I’m sitting in my office and wondering to myself “Why on earth do we not have any posters around here?” For an office that is piled high with gadgets and games, the only thing hanging on our wall is a lonely whiteboard. Which is not a great thing considering I’ve supposed to have studied Interior Design as well.

Thankfully, there are some quick things you can do for your home or office to bring some very cute geek chic looks that won’t break your bank.

Get cushy
Cushions are a great way to jazz up chairs and sofas, and what better way to celebrate your inner geek than with some geek-inspired cushions? There’s a “Ctrl+Alt+Del” cushion for the Windows lovers, or even cushions based on logos of popular social media networks. We personally love the ones based on Adobe’s suite of products – who doesn’t like to snuggle up to a bit of InDesign?

Recolor your coffee mug
If you’re a designer and need that extra cup of coffee to get you through yet another night at home working on projects, why not grab a cup of coffee in your very own Pantone mug? They’re a great way to bring some color when sharing a cup or two with friends, and with literally hundreds of colors to choose from, these mugs will certainly get you the nod of approval from your fellow overworked designers.

Get plastered
No, no, not that – we’re talking about walls here. Wallpaper is a great way to breathe new life into a room instead of repainting it, but putting up wallpaper can be a bit of a challenge if not done correctly. So why not play it safe and grab some geeky wall decals? Companies like Blik and Wall Cravings both offer some classic and easy to apply wall transfers, such as Space Invaders, Mario, and even Donkey Kong to turn your boring walls into a gaming masterpiece.

Turn cables into art
There are so many cables under my desk that I’m tempted to dive under and see if any of them actually lead back to Narnia. While most of us  tend to get away with messy cabling at our office, it becomes a bit of an eyesore at home. So rather than shoving cables behind couches and binding them together with tape, why not get a little bit adventurous and artistic? Glue or Velcro your cables to the wall in interesting patterns to make for a very unique way to manage your cables. Just make sure you’ve sorted out your design first on paper before fixing things to the wall.

Accessorize with USB toys!
Okay this one is more for your office desk than for your home, so forgive me. While we traditionally plug all kinds of devices into USB ports, there are a couple of fun things that you can plug in as well, such as mini lava lamps, mug warmers, foam missile launchers, fans, and even a plasma globe. If you’ve got a USB hub handy or a lot of ports free on your PC, then plug in some quirky USB toys and waste the hours away!

So, at last, Facebook has filed for its IPO, Initial Public Offering, basically meaning it’s now going to be publicly traded, so you could own a part of Facebook eventually. First, let’s take a look at some of the numbers.

Facebook is seeking to raise $5 billion through this IPO, but it may end up raising a lot more than that, according to many pundits. The company made $1 billion in profit on revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011, quite a feat. 85% of that came from advertising, and about 12% from Zynga, the social-gaming company best known for FarmVille.

Facebook has 843 million monthly active users, and about half that active on a daily basis. Perhaps more astonishing, more than 250 million photos are uploaded to the site every single day

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, retains control over Facebook, with 28.4% of the stock, the percentage he holds right now, giving him a controlling interest with 56.9% of the votes. If, for example, Facebook would raise $10 billion with the IPO, Zuckerberg would then be worth almost $3 billion.

But he will go from a salary of $500,000 in 2011 to $1 in 2013, mimicking Steve Jobs, who famously took only $1 per year in salary after he returned to Apple in 1997.

Well, let’s not cry for Zuckerberg, okay?

The question then becomes, is this is the end of Facebook as we’ve come to know it or the beginning of something new?

My guess is, to borrow a phrase from Bachman Turner Overdrive, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Already at almost 850 million users, Facebook is on track to reach 1 billion users sometime this year, probably sooner rather than later. That makes Facebook rank up there with as many users as population in the largest countries in the world, a truly remarkable achievement. I for one, do not see any slow down in Facebook usage among my family or friends, and not even professionally do I see anything like the Facebook apocalypse that some have predicted.

