IE9 falls below 10% market share, Firefox hits 50-month low, and Chrome again gains the most

The second half of 2013′s browser war has begun. July saw the fourth full month of IE10 availability on Windows 7, as well as one full month of Firefox 22 availability and the release of Chrome 28. The latest market share numbers from Net Applications show Chrome was the biggest winner last month.

Between June and July, Internet Explorer gained 0.46 percentage points (from 56.15 percent to 56.61 percent), Firefox lost a solid 0.86 percentage points (from 19.15 percent to 18.29 percent), and Chrome grabbed 0.59 percentage points (from 17.17 percent to 17.76 percent). Safari meanwhile slipped 0.13 percentage points to 5.42 percent and Opera slipped 0.09 percentage points to 1.49 percent.

At 56.61 percent, Internet Explorer has hit a new high for the year. January was the first time the browser went back above the 55 percent mark, and while the next few months have shown it won’t be losing that crown anytime soon, it still has a long way to go before the 60 percent mark.

At 15.36 percent in July, IE10 has slowed its growth, but still managed to grab another 1.84 percent share. Meanwhile, IE9 has lost a solid 2.02 percentage points, falling to 9.69 percent. Soon IE11 will be following in its predecessor’s footsteps, given that it will be available for both Windows 7 and Windows 8.

IE8 meanwhile somehow managed to grab 0.85 percentage points, and it’s still the world’s most popular browser at 23.52 percent. The real tragedy here is that IE10 is mainly stealing share from IE9 on Windows 7, since Windows XP users can’t upgrade past IE8.

IE7 was down 0.13 percentage points to 1.56 percent and IE6 slipped just 0.03 percentage points to 6.10 percent. Everyone can’t wait for it to fall below the 5 percent mark, but that won’t happen till sometime later this year or even 2014 (China is delaying the inevitable).

At 18.29 percent, Firefox has hit a new low not just for this year. The last time we have seen the browser at 18 percent was way back in May 2008. Firefox 22 was available for all of July, so it managed to grab 10.21 percent share as all the other versions lost share: Firefox 21 fell 10.74 points, Firefox 20 lost 0.29 points, Firefox 19 dipped 0.08 points, and Firefox 18 slipped 0.06 points.

At 17.76 percent, Chrome has managed to recover quite a bit from its 21-month low in May. Chrome 28 grabbed 8.98 percentage points to start, as it wasn’t available for a full month. All other versions were down: Chrome 27 lost 7.44 points, Chrome 26 slipped 0.26 points, while Chrome 25 and Chrome 24 lost a combined 0.05 points. Both June and July have brought back the chance Chrome could finally surpass Firefox this year.

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views. To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than page views.

Nevertheless, for July 2013, StatCounter listed Chrome as first with 43.12 percent market share, IE in second with 24.53 percent, Firefox in third with 20.09 percent, Safari with 8.59 percent, and Opera with 1.10 percent. The only part everyone agrees on is that Safari and Opera are not in the top three.

See also – Windows 8 now up to 5.40% market share, after seeing its smallest gain since launch

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Windows 8 now up to 5.40% market share, after seeing its smallest gain since launch

As we enter the second half of 2013, Windows 8 continues to steadily but slowly grow its share. Meanwhile, Windows 7′s hold on the market remains strong, and it’s not looking to back down to its successor anytime soon.

The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that July 2013 was a quiet one for Windows 8, which gained 0.30 percentage points (from 5.10 percent to 5.40 percent) while Windows 7 recovered 0.12 percentage points (from 44.37 percent to 44.49 percent).

Windows 8 hasn’t been growing as quickly as some would have hoped. Although June was its biggest gain this year at 0.83 percentage points, it looks like July is its smallest since its official release in October.

We attributed June’s big jump to Windows 8.1, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, which will be a free update for Windows 8 users available via the Window Store. Many were likely interested in giving the free preview Microsoft gave away at its Build 2013 conference, so they chose to finally get Windows 8, but July is back to business as usual: many are simply happy with Windows 7.

In January, Windows 7 lost market share for the first time since its release, just a month after passing the 45 percent mark. It’s hovering just below that mark now, and while it gained last month, we don’t think it will ever reach it again.

