Saudi Arabia has largest smartphone usage in the world

In a recent press release by Saudi Telecom, it was announced that the company has recently launched 68 new smartphones for the kingdom.  Each handset will be part of a ‘commitment contract’ which will allw customers to chose from various packages, focusing on talk time, messages and data services.

What has also come to light from the press release is the result of a recent study conducted by UN which reports that Saudi Arabia has the highest smartphone adoption rate in the world, at 188%.

Press Release

STC Group has crowned its relationship with its subscriber base â€" the largest in the Kingdom â€"by launching a new variety of choices of smartphones, thereby exposing them to the latest of what’s on offer in the world of technology, via smart packages which meet their personal demands and choices on both practical and purchasing power fronts.

A report issued by the United Nations (UNCTAD) positions Saudi Arabia as the number one worldwide in the use of mobile phones, with penetration levels reaching 188%. STC’s leadership in the smartphone category is embodied by its provision of a platform of exclusive and exceptional offers which have gained the satisfaction of both existing and potential subscribers, in equal measure, deepening their confidence in the integrated solutions offered by STC, and continuing its successful journey  in mobilizing its huge resources to achieve international partnerships with the largest and most famous smartphone manufacturers in the world, as well as attracting new partners to share in its success, locally, regionally and globally.

Your Smart Choice with STC… Always

STC’s design of smartphone packages is a ‘commitment contract’ which offers its subscribers smartphones of their choice, in addition to what each bundle offers exclusively, per segment, whether it be a number of call minutes, monthly internet data bundles, or other benefits which allow them to arrange their demands of services according to their daily schedules, either at work, while travelling or even studying.

STC has also offered a number of outstanding packages to their subscribers, including postpaid packages offering free smartphones or at discounted and attractive prices, while enjoying technical applications and call minutes, video, SMS, MMS as well as internet service.

STC’s offices and sales channels have become  non-stop ‘beehives’, devoting all efforts to gain customer satisfaction and instilling confidence in them for an easier life with modern technology, setting up 299 offices working on providing mobile electronic devices of broadband, as well as the latest smartphones from the 10 top companies worldwide (Blackberry, Motorola, Apple, Sony, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Huawei, Nokia and Acer), and through sixty-eight types of advanced devices  available at STC” offices and outlets in the year 2012.

Smartphones currently represent 34% of the total devices on the STC network; with an increase of 200% in Android operating system devices. STC first deployed premium smartphones through the BlackBerry Porsche. The Group was also the first to launch the 4^th generation technology, with growing coverage throughout the Middle East and North Africa. STC was also exclusively the first in enable its subscribers to purchase from the Nokia OVI Store, and adding their purchases on to their monthly bill. In addition, it was the first to provide the Windows operating system in the Saudi market through HTC.

STC Packages” Adapt to subscribers’ changing choices

STC’s unique flexible packages vary in subscription price as per the smartphone device type chosen by subscribers, thus determining the price of the smartphone for each package. Subscribers can select the appropriate device to enjoy a selection of integrated and economical offers to suit their own financial situation. Postpaid packages devices has one package only, and every subscriber can have five devices at a maximum, (for example; a subscriber who has 8 numbers is able to subscribe for only five devices and each of them with one package only).

STC is proud that it does not penalize subscribers who wish to migrate between postpaid packages (Easy, Easy Plus, Zero, Zero Plus) subscribed on the devices, as well as the monthly fees subscription selected. The company has enabled subscribers to monitor their bills and related services through the ‘My STC’ App for all smartphones.

As for after sales services, STC Group continues to provide exceptional services to its subscribers through its service centers located throughout of the Kingdom , operated in conjunction with international partners, offering round the clock and advanced technical and maintenance support.

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Facebook stock finishes flat in debut

NEW YORK (AP) â€" In the hours before Facebook's stock began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market for the first time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reminded the company's 3,500 employees not to get caught up in the hoopla surrounding its long-awaited initial public offering.

"Right now this all seems like a big deal," Zuckerberg said before he pushed a button that rang Nasdaq's opening bell from company headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, Calif. "Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here's the thing, our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected."

Facebook's IPO, it turns out, wasn't as big a deal as expected.

