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Google Chrome has a flexible URL bar. Some applications and users may not really need it and there is now an option to kill it. The effect is a 30 pixel gain in vertical space and transforms the standard viewing window in Chrome into a full-screen view. The downside: There is a security issue as users will not always notice the URL and are now much more exposed to phishing attacks, for example and not aware whether they are on a secure or unsecured website.

Instead of showing a URL bar permanently, the user will have to double-click a tab to see a shortened version of the URL that is displayed with a hover effect, if you move the mouse pointer away from the field, the URL bar disappears. The feature has to be enabled via a flag in a recent Canary or nightly build version of Chrome 13. To activate the hidden URL bar, users will also have to right-click a tab and select “Hide the toolbar”. Besides killing the URL bar, the new feature also moves the tools menu, hides any extension and introduces new back/forward buttons. To open a tab URL bar, click the tab once.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn Corp. and its three main venture backers will own a combined stake of $5.14 billion. It has been a long road for the founder and it has been eight years leading up to this day, the first IPO by a major US social networking site.

“Any solid returns like this are clearly a great thing and there’s been too few of them in the past decade,” said Eric Risley, founder of Architect Partners, a technology merger-and- acquisition advisory firm in Menlo Park, California. “This was not an overnight success by any means.”

The shares went from $49.25 to a major $94.25 at around 4pm NY time. At the closing price the market value of LinkedIn was around $8.91 billion.

There is a report that a supply chain for Apple products out of Taiwan is shipping brand new 11.6 and 13.3 inch MacBok Air models featuring the Sandy Bridge platform and Thunderbolt interfaces in late May. This is for a launch that will be coming in June or July no doubt and seems it may not be the product Apple is supposedly going to launch on its retail anniversary. This is all reports from the makers in the supply chain. However Apple has not commented and is usually hush hush about its launches. Here a small overview of Apple in the laptop market and why this report of the new Mac Book Air is likely to take flight in June/July.

Apple shipped over 2.7 million notebook PCs in the first quarter of 2011, historically the second highest quarterly level and only 5% lower than the shipment volume in the preceding quarter. The 5% sequential drop was lower than the corresponding industry average decrease of more than 10%, and this was mainly due to booming sales of new MacBook Pro models. Along with shipments of the new MacBook Air, Apple’s notebook PC shipment volume in the second quarter is expected to rise by 5-10% on quarter and may attain 3.0 million units.

I found from some reliable sources that Apple might be launching something major for its 10th retail anniversary for Thursday the 19th. This is what I have read:
They will be having an overnight shift that will be around 10-15 employees at each Apple Store that will work from late night Saturday into mid Sunday. During the said shift the employees will have lock their cell phones in the main office and will also sign a nondisclosure agreement with Apple. Apple will be putting up black curtains at all the stores so that people cannot see inside of the stores. The overnight shift will have a many roles, visual staff, a manager a couple of Genius members, a business team member, one back of the house employee and a few Apple specialists. It has been said that they have received hardware and there is more to come between Friday and Saturday. Employees also needed to download gigabytes of data from Apple which was labeled training and is password protected and will not be accessible to managers until Saturday afternoon.
Apple must be planning something big but how could something this major go under the radar and not really know what they could be presenting to the world. I guess we will find out shortly.

The Playstation Network is still down and get this it won’t be coming back online willy nilly. The Japanese government is refusing to allow Sony to reactivate its damaged network until there is something reached on a few outstanding issues. One of the first issues is that Sony promised a counter-hacking measure that was announced back on May 1st and they have not fully enacted it, although details of what has and hasn’t been done are not yet available for good reason. The second big thing is the credit cards and Japan wants to see further preventive measures taken to ensure that users’ credit card numbers and other private data won’t be exposed through the use of Sony’s online services again. Let’s hope Japan keeps the foot on the throat of Sony until they meet all the promises made.

Asked about the possibility of Amazon launching a multipurpose tablet device, the company’s president and CEO Jeff Bezos said to “stay tuned” on the company’s plans. In an interview at Consumer Reports’ offices, Bezos also signaled that any such device, should it come, is more likely to supplement than to supplant the Kindle, which he calls Amazon’s “purpose-built e-reading device.”

Bezos also responded to a question from a visiting retail reporter about a possible Amazon tablet in a way that also seemed to suggest the possible co-existence of the Kindle and other Amazon devices: “I hate the term ‘killer,’ as in one device killing another in the marketplace.”