Sure, some people closed down their Facebook accounts in protest to lack in privacy and security, and other issues, but that was a small minority apparently, that never got any traction in wider circles.

And it’s inevitable, I assume, that what is successful will be criticized, no matter what it does, and that’s true for Facebook, as well. Now that it will be a publicly traded company, even though Zuckerberg apparently retains the control, it will have to be more careful about its moves. Now it has not only the users to satisfy, but the shareholders as well, and both parties can be fickle and turn on you in a second.

Other than tying up more people to use its services, where will Facebook’s necessary future growth come from? Online gaming with Zynga seems to be doing well, and there’s plenty of room for expansion there, in number of users as well as in revenue.

Will Facebook tackle Google head-on and go into search? Hardly likely. But online music, video, and other digital media, that could be matched rather nicely with the increasing user base. It also has a lot left to do in terms of apps and mobile, so expect that to be on Facebook’s radar too, moving forward.

But whatever it is that Facebook will do next, after the IPO, you’d be foolish to count Zuckerberg and co. out just yet.

Photo by Robert Scoble.

Most of us go through so much electronic junk, buying more than we really need, and often just throwing it away. Sometimes a smartphone ends up in a drawer; sometimes it’s sold. Oftentimes a new computer is bought and the old one gathers dust in the garage. And I could say that I’m going to urge you to dig out that old computer and start using it again because I feel so strongly about protecting Mother Earth, but that’d be a lie. All I want to do, in fact, is to make you put your tech gear to better use and perhaps learn something in the process.

I’ll put this in the context of my recent experience with an old Mac. I’ve always wanted an iMac G4, the one with the half-dome base and a display that seems to float in the air. One day I found one on a website – something akin to eBay – called the seller up and the next day I was the proud owner of a once-powerful Mac. As it turns out, there’s much more power in my iPhone 4S than this Mac. It has an 800 Mhz processor, 1 GB RAM, and a 64 MB graphics card. Wow!

So besides looking very pretty on my desk, what was I supposed to do with this computer? Sure, I can browse the web with it, but it can’t run the latest browsers, so a lot of sites simply won’t work. Gaming is out of the question, as is any photo or video editing. It can’t keep up with video playback beyond some pathetically low resolution, and I’m pretty sure playing MP3s will be a stretch for the processor.

I could use it to write articles like this one with, so for that it’s still useful. But what I’ve decided to do is to get back to basics and really learn UNIX and the command line.

You know, “ls” for listing the contents of a directory, “ps” or “top” for checking what’s running, “rsync” for copying files to and from a server, “grep” to find things, and so on. I know some of this from having worked with computers for many years, but I still can’t say I’m very comfortable with a command line. The goal now is that my old Mac will, because it’s so old and slow, make me proficient at UNIX.

I’ve already started making a list of things I have to start working on. First on the list is learning some basics in the Bash shell, the Vim text editor, as well as how to do FTP and SSH. With that in place, I should be able to do a lot of the maintenance of my websites just by using the Terminal application on the iMac.

After that, I thought I’d venture on with network configuration, website hosting, and some software development. But that’s far away in the future so let’s not get too carried away.

Regardless of whether you want to use an old computer to become a command line whiz kid or not, there’s a lot of things you can use it for. It can be a file server, print server, used to download things with, and lots more.

Only your fantasy sets the limits, and your wallet will thank you, as well. Not a bad combination.

I think we can all agree that Nokia has not been doing too great the last few years. Sure, the Finnish telecom giant has released some interesting smartphones, like the N8 with its amazing camera. But it has not been able to grab headlines, like its competitors, at least not for the right reasons. When Nokia announced its partnership with Microsoft about a year ago, I was actually very excited because I felt going with Windows Phone for its smartphones would allow Nokia the stability and functionality it so badly needed.

