, too," he said.
The company also wants to sell cloud storage. If your tunes and videos take up more space than the 5 GB Amazon is giving out, you can pay an annual storage fee to use Cloud Drive: The use of 20 GB of storage, for example, will cost $20 (and this includes the 5 free GB). For an undisclosed period of time, however, Amazon is offering 20 GB of free storage to those who buy a digital album from its Amazon MP3 store.
Documents or videos you've uploaded to Cloud Drive will open with programs on the computer you're using, Pape said, while songs in MP3 or AAC files will be playable through the Web-based Cloud Player.
The player offers simple controls — you can play, pause or skip tracks, or build your own playlists. For users who want to listen while on the go, an updated version of the Amazon MP3 digital music-buying app will include Cloud Player, letting users play music they've stored with Amazon's service on their cell phone as well as tunes that are already on their handsets.

source : google

NEW YORK - Facebook's decision to test digital movie rentals and purchases with Warner Bros. is no immediate threat to Netflix's streaming service, but creates a new potential longer-term online video competitor, Goldman Sachs analyst Ingrid Chung said Tuesday.
"Facebook’s foray into pay-per-view does not impact our Netflix estimates," she said in a report. "However, Facebook represents a new potential entrant that few in the investment community were concerned with prior to this announcement, so we believe it does indeed represent an incremental negative for Netflix shares."
She added that Facebook "could some day become a credible threat to Netflix."
For now, Facebook seems to position itself as a pay-per-view platform, "which is more of a threat to other forms of VOD (such as iTunes or Amazon)," Chung said. She added that the social networking site "lacks content, does not have wide distribution across devices that connect to the living room TV, has few people on the payments platform and does not have an incumbent business that is under threat from increasing online video viewership."
Longer-term, it could become a challenger and concern for Netflix, she argued, citing Facebook's more than 500 million active users, compared with Netflix’s 20 million subscribers.
"The “wisdom of friends” could be a bigger driver of movie viewership than the “wisdom of crowds"," Chung also said. Plus: "We believe that many of the issues outlined above could be fixed over time, including the gap to the living room TV."
Netflix shares had opened lower on Tuesday following the Facebook-Warner Bros. news.
Goldman earlier this year invested $450 million in Facebook.

source :
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/facebook-could-become-a-credible-165335

Adobe on Tuesday released Flash Player 10.3 beta, which provides users with greater control over the program's privacy and storage options.
Going forward, users will be able to clear local storage - sometimes known as "F
Adobe on Tuesday released Flash Player 10.3 beta, which provides users with greater control over the program's privacy and storage options.
Going forward, users will be able to clear local storage - sometimes known as "Flash cookies" - on versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox. "Cookies" are little bits of data collected about your Internet activity. They can be useful - like remembering passwords and settings on sites that you surf to frequently - but there are also concerns about targeted advertising and how much data is really collected.
Web cookies can be deleted, but management of cookies inside products like Flash are a bit more complex. Adobe said Tuesday, however, that Flash Player 10.3 Beta "integrates control of local storage with the browser's privacy settings," something the company promised in January.
As a result, "users will have a simpler way to clear local storage from the browser settings interface, similar to how they clear their browser cookies today," Adobe said.
The Flash Player 10.3 beta local storage settings will apply to Mozilla Firefox 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and higher, and future releases of Safari and Google Chrome.
In Firefox 4 (right), the "Clear All History" option will have a "Cookies" option. Check it and click "Clear Now" to delete.
Mozilla executives said Tuesday that the release candidate for Firefox 4 is expected sometime this week, with a final release expected later this month. Firefox 4 also includes a "do not track" component, which will give Web users the option not to have their activity tracked by third-party sites.
On IE, the "Delete Browsing History" window will also have a "Cookies" option, which reads: "Files stored on your computer by websites to save preferences such as login information." Check it and hit "Delete."
The 10.3 beta also simplifies the Flash Player settings manager as it relates to privacy, security, and storage settings. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can now access the Flash Player settings manager directly from the Control Panel or Systems Preferences on their computer.
Flash cookies, or local shared objects (LSO), made headlines recently when the Federal Trade Commission released a report that called on browser makers to include a "do not track" option in their products. The FTC also mentioned Adobe because it said the cookies gathered by Flash are collected regardless of the browser's settings.
Adobe added an in-private browsing option to Flash Player 10.1, which allows users to surf and play video content without having their activity tracked. But going forward, users will also be able to delete LSOs from their browser settings, whether they are using normal browsing or private.
Early last month, Adobe released Flash Player 10.2, which includes a feature known as Stage Video that promises increased performance while using less processing power. Adobe also promised other additions that were previewed in the beta version, including custom native mouse cursors, multiple monitor full-screen support, Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support, and enhanced sub-pixel rendering for superior text readability.