Windows Vista meanwhile declined 0.38 percentage points (from 4.61 percent to 4.24 percent), after finally falling below the 5 percent mark in March. Windows XP managed to regain 0.02 percentage points (from 37.17 percent to 37.19 percent).

At the end of 2012, all the versions of Windows managed to increase their overall market share after six months of losses, mainly thanks to Windows 7 and Windows 8. In 2013, however, Windows has lost share every month except for March, and now July.

Between June and July, Windows gained 0.05 percentage points (from 91.51 percent to 91.56 percent). This gain was OS X’s and Linux’s loss: down 0.01 percentage points (to 7.19 percent) and 0.03 percentage points (to 1.25 percent), respectively.

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views. To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than of page views, but if you prefer the latter, the corresponding data is available here (Windows 8 is at 6.61 percent, but remember, that’s from a different market share pie).

See also – As Windows Phone 8 fulfilled the Windows Phone promise, so will Blue complete Windows 8

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Windows 8 now up to 5.42% market share, after seeing its smallest gain since launch

As we enter the second half of 2013, Windows 8 continues to steadily but slowly grow its share, while Windows XP and Vista decline. Nevertheless, Windows 7′s hold on the market remains strong, and it’s not looking to back down to its successor anytime soon.

The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that July 2013 was a quiet one for Windows 8, which gained 0.32 percentage points (from 5.10 percent to 5.42 percent) while Windows 7 recovered 0.13 percentage points (from 44.37 percent to 44.50 percent).

Windows 8 hasn’t been growing as quickly as some would have hoped. Although June was its biggest gain this year at 0.83 percentage points, it looks like July is its smallest since its official release in October.

We attributed June’s big jump to Windows 8.1, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, which will be a free update for Windows 8 users available via the Window Store. Many were likely interested in giving the free preview Microsoft gave away at its Build 2013 conference, so they chose to finally get Windows 8, but July is back to business as usual: many are simply happy with Windows 7.

In January, Windows 7 lost market share for the first time since its release, just a month after passing the 45 percent mark. It’s hovering just below that mark now, and while it gained last month, we don’t think it will ever reach it again.

Windows Vista meanwhile declined 0.36 percentage points (from 4.61 percent to 4.26 percent), after finally falling below the 5 percent mark in March. Windows XP didn’t lose the most this time: just 0.15 percentage points (from 37.17 percent to 37.02 percent).

At the end of 2012, all the versions of Windows managed to increase their overall market share after six months of losses, mainly thanks to Windows 7 and Windows 8. In 2013, however, Windows has lost share every month except for March.

Between June and July, Windows lost 0.06 percentage points (from 91.51 percent to 91.45 percent). This loss was OS X’s gain but Linux fell too: up 0.08 percentage points (to 7.28 percent) and down 0.02 percentage points (to 1.26 percent), respectively.

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views. To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than of page views, but if you prefer the latter, the corresponding data is available here (Windows 8 is at 6.61 percent, but remember, that’s from a different market share pie).

See also – As Windows Phone 8 fulfilled the Windows Phone promise, so will Blue complete Windows 8

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Facebook completes transition to HTTPS secure browsing by default

Facebook announced today that it is completing the implemention of secure HTTPS browsing for all users. Today’s news comes two years after the company added the feature which should make connecting to Facebook’s servers more secure.

The company revealed that a third of its users had this feature enabled after it was first introduced. Now, all traffic to Facebook’s website and 80 percent of all going to the mobile optimized version will use a secure connection. The service uses Transport Layer Security (TLS), or Secure Socket Layer (SSL), to protect the connection.

Interestingly, adoption of secure browsing had been growing since 2011. The company said that the rate had reached 35 percent organically before Facebook even did anything.

More to follow. Please refresh for updates.

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Foursquare tightens contribution to OpenStreetMap data with new “edit map” links

Foursquare switched from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap (OSM) and MapBox last February, and now it’s deepening its relationship with OSM by adding in an “edit map” link on Foursquare.com that takes users straight to the wiki map service’s Web editor.

The link is currently only available to Foursquare Superusers in the UK, Australia, Germany and Brazil, but the company plans to roll it out to more locations in the future.

Back in May, MapBox showed off iD, an OSM map editor of its own.

