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This article (by Emily Price) details a few interesting facts surrounding the social media giant 'Facebook', particularly around gaming. We are all familiar with social games, such as Mafia Wars and Farmville, and Facebook has been recently seeing most of their income from in-game advertisements and in-app purchases. Facebook has seen a 13% growth in gaming users since September 2011 (226 million - 251 million.) Facebook now has over 900 million users, and over 500 million users are utilizing Facebook via a mobile platform. Facebook says that games grow on the network in five different ways: App Center, Notifications, News Feed, Timeline, and games users have Bookmarked. 8 out of the 10 top iOS games have Facebook integrated, and the top two categories of games users play on Facebook are 'Simulation' and 'Games and Puzzles.' This relates to Portable Computing because Facebook has recently taken large steps to improve the user's mobile experience, understanding that most of their core audience is on smart devices. This relates to eLifestyle because we see these social networks like Facebook integrating gaming into the user's social feed, allowing them to spend more time on the site. This relates to Economics because as games become cheaper and more accesible, we see that most of the gaming market is taken by mobile games; no longer do we have to go to an electronics boutique to purchase a $60 triple-A game, when we can buy the $0.99 version of said game or another digitally. Mobile games are the consumer conscious choice because you get the most "bang for your buck." This relates to ICS20 because although most of us say that our time on Facebook is deteriorating, we still are entrenched in the social gaming environment; this is demonstrated by Facebook's 65 million user growth in 2012 alone.

Apple is the wealthiest company in the world possessing more money than the US government. With this being said, it is no surprise that four of the top five best paid executives in America are employed by Apple. It was reported by Bloomberg that they each receive a base salary of $805,400, but also get paid in stock options. At the top of the list, Bob Mansfield, Senior VP of Technologies makes a huge equivalent of $85.5 million a year. Next on the list is Bruce Sewell, Apple's lead lawyer, who makes $69 million a year. After that is Jeffrey Williams, Senior VP of Operations, who makes $68.7 million a year, and Peter Oppenheimer, Chief Financial Officer, who makes $68.6 million a year. I gave this article the economics tag because it deals with the salaries of highly paid apple employees. Personally, I think it is outrageous that these people make multi-million dollar salaries, and this kind of thing should be regulated.     

DayZ is a revolutionary game which started as an idea from lead designer Dean Hall. Dean Hall was inspired to make DayZ after a near death experience. DayZ started off as a mod for Arma 2 which was out for three years sold 1 million copies after the DayZ mod was released they sold 1 million copies in a few months. After Bohemia (the company that makes ARMA games) gave Dean Hall a standalone DayZ project which has passed 1.5 million copies sold and is still in pre-alpha. All in all DayZ is a game that tests your humanity, fear, compassion and everything in between.

A lot of people have been using instagram to take pictures and upload them. Instagram launched in October 2010, growing to 1 million users in the first 10 weeks of existence. It grew to 27 million users in the first year, according to stats from the Apple App Store. Today, Instagram has more than 30 million registered users, who upload more than 5 million photos per day. Now that Instagram is available on Android, which claims to have users that are twice as engaged as iOS users. It relates to the course because it shows how our culture gets influenced by the internet.

Google Inc buys Nik Software's "Snapseed", in competition to Instagram, which was recently bought by Facebook. Despite being less popular than Instagram, and costing $4.99, in contrast to Instagram being free on Apple's mobile devices, Snapseed won Apple Inc's "iPad App Of The Year (2011)" award for its photo editing abilities. This article describes reactions to Google's purchase from companies including Google Inc., Nik Software, and BGC Partners. It seems once again that Google is playing catch up in social media to companies such as Facebook. Google Inc. reported this week that Google+ had reached 400 million users, and 100 million monthly active users. As a user of both Facebook and Google+, I feel as though Google is once again the underdog, albeit a rising one. In comparison to the battle for social media supremacy, Snapseed also has 9 million users, versus Instagram's 100 million. Google is rising in popularity and Facebook may have some competition. Perhaps this purchase of the photo-editing power of Snapseed may help Google in their obstacle ridden climb.

This article is about how the operating system Windows 8, has passed 200 million license sales. Within the first six months of windows 8 release, it passed 100 million license sales. However after that, the progress stayed the same and there weren't any spikes in sales. Windows 8 is doing slower at its sales than windows 7, as windows 7 passed 240 million sales after its first year. The reason for the slowdown in sales is the general PC market. People haven't got used to the tablet style computers with a touch screen interface. Microsoft is slowly going to change that and bring back the keyboard and mouse UI. By the time April 2014 hits, windows 8 should have a new 8.1.1 update.

A day after Google announced that 190 million Android devices have been manufactured to date, Sony Ericsson this morning revealed that 22 million of those that were sold were its Android-powered Xperia smartphones. 

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has just dropped some numbers at a speaker dinner here at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Costolo revealed that the company has gone from 90 million tweets per day in September of 2010 to 100 million at the beginning of this year to 1/4 billion tweets per day as of today, a 177% percent change.  Twitter is now serving up a billion tweets every 4-5 days, Costolo said.

Samsung has recently announced that it has sold 30 million Galaxy S III smartphones worldwide, the phone dropped in may making it the fastest selling smartphone to date. Although this sales figure seems impressive it still falls short of the sales rate for the iPhone 5. Apple doesn't announce sales for individual iPhone models but analysts expect the company to sell between 40 to 50 million iPhone 5 devices in the month of December. Overall, Samsung is said to have shipped twice as many smartphones than Apple.