One of the most anticipated IPOs in Wall Street history ended on a flat note Friday, with Facebook's stock closing at $38.23, up 23 cents from Thursday night's pricing.

That means the company founded in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room has a market value of about $105 billion, more than Amazon.com, McDonald's and Silicon Valley icons Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.

It also gave 28-year-old Zuckerberg a stake worth $19,252,698,725.50.

But for many seeking a big first-day pop in Facebook's share price, the increase of six-tenths of one percent was a letdown.

"This is like kissing your sister," said John Fitzgibbon, founder of IPO Scoop, a research firm. "With all the drumbeats and hype, I don't think there'll be barroom bragging tonight."

Added Nick Einhorn, an analyst with IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital: "It wasn't quite as exciting as it could have been. But I don't think we should view it as a failure."

Indeed, the small jump in price could be seen as an indication that Facebook and the investment banks that arranged the IPO priced the stock in an appropriate range.

It was also good for ordinary investors, who are mostly shut out from the IPO price and have to buy the stock in the open market on day one. They got a chance to buy all day at a price not much above $38.

And it was good for early investors in the company, who owned more than half the 421 million shares made available in the IPO. Had the stock shot to $60 Friday morning, those early investors would have felt they hadn't gotten enough money for their stakes.

The 421 million shares that were sold fetched $16 billion and represented 15 percent of the company's stock. Facebook got $7 billion, and the early investors $9 billion. The other 85 percent of Facebook's stock is owned by Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives, employees and early investors. In comparison, Google offered just 7.2 percent of its stock when it went public in 2004. Its stock rose 18 percent on day one.

Here was Facebook's "timeline" Friday, trading under the symbol "FB" on the Nasdaq Stock Market:

The stock opened at 11:30 a.m. at $42.05, but soon dipped to $38.01. It briefly traded as high as $45 and by noon was at $40.40. It fluttered throughout the afternoon and hugged the $38 mark for much of the final hour, before closing at $38.23.

By the end of the day, about 570 million shares had changed hands, a huge trading volume for any company.

TD Ameritrade reported that in the first 45 minutes of trading, Facebook accounted for a record 24 percent of trades executed by its customers.

By comparison, on its first day back on the stock market, in November 2010, General Motors represented 7 percent of trades on the online brokerage.

Steve Quirk, who oversees trading strategy at TD Ameritrade, said that about 60,000 orders were lined up before Facebook opened.

Technical glitches delayed the start of Facebook's trading by a half-hour. The Securities and Exchange Commission also is investigating problems traders encountered in changing and canceling their orders.

Other social media companies, most of which have gone public in the last year, saw their shares plummet when it became clear what kind of reception Facebook was getting in the public market. Shares of game-maker Zynga Inc. and reviews site Yelp Inc. both hit all-time lows.

The stock market will now begin assigning a dollar value to Facebook based primarily on its financial performance. If Facebook can continue to increase its revenue and profit at the rate it has the past few years, the stock should rise. Google reported strong earnings after it became a public company, and its stock price more than tripled the first year, from $85 to $280.

Facebook's stock price will also depend somewhat on broad economic forces, as well as the whims of investors.

Facebook is one of those rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street's money lust. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting its 900 million users around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

Most tech companies going public want a big rise in their debut to show they're "strong, dynamic companies standing out in the crowd," said Francis Gaskins, president of researcher IPOdesktop, but Facebook already has that image, and so may not care.

Few of the Internet companies to go public recently have been profitable. But Facebook had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In 2011, it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, up from earnings of $606 million and revenue of $2 billion a year earlier.

That's a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and had revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as "FarmVille."

Facebook's public debut marked a milestone in the history of the Internet. In 1995, Netscape Communications' IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate. Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom. That explosion of entrepreneurial activity and investment culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had hatched a "new economy."

It took Google Inc.'s IPO in 2004 to prove that an Internet company with a revolutionary idea could be profitable. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection.

Facebook's IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company's cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to bring in other talented engineers and promising technology. That's what Google has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don't include Google's pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China.

Zuckerberg's biggest deal so far came when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion in April. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on Facebook's current share price, Instagram is in line to receive about $1.2 billion.

Friday's debut, though, resulted in deals worth much less.

