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With face time being a big hit on the iPhone 4. It was no secret the Droid would be soon to follow. As we know the Droid wants to do everything and now the Droid does video chat. You can now video or voice chat with your friends, family and colleagues right from your Android phone, whether they’re on their compatible Android tablet or phone, or using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer. You can make calls over a 3G or 4G data network (if your carrier supports it) or over Wi-Fi.
Google Talk with video and voice chat will gradually roll out to Nexus S devices in the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update and will launch on other Android 2.3+ devices in the future.

Microsoft yesterday announced third quarter earnings and they hit some record breaking numbers.
Microsoft had third-quarter revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended Mar. 31, 2011, a 13% increase from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.71 billion, $5.23 billion, and $0.61 per share, which represented increases of 10%, 31%, and 36%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period. Diluted earnings per share included a $0.05 tax benefit primarily related to an agreement with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to settle a portion of their audit of tax years 2004 to 2006.
“We delivered strong financial results despite a mixed PC environment, which demonstrates the strength and breadth of our businesses,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft. “Consumers are purchasing Office 2010, Xbox and Kinect at tremendous rates, and businesses of all sizes are purchasing Microsoft platforms and applications.”
Some more highlights are as follows, MS business division grew 21% and Windows 7 is the fastest selling OS in history with over 350 million licenses sold. All in all Microsoft is doing great.

Sony is finally being sued for the breach of the Playstation Network. As I predicted in one of my earlier blogs about Sony’s network being down, it was inevitable someone would find some legal move to take a shot at Sony for not properly handling the data. The suit was filed today on behalf of Kristopher Johns, 36, of Birmingham, Ala., in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Johns accuses Sony of not taking “reasonable care to protect, encrypt, and secure the private and sensitive data of its users.” He also believes Sony took too long to notify him and other customers that their personal information had been exposed. Because of that, the complaint alleges, Sony did not allow its customers “to make an informed decision as to whether to change credit card numbers, close the exposed accounts, check their credit reports, or take other mitigating actions.”
The lawsuit is asking for monetary compensation and free credit card monitoring, and is seeking class action status.
Johns’ complaint echoes the concerns of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. Blumenthal yesterday wrote a letter to Jack Tretton, president and chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America, saying he was troubled that the company had not notified customers sooner about the breach. He also called for Sony to provide affected customers with financial data security services, including free access to credit reporting services for two years to protect against identity theft.

If this does go class action who knows how big this could honestly get. I know I have a PSN account and I am certainly bothered by these troubling events. I will keep this story close at hand and update with new information as it comes forth.

Many of the Hollywood studios have a divide on whether to join YouTube initiatives to rent movies on demand. This is actually holding up the launch of this service. Sources from TheWrap state Fox and Paramount are confirming they are have no intention to move forward with any deal at this time. Disney has also not made its intentions clear on whether or not it will be striking a deal with YouTube. Warner Bros., Sony and Universal have inked deals with YouTube for rental at launch.

YouTube is not a slam dunk, by any means, said one executive at Sony. “It’s unproven as to whether this audience through this medium will pay for content. But it’s a huge audience. And it’s an audience that pays for video,” the executive said.

All three majors believe that Google will help develop technology to eventually lead to a sell-through model, where consumers can buy – not just rent – movies and store them in digital lockers.

Starting Tuesday, Facebook is releasing Deals as a “test” in five cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. The company, which has more than 600 million members, said it hoped that its ability to tap directly into the communications and activities of networks of friends will help it offer a more compelling service than rivals. It will be easy to share deals with friends, see when a friend buys something and find offers that your friends are interested in, said Emily White, Facebook’s director for local. Facebook will focus on offers for things that are best done with friends, like concerts or events, she said.
“You can receive Facebook deals via e-mail,” she said. “But if there is a deal that is good for you, it will likely show up in your news feed at some point in the day.”
Most of the sites you can get deals from let you link the deals to Facebook but this would be more of the actual site getting these deals as aposed to sharing via Groupon or Living Social. This is going to be another way for Facebook to increase revenue streams, with the movie rental testing seemingly going well, it is no doubt that if Facebook has the right amount of deals, people will pay for them.