OSM already boasts more than one million registered users, but the uptick from Foursquare contributors should still be a nice bump for the project. Foursquare, for its part, will build up goodwill with the community for its contributions. This is looking like wins all around, especially if it results in me getting lost less frequently.

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Yahoo acquires ecommerce app platform startup Lexity, will maintain all its products and services

Ecommerce app platform startup Lexity today announced it has been acquired by Yahoo. Unsurprisingly, financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Unlike other Yahoo acquisitions, this is not a strictly talent buy. All of Lexity’s products, services, and initiatives will be moved over to its new parent company:

All Lexity apps, including our flagship app Lexity Live, will continue to run seamlessly, and we are putting more resources towards making them even better. We will continue to support merchants on any ecommerce platform―BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, you name it. We will also continue to support and enhance Commerce Central, our write-once, run-anywhere platform for developers.

Founded just four years ago by former Yahoo employee Amit Kumar, Lexity (formerly knowns as Vurve) markets itself as offering multiple ecommerce services for small- and medium-sized businesses. It has its own app store for online retailers and serves “tens of thousands of customers” in 114 countries.

Kumar will get a welcome-home celebration, although this wasn’t a one-man show. Lexity thanked its board members Santo Politi of Spark Capital and Jon Callaghan of True Ventures, as well as its angel investors and advisors.

If you’re a Lexity customer, you’ll want to read the FAQ.

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GetGlue partners with Gnip to sell its second-screen entertainment data

Second-screen check-in platform GetGlue has teamed up with social data reseller Gnip. What this means is that Gnip is the distributor of GetGlue’s firehose of publicly available data, which gives it a rather broad view of social data around viewing habits for television shows, movies, and sports.

The addition of GetGlue adds to Gnip’s arsenal of popular social networks that have been opening up their data to be resold to developers and third-parties. In May, it announced a partnership with Foursquare for its real-time check-in data. Other sources include Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, StockTwits, Estimize, and Disqus.

Gnip’s CEO Chris Moody says: “At Gnip, we want to be the source for all public conversations happening online…GetGlue provides a rich new source of information that will be incredibly valuable to networks, producers, advertisers and movie studios.”

GetGlue has emerged as a formidable tool in the entertainment space. It counts more than 4 million users and a monthly social reach of over 100 million unique users. Just like how people would check-in to a venue on Foursquare, they would do the same thing when they’re watching a TV or movie show. And the company is working with studios to enhance its offering.

Gnip is not the only reseller in the marketplace as it is competing for users and sources from DataSift and Splunk. This Boulder-based company serves a wide range of industries, from social media monitoring to finance and government and claims to deliver more than 120 billion “realtime social data activities each month”.

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One year on: Microsoft made over 600 changes to Outlook.com, based on 50 times more feedback than Hotmail

Exactly a year ago, Microsoft launched the preview of Outlook.com, and today the company is looking back and celebrating how far it’s come. In fact, Microsoft has revealed it has made over 600 additions, changes, and improvements to the service thanks to 34 feature releases in the last 12 months.

The biggest driver of these tweaks, according to Microsoft, has been user feedback, in addition to all the usual focus groups, research, events, and blog comments. Compared to Hotmail, Outlook.com far more prominently places user-feedback requests, and as a result the average number of monthly feedback submissions for Outlook.com is about 50 times what Microsoft used to receive with Hotmail.

Dick Craddock, Outlook.com’s Group Program Manager, revealed how Microsoft handles all this data:

All of this feedback is triaged daily or weekly to provide a list of what we’re hearing, the current status on investigation, and the plan for what we’re going to do. Some feedback is pretty clear, like “can you add ?” When feedback is less clear, we’ll often reach out directly to the person giving the feedback, to understand more about what they’re asking for. We also work very closely with our support team to parse this info, because one person’s feature request can be another person’s support issue.

Microsoft also emphasized that Outlook.com is “the world’s fastest growing email service.” We had the opportunity to talk to Dharmesh Mehta, Sr. Director of Product Management for Outlook.com and SkyDrive, to dig into this a bit more.

Mehta admitted to TNW that as Hotmail users moved to Outlook.com, the growth of the new service understandably peaked. That being said, he noted the number has still been growing steadily, though he wouldn’t reveal new figures beyond the 400 million active user milestone the company revealed in May.