Alper Aydinoglu, a DePaul University student who got 50 shares via Etrade at $38, said he was "disappointed with the first day of trading."

His gain on paper: $11.50, but that was before Etrade's standard commission of $9.99.

Aydinoglu still called it an excellent learning opportunity.

"On top of everything, I now have the bragging rights that I participated in one of the most popular IPOs of all time."

___

AP Technology Writers Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and Peter Svensson in New York, Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen in Menlo Park, Calif., and AP Business Writers Bernard Condon, Pallavi Gogoi and Joseph Pisani in New York contributed to this story.

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UK surveillance could yield window into lives

LONDON (AP) â€" British officials have given their word: "We won't read your emails."

But experts say that its proposed new surveillance program, unveiled last week as part of the government's annual legislative program, will gather so much data that spooks won't have to read your messages to guess what you're up to.

The U.K. Home Office stresses that it is not seeking to read the content of every Britons' communications, saying the data it was seeking "is NOT the content of any communication." It is, however, seeking information on who's sending the message, whom it's sent to, where it's sent from, and potentially other details including a message's length and its format.

The government's proposal is just a draft bill, so it could be modified or scrapped. But if passed in its current form, it would put a huge amount of personal data at the government's disposal, which it could potentially use to deduce a startling amount about Britons' private life â€" from sleep patterns to driving habits or even infidelity.

"We're really entering a whole new phase of analysis based on the data that we can collect," said Gerald Kane, an information systems expert at Boston College. "There is quite a lot you can learn."

The ocean of information is hard to fathom. Britons generate 4 billion hours of voice calls and 130 billion text messages annually, according to industry figures. In 2008 the BBC put the annual number of U.K.-linked emails at around 1 trillion. Then there are instant messaging services run by companies such as BlackBerry, Internet telephony services such as Skype, chat rooms, and in-game services liked those used by World of Warcraft.

Communications service providers, who would log the details of all that back-and-forth, believe that the government's program would force them to process petabytes (1 quadrillion bytes) of information every day. It's a mind-bogglingly large amount of data on the scale of every book, every movie, and every piece of music ever released.

So even without opening emails, how much can British spooks learn about who's sending them?

THEY'LL SEE THE RED FLAGS

Do you know how fast you were going?

Your phone does.

If you sent a first text from London before stepping behind the wheel, and a second one from a service station outside Manchester only three hours later, authorities could infer that you broke the speed limit to cover the roughly 200 miles which separate the two.

Crunching location data and communications patterns gives a remarkable rich view of a person's lives â€" and their misadventures.

Ken Altshuler, of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, raves about the benefits which smartphones and social media have brought to savvy divorce attorneys. Lawyers don't need sophisticated data mining software to spot evidence of infidelity or hints of hidden wealth when they review phone records or text traffic, he said.

"One name, one phone number that's not on our client's radar, and our curiosity is piqued," he said. The more the communication â€" a late-night text sent to a work colleague, an unexplained international phone call â€" is out of character, "the more of a red flag we see."

THEY'LL KNOW HOW YOU'RE SLEEPING

The ebb and flow of electronic communication â€"that call to your mother just before bed, that early-morning email to your boss saying you'll be late â€" frames our waking lives.

"You can figure somebody's sleep patterns, their weekly pattern of work," said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University machine learning expert. In 2006, he helped found New York-based Sense Networks, which crunches phone data to do just that.

Jebara said that calls made from the same location between 9 and 5 are a good indication of where a person works; the frequency of email traffic to or from a person's work account is a good hint of his or her work ethic; dramatic changes to a person's electronic routine might suggest a promotion â€" or a redundancy.

"You can quickly figure out when somebody lost their job," Jebara said, adding: "Credit card companies have been interested in that for a while."

THEY'LL KNOW WHO'S THE BOSS

Drill down, and communication can reveal remarkably rich information. For example, does office worker A answer office worker B's missives within minutes of the message being sent? Does B often leave colleagues' emails unanswered for hours on end? If so, B probably stands for "boss."

That's an example of what Jebara's Columbia colleagues described as "automated social hierarchy detection," a technique which can infer who gives the orders, who's respected, and who's ignored based purely on whose emails get answered and how quickly. In 2007 four of them analyzed traffic taken from the Enron Corporation's email archive to correctly guess the seniority of several top-level managers.