Who knows what will happen with the Kindle if Amazon does put out a tablet. Will there just be integration of the tablet and the Kindle or will things change with a new tablet and maybe a focus dropped off the Kindle and put on this tablet.

Samsung will demonstrate an all-new 10.1-inch display at the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium next week. Samsung’s new display will have a 2560 x 1600 resolution, far in excess of anything on the tablet market today. At 300 dpi, the display also compares favorably with the Retina Display resolution of Apple’s iPhone 4; meanwhile, Samsung claims the PenTile technology used in the display allows it to operate while drawing 40 percent less power.

The screen size is going to be 10.1 inches and the iPad is always been 9.7 and it will be interesting to see if in the iPad 3 if Apple ups the stakes on the size or not. The iPad’s current resolution is 1024 x 768. Also Apple has currently stayed away from the PenTile technology which is in this new Smasung tablet. amsung’s new display does prove that high-res, tablet-sized displays are indeed possible without giving up power efficiency, which makes it all the more likely that we’ll see a Retina Display quality touchscreen in the iPad 3. It’s previously been rumored that Apple wanted to include such technology in the iPad 2, but was unable to do so because of high costs and manufacturing constraints.

Another step in the battle against Apple for the top tablet in the world, and it is no doubt that if Samsung can do all of this Apple will have some big tricks up their sleeves for the iPad 3. Apple already has the advantage of branding and I tell you that is a huge advantage for any company making a tablet to overcome.

It has been reported by The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons that the social network Facebook hired a PR firm to place negative stories about Google. It basically goes like this; Burson-Marsteller which is a top public relations firm pitched anti-Google stories to newspapers that they should investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. They even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-basing op-ed, which would be placed in papers such as The Washington Post, Politico and the Huffington Post.
This all came out when it all backfired on them and blogger decided to post the emails that were sent to him and then USA Today put out a story that the firm was spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google on behalf of an unnamed client.

Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: first, it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.

Facebook may have made a very powerful enemy in this crazy world of social networking and who knows how far this will even escalate. All I know is Facebook better put their best researchers on the case to find out if their feelings on Google’s privacy invasion is actually true.

A report from Context is showing that the 64GB iPad 2 is still the most popular version of the Apple tablets even though Android devices are beginning to make in-roads to Apple’s majority market share. Six weeks since the launch of the 64GB 3G model that in Europe alone accounted for a third of all the iPad 2 sales and the Wi-Fi only 16GB model was second in popularity. Apple’s iPad devices comprised a whopping 80% of tablet devices sold in the first quarter of 2011. However, this figure represented a 5% decrease from the previous quarter, highlighting the growing popularity and number of Android devices.

“Apple defined the tablet market with the launch of the iPad in May 2010, but the signs are that the hegemonic presence in the market will face a strong challenge this year,” said Salman Chaudhry, mobile computing analyst at Context.

With new Android devices coming out it will be interesting to see if Apple can continue the domination in the market. Time will only tell how long the market share will hold.

Yesterday I wrote about the $8.5 billion dollar purchase of Skype. Well it looks like Microsoft is getting Qik out of the deal as well. Qik is a streaming mobile video company that Skype acquired for $121 million earlier this year. Though it has been announced that Skype will have its own division inside the Microsoft family and that qik maybe a part of the mobile perspective. The funny thing about this acquisition is that Microsoft’s Windows 7 phones don’t run Skype or Qik and yet Android and the iPhone do. Obviously one of the goals behind this will be the integration of these programs into the Windows mobile phones. Here are a few statements from Steven Ballmer the Microsoft CEO on the importance of the mobile video side of things that Qik can give them.

“Mobile is clearly moving to be a rich communications capability above and beyond just voice. We introduced two-way video recently in terms of our iPhone products and our Android products, and we’ll work together with Microsoft to keep enhancing and enriching those, and you can see just how much video is going to dominate the traffic as we look for the next few years. It’s one of the fastest-growing parts of the industry, and Skype’s well-positioned.

Video is in our DNA, it’s in the technology that we produce, it’s in the way that we think about communications. Over 40 percent of all the traffic that Skype delivers today is already video. Video ads is one of the biggest opportunities that we see moving forward. And we’re just at the beginning of that in the U.S. Less than 5 percent of the market is there today. Video itself we think as an overall market both for advertising and for rich communications around collaboration and finding ways to create that engaged user base is one of the fastest-growing areas of the market. We estimate 45 percent growth just in video-based ads over the compound annual growth rate just over the next few years.”