Swedish Supreme Court rejects Pirate Bay founders final appeal

The Swedish Supreme Court will not hear an appeal from the founders of The Pirate Bay against prison sentences and fines imposed by the Swedish Court of Appeals, the court said on Wednesday.

Over a year ago, the Court of Appeals sentenced Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundström to 10 months, eight months, and four months of jail time, respectively. The court also said they must collectively pay a 46 million kronor (US$6.7 million) fine.

The Supreme Court hears cases that are considered important for the direction of Swedish law enforcement, or when there are special circumstances. The court has reviewed the material in the Pirate Bay case and found that neither reason to hear the case exists, it said.

Steam reaches mobile through Android and iOS app

Valve’s popular cloud-based PC gaming platform Steam will now be accessible from your iOS and Android-based mobile phone, according to a press release sent out today by Valve.

You won´t be able to play out your favorite PC games on your phone but thats not the purpose. The ideia is for you to be able to track Steam sales anywhere from your phone and check out the latest Steam bargains that apear once in a while. It will also allow you to chat with friends, view profiles, screenshots and user generated content.

Mozilla releases programming language Rust 0.1

After more than five years in the pipeline, Mozilla Labs and the Rust community have released the first alpha — version 0.1 — of the Rust programming language compiler.

The Rust language emphasizes concurrency and memory safety, and — if everything goes to plan — is ultimately being groomed to replace C++ as Mozilla’s compiled language of choice. Browser prototypes programmed in Rust will eventually emerge, and then one day Firefox — or parts of Firefox — might be re-written in Rust.

Rust is a strongly-typed systems programming language with a focus on memory safety and concurrency. The compiler is supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Feature-wise, Rust intentionally doesn´t bring any new ideas, and instead builds upon existing, known features that are present in other languages.

YouTube Reaches 4 Billion Daily Views

YouTube, Google Inc's video website, is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company.

The jump in video views comes as Google pushes YouTube beyond the personal computer, with versions of the site that work on smartphones and televisions, and as the company steps up efforts to offer more professional-grade content on the site.

Robert Kyncl, vice president of content at Google and a former architect of the Netflix streaming business, said that YouTube serves 3 billion hours per video every month and tops 800 million unique visitors per month.

YouTube also said today that users are now uploading an hour of video every second equaling 60 hours of video every minute.

Aquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, YouTube represents one of Google's key opportunities to generate new sources of revenue outside its traditional Internet search advertising business.

Reuters notes however that most of the 4 billion videos viewed on YouTube today don’t make money. Only 3 billion YouTube videos a week are being monetized.


                                                                                                     Source: http://www.reuters.com

Google Q4 earnings disappoint, shares down 10 per cent

Google has suffered the rare indignity of falling below Wall Street expectations after announcing its earnings for Q4 2011.

Company stock dropped a whopping ten per cent in after-hours trading after reporting net revenue of $8.13 billion (£5.25bn) and $9.50 (£6.13) in earnings per share.

While those figures still put the company in a position to be envied by almost every other publicly traded entity in the world, Wall Street was expecting more. Experts had predicted $8.40 billion in net revenue and $10.49 in earnings per share.

Not everything is bad, although it's rare that Google misses the mark, the company is heralding it's first $10 billion+ quarter, before "traffic acquisition costs." and a 25 per cent gain on the corresponding quarter in 2010.