Nevertheless, Mehda insisted there has been no dip in users at all, even despite some parts of the email services have been drastically changed. In fact, he insisted that customer satisfaction is “excellent” and noted this is likely because Outlook.com is “designed by the people for the people.”

Going forward, Mehda wouldn’t reveal what Microsoft has up its sleeve. Today’s blog post did hint that some users, however, will soon get something they’ve sorely wanted:

We know there are 1 or 2 big ones you’ve asked for that we haven’t quite gotten to yet. We hear you and we’re working on it.

When asked if there would ever be a pay-for version of Outlook.com with premium features, aside from the ad-free option, we got a resounding “no.”

See also – Outlook.com now has 400m active accounts as Microsoft completes Hotmail migration, including 125m mobile users and Microsoft to stop supporting Outlook.com linked accounts in late July, will move users over to aliases instead

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StackSocial signs strategic partnership with AOL for its white-label online marketplace

E-commerce platform StackSocial has announced signing a partnership with AOL. The startup will provide its white-label online marketplace service for TUAW.

StackSocial provides deals and bundles for gadgets, software and online education products. With over 20 publisher partners, the startup now reaches 30 million readers per month with its platform.

AOL is a big prize for StackSocial, but the startup doesn’t have any assurances that it will reach any of the giant’s other Web properties. Opportunities do remain on the table, though, depending on how things go.

“We’re basically going to use this to monitor the success for them and if it hits those metrics, we’ll begin to dialog with AOL and begin to roll it out to other properties,” founder Josh Payne said.

When it first got started in 2011, StackSocial met resistance toward the convergence of editorial and e-commerce, but Payne views the latest deal as a strong affirmation of his company’s business model.

“The reason we were able to make this deal with AOL happen was because we’ve already validated it with 20 other publishers,” he said, adding that some partners bring is as much as seven figures in StackSocial sales annually.

StackSocial has built up a profitable business focusing on tech sites, and especially those from the Apple ecosystem, but it’s interested in other verticals as well. One obstacle it faces, though, is an increased complexity with offering physical goods instead of digital products like software, games and tutorials.

Payne also noted that StackSocial is currently building a self-serve platform that will enable it to provide online marketplace services for smaller publishers. The startup is also interested in tapping the mobile app distribution market once it can provide an elegant solution that works alongside the current app store model.

Since StackSocial has been profitable from launch, it hasn’t needed to raise much venture money. It did, pick up $800,000 in seed funding from several notable investors, including 500 Startups and Siemer Ventures, last July, but Payne said his team hasn’t needed to touch the money. StackSocial currently has 17 employees.

“We’ve sort of been a Silicon Beach success story and we really take a lot of pride in being an LA company and a lot of pride in running our company in a way that’s profitable, ” Payne said in an interview. “We’re looking to have that continued growth – the second half of this year is going to be a big one. We’re really hitting our stride.”

In the long term, StackSocial is also aiming to build out its own open marketplace offering. While it white-labels its platform for publishers, it also brings in about half its revenue from putting up deals on its own site. Upcoming improvements to StackSocial’s own e-commerce store will be focused around building a sense of community and improving engagement.

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Google Flights now offers ‘tips’ and ‘best flights’ for budget- and time-conscious travelers

Google’s Flights search service has been updated with a new ‘tips’ feature designed to surface cheaper flights.

Naturally, tips will be aimed at those with a little flexibility in their schedule, as the resulting message could suggest dates one day either side of the preferred option. But if you’re on a budget, this could prove a popular feature.

The new feature may also reveal whether a different nearby airport is offering a non-stop alternative flight to your destination, or a cheap upgrade to business class.

Google Flights also now has a ‘best flights’ section that highlights the flights that are likely to be the best trade-off between price and convenience. So, in other words, they may not necessarily be the cheapest or the exact dates/times you requested, but it strikes a balance between the two to save you sifting through the results rubble.

Google acquired Boston-based airfare software company ITA in April 2010 for $700m, and subsequently launched its own ITA-powered product in September 2011, branded as Google Flights.

Earlier this year, Google Flights updated the search function to allow people to narrow down destinations by region rather than airport, and then opened the engine up to support flight searches originating from the UK, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. This was in addition to Canada, which had been its second launch market (after the US) back in June 2012.