Let’s take one step further back, to Mobile World Congress in 2010. There, in Barcelona, I witnessed when Microsoft unveiled the new Windows Phone 7 operating systems for mobile devices. I wasn’t exactly blown away but what I saw, but I was convinced it could compete with iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and all the rest. Microsoft had thought in new ways in terms of the interface as well as functionality, which is not something that can be said about Microsoft very often.

Then we waited. First we waited for any Windows Phone smartphone to appear, and what first came out didn’t exactly impress too much. Then we waited for Nokia to introduce its first Windows Phone device and while we waited we got the N9.

Finally, in October 2011, Stephen Elop stood on stage at Nokia World in London, declaring that the Lumia 800 was “the first real Windows Phone device.” As it turns out, the Lumia 800 is basically the N9 but running the Windows Phone OS. I’ve had a Lumia 800 for a few days now, and I can say it’s a very, very nice smartphone.

But I’m not going to review the Lumia 800 in this article, for that you’ll have to wait for the Tbreak tech labs team to sink their teeth into it. What I can tell you is that Nokia seems to be on the right track again, and that’s good news for you as a consumer as well as the industry as a whole.

With the Lumia 800, and presumably also with the Lumia 900, which I’ve not tried, Nokia has beautifully designed, high-quality smartphones, which run a cutting-edge mobile OS. Sure, the Marketplace for Windows Phone may only have 50,000 apps compared to the 500,000 you can find for iOS, and that is a problem, but it’s a problem that can be made to go away. Nokia and Microsoft have to push hard to get great apps, and a lot of them, developed for the Windows Phone OS. One such app, which many of us are waiting for right now, is Carbon for Windows Phone by UAE-based dots & lines.

By adopting Windows Phone as the OS for its smartphones, Nokia remedied the one big problem it has had over the last few years: Symbian. Now, Nokia can focus on its industrial and product design, something it has always been good at, and spend less time developing an OS. And I, for one, think that is a good thing.

Nokia is in the game again, baby, and I, for one, wish them all the luck in the world.

Picture by Olga Berrios.

January 18, 2012, will go down in history as a day when the Internet community managed to stop a piece of legislation from being enacted in the U.S. That seems to be the common view held after it seemed as SOPA was cancelled after the protests, which darkened and disabled websites around the world. Even right here on this site we could read, “SOPA is now officially dead.”

But is that really true?

As far as I can tell there is no guarantee that SOPA is dead, but chances are we won’t hear a lot about it for quite a while.

First, let’s just quickly look at what we’re talking about. SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill introduced to the U.S. Senate, and its equivalent in the House of Representatives is PIPA, or Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act. Although they are legislation in different parts of the Congress, they are really aimed at accomplishing the same thing, namely to curtail online piracy and copyright infringement.

My understanding is that this gives government as well as companies the right to go after the distribution mechanisms of illegal distributing copyrighted material, like websites and Internet access providers, instead of the end users. So far, it’s been the end users, the people who download movies with BitTorrent, which the music industry has gone after and sued. With SOPA and PIPA, that would all change.

To protest SOPA and PIPA, Reddit.com announced it would shut down its site on January 18. Many other sites followed, including Wikipedia, and sites around the world went silent on that day. The day before the protests, the author of the SOPA bill, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, said he expected the work on SOPA to continue in February: “To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy.” He added, “Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February.”

As it turns out, the online protests on January 18 had a measurable effect. The day after, the number of opponents in the U.S. Congress to the bill, increased to 101 from having been only 31 previously. It would seem that politicians do listen to voters after all.

Then on January 20, Chairman Smith seemed to back down: “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.” And he finished, “The House Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

So does this mean that the January 18 protests have completely won over the proponents of SOPA and PIPA? Some say that SOPA and PIPA won’t come back in any way shape or form this year because it’s an election year. Politicians have too much to do with the Presidential race, to gain or retain seats in Congress, as well as local elections, to bother to keep on fighting for SOPA and PIPA, especially after this very public protest.