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag. 

source : http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381650,00.asp

Lenovo is preparing to introduce a new ultraportable notebook, the ThinkPad X220. Although a product page isn't up yet, the system's spec sheet has been discovered on Lenovo's site. The 12.5-inch machine will be offered with a slew of high-end features, including an optional 1366x768 IPS display and five full-powered Intel Sandy Bridge Core i3, i5 or i7 processors.

The total package weighs less than three pounds and includes up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, 160GB to 320GB of mechanical storage and 4GB to 160GB of flash storage courtesy of Intel's 310 Series. There doesn't appear to be any discrete graphics options so you'll be stuck with Sandy Bridge's on-die chip -- though that's not necessarily a bad thing in the case of Intel's HD 3000.

Connectivity includes DisplayPort and VGA outputs, three USB 2.0 ports (one "Always On") and one optional USB 3.0 port, a 54mm Express Card slot, an SD card reader, and various WLAN/WWAN Intel Centrino wireless adapters. The ThinkPad X220 gets up to 15 hours of runtime with a nine-cell battery and that's boosted to 23 hours with an external battery pack.

Lenovo notes other business-friendly features, such as a quiet keyboard, microphone and speaker mute buttons with LED indicators, a 720p webcam, as well as the ability to adjust the mic's sensitivity for a single person or conference calls. There's also a new buttonless touchpad that we've found pretty finicky, but we'll reserve final judgment for our upcoming review.

http://www.techspot.com/news/42710-lenovo-readies-thinkpad-x220-with-sandy-bridge-ips-panel.html

SAN FRANCISCO — YouTube, the video site owned by Google, formally announced on Monday that it had acquired Next New Networks, a Web video production company, in its biggest effort yet to move beyond short, quirky home videos to professionally produced content.

The acquisition of Next New Networks, which produces original programming and helps video creators distribute their films and make money, is YouTube’s biggest leap into creating its own programming. But that will be minimal, the companies said. Original programming has taken a back seat at Next New Networks, and Google has shied away from producing its own content.

“We want to make as clean a line as possible for us to build the platform on YouTube and then let the content production happen with our partners,” said Tom Pickett, director of global content operation at YouTube.

Google will pay less than $50 million for the company, according to two people briefed on the terms of the deal. The New York Times first reported YouTube’s interest in the company in December. The companies declined to comment on the price.

Improving its original programming is crucial for YouTube, which faces competition from Web video services like Hulu, iTunes and Netflix. For its part, Google, which is trying to popularize its Google TV service, needs more Web video that people will watch for hours at a time.

“There’s still a lot of YouTube that’s about the single video experience right now,” Mr. Pickett said. “We want to think about sets of videos and program experiences. That’s where we’re heading and we think this team is going to help us get there.”

Many video creators on YouTube “are making money and doing great, but as a group they have not added up to shake the foundations of the way people watch content,” said James L. McQuivey, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research. “Maybe it’s just that they’re not aggregated in a meaningful way, but as long as YouTube remains something you do between phone calls at work, it won’t change the way the industry envisions its relationship with the viewer.”

The company also said Monday that it was creating a program called YouTube Next that will help the video makers with whom YouTube shares ad revenue to produce more professional content by giving them grants and training.

Next New Networks, which attracts two billion views a month, compares itself to cable networks, which do not own all their programming but package and broadcast other people’s shows. It helps video creators with advertising, distribution of their shows to various Web sites, and in building an audience by including shows as part of a programming package.

It created the shows “Barely Political” and “Indy Mogul.” It produces videos for the Gregory Brothers, whose video “Bed Intruder Song” was the most-watched video on YouTube last year, and Hungry Nation, a series of online food shows. The Gregory Brothers’ videos, for instance, had up to 20,000 views an episode before the group started working with Next New Networks, and now they have up to two million views for an episode, said Lance Podell, chairman of Next New Networks.

Most of Next New’s shows are on YouTube, but others appear on services like iTunes and Vimeo, and that will continue.

“At this point, we are YouTube-focused, but that doesn’t mean that as an adviser to creators we won’t be able to suggest to them how their business can build on YouTube and off of YouTube,” Mr. Podell said.

He will be director and global head of YouTube Next lab and audience development. YouTube also said it hired the former head of digital distribution at Paramount, Alex Carloss, to work on content acquisition.

Next New Networks, which was founded in 2007, has raised $26 million from investment firms including Spark Capital, Fuse Capital and Goldman Sachs. The company is based in New York and will remain there. YouTube is based in San Bruno, Calif.