Intelligence agencies may not need such tools to untangle corporate flowcharts, but identifying ringleaders becomes more important when tracking a suspected terrorist cell.

"If you piece together the chain of influence, then you can find the central authority," he said. "You can figure that out without looking at the content."

THEY'LL KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO

Seeing how networks of people communicate isn't just about finding your boss, it's about figuring out who are your friends.

Programs already exist to determine the density of communications â€" something that can identify close groups of friends or family without even knowing who's who. If one user is identified as suspicious, then the users closest to him or her might get a second look as well.

"Let's say we find out somebody in the U.K. is a terrorist," said Kane. "You know exactly who he talks to on almost every channel, so BOOM you know his 10 closest contacts. Knowing that information not only allows you to go to his house, but allows you to go to their houses as well."

A SNOOPER'S CHARTER?

Detective work at the stroke of a key is clearly attractive to spy agencies. British officialdom has been pushing for the mass surveillance program for years, but civil libertarians are perturbed, branding the proposal a "snooper's charter."

Kane said that the surveillance regime had to be seen in the context of social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, where hundreds of millions of people were constantly volunteering information about themselves, their friends, their family and their colleagues.

"There's no sense in getting all Big Brother-ish that there are legitimate safeguards in place," he said. "The bottom line is that we're all leaving digital trails, everywhere, all the time. The whole concept of privacy is shifting daily."

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Google celebrates birthday of Omar Khayyam

Google today is celebrating Omar Khayyam’s contributions through a doodle that is visible on Persian as well as Middle Eastern domains.

Omar Khayyam is often referred to as a great poet, with his work having been translated into many languages. However, his influence spans far beyond poetry into the fields of mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. His Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra is considered a key treaty on algebra.

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As Facebook grows, millions say, 'no, thanks'

NEW YORK (AP) â€" Don't try to friend MaLi Arwood on Facebook. You won't find her there.

You won't find Thomas Chin, either. Or Kariann Goldschmitt. Or Jake Edelstein.

More than 900 million people worldwide check their Facebook accounts at least once a month, but millions more are Facebook holdouts.

They say they don't want Facebook. They insist they don't need Facebook. They say they're living life just fine without the long-forgotten acquaintances that the world's largest social network sometimes resurrects.

They are the resisters.

"I'm absolutely in touch with everyone in my life that I want to be in touch with," Arwood says. "I don't need to share triviality with someone that I might have known for six months 12 years ago."

Even without people like Arwood, Facebook is one of the biggest business success stories in history. The site had 1 million users by the end of 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg started it in his Harvard dorm room. Two years later, it had 12 million. Facebook had 500 million by summer 2010 and 901 million as of March 31, according to the company.

That staggering rise in popularity is one reason why Facebook Inc.'s initial public offering is one of the most hotly anticipated in years. The company's shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday under the ticker symbol "FB". Facebook is likely to have an estimated market valuation of some $100 billion, making it worth more than Kraft Foods, Ford or Disney.

Facebook still has plenty of room to grow, particularly in developing countries where people are only starting to get Internet access. As it is, about 80 percent of its users are outside U.S. and Canada.

But if Facebook is to live up to its pre-IPO hype and reward the investors who are clamoring for its stock this week, it needs to convince some of the resisters to join. Two out of every five American adults have not joined Facebook, according to a recent Associated Press-CNBC poll. Among those who are not on Facebook, a third cited a lack of interest or need.

If all those people continue to shun Facebook, the social network could become akin to a postal system that only delivers mail to houses on one side of the street. The system isn't as useful, and people aren't apt to spend as much time with it. That means fewer opportunities for Facebook to sell ads.

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says that new communications channels â€" from the telephone to radio, TV and personal computers â€" often breed a cadre of holdouts in their early days.

"It's disorienting because people have different relationships with others depending on the media they use," Rainie says. "But we've been through this before. As each new communications media comes to prominence, there is a period of adoption."

Len Kleinrock, 77, says Facebook is fine for his grandchildren, but it's not for him.

"I do not want more distractions," he says. "As it is, I am deluged with email. My friends and colleagues have ready access to me and I don't really want another service that I would feel obliged to check into on a frequent basis."

