Apple is set to announce its next-gen iteration of the popular iPad in the first week of March, a new report from AllThingsD reveals.

Sources say Apple is likely to host the launch event for the device in San Francisco, almost exactly year after the company announced its current iPad model. There is no concrete data on when it will be available to buy, but if last years launch of iPad 2 is anything to go by, expect it to be available for purchase two weeks after the launch.

Specifications of the new device are said to be almost entirely what we’ve been led to expect from all the rumours. Experts expect a device similar in form factor to the iPad 2, but powered by a much faster chip (though most probably not a quad-core), with a much improved graphics processing unit, and a wonderful 2048 x 1536 Retina Display resolution to feast your eye on.

Along with the new device, expect a newer version of the OS bringing the necessary iPad 3 exclusive features.

No invites have been sent as yet to the major industry watchers, and Apple has said it wont comment on speculation or rumours.

Source: AllthingsD

Yesterday, after month long negotiations finally broke down between the hacker group and Symantec, Anonymous leaked the source code for Symantec’s PCAnywhere software. The source code was actually stolen in late December or early January of this year, after which Symantec apparently tried to handle the situation by paying the hacker group $50,000 to not leak the code.

Turns out the entire negotiations were just a setup by law enforcement officers, trying to lure the hackers in order to get their information. The entire email thread has been posted online for everyone to see by the Lords of Dharamaja, one of the hacker groups associated with Anonymous. Posting on his Twitter, one of the hackers, Yama Tough, wrote, “You won’t believe it but Symantec offered us money to keep quiet.”

According to Symantec spokesperson Cris Paden who told Forbes in an interview, “Symantec began to receive emails from the hackers a few days later, in which the group demanded money not to publish the portion of Symantec’s source code it hadn’t yet released.”

“When they came to us with what was for all intents and purposes extortion, we went to law enforcement,” says Paden. “From that point on, we turned over the investigation to them.” Eventually after the month long sting operation that didn’t go as intended, Anonymous finally released the source code yesterday on file sharing sites around the world. “We’re able to say with high confidence, any type of cyber attacks generated by this attack would have old characteristics and look like an attack from 2006 that can easily be stopped using current versions of our solutions,” says Paden as Symantec is still analyzing the leaked code. “Our customers are protected.”

The effectiveness of the sting operation by the unnamed law enforcement agencies isn’t clear yet, as the investigation of this leak against one of the world’s biggest security firm is still under way. “As to what happens next,” Paden says. “We’re not really sure.”

In the latest Consumer Preview (build 8220) test release leaked over the weekend, it turned out that the iconic ‘Start’ button was nowhere to be found. As The Verge reports, instead of having the button be there on the UI, users will have to hover their mouse on the lower left corner to access the Start screen.

This new move is brought about to bring together the visual appearance of Windows 8 across all devices, from smartphones to tablets to PC users. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Microsoft will bring back the Start button by popular demand. However, it seems unlikely at this point as the functionality is still very easily available and that  Microsoft have long calimed that they want to move beyond the Start button’s age-old design.

As it stands, we will provide more in-depth news on the functionality of the now elusive Start button.

In a report released by research firm Canalys, the Q4 results of last year have finally allowed a complete tally for 2011. There have been some surprising developments and others that were expected. Looking at the table below, you’ll see that for the first time, smartphone shipments have crossed the global shipments of desktop pc, laptops, netbooks and tablets combined.

The annual growth of smartphones is quite high, with almost 63% increase over last year. This has allowed for a global shipment of 487.7 million smartphones, compared to 414.6 million client PCs. Of course, the real star of the show are tablet computers, that have seen an astronomically high 274% increase over last year.

“In 2011 we saw a fall in demand for netbooks, and slowing demand for notebooks and desktops as a direct result of rising interest in pads (tablets),” said Chris Jones, Canalys VP and Principal Analyst. “But pads have had negligible impact on smart phone volumes and markets across the globe have seen persistent and substantial growth through 2011.”

Coming back to smartphones, it seems that the sudden increase in popularity of tablets hasn’t affected the smartphone market. The competition among the major platforms seems to be one-sided, though, as Android smartphones had the lion’s share of shipments, with almost 49% global market share. Apple comes in at a distant second with 19% followed closely (and surprisingly) by Symbian. BlackBerry seems to be strolling along at 10.5%; not nearly as bad as everyone was making it out to be, but still nowhere near Apple or Android.

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.