But as far as I can tell there’s no guarantee that the legislation won’t come back later, perhaps in a different guise.

My guess is that SOPA and PIPA will come back to the top of the agenda in U.S. politics at some point. The commercial interests driving them are far too powerful and rich that they would just leave it well enough alone. However, it won’t be under the names SOPA and PIPA. Those names are now tainted, and most Americans, indeed scores of people around the world, associate the acronyms with greedy corporations trying to get the government to write and implement legislation that will merely punish ordinary people.

The battle may have been won, but the war is far from over.

Photo by Steve Snodgrass.

At Microsoft’s BUILD conference in California in September last year the company showed off Windows 8 and gave us a lot of information about what the next generation of its operating system will be like. Even though Windows 7 has been a big sales success, concerns about slow uptake, especially in businesses, have popped up from time to time.

In the latest worldwide figures from StatCounter about desktop operating systems, Windows 7 has the lead over Windows XP, a situation that it has just recently acquired (in October 2011). That means an OS released in October 2009 has just passed an OS released in 2001. Surely that can’t be a very comforting situation for Redmond.

Add to that, that Windows XP is still the number one OS in large markets around the world, including China, and we suspect that this is a headache that Steve Ballmer is making his teams work hard at – how to get users to switch to Windows 8 faster than they did to Windows 7. It certainly doesn’t help that research company Gartner has said it expects the uptake of Windows 8 will be slower than that of Windows 7.

The developer preview version of Windows 8 that was introduced at BUILD last year has, by all accounts, been well received. Undoubtedly we still have lots to find out about Microsoft’s plans for the OS, even after CES last week.

So how will Windows 8 be received once it is officially introduced?

Obviously we don’t know, but one key issue, I think, will be how well Windows 8 runs on existing hardware. Microsoft’s Vice President of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, said last year, “everything that runs on Windows 7 runs on Windows 8.” For Microsoft’s sake, I hope that’s true even though I fully expect the latest 2012 hardware will run the new OS better than computers from 2011 or earlier.

One other thing I think will be important is the integration between touch and traditional interface. Windows 8 will just be “one operating system,” for both tablets and computers; that much has Microsoft said. For example, on a computer with a touchscreen, you can use the Metro interface for touch, and what looks like Windows 7 with keyboard and mouse. How well apps, information and other types of integration works between the two modes will be important for usability.

I am actually very excited about seeing what Microsoft comes up with for Windows 8 and how it develops over the coming months. Hopefully, after the public beta has been in circulation a while, Redmond will announce a launch date. Then we can start preparing for what is set to be another big Microsoft Windows launch.

Photo by BUILDWindows.

Unfortunately, we hardly ever get any sales or other market information about the Middle East and that’s also true for Apple. The iPhone 4S was introduced not long ago, and it’d be so interesting to know how well it has done.

Unless Apple changes its policies and practice in terms of sharing sales figures for the region, we’re left with what we can gather from other corners of the world.

If we look at some of the latest smartphone sales figures from the U.S., I think you will be surprised.

TechCrunch has published figures by research firm NPD that show that iOS came out on top in the October-November 2011 time period with a 43% market share in the U.S. Android is still ahead though with 47% share, which is down from the 60% it had in Q3.

What’s also very interesting – although not very surprising – is that smartphones are occupying an increasingly large part of the mobile handset market. In other words, we buy more smartphones and less featurephones and other mobile phones. In fact, two out of three handsets sold in October-November were smartphones, up from 50% the year before, according to NPD. Furthermore, nine out of the top ten phones sold in the period were smartphones.

That’s a lot of smartphones, no matter how you look at it.

For me the biggest surprise, however, when looking at the NPD numbers is that Apple occupies the top three slots of top models sold. The iPhone 4S is number one, followed by iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS occupies the number-three position.

Yes, that’s Apple ahead of all the Android handsets, including those from Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG, and that with its iPhone 3GS, a phone introduced in 2009.

That sure surprised me.