Kleinrock says his resistance is generational, but discomfort with technology isn't a factor.

After all, Kleinrock is arguably the world's first Internet user. The University of California, Los Angeles professor was part of the team that invented the Internet. His lab was where researchers gathered in 1969 to send test data between two bulky computers â€"the beginnings of the Arpanet network, which morphed into the Internet we know today.

"I'm having a 'been-there, done-that' feeling," Kleinrock says. "There's not a need on my part for reaching out and finding new social groups to interact with. I have trouble keeping up with those I'm involved with now."

Thomas Chin, 35, who works at an advertising and media planning company in New York, says he may be missing out on what friends-of-friends-of-friends are doing, but he doesn't need Facebook to connect with family and closer acquaintances.

"If we're going to go out to do stuff, we organize it (outside) of Facebook," he says.

Some people don't join the social network because they don't have a computer or Internet access, are concerned about privacy, or generally dislike Facebook. Those without a college education are less likely to be on Facebook, as are those with lower incomes. Women who choose to skip Facebook are more likely than men to cite privacy issues, while seniors are more likely than those 50-64 years old to cite computer issues, according the AP-CNBC poll.

About three-quarters of seniors are not on Facebook. By contrast, more than half of those under 35 use it every day.

The poll of 1,004 adults nationwide was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications May 3-7 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

Steve Jones, a professor who studies online culture and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says many resisters consider Facebook to be too much of a chore.

"We've added social networking to our lives. We haven't added any hours to our days," Jones says. "The decision to be online on Facebook is simultaneously a decision not to be doing something else."

Jones says many people on Facebook try to overcome that by multitasking, but they end up splitting their attention and engaging with others online only superficially.

Arwood, 47, a restaurant manager in Chicago, says she was surprised when colleagues on an English-teaching program in rural Spain in 2010 opted to spend their breaks checking Facebook.

"I spent my time on break trying to learn more about the Spanish culture, really taking advantage of it," she says. "I went on walks with some of the students and asked them questions."

Kariann Goldschmitt, 32, a music professor at New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., was on Facebook not long after its founding in 2004, but she quit in 2010. In part, it was because of growing concerns about her privacy and Facebook's ongoing encouragement of people to share more about themselves with the company, with marketers and with the world.

She says she's been much more productive since leaving.

"I was a typical user, on it once or twice a day," she says. "After a certain point, I sort of resented how it felt like an obligation rather than fun."

Besides Facebook resisters and quitters, there are those who take a break. In some cases, people quit temporarily as they apply for new jobs, so that potential employers won't stumble on photos of their wild nights out drinking. Although Facebook doesn't make it easy to find, it offers options for both deleting and suspending accounts.

Goldschmitt says it takes effort to stay in touch with friends and relatives without Facebook. For instance, she has to make mental notes of when her friends are expecting babies, knowing that they have become so used to Facebook "that they don't engage with us anymore."

"I'm like, 'Hmmm, when is nine months?' I have to remember to contact them since they won't remember to tell me when the baby's born."

Neil Robinson, 54, a government lawyer in Washington, says that when his nephew's son was born, pictures went up on Facebook almost immediately. As a Facebook holdout, he had to wait for someone to email photos.

After years of resisting, Robinson plans to join next month, mostly because he doesn't want to lose touch with younger relatives who choose Facebook as their primary means of communication.

But for every Robinson, there is an Edelstein, who has no desire for Facebook and prefers email and postcards.

"I prefer to keep my communications personal and targeted," says Jake Edelstein, 41, a pharmaceutical consultant in New York. "You're getting a message that's written for you. Clearly someone took the time to sit down to do it."

___

Associated Press Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius in Washington contributed this report.

___

Online:

http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com

http://facebook.cnbc.com

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Two precious minutes with the Samsung Galaxy SIII

This week I was invited by Samsung to an event where they officially unveiled their latest flagship phone, the Samsung Galaxy SIII. Needless to say, everyone in attendance couldn’t wait to get their hands on this beautiful phone and play around with its new features. I managed to sneak away for a short while and spent a loving two minutes with the phone before I had to surrender it. Here’s a really quick video to preview the Galaxy SIII:

And if that wasn’t enough, here are some quick photos of the phone as well – Samsung have yet to reveal details on pricing or a UAE release date.