Google's very own Gmail has overtaken Hotmail as the world's most-used email service. ComSorce released its data confirming that Gmail had 287 million unique worldwide visitors last month, while Hotmail received 256 million. I personally have both accounts but I use Gmail as my more personal email than my Hotmail. I always thought Gmail was ahead of the game by far. However, after seeing this statistic, Gmail is only a hair more popular than Hotmail. Don't forget Yahoo. In third place, with 281 million visitors, Yahoo is top three on the most visited email service.I believe that after Gmail has finally surpassed Hotmail, the gap of visitors between Gmail and Hotmail and even Yahoo will increase drastically with Gmail in first place by far.

In Thailand, e-book has been spreading according to local books and magazines "Ookbee". It is Thailand's biggest e-bookstore with a claimed 88% market share. It has 3 million users so far and is adding new subscribers at a rate of 6,000 each day. Last year, delivered about 8 million books free and paid and ranked in revenues of about "several million dollars" in the year.

Game of Thrones, the fantasy series that came out of a series of novels written by George R. R. Martin and adapted by HBO has just recently aired its third season with a bunch of people watching it during its premiere. The bad news is that the amount of people pirating the show is more then half the amount of people who actually watched it on HBO. With the premiere having around 6.7 million viewers and the amount of pirate viewers at 4.4 million. These stats are quite impressive but HBO can expect a lot more views when it counts on-demand, DVR, online streams with a gross audience of 11.6 million viewers when counting non-live viewers. On the other hand, TorrentFreak claims that GoT has been the most-pirated show over the past year and that the pirated audience is growing even faster. A few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, it had around 110,303 leechers and 52,786 seeders, a total of 163,088 people. This number actually broke the previous record with 144,663 peers for another show called "Heroes".

Approximately 119mill tablets will reach consumers around the world this year and last year up to 60 million. 73 million will be iPads 

In this article, it states that the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics were the most tweeted and most mentioned moments, athletes and sports up to date. The most mentioned sports on twitter in order were ice hockey, curling, and figure skating while the most mentioned sport on Facebook in order was ice hockey, figure skating and bobsleigh. In all, 40 million Olympic-related tweets were sent during the games and 45 million different Facebook users were responsible for a combined 120 million posts, comments and likes on Facebook. twitter did break down the top moments on Twitter of the games was USA's win over Russia in men's ice hockey shootout was 72, 630 TPM  while Facebook created a video that showed the most popular sports in each country each day. Canada was mainly talking about Ice hockey with a little figure skating 

In this article, Rob Beschizza examines how many medals each country in the olympics has per 10 million people living in that country. Canada has only 4 medals per 10 million people whereas Norway holds 27.9 medals per 10 million people. This graph shows a new way of calculating who has the most medals. Rob Beschizza has a career in writing articles for the site: BoingBoing, and each Olympian has a career in their favourite sport.

Missed the mark here. The intention was to post something related to Careers in Computing.

Apple announced today that over the weekend the iPhone 4s sold roughly 4 million copies, doubling the iPhone 4's sales. This is relevant because now i get the feeling that apple can put out pretty much anything, and it will sale really well.

Apple just announced that it sold four million iPhone 4S handsets over the last weekend. The phone hit stores on October 14th and it took just three days to move the massive lot. Incredible.

The iPhone 4s was in stores on October 14th and sold 4 million copies, doubling the iPhone 4's sales. This surprised me because when I first heard of the iPhone 4s, it seemed rushed. I thought the 4s was just something to put in the market while Apple was trying to make adjustments for the iPhone 5. I'm starting to think that whatever Apple puts releases into the market, consumers will just buy buy buy.

This article talks about google and its effect on our society. Google+ now has 170 million users abd is becoming a NO.3 Social network. However if you go by active monthly users in the U.S., Google+ would rank 6. This relates to our course because we too use google and many people starts to use a lot of social networking programs as part of their daily lives. All of my friends has signed up for st least 2 social networking and it;s becoming a big part of our lives. Google used to be popular for searching things but now it's taking over social networking as well and becoming most popular and well known network. 

Google+ is said to be rated the third most popular social networking site. However, numbers of users are always changing. Google+ has recently changed their look of their website, which may or may not attract more users. Many people are reliant on social networking sites because they find it is a better way to keep in touch with those you do not see anymore. Google+ is still far behind facebook, with 850 millions users, while Google+ still sitting at a 170 million users. Technology is what everyone in this generation is doing, so the numbers will increase once more people start talking more about Google+ and less about Facebook. 

Google+ announced  that Google plus has 170 million users. With this number of users Google+ is #3 on the top social networks ahead of Google+ is twitter and facebook

Minecraft PE is one of the greatest apps ever. Minecraft PE has stood on its head since it's release and is one of the most popular apps of all time. Minecraft was originally a PC game but some may say that the Pocket Edition has proven to be better. So will Mojang(the creator) slowly add more content or will a new follow up be at large?

Minecraft PE can be a very enjoyable game. Over 21 million copies of this seven dollar game was sold since its initial realise for the Xperia PLAY on August 16, 2011. I fined did really interesting that this game is doing so well. The mobile version so far, has 7 million more copies sold than the PC version. The PE version still does not allow redstone placement, although it can be mined and used in crafting recipes, and have near infinite worlds. I believe many of the customers are first time players who want to try the game at a lower cost. Although I do like the Pocket edition version, the PC version just has more to offer with the possibilities of mods an online multiplayer game modes.

although many people weren't pleased with the new release from apple because it was only an upgrade to the previous iPhone 4, apple still managed to break records. An estimated one million pre-orders were made in the span of 24 hours. the iPhone 4S which is a major upgrade to the iPhone 4 has better processor improvements, a new 8 mega pixel camera, and new speech to text and text to speech.

Second bad news for Sony today.  Following the hack attempts at three of their networks, the company today announced [JP] that it will recall a total of 1.6 million BRAVIA LCD TV sets sold in Japan and other regions. The problem is a backlight component inside the TVs that could overheat and make the upper casing melt.