We hear so much about the Android juggernaut, that Android is outselling iPhone, and there’s no doubt that Android has come a long way in a short period of time. And even though I am an Apple fan and currently an iPhone 4S user I occasionally stray over to the Android side, mainly due to the wide range of hardware that is available.

Google executive Andy Rubin posted on Google+ that 3.7 million Android activations were carried out on December 24 – 25, 2011. That’s an amazing number, but it seems that iPhone still trumped Android for the holiday sales, as well. For in-store sales at AT&T in U.S., supposedly 66% was iPhone.

But don’t think for a second that Apple and iPhone now somehow beat Android. Sure, Apple has raked in more money to its already burgeoning war chest, and Android may not be top of all the charts, but the force that is Android will be hard to stop. Just look at all the new devices – from smartphones to tablets and beyond – all running Android, which were introduced in Las Vegas.

However, for now, let Apple bask for a second in the glow of having the top three selling mobile phones in the U.S. for the October-November 2011 period.

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano.

The funny thing about Google, at least for me, is that my interactions with them generally tend to be significant. The last time I dealt with anyone at Google was about a year ago. I spoke to a man who was head of marketing at Google Middle East about a project they had launched – it was a phone interview arranged through their then PR agency Hill and Knowlton and I remember it being the most boring interview I had ever conducted. It seemed almost silly for someone like Google – it was basically a little website they had developed which told people how to use the Internet. It was pretty rudimentary – a ten year old would have seen it and got bored. That of course, was beside the point, it was aimed at people who weren’t accustomed to PCs and the Internet in general, plus it was in Arabic.

I thought it would be insulting to tell the man at Google that he was wasting my time, so I threw at him some quick questions, all of which he passionately replied to. I didn’t bother publishing the article because I thought it was the most uninteresting thing either Google or anyone else had done. We’re a bit spoilt like that at Tbreak – we’re not ones for basic Internet lessons, we’d rather be spending our time covering the cutting edge of technology, like cars that park themselves or graphic cards that are a mighty 5% faster than its predecessor.

The man who spoke so passionately about what I thought was one of Google’s less impressive projects was Wael Ghonim. In the months that followed, Wael would turn out to be one of the greatest heroes of the Egyptian revolution and one of Time Magazine’s most influential men of 2011.

I’ve kicked myself a few times for not publishing that article. So, when Google invited me to meet them over lunch, I was excited. Plus, it was an opportunity to meet some of UAE’s most prominent bloggers. The list included Paz Marketing’s  Joe Akkawi, Omar Abu Omar from Cobone, Emirati blogger Sultan Al Qassemi, Gradberry’s Iba Masood, Clique Media’s Bhavishya Kanjhan, MEED’s Triska Hamid and Samer from Jazarah.net.

A few months ago, I wrote about how Google was turning into the next Microsoft. In many ways, I still believe it is. However, the thing about Google is that its technology empowers people to do extraordinary things. Whether it’s the free Google Docs, which empower people like the folks at Tbreak to collaborate on projects or more significantly like conducting interviews of political candidates in Egypt, so people can form informed opinions for themselves. A seminar which preceded lunch covered what Google was doing in the Middle East.

Over lunch, I talked to Ari Kesisoglu, MD of Google MENA, about how we use Google products in our daily work lives and how much it has helped us as a business. I did, however, complain about how we provide YouTube with all the latest technology interviews and product reviews and it was about time content producers received revenue for their efforts, just like people in the US do. “We’ll have some news about that soon,” he said with a smirk.

It’s refreshing to see how much interest Google is showing in this region and even more so that they’re listening to the digital media. They took the time to talk to all the bloggers, replying to every query thrown their way. Maybe they’re not turning into Microsoft after all.

The 2012 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show just got over in Las Vegas. CES was first held in 1967, and it certainly has changed over the years. But is it getting too big? Is it not worth the big bucks anymore that companies pay to exhibit there?