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Siri still loves Lumia 900, just ask her differently

Apple had rushed to fix an embarrassing goof up by Siri when the voice assistant thought the best smart phone was the Nokia Lumia 900. After Apple’s update, Siri would just reply you’re kidding, right?”, or wait…there are other phones?” when a user would ask what the best smartphone was. But fix Apple how many, Siri still loves the Lumia 900 and would still recommend it you as the best smartphone. You just have to ask her differently…maybe whisper it into her ear so the big angry overlord doesn’t hear it.

As discovered by WMPowerUser, ask Siri, according to customer satisfaction what’s the best smart phone ever”, and she promptly searches Nokia Lumia 900 for you. Its almost endearing.

We wonder how long before Apple attempts to fix this bug”.

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Facebook raises IPO price as offering nears

NEW YORK (AP) â€" Facebook on Tuesday increased the price range at which it plans to sell stock to the public, as investor enthusiasm in the offering continued to mount and boost the potential value of the world's most popular social network.

The Menlo Park, Calif. company said in a regulatory filing that it now expects to sell its stock for between $34 and $38 per share, up from its previous range of $28 to $35. At the upper limit of $38 per share, the sale would raise about $12.8 billion.

The IPO is expected to be completed late Thursday and begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday under the ticker symbol "FB."

The increased range is a sign of high demand from investors to own a piece of the world's most popular social network. The initial public offering is the most hotly anticipated in years and would value Facebook at more than $100 billion.

Facebook is selling 180 million of its shares in the IPO. Another 157 million shares are coming from existing stockholders, including the company's earliest investors and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Even after the IPO, Zuckerberg will remain Facebook's single largest shareholder. And he will control the company through 57 percent of its voting stock.

The IPO is expected to be the largest ever for an Internet company. It is expected to raise more than 10 times as much as the $1.67 billion raised in Google Inc.'s 2004 IPO.

At a value of $38 per share, the high end of Facebook's expected range, Facebook would generate $6.84 billion on its shares. Existing stockholders would collectively make $5.98 billion.

Facebook has more than 900 million users who log in at least once a month.

Even at the higher price range, it's going to be tough for the company's fans and everyday investors to get in on the IPO. Most of the shares are expected to go to people with connections to the company or large, active accounts with one of the big banks or brokerage firms directly involved in the stock sale.

Morgan Stanley leads the team of 33 underwriters selected for the Facebook offering, followed by JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

The inclusion of online broker E-Trade Financial Corp. as an underwriter was seen as a glimmer of hope that Facebook might make more shares available than usual for retail investors through discount brokerages. But chances of getting any are very slim regardless.

Analysts say there's so much interest in Facebook's stock that some underwriters are closing their books as early as Tuesday. This means they won't be taking any more orders from potential buyers.

In its Tuesday filing, Facebook also adjusted the timetable for finishing its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, saying it expects the deal to close sometime in 2012. Previously, it had said it expected to complete the deal in the second quarter.

Some have speculated that the acquisition of the photo-sharing network would come under regulatory scrutiny. If the deal doesn't close by Dec. 10, Facebook could have to pay Instagram a breakup fee of $200 million.

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Revolving door: Yahoo ushers out another CEO

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) â€" Yahoo still has credibility issues, even after casting aside CEO Scott Thompson because his official biography included a college degree that he never received.

The troubled Internet company's next challenge will be convincing its restless shareholders and demoralized employees that the turnaround work started during Thompson's tumultuous four-month stint as CEO won't be wasted.

It won't be an easy task, given that Yahoo Inc. has now gone through four full-time CEOs in a five-year stretch marked by broken promises of better times ahead. Instead, Yahoo's revenue and stock price have sagged during a time when rivals such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. as advertisers spend more money online.

"Yahoo has been floundering for years and it looks like there is going to be at least several more months of indirection now that another CEO is coming in," said Adam Hanft, who runs a consulting firm that specializes in brand reputation and crisis management.

Yahoo's hopes are now resting on Ross Levinsohn as its interim CEO. Levinsohn had a successful stint running Internet services within Rupert Murdoch's media empire at News Corp. before one of Yahoo's former CEOs, Carol Bartz, hired him in November 2010 to help her in her mostly fruitless attempt to fix the company.