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TNW Academy announces its WebRTC-powered platform, built by LiveNinja

Ever since the inception of TNW Academy, it’s been our goal to provide a product that is above and beyond anything else that you’ll find in online education. While gathering world-class instructors is the first step to fulfilling that goal, making the presentation from and the interaction with those instructors has to be the next step. It’s with that in mind that we are thrilled to announce TNW Academy’s new platform, in conjunction with Miami-based LiveNinja.

I first had the chance to meet LiveNinja CEO Will Weinraub and his team when I was in Miami for SuperConf back in 2012. The polish on the product, especially considering its young age at the time, was beyond what we typically see anywhere. In the year and few months that have followed, I’ve gotten to see Will and the team continually test, iterate and improve LiveNinja, molding it into an incredible portal for one-on-one learning online.

With the release of TNW Academy on LiveNinja, we’re taking cutting-edge technology and producing an experience that is positively unlike anything that you’ve seen in online learning. Live, streaming video from instructors, as well as seamless recorded video playback will combine with presentation sharing in a single browser window. Backed by the newly-released WebRTC project, there will be no need to install extra plugins. All you’ll need to attend an Academy session is a supported browser. Right now that includes Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but plans have already been announced for WebRTC support in Apple Safari.

But how does it look? In a word, incredible:

Elements of the Academy class can be moved wherever they are convenient for the attendee. You’ll have real-time chat, as well as Q&A all within the browser. On the back end, TNW’s development team has been hard at work integrating our Paydro payments solution, as well as automating the confirmation and invitation processes. With the LiveNinja platform, TNW Academy classes will no longer be limited to only 100 attendees, and we’ll be pushing the limits with every upcoming class.

Our thanks goes out to the LiveNinja team for seeing a vision and turning it into a reality. But none of this would be possible if it weren’t for you, our TNW Academy students. We’re pushing every envelope to develop the absolute best experience for online learning, and this represents a major step within this goal. Thank you.

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Google to roll out free ‘speedier’ WiFi at 7,000 Starbucks stores in the US

Google has announced a tie-up with Starbucks that will see all 7,000 of the coffeehouse giant’s company-operated stores in the US receive free Google-powered WiFi.

Starbucks, of course, already offers free WiFi via AT&T, but with the roll out that’s taking place over the next 18 months, the Internet giant says that customers will get speeds “up to 10x faster” than before. This also sounds very much like AT&T has been given the elbow by Starbucks.

It’s worth adding here that if you’re in a Google Fiber city (Kansas), this speed will jump up to 100 times faster.

“Google has long invested in helping the Internet grow stronger, including projects to make Internet access speedier, more affordable, and more widely available,” says Kevin Lo, General Manager, Google Access.

“The free Internet connection at Starbucks has become an important part of many communities over the years, such as in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or for students without Internet at home who do their homework at Starbucks.”

The service will start rolling out from August this year.

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Germany’s Earlybird Venture Capital closes a new $200m fund as it expands into later stage deals

Earlybird Venture Capital has announced that it has closed its fourth fund, valued at €150 million ($200 million).

The Berlin and Munich-based firm is known for investing in early venture rounds and counts the likes of Carpooling.com, 6Wunderkinder, EyeEm and SocialBakers amongst its portfolio.

Earlybird partner Jason Whitmire tells us that the fund closed above target, helped by interest from some American institutional investors who have shied away from the European VC market since the early 2000s dotcom bubble days but are now more confident in Europe’s potential.

The new fund will see Earlybird broadening its options as to when it invests in startups, although it will stay away from seed-stage investments, where Whitmire says supply in Europe is already “robust,” and very late stage deals.

Witmire says although previous funds have taken in both Internet tech and medical startups, this one is all about the former, with a separate medical fund expected to close next year. There have already been ten investments from the fund announced today, the first of which was B2B payments startup Traxpay, last year.

Expect to see some investments of up to the €10 million ($13.2m) mark from this new fund, Earlybird’s fourth since it was founded in 1997.

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Facebook testing ‘On This Day’ tab in the News Feed to give users take a trip down memory lane

Facebook is testing a News Feed filter across its Web and mobile apps called ‘On This Day’ which – as is probably pretty self-explanatory – shows a list of content and status updates published on the social network exactly a year ago.