The guys over at Crackberry managed to get a hold of some slides that shows the BlackBerry roadmap for this year. One such slide showed a sneak peak at BlackBerry’s next flagship smartphone, codenamed ‘London’.

The BlackBerry London is expected to launch by the end of this year, probably around September. What makes London so special is that it’ll be running the new and completely reformed QNX based BlackBerry 10 OS. The all touchscreen London is expected to have a dual-core TI OMAP 5 processor running at 1.5GHz, so that’s already beyond what the current PlayBook is capable of.

With all the trouble that RIM has been going through in 2011, BlackBerry London could be exactly what’s needed to bring the company back up to speed with other smartphone makers; a territory that RIM once dominated.

With the launch of the new AMD HD 7950 graphics card, a lot of information has come out from various sources. Bright Side of News reported a leaked document from one of AMD’s partners that listed the roadmap for the release of the rest of the HD7000 series graphics cards.

The slide itself is pretty self explanatory with the release schedule. After the HD 79xx series, the first thing we’ll see are the budget oriented, sub-$100 HD77xx cards in mid-February. Following that will be the mainstream, sub-$200 HD 78xx cards out in March, presumably along the same time as the Nvidia 600 series cards. So by the time Nvidia launches their new cards, AMD will have already released most of their line-up.

Of course, that’s not where the Graphics Core Next architecture release ends, as the dual-GPU HD 7990 comes out in early Q2 of this year, most likely in April.

Speaking at the Midem conference in Cannes yesterday, the CEO of Rovio, more popularly known as the studio behind Angry Birds, talked about how they handle piracy. With over 500 million downloads and physical merchandise spreading all across the world, piracy is something that would naturally happen to this multi-billion dollar brand.

Unlike the music industry, though, who try to tackle users and pirates alike with legal action left and right, Rovio has a different outlook on the problem. “We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy,” said Mikael Hed, CEO at Rovio, in an interview.

Apart from pirated Angry Birds apps, Hed also mentioned that there are “tons and tons” of merchandise in Asian countries that’s not licensed by Rovio; clearly that is all revenue being lost. However, Hed says that “It would be futile to try to eradicate all the piracy through legal means – pursuing the pirates… We are doing that too, but mostly in cases when we feel the products that pirates are doing are harmful, either to the brand image or to the customers.”

Rovio sees their customers as fans, rather than users, as is the case with the music industry. ”If we lose that fanbase, our business is done, but if we can grow that fanbase, our business will grow,” he said. And this is where piracy isn’t taken as a complete evil towards the business, but instead it is seen as a means to increase the fans of the Angry Birds brand. “Piracy may not be a bad thing; it can get us more business at the end of the day.”

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.

Western Digital announced their 2nd quarter 2012 results, with sales of $2bn, compared to $2,5bn from a year earlier. The mere 20% decrease in sales is quite remarkable considering how badly WD’s manufacturing plants were hit during last year’s Thailand floods. In fact, WD did indeed ship almost half the hard drives shipped in the same period last year, with 28.5 million drives in Q2 2012 compared to 52.2 million drives in Q2 2011. Despite this, increase in prices and gross profit margins lead to profits of $145m, compared to $225m last year.

While discussing these earnings call, WD’s CEO, John F. Coyne was asked about ultrabooks and what medium storage will be used in them, given the heavy push from Intel and other OEMs. “I expect ultrabooks to have both hard drives, traditional hard drives and hybrid hard drives and SSDs. So I think there will be, depending on the specific version of ultrabook, you will see all 3 solutions and even in certain models, choices between those solutions in the same model, ” said Coyne (via transcript at Seeking Alpha).

“And we think that the SSD penetration profile will be in very low single digits in a mature ultrabook environment. And then we see an emerging position for hybrids a little early to develop a view on exactly what percentage of penetration, but we see hybrids as a very compelling alternative on the performance side to solid state on bang for the buck. And we anticipate that in large capacity environments, traditional hard drives will continue to be the compelling solution.”

One of the biggest reasons we don’t find Seagate’s Momentus XT in many notebooks as a default, or even optional HDD is because Seagate is the only manufacturer making hybrid drives; nobody else in the industry is making them. The critical mass for hybrid drives hasn’t been achieved simply because there is only one supplier in the market. With WD entering the foray of hybrid drives, the landscape for traditional hard drives could change very soon.

You can check out our review of the latest Momentus XT drive to see how fast it is compared to traditional HDDs vs SSDs.