Apple have announced the date that they will release the much rumoured iPhone 5. They haven't said directly that this announcement will be for the new iPhone but the invitation says it all. The date they've set is 12th September.
Digital Meets Analog
We've all been there, we have a notebook full of notes from a meeting or just doodles about a possible new project and for a number of reasons we want to digitize them - we may want to just have backup copies, need to send them to another person(s) or for a tonne of other reasons. It's not exactly a hard thing to do, you either type up your notes or take a picture with your phone but who really wants to write out their notes twice and what if you have drawings? Taking a picture of your notes is the perfect solution then. Well not quite, when taking a picture you just have a static picture, what about the content?
The hugely popular Evernote service has teamed up with the even more popular Moleskine Notebook company to come up with a way of combining both handwritten/drawn notes with the digital world. To do this they've created the Evernote Smart Notebook. The notebook features unique dotted ruled or dotted squared pages that allows Evernote to read the page better when taking the photo, these special dotted lines apparently help Evernote to read your handwriting better and ensure the page is not skewed when saved.
The best feature of this is the handwriting recognition which makes all of your handwritten notes searchable. This may not seem like a huge feature but trust me, it is.
The new Evernote Smart Notebooks also come with a stack of stickers that you place around the page. The idea is that Evernote picks up the smart stickers and knows which note belongs where in your Evernote account and can add tags and more to the notes depending on which sticker you use.
You also get a 3 month Evernote Premium subscription with your notebook which has a whole range of upgraded features which should make this a more than useful new service.
Although I have no doubt that this will be a useful product/service combination I'm still not convinced there will ever be a perfect solution to combining the analog and digital worlds.
83 million Fakebookers
It has been revealed that 83 million accounts on Facebook are categorised as 'fake'. This accounting for 8.7% of Facebook's 955 million users. It has long been known that there are a number of fake profiles on the social network but the actual number has never been revealed, until the company's filings were published this week that is. Upon reading the filing it doesn't appear to be as bad as first suggested. Facebook have categorised the fake accounts in to three categories; 'Duplicates', 'Misclassified', and 'Undesirable' with duplicates accounting for the highest proportion - 4.8%. Facebook defines duplicates as "an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account", so they're not really fake accounts as such.
Misclassified accounts amounted to 2.4% of these accounts with Facebook describing these as "users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet", so again not exactly fake accounts.
What I would describe as real fake accounts amounted to just 1.5% of the 83 million with the company defining these as 'undesirable'. These are the accounts that send spam and other annoying content, they are the ones that breach Facebook's terms of service.
For an advertiser, having to spend huge amounts of money on potentially fake accounts isn't good news and this only adds to the worries that many have over Facebook's business model which relies heavily on targeted advertising.
This worry has has clearly been seen in the company's stock with around 50-60% being knocked off it's value since its IPO earlier this year. At the time of writing this the stock was down to $20.50 from it's peak of $40 on the day of it's IPO. The exact reasons for this drop in value are of course complicated but the news of these fake accounts almost certainly help the situation.
What people are waiting for next is news from Facebook about what they're going to do about these accounts.
80 million join Instagram
Instagram announced in a blog post today that 80 million people have now signed up to the photo editing and sharing service. The following is from their post:
We’re excited to announce that the Instagram community has grown to over 80 million registered users who have shared nearly 4 billion photos!
Since Facebook acquired the service earlier this year and with the release of an Android version of the service the number of users has grown by 30 million.
Mountain Lion Available on Mac App Store
Apple today announced that the next version of its Mac OS will be available to download on its Mac App Store from tomorrow. The latest update pushes integration with Twitter, Facebook and a range of other services to a new level with one click updates to these services. Along with further integration with iOS including reminders, notes, iMessage and much more... in fact 200 more.
It'll be available for just $19.99 in the US and £13.99 in the UK. We'll have to wait until the evening in the UK though as these updates usually become live around midday US time.