For a number of users with the most recent Facebook design on the Web, the option is available by hitting the downward arrow underneath the News Feed categories in the top right-hand corner of the page.

Facebook then displays a header image taken from a photo or gallery uploaded that day – in this case July 31, 2012 – with the tagline ‘What your friends were up to a year ago today.’ A list of notable content is then assembled underneath, giving users the ability to take a quick trip down memory lane.

The various posts and status updates aren’t assembled in chronological order, suggesting that Facebook is testing a rather more complex algorithm to keep users engaged with the feature.

Inside Facebook notes that for some users, there’s also a sidebar showing other notable events that occurred around this time. These are split into ‘Your Friends On This Day’ and ‘Your Friends This Month’, which show other interesting nuggets of information from years gone by. The News Feed filter shows as the URL ‘facebook.com/feed/todayinhistory’, suggesting that a slight rebranding could also be on the cards before the feature is rolled out to all Facebook users.

From the Facebook iOS app, ‘On This Day’ is available to a select group of users by scrolling to the top of the News Feed and finding the necessary option in the expandable menu. It’s almost identical to the Web incarnation – minus the sidebar – but does seem to serve up posts and other content in a different order.

The feature isn’t a particularly new idea – Facebook introduced a similar feature also called ‘On This Day’ in August 2011. Given that the social network has been around for some time now, it’s a good opportunity for Facebook to leverage all of that ageing content in new and interesting ways.

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YouTube rival Dailymotion extends its VEVO music-video syndication to Europe

French video-sharing service Dailymotion has extended its syndication partnership with VEVO to Europe, meaning that Dailymotion users in France, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK can now watch more than 75,000 videos from the music-focused platform.

Prior to today, Dailymotion had a deal in place in the US market only, but now it has been extended to Europe this will significantly open up ad-supported access to VEVO’s catalogue which includes music videos, concerts and related programming.

“Dailymotion is committed to providing our users with great original content, and music is one of our most popular areas, so we are very excited to extend our partnership with VEVO on this,” says Marc Eychenne, Head of Content EMEA at Dailymotion. “This will provide great content to our European users and a platform to help VEVO reach many more music fans.”

This follows news from earlier this month that YouTube had inked an extension to its own content partnership with VEVO, ending speculation about the their relationship. In addition, YouTube also invested an undisclosed sum in the company — as was speculated in January this year.

So if you’re based in any of the five aforementioned European countries or, indeed, the US you can access VEVO now directly through Dailymotion.

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Google to retire Catalogs iOS and Android apps on August 15 but it will continue on the Web

Google has decided to pull down the shutters on the mobile apps for its Catalogs service, but will continue to keep it running for US users on the Web.

The service, which brings together digital versions of traditional catalogs stored all in one place for easy perusal and purchasing, will stop working on its iOS and Google Android apps on August 15, according to Android Police. It never made it beyond the US.

While the service will live on online, and the apps are still available to download as of now, the closure of Catalogs suggests that just not that many people found shopping from catalogs on their tablets a very worthwhile use of time. It probably doesn’t help that virtually no one had heard of it either.

The closure is also the latest to be issued from Google and follows the shuttering of its Google Reader service on July 1 this year. Google also plans to close its location tracking and sharing service Latitude on August 9, too.

Via Engadget

Featured Image Credit – Getty Images

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Download Driver Cleaner Professional - MajorGeeks

Driver Cleaner is a program which helps you to remove parts of drivers that are left after uninstalling the old drivers. The program is for ATI and nVidia drivers. First you need to uninstall the drivers from the control panel than reboot and after that run the program. If you really want a good description of what steps you should do than you really need to read the readme file included in the zip file and installation as it contains a detailed description step by step.

via download driver - Penelusuran Blog Google

Everlapse taps into Instagram, enabling users to create a highlight reel of top 20 popular photos

Everlapse, the iOS app that lets you take your memories and creates them as time-lapse media files, has added Instagram support to its product. With this feature, users can curate the top 20 popular photos in their Instagram account.