Thompson, who was hired as Yahoo's CEO in January to fill a void created by Bartz's firing, had promoted Levinsohn last month to oversee the company's media and advertising services throughout the world.

"This may seem like a great deal of news to digest, but as you are all keenly aware, Yahoo is a dynamic, global company in a dynamic, global industry, so change â€" sometimes unexpected and sometimes at lightning speed â€" is something we will continue to live with and something we should embrace," Levinsohn wrote in a Sunday memo to employees that was provided to The Associated Press.

Levinsohn, 48, plans to address workers at a companywide meeting Monday afternoon.

Yahoo tried to make Levinsohn's job slightly easier by reaching a truce with dissident shareholder Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager who exposed the inaccurate information on Thompson's bio and had made it clear he would continue to publicly skewer the company unless he was given a chance to help develop a turnaround strategy.

To placate Loeb, Yahoo is shaking up its board of directors, which has been in a state of flux for several months.

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and four other directors who had already announced plans to step down at the company's annual meeting later this year are leaving the board immediately. All five of those directors signed off on the hiring of Thompson, a move that made them all look bad by the recent revelation that they didn't catch an inaccuracy circulating for years about his education.

Three of Yahoo's vacated board seats will be filled by Loeb, and two of his allies, former MTV Networks executive Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson.

Alfred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive who joined Yahoo's board just three months ago, replaces Bostock as chairman.

The reshuffled board will now try to complete a long-delayed deal to sell part of Yahoo's roughly 40 percent stake in China's Alibaba Group, an investment that investors view as the company's most valuable asset. If a deal can be completed, it could generate billions of dollars that could be returned to Yahoo shareholders and ease some of the pressure on Levinsohn.

Loeb, who controls a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo though his Third Point hedge fund, had been waging a campaign to gain four seats on the company's board. Loeb settled for a compromise and Thompson's departure. The two had a falling out in late March when Thompson told Loeb he wasn't qualified to be on Yahoo's board.

Although Yahoo gave no official explanation for Thompson's abrupt exit, it was clearly tied to inaccuracies that appeared on Thompson's biography on the company's website and in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The bio listed two degrees â€" in accounting and computer science â€" from Stonehill College, a small school near Boston. After discovering Thompson never received a computer science degree, Loeb exposed the fabrication in a May 3 letter to Yahoo's board. The revelation raised questions about why the accomplishment had periodically appeared on his bio in the years while he was running PayPal, an online payment service owned by eBay Inc.

Yahoo initially stood behind Thompson, brushing off the inclusion of the bogus degree as an "inadvertent error," but harsh criticism from employees, shareholders and corporate governance experts prompted the board to appoint a special committee to investigate how the fabrication occurred.

Thompson, 54, spent much of the past week scrambling to save his job. He sent a memo to employees, apologizing for distractions caused by news of the illusory degree and then sought to assure other Yahoo executives that he wasn't the source of the inaccuracy. He blamed a Chicago headhunting firm, Heidrick & Struggles.

In an internal memo last week, Heidrick & Struggles denied Thompson's accusation. "This allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect," CEO Kevin Kelly wrote to employees. On Sunday, a spokesman for the firm declined to comment.

In a twist, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Thompson had told the board last week that he has thyroid cancer. The diagnosis contributed to his decision to step down, according to the newspaper's unidentified sources.

The flap over the misleading bio elevated the angst in Yahoo just a month after Thompson laid off 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the biggest payroll purge in the company's history. In recent weeks, Thompson had been drawing up plans to close or sell about 50 of Yahoo's services while also antagonizing much of Silicon Valley with a lawsuit alleging the rapidly growing social network Facebook stole some of its technology from Yahoo.

"In spite of the very bumpy road we've traveled, we are achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction," Levinsohn wrote in his Sunday memo.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan thinks Levinsohn's media background may make him better qualified to be Yahoo's CEO than Thompson, whose experience is rooted in electronic commerce.

"Ross Levinsohn is common-sense executive, a pragmatic operator who people love to work for," Rohan said. "He is the right guy for this job."

Yahoo's stock has been sagging since it squandered an opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. in May 2008 for $33 per share, or $47.5 billion. Yahoo's stock hasn't traded above $20 since September 2008.

