Approx 150million users were affected when the Gmail service run by Google was disrupted due a miscalculation by one of their engineers. Although it was for two hours it has been classed as a ‘big deal’ and investigations are underway to ensure it doesn’t happen again. The blackout occurred whilst carrying out routine upgrades to the company’s web server – outages have already taken place in February and March. It’s said that in this instance engineers slightly underestimated the increased load put on other parts of the system hence cause the widespread blackout. Access through desktop email programs seem to have been unaffected. Gmail itself has been ranked as the 3 most popular email program after services from Microsoft and Yahoo.

Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are being urged to switch to a rival until serious security flaws have been fixed. This flaw could allow criminals to take control of people’s computer’s and steal their passwords. Microsoft themselves have warned people to become vigilant while it prepared an emergency patch to resolve it. Internet explorer is used by the vast majority of the world’s computer users. What makes it worse for Microsoft is that other rivals such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari have not been suspected of the flaw. It’s been advised that users change IE security setting to high, switch to a windows user account with limited rights and ensure you keep anti-virus and anti-spy ware software is up to date.

The gaming sector has shown a vast contrast in profitability between the western developers and the Chinese. It’s been identified that western gaming firms were still using traditional methods to get through to the retail channels via putting games onto DVDs. The Chinese developers have moved away from this and are now focusing on the PC market and use direct downloads rather than retail stores to get to consumers. Three factors which force the operating costs of western firms to spiral upwards include:

• Games are getting larger which mean longer development times hence more staff costs
• The console space is fragmented so developers have to work on many platforms at any one time.
• The cost of licensing intellectual property or gaining sports body endorsement has gone up.

The software giant Microsoft has made it’s much awaited launch of the Xbox 360 which it says will bring a new era in home entertainment. The main difference between is the look which is completely different – the original version being replaced with a sleeker shiny look. Underneath the shell, the processing power is many times greater than the original console and estimates of how much more vary between 2 and 10 times as powerful. The power boost is due to the Xbox 360 having 3 processing cores compared to the original only having one. In terms of graphics, the new Xbox can draw up to 500 million polygons where as in comparison the older version had an upper limit of 125million.

Swoopo is a new site which started in Germany offering shoppers goods at prices at a fraction of the retail price has now hit the US. An example of the prices includes a 40inch Samsung TV which sold for $67 against its RRP of $1500. The only catch is that users are charged 60 cents every time they bid hence charges can add up quickly!. Critics are saying that the site is preying on individuals who overlook small increments of money they spend to pursue the discounts – often the odds are high as bids are being made against people in Germany, Britain and the states.

A fault on a cable has caused a blackout of internet services in West Africa. The damage was found to be on a cable 15miles of the coast of Benin on a SAT 3 cable that connects Europe to South Africa. The impact left 70% of Nigeria’s bandwidth out of action causing chaos in the banking sector, government and mobile phone networks. The fault also had a knock on impact in Togo, Niger and Benin and as a short term remedy countries had to reroute the traffic or use satellite links to maintain connectivity. The network is run by Suburban Telecom and a ship was diverted from Cape Town to repair the fault.

There has been an ongoing 3 year battle between a British couple and Google in an attempt to get there price comparison website recognised. The website directs shoppers to online deals for goods such as TVs or flights but has struggled once it disappeared from Google search results under these categories. Many consumers believe that Google works on a formula which may have caused the site to disappear. For sites like these they rely on Google to forward traffic on – sometimes as much as 60% and if you get missed of then it has a massive impact on your business.

Wikipedia has finally hit a record more than three million articles after eight years and the work of many people around the world. The 3 million barrier was broken early on Monday morning UK time by an article about a Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen. The articles themselves have emerged through the contributions of more than 10 million registered users who have helped create more than 17 million pages and performed 326million edits on the English Wikipedia’s database. In comparison the French Wikipedia now has more than 800,000 articles while the Japanese, Polish and Italian sites have around 600,000. The site was first founded in 2001 by a team consisting of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and the popularity of the site heighten in 2004 – 2007.