Started by the three founders of CoTweet, which sold to ExactTarget, and ultimately to Salesforce, Everlapse utilizes time-lapse technology to allow you to capture a moment over any period of time. Think about it this way, take all of the photos from your DailyBooth collection and import it into Everlapse. Then you’ll see 365 days worth of images go by in a cool animation to see how you’ve aged.

And it’s not just selfies that you can use. People can use it on the coffee that they order, for games, flipbooks, or anything else.

Meet Instagram Highlight Reels

Instagram happens to be one of the most popular photo apps out in the marketplace right now and there are those who just want to relive the memories. Everlapse now makes it possible by taking the top 20 photos and turning them into clips. Each one is curated based on the number of Likes it receives and ordered by chronological order.

Currently, this feature will only pull in photos, not videos. The resulting clips can be saved, shared to Twitter and Facebook, and embedded onto blogs and websites.

To begin, users can go to the Everlapse site and sign in using their Instagram account. After authenticating, it may take about a minute before you see the results — most likely the length of time depends on how many photos you have and how popular each one is. Here’s an example of one created using my account:

While your highlight reel is only going to have 20 photos, fear not, because there actually is no limit on how many can be applied. Once the initial composition has been completed, users can edit the clip in Everlapse and import more photos to the clip. Additionally, because of the service’s “special” ability, if the clip was tweeted, friends can reply back with a photo and it can be inserted into the clip as well.

The case for broad appeal

When we first saw this, one of the thing that we wondered was whether it would be just a “one-hit wonder”, that is, are users going to find the Instagram implementation helpful? Well it isn’t a “one-hit wonder”. Rather, it’s the beginnings of what could be a fascinating implementation by Everlapse to get brands and people more engaged at events, for promotions, etc.

Imagine being at South by Southwest, Coachella, or at the Consumer Electronics Show. Having the ability to import all of the photos from Instagram using a specific hashtag or from one specific user can be appealing to brands. It can probably go without saying that this could be in the works in the future.

Everlapse is a fairly new product and was created by the folks at Seesaw, the decision making startup. It was the result of the company’s hackday weekend and so far it has stuck and became popular with its users.

The app is available for iOS devices only. An Android version is planned, but only after the company has fully figured out how the core of the service will work.

➤ Everlapse Instagram Highlight Reel

➤ Everlapse for iOS

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New digitally-signed malware hijacks Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts via Chrome and Firefox plugins

A new piece of malware taking the form of fake extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox that hijack Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts has been discovered. Users of these browsers and social networks are lured into installing what they think is a video player update and to make matters worse, the threat is digitally-signed.

The malware, which was first discovered by security firm Trend Micro, is detected as TROJ_FEBUSER.AA. It installs a browser extension for Chrome and an add-on for Firefox, but doesn’t adapt itself to Internet Explorer, Safari, nor Opera.

The threat in question tries to trick the user by claiming to be a “service pack” for either Chrome or Mozilla, depending on what browser is accessing the page, and newer versions use the name “F-Secure,” in reference to the security company:

Once installed, the malware calls home to download a configuration file, which in turn includes details for hijacking the user’s social media accounts. It can then perform the following actions, without any authorization from the user: Like pages, share posts, join a group, invite friends to a group, chat with friends, post comments, and update statuses.

That description seems to be very Facebook-specific, and is quite similar to a Facebook threat Microsoft discovered two months ago, but Trend Micro insists that Twitter and Google+ accounts are affected as well. The company further notes that because of these actions, the attackers could, for example, use the accounts to spread malicious links to their threat or others.

Since the fake video player update is digitally signed, users might be tricked into thinking the file comes from a legitimate source. As we know, that’s not necessarily true; here’s what Trend Micro has to say about the digital signing:

Digital signatures are a way for developers and publishers to prove that a file did come from them and has not been modified. Potential victims may take this to mean that the file is legitimate and harmless. It is not yet clear if this signature was fraudulently issued, or a valid organization had their signing key compromised and used for this type of purpose.

Malware authors like to target popular browsers as it means they can attack users regardless of the operating system they are running. A word of advice to both Chrome and Firefox users, especially given the digital signature: make a point to only install browser extensions and add-ons from trusted sources such as the Chrome Web Store and Add-ons for Firefox.

See also – Google further secures Chrome against malicious extensions and Latest study finds IE10 is better at blocking malware than Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera

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