For CES in 2011, 140,000 visitors, 30,000 from outside the U.S., flocked to Vegas to take in all the latest in consumer technology and gadgets. That’s a lot of people in one place, even in a city like Las Vegas, which is basically built on tourism.

I’ve been fortunate to attend a few CES spectacles as a reporter, and I can tell you that it is backbreaking work; from early morning press-tours to late-evening parties, and interviews and press conferences in between. Sounds glamorous? It’s not, I can tell you. There’s just too much to cover and you fight desperately to try to filter things and decide what to write about.

But that’s a topic for another day. By all accounts, CES 2012 was a huge success and the usual websites, magazines etc. reported from Vegas with fever-pitch frenzy.  I saw a tweet the other day from a reporter, which said something like “we posted more than 100 stories today from CES.” That’s just crazy.

But there is that much – and more – to report on, and that’s sort of the problem. For big companies, like Intel, it’s a chance to stand out, but spending, presumably, millions of dollars on CES must be giving them reason to pause and think whether it’s worth it. For small companies, I can only see it being worth it, if they have something really spectacular to show off that every news outlet will pick up.

And then you have citizen-journalism. Being away from CES this year, I’ve picked up so much news via tweets and other social media messages from individuals at the show- regular visitors and not professional reporters. That, I think, will have a more profound change on these shows more than anything.

Although CES is a spectacular show I believe the future is in smaller, more frequent and directed events. Apple has realized that- one reason why they dumped MacWorld Expo in 2009, and Microsoft has as well, making this CES its last. Now we’re just waiting for the rest to catch up.

And that also goes for GITEX in Dubai, although that’s a different beast altogether as it relies much more on enterprise tech and CES is obviously focused on consumers. However, I would suspect we could ask many of the same questions about GITEX as we do about CES. One thing I have to say to the GITEX organizers is that you have to catch up with the times and realize that social media can make or break you.

Photo by VentureBeat.

I think CodeYear.com is one of the most exciting and innovative ideas that have come along in a very long time. As I write this it says on that page, “236,059 people have decided to learn to code in 2012.” That’s an amazing number of people.

CodeYear is a project by Codecademy.com to try to get more people writing programming code, or at least to get a taste for what it means to program.

I signed up even though I’ve got quite a bit of programming experience already, and I really hope you do too. If you’ve never written a single bit or byte of code, perhaps never even thought about it, then you’re the perfect candidate for this project.

If you have no experience of computer programming, it basically involves writing commands that the computer will understand to get it to carry out certain tasks. That could be to display a web page, type an article, play a game or just make a phone call with your smartphone. Everything you do with a gadget today requires software and software has to be programmed. Software is clearly of critical importance today. Just look at what sells a smartphone today. Sure, having a big screen and fast processor helps, but having a lot of apps,  great apps, available for it is a competitive advantage and arguably as important.

I started out programming using BASIC in my high school’s computer lab. As I quickly got the bug, so to speak, I moved on with Turbo Pascal and remember trying to develop an application like Microsoft Paint. And I did it too. My application may not have been as robust as Paint (in other words it crashed a lot), but it could do a heck of a lot more than Microsoft’s application. Then I moved on with Assembly language, C and some C++. In more recent years it’s been PHP and ActionScript that has kept me busy.

But I am not a programmer. Not so much because I don’t make a living out of writing code but because it’s something I’d not like to do to as a job, nor would I like to spend that much time writing code. To me hacking together some code is fun and something I enjoy doing from time to time but that’s about it.

I am however very grateful that I got to spend a lot of time writing code earlier on in my life because I think it’s given me a much deeper understanding of and appreciation for what it takes to develop an application, whether it’s for a computer, a smartphone, or the web.

So come on, sign up for CodeYear.com and get programming. If you do continue on to actually developing a piece of software, let us know and we’ll share it here with others. I think once you give software programming a go, the bug will bite you. And this is the good kind of bug.

Photo by James Cridland.