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Skype now available for Nokia smartphones in Ovi Store
Mar 3rd
More than 200 million smartphone users worldwide now have Skype at their fingertips
Luxembourg and Espoo, Finland – Skype and Nokia today jointly announced the release of Skype for Symbian, a Skype client for Nokia smartphones based on the Symbian platform, the world’s most popular smartphone platform. Skype for Symbian will allow Nokia smartphone users worldwide to use Skype on the move, over either a WiFi or mobile data connection (GPRS, EDGE, 3G). It is now downloadable for free from the Ovi Store, Nokia’s one-stop shop for mobile content.
PayPal India hits reboot
Mar 1st
PayPal confirmed late last week that the Reserve Bank of India had given it the go ahead to restart bank withdrawals in the country for settlements for exports of goods and services.
However, the company’s Asia-Pacific boss Farhad Irani warned that personal payments remained switched off.
“We are currently making changes to comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of goods and services, and we anticipate that as of Wednesday, March 3rd, we will be able to resume the bank withdrawal service,” he said in a PayPal blog post.
“As part of the changes, you will be required to fill out a new field entitled ‘Export Code’ when you request a withdrawal. This information is required under the current laws of India in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions.”
The RBI told PayPal to get its house in order by getting specific approvals to allow personal inward remittances to India, which Irani admitted the firm doesn’t currently have.
“Until we get these approvals, personal payments into India will remain suspended,” he said.
Google Explains Search Rankings After Complaints in Europe
Feb 26th
Google has offered a general explanation of how it ranks its search results, one day after the European Commission said it was looking into antitrust complaints against the company.
In a blog post Thursday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal also referred to a recent op-ed piece suggesting that regulators should control how search engines rank results. He stressed that developing search rankings is very difficult, implying perhaps that regulating search would be hard for any government to do well.
Laying out the challenge, Singhal said Google processes hundreds of millions of queries a day, with at least 20 percent of them totally new. To handle the volume and variety of queries, the company uses a collection of algorithms to sift through data.
“Our algorithms use hundreds of different signals to pick the top results for any given query. Signals are indicators of relevance, and they include items as simple as the words on a webpage or more complex calculations such as the authoritativeness of other sites linking to any given page,” he said.
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Apostrophe : A Practical CMS
Feb 23rd
Apostrophe is a content management system designed for maximum flexibility with a minimal learning curve. The interface is ergonomic, all content-editing is performed in-context. Manage levels of user permission. Organize and integrate photos and videos in the media library. Create complex page hierarchies quickly.
- Create flexible templates with sections that can expand to accommodate different types of content. Apostrophe lets you define areas in your templates and set options for the content they support. Allow your clients to add content without damaging your design.
- Extend the capabilities of the CMS with your own custom modules and content slots. Want to add new functionality to the CMS? It’s easy to create your own in-context editable components.
- Wield the power of the best PHP framework on the web. Apostrophe is an extension of the Symfony framework, so using it to build your site gives you access to a wealth of development tools. Pretty cool.
Windows Phone Series 7
Feb 22nd
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, Microsoft finally unveiled the latest version of Windows Mobile. The company took two years to develop the new OS, starting essentially from scratch. The result is a world class smartphone operating system and UI that actually has a chance to make Microsoft a player in the space again. The company has been operating in the mobile space for a while, of course, but after Apple and Google entered the market, Microsoft had no choice but to chuck its old OS in favor of a more competitive version.
To understand Microsoft’s approach to the market with Windows Phone Series 7, we need to examine the diametrically opposing ways its competitors develop products for the space. Apple epitomizes the closed approach. Google and the open source community, on the other hand, view smartphones as an open platform for design and innovation. While both approaches have merit, Apple’s move to drive software developers to write and support a specific OS has helped the company go from zero to 25 percent market share in less than three years. It has served the company well and has generated a lot of money for the developers of the iPhone’s more than 150,000 apps.
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