It’s been about 72 hours and the Playstation Network is still down. Sony has confirmed that the outage is due to one or more hackers attacking the system. In a statement from Sony’s Patrick Seybold he states this:

An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.

Funny enough since they have been attacked, who knows what has actually happened as far as what hackers have been able to get. We all know this stems from Sony taking a strong stand on piracy of their games and maybe taking it a bit too far by trying to get the isp who hit the site to few how to mod the PS3 to play pirated games. It looks like Sony hit a big button with the hacker community by not just going after the person who created the hack but the people who just viewed it! If this gets worse and it affects people by their credit cards becoming compromised and such, I wonder if the people could have a case against Sony, cause as we all know Sony seems to love a good litigation.

Samsung has announced its first 4G LTE phone for Big Red, the Droid Charge, which will be available Thursday, April 28th. It features a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, an 8-MP rear camera with LED flash, a 1.3-MP front-facing camera, 1-GHz processor, Android 2.2 (Froyo), and– its main selling point–support for Verizon’s LTE network. Are you sitting down? The Samsung Droid Charge will cost $299 with a two-year contract, $50 more than the HTC Thunderbolt.

On a nice side, the Droid Charge comes with a 1600 mAh battery instead of the Thunderbolt’s 1400 mAh, which means it should last longer on a charge–without the need for an extended battery. On our tests, the Thunderbolt lasted a mere 3 hours and 56 minutes while continuously surfing over 4G. With 200 more milliampere-hours, we expect that the Droid Charge will come closer to our average Android battery life of 5 hours and 50 minutes.

Microsoft, which has had a bit of a turnstile at the top of its online advertising business, just replaced its top boss. The software giant today named Frank Holland to the job of corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft’s global advertising sales business, the newly created Advertising and Online organization. Holland will report to Microsoft’s chief operating officer, Kevin Turner.

Though the division is new, Holland is taking most of the responsibilities from Darren Huston, corporate vice president of the Consumer and Online organization. The other piece of Huston’s job, the marketing of Microsoft itself, will fall to Chris Capossela, who was named senior vice president of the Consumer Channels and Central Marketing Group two weeks ago.

A bit of a background on Holland:

Holland has worked for Microsoft for 13 years, most recently as corporate vice president of Microsoft’s worldwide operations. That job had little to do with ad sales. Instead, Holland led the company’s agreement processing and invoicing, sales operations, and business planning groups, and was also responsible for the incentive compensation and training of the global sales force.

According to AlertSite, a Web performance management company, between 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET Thursday, one portion of the Reddit site took more than 60 seconds to load, only to return an error message. Foursquare’s homepage had 84.44% availability between 8:15 a.m. and noon, also returning error messages explaining the downtime and slowness.

At 5:16 a.m. ET Thursday, site administrators reported that they were dealing with connectivity issues impacting Amazon’s Relational Database Service, which is used to manage a cloud database, across multiple zones in the Eastern United States.

That means some Web sites were down or partially disabled for at least 11 hours.

While that’s a problem for the downed sites, it’s probably going to be tougher on Amazon itself, according to Robert Mahowald, an analyst with IDC. “Amazon is held as a paradigm of operational uptime,” he said. “When this kind of thing happens, it definitely sends a chill through the whole cloud and hosted services industry…. It’s absolutely a black eye. There’s no doubt about it.”

Security researches are found that Apple iphone keeps track of where you go and saves every detail of it to a file that hidden to the device and is copied to the owner’s pc when the two are synched. It appears that these files have the latitude and longitude of the phone’s coordinates along with a timestamp, which means if anyone simple your phone or the computer the computer could discover the details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.
“Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been,” said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.
Only the iPhone records the user’s location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. “Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and couldn’t find any,” said Warden. “We haven’t come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this.”
Simon Davies, director of the pressure group Privacy International, said: “This is a worrying discovery. Location is one of the most sensitive elements in anyone’s life – just think where people go in the evening. The existence of that data creates a real threat to privacy. The absence of notice to users or any control option can only stem from ignorance about privacy at the design stage.”
Warden and Allan have set up a web page which answers questions about the file, and created a simple downloadable application to let Apple users check for themselves what location data the phone is retaining. The Guardian has confirmed that 3G-enabled devices including the iPad also retain the data and copy it to the owner’s computer.