Soft Tech Service

Google on its official blog, Google announced the death penalty to its code search engine, Buzz, Jaiku which let users send updates to friends, the Google personalised homepage feature iGoogle, and the University Research Program for Google Search. The shut-downs came as part of Google's housecleaning effort announced in early September, in which the company said it will shut down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features."Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today's announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome," said Google in the blog post.
Google Buzz, a social networking and messaging tool integrated into Gmail service, has been widely criticised for privacy concerns and held back the search giant from expanding its businesses to the social networking space. After Buzz, Google launched Google+ in June, which has been receiving a good response and passed the 40 million user mark, the company's chief executive officer Larry Page said.

Genevieve Johnson, psychology lecturer at Australia's Curtin University's School of Education who conducted the study, analysed responses from 51 boys and 44 girls at a Canadian primary school. She likened the situation of boys who did not use e-mail to that of boys from an earlier era not familiar with TV.
"Think back to when you were a little kid if one of your friends didn't have a lunch box with the latest cartoon characters on it - because they didn't watch TV - they were almost socially isolated because they didn't know what was going on,"
Johnson said."So when we say that children who use the internet under certain circumstances are more popular - that's true," said Johnson, according to a university statement.The surveyed girls were more likely than the boys to use e-mail at home but at school the girls and boys reported very similar use.The similarity between boys' and girls' e-mail use suggested internet teaching at school may be closing the technology gender gap."We've got this impression that the internet, including games, is something bad. This is totally inconsistent with the vast majority of my research," Johnson said."I cannot say that every single online application is associated with positive developmental outcomes - but most are," she concluded.

Facebook released its long-awaited iPad app and introduced support for social games on the mobile versions of its online service. The dual announcements plug two key holes in Facebook's product offerings and could provide a way for Facebook to generate revenue from the more than 350 million users who access its service on mobile devices every month. Facebook said that the mobile versions of its website will now offer tighter integration with third-party social games and applications. Those games, such as Zynga's Farmville, are extremely popular among Facebook users who access the service on their PCs.
Similar to the experience on a PC, Facebook users on mobile devices such as Apple's iPhone and Android smartphones will receive alerts in their newsfeed when their friends play certain games or invite them to play along with them. Facebook's mobile service will also offer bookmarks within the website of a user's favorite games, for quick access. Many of those games offer users the ability to purchase virtual goods -- such as additional equipment or clothing to enhance the experience in a game -- using Facebook's special so-called Credits currency. Facebook takes a 30 per cent cut of the revenue from those transactions. The company said it would require third-party app developers to support Credits in the mobile versions of their games that interact with Facebook. The rule only applies to games aimed at users of the Facebook website developed using HTML5 technology and accessed through a standard browser. Facebook said the specialized iPhone app version of its service would not support its Credits currency, in accordance with Apple's terms of service.
The new version of Facebook for Apple's popular iPad tablet has been rumored on industry blogs for months. Facebook said the iPad app will offer enhanced photo-viewing capabilities and messaging capabilities.

NEW YORK: Internet search giant Google has been ranked as the best company to work for by management and engineering graduates in two separate surveys, which term the company the world's "most attractive employer" of 2011.
According to the survey conducted by global employer branding firm Universum, Google has been ranked at the top of its 2011 list of the top 50 global businesses and engineering companies to work for -- the third year in a row.
The search giant has been dubbed the most attractive employer by more than 160,000 people from Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, the UK and US looking for the right place to work.
"For the last three years, we have been seeing Google leading the pack and it will take a strong player with a clear talent strategy to steal this number one spot," Universum Head (Research and Consulting) Lovisa Ohnell said.
The search giant is followed by auditor KPMG, where most B-Schools students want to work, while engineering graduates picked tech giant IBM as their second choice.
For engineering students, software giant Microsoft is the third choice, followed by car-maker BMW (fourth), chip-maker Intel (fifth), electronics company Sony (sixth), tech firm Apple (seventh), GE (eighth), Siemens (ninth) and consumer goods group Procter & Gamble (10th).
The other technology firms that were favoured by engineers are HP, Cisco, Oracle, Nokia, Dell, and Lenovo.
"The software industry is highly dependent on its human capital, hence the efforts to attract and retain the brightest minds in the world," Universum Global Account Director Carlo Duraturo said.
"There's a new working culture paradigm today -- the relaxed and creative office -- and part of it we owe to this industry. Generation Y feels very comfortable working in this new environment and it's clearly reflected in the attractiveness of the software industry," Duraturo added.
Meanwhile, in the list of top 50 employers for business students, KPMG is followed by rivals PwC, Ernst & Young and Deloitte at third, fourth and fifth spot, respectively.
In addition, B-Schools students seeking the best employer ranked Microsoft sixth in the list, followed by Procter & Gamble (seventh), financial services entity JP Morgan (eighth), Apple (ninth) and financial services major Goldman Sachs (10th).
Among the other notable names in the list, soft drink major Coca-Cola figured at 12th position in the list, while Citi occupied 29th place and beverages firm PepsiCo bagged 30th place in the list for business students.

Apple, which will introduce a new iPhone version tomorrow, ships fewer handsets to the world's second-largest mobile-phone market than it does to Norway. Nokia Oyj and Research In Motion Ltd sell more devices in India, where smartphone shipments are forecast to grow almost 70 per cent a year until 2015, helping mitigate their market-share losses in the US and Europe. Sales for the world's biggest company by market value are hindered because Indian wireless carriers, which started third- generation networks this year, have yet to offer nationwide services fast enough to take advantage of iPhone features, said Gus Papageorgiou, an analyst at Scotia Capital Inc. in Toronto. "Networks in India are just not conducive for Apple -- 3G networks aren't quite where they are in Western Europe and North America," he said. "RIM got the right product, the right timing, the right app." Apple shipped 62,043 iPhones to India in the quarter ending June 30, or fewer than to Norway, Belgium or Israel, according to estimates by Framingham, Massachusetts-based researcher IDC.