Amazon has announced its Q4, 2011 results. The positive news is that the net sales are up by 35% to $17.43 billion compared to last year, helped no doubt by the truckload of Kindles that Amazon shipped. Although they did not release specific numbers, Amazon did mention that during the nine-week holiday period, Kindle sales increased by 177 percent over last year, most probably due to the new low-price Kindle and the Kindle Fire, which has been quite a big hit.

Unfortunately, though, as Apple will tell you, selling products at a low price isn’t the best way to earn money. This means all those $199 Kindle Fires would have had a major role to play in the drop of net income for Amazon, which was down by 58% over last year. Read more »

We knew it had to happen eventually, but now we already have an exact date to look forward to. Google has just announced that it will be joining a bunch of other major internet companies in a coordinated launch of the next-generation Internet protocol on June 6 this year.

IPv6 is the replacement for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, which ran out of addresses quite some time ago. Read more »

Facebook is pretty popular, ‘pretty’ possibly being the understatement of the century, but did you know that in fact 1 in 10 people use Facebook and that combined, that makes 800 million users worldwide?

With that much activity, Facebook Inc. have made themselves a pretty sizable audience for advertisers to address, but with talks of the company going public, just how much did you expect it was actually worth? Read more »

Mozilla’s popular Firefox browser has sat at the top of the rankings since 2009, beating off the likes of veteran browser Internet Explorer and relative (2008) newcomer, Google Chrome.

Over the course of 2011, we’ve seen Mozilla push new features and extend the Firefox family with the likes of Firefox for Android and their development channel Firefox Aurora, but let them team show just what they got up to across the last 12 months. Read more »

The wait was over for many a Jedi and Sith-in-training yesterday, as Star Wars: The Old Republic; EA, BioWare and LucasArts’ new MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) finally launched on PC.

The title itself fills the gap left by the last Star Wars MMO, Star Wars: Galaxies which saw varied interest between its launch in 2003 and its recent shutdown, less than a week ago (December 15th). Read more »

Facebook announced its Timeline feature back in September at the f8 conference and today it’s ready and available for everyone (globally) to enable, try out under cover and, finally, publish to Facebook contacts.

Timeline replaces your profile page with a reworked new one, focused on your entire Facebook activity divided into years starting with your first ever birthday. Read more »

After the initial buzz about Google+ dried out, we barely hear any news about the service these days but Google seems determined to make this one a success. They’ve updated Hangouts with some cool new features and bringing it to Google+ Messenger on mobile devices.

With the update, Google aims to make Hangouts the online conferencing tool. The first step is to make it easier to start or join a hangout. Read more »

Google brought some good news to its Gmail users in the US and Canada. The search giant is extending the availability of the free calling service that Gmail offers by another year.

That means that you will be able to place domestic calls in the US and Canada through the whole 2012 completely free of charge. That’s the second extension of the free calling service as it was initially expected to only last until the end of 2010, which later changed to the end of 2011. Read more »

Google just introduced another one of the cool side-projects of its software developers to the world. Dubbed Schemer, the new service aims to let you make better use of your spare time by sharing fun ideas with people around the world.

Here’s what Schemer should, ideally be all about, according to the developers: Read more »

Twitter released a major update yesterday that spanned their website, mobile applications and even the recently acquired TweetDeck. The web interface now includes a new top bar with three new tabs for Home, Connect and Discover.

Home is your timeline where you can see tweets from the people you follow and yourself. The profile information and additional options that were present on the right side of the previous design have been shifted to the left. You can now click on tweets to expand them and if there are any images or videos embedded then they can be viewed right then and there. Read more »

The highly anticipated update to the Android version of the Facebook app has finally hit the Android Market. With this new update, Facebook has introduced a new UI that should make your life a lot easier.

For starters there is now a bar at the top with that, just like the Facebook website, which gives you quick access to your friends requests, messages and notifications. You even get real time push notifications now. Another new feature is a left-hand menu that slides in from the side to give you quick access to your favorites, lists and the search bar. Read more »

Hot on the heels of the update for the iOS version, Google has now upgraded the Android version of the Google+ app. Among the most noticeable changes is a new red icon, which is now the same as the favicon for the Google+ website.

Other changes include the ability to search within the app, +1 photos and comments, upload high resolution photos, ability to see whether other Google+ users are online and whether they are typing in Messenger, Read more »

Nokia just released a major update to their Nokia Maps 3D web app, adding several new features. The mapping software, which offers arguably the best photorealistic 3D view mode (albeit in a limited number of cities) now got local attractions, restaurants, and shops and navigation support.

You can search for addresses, businesses and various other points of interests and you can now plan a route with walk or drive directions. And it all works in 3D Read more »

Facebook is getting ready to refresh its arsenal on Android. The software engineers of the behemoth social network are putting the finishing touches on version 1.8 of the Facebook app for Android and there will be a whole new app coming to the Google platform in the near future.

The new version of the app brings slightly cleaner UI and should supposedly improve navigation, menu and search functionality. We should be hearing more about it in the near future, when it is expected to hit the Android Market. Read more »

Google added another feature to their constantly growing bag of tricks – the simple calculator feature of Google Search has grown a graphing calculator. You just type in a function (e.g. sin(x) * x) and you’ll get an interactive plot of the function as the top search result.

You can pan around and zoom in and out, check the value of the function at any point you like and even plot multiple functions (separate them with a comma). All this is done with HTML5 plus SVG, there’s no Flash used (so it should run problem-free on devices without Flash support). Read more »