After only being launched in late January, Ovi Maps has had well over three million downloads to date. TechRadar caught up with Michael Halbherr, Head of Ovi Experience and Services at Nokia, to talk about the future of mapping, pedestrian navigation and how augmented reality will bring together our physical and virtual lives. Before working at Nokia itself, Halbherr was at Gate 5, a mobile mapping and community provider. This experience clearly informs his view of the future of mapping. “[It's about] where the real world meets the virtual world. You go to the virtual world… or you [...]

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TechRadar caught up with Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, for an exclusive interview at the recent South By South West Interactive (SXSWi) conference in Austin Texas. TechRadar: In the panel Gmail: Behind the Scenes, Gmail engineer Jonathan Perlow said that Google had been working on Buzz for four years before it launched… Jackson: For many of the projects that we do in Gmail, we’ll try something and for whatever reason maybe it will work or maybe it won’t work and sometimes we come back to the projects later. For example some of the labels work that we launched [...]

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Silverlight does a lot more than playing video; it’s on 60 per cent of all PCs worldwide, apps from eBay listing tools to social networking clients are showing up – and Silverlight runs on Macs, PCs, Linux (through Mono) and soon on Symbian, MeeGo and Windows Phone. Microsoft launched a release candidate of Silverlight 4 this week at the MIX conference and while you won’t want to upgrade just yet (the RC is aimed at developers, the final version will be here next month and some apps built for Silverlight 3 don’t yet run in the RC), when you do you’ll get apps with lots [...]

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Twitter, launched in 2006, has become the web’s hottest property. With celebrity endorsement from the likes of Oprah, Lindsay Lohan and Stephen Fry, it now has 75 million very active users. But haven’t we seen this all before? The here today, gone tomorrow fickleness of the web’s every shifting demographic has embraced, chewed up and spat out a legion of other services, from ICQ to MySpace. Once favoured toys, they’re now forgotten and dusty, languishing at the back of the cupboard. If we were to assume the same trajectory for Twitter, that would give it a projected lifespan [...]

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You’re going to see a lot more Silverlight apps this year – and they won’t all be running on Windows Phone. Microsoft announced a near-final fourth version of its multimedia web technology Silverlight at its MIX conference in Las Vegas this week. The corporation was keen to talk up Silverlight’s rate of adoption and noted that installations are approaching 60 per cent of all “internet devices” worldwide. Silverlight powers many casual games, with plenty solitaires and puzzles waiting for you. You can even indulge in a little 8-bit nostalgia, with a Silverlight [...]

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In cyberspace it seems that deceased serial killers can live on. I know this first hand, because for the last few months a character calling themselves “Fred West” has been running a Fan Page in my honour. There’s even a picture of the murderer on his profile, and a status message that says he loves to “potter around under people’s patios” Facebook rules state that only authorised representatives of companies, celebrities and music groups are allowed to create Fan Pages – other users should create groups instead. I wouldn’t exactly [...]

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HTML5 is going to bring us some powerful and sophisticated web apps, says Steven Sinosfsky, President of Microsoft’s Windows and Windows Live Division. But if you’re expecting the head of the Windows division to be worried about that, he suggests you think about how browsers will achieve their ambitions. “The world for a while went down this path [with] the browser as this tiny little program you just ran on top of the OS, this cool thing that didn’t care about the device hardware or the OS. That can work for a period of time but underneath the hardware is changing rapidly [...]

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Scalable Vector Graphics are the equivalent of HTML for graphics. Instead of using an image you describe what you want to see – and if you want to change it once it’s been displayed you can do that with a script. Bing and Google Maps already show routes using SVG – as long as you’re not using Internet Explorer. Microsoft was involved in the original SVG spec back in 2001 (when the W3C asked the company to combine its VML proposal with Adobe’s PGML) but IE9 will be the first time Internet Explorer supports SVG without a plug-in. To the Internet Explorer team, SVG is one [...]

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We love HTML5, declares Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch. “We love it so much, we want it to actually work.” The preview of IE9 released today at Microsoft’s MIX developer conference supports HTML5 – including SVG and the audio tag (video will be in the final release). But it still has some issues with speed, as we’ll come onto. It has the GPU hardware acceleration announced last year at the Professional Developer Conference to improve performance, plus a new JavaScript compiler that takes advantage of dual-core systems. And it includes hundreds of [...]

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Microsoft has announced a near-final version of its multimedia web technology Silverlight. The Release Candidate (RC) follows on from the beta version released at the Professional Developers Conference in November 2009. Microsoft made the announcement at its MIX 10 conference at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The corporation was keen to talk up Silverlight’s rate of adoption and noted that installations are approaching 60 per cent of all “internet devices” worldwide. Microsoft says that’s an increase of nearly 15 per cent in just four months and wheeled out demos from partners [...]

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