The shares ended last week at $15.19, leaving it with a market value of $18.6 billion. That's slightly less than the individual fortunes of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose company was still smaller than Yahoo when it went public in 2004.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbeg's wealth also could surpass Yahoo's market value depending on the price set in an initial public offering of stock that is expected to be set Thursday.

Yahoo's struggles center on the company's inability to keep up with Google and Facebook in the race for online advertising. Yahoo's annual revenue has fallen from a peak of $7.2 billion in 2008 to $5 billion last year. Over the same period, Google's annual revenue has climbed from $22 billion in 2008 to $38 billion last year. Facebook's annual revenue has increased from $272 million in 2008 to $3.7 billion last year.

"Yahoo has been embattled for such a long time that there are a lot of people prepared to believe the worst about that company," said Post, who specializes in corporate governance and professional ethics. "When you're angry at the management and the board, when nothing's going right and you're losing money, it's understandable that shareholders would adopt an 'off with their head' attitude."

___

AP Business Writer Christina Rexrode in New York contributed to this story.

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Yahoo CEO steps down after resume fiasco

Yahoo announced yesterday in a formal statement that CEO Scott Thompson will be stepping down, after it was revealed earlier that he padded the qualifications listed on his resume.

The announcement comes at a time when the once leading search website is being plagued by internal problems, despite trying to retain its already dwindling market share. Yahoo’s global media chief Ross Levinsohn has been appointed as interim chief executive, hot on the heels of another announcement that the board of directors will also receive a shake-up.

Dan Loeb, CEO of Third Point, owns about 5.8% of Yahoo and is the largest outside shareholder. Loeb was the one who initially probed into Thompson’s background and exposed his resume blunder. Loeb also proposed to Yahoo that four board members be replaced, something that Yahoo dismissed until recent events. In it’s statement yesterday Yahoo announced that it will add to its board Dan Loeb himself; Harry Wilson, CEO of Maeva; and Michael Wolf, CEO of Activate.

In an internal email to employees, Levinsohn acknowledged the very bumpy road we’ve traveled”, but continued by saying that the company will go on the offensive starting today.”

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Facebook updates data use policy to give more info

NEW YORK (AP) â€" Facebook is updating its data use policy in an attempt to give people more clarity on how the company uses information they share.

As part of the changes, Facebook is also signaling that it may start showing people ads on sites other than Facebook, targeting the pitches to interests and hobbies that users express on Facebook.

The move comes a week before Facebook Inc.'s expected initial public offering of stock. Facebook held events with potential investors this week, including one in Silicon Valley on Friday, and it has posted a version of its road show online. The offering could value Facebook at nearly $100 billion â€" more than Kraft, Ford and other major brands.

The policy changes are in response to an audit by Irish data-protection authorities last year, Facebook said Friday. The commission had asked Facebook to be more transparent about how it collects people's data and uses it for advertising, as well as how long it keeps such information.

Facebook plans to notify its more than 900 million users of the changes through advertisements around the site and on its mobile apps. Users who want to dig deeper can read a version of the policy that highlights the changes word by word. Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, will host an online chat Monday to answer any questions.

Egan said the company wasn't substantially changing its business practices, but wants to "err on the side of providing too much information."

Facebook's overseas headquarters are based in Dublin, Ireland, a member of the European Union. This means the company is required to comply with European data privacy laws. Facebook said the changes were also a response to feedback from its users.

As part of the changes to the policy, Facebook has created a section to explain how it uses technologies such as cookies to deliver ads, secure the site and offer various features. Cookies, which are small files containing data or alphanumeric IDs, are commonly used to track people's activities around the Web, for example. The information could then be used to target ads to their hobbies and interests.

The changes also incorporate updates that Facebook has made to its site since its previous policy revision announced in September. This includes reorganizing people's profile pages in a "timeline" format and adding an "activity log" that lets people see everything they've done on the site, as well as who can see it. The "cover photo" people put on their timeline is considered public information, along with their gender.

Facebook also has given itself more leeway on how long it keeps information it collects. Before, it has typically kept such data for 180 days. Facebook said it will now retain data for "as long as it is necessary to provide services." This could be longer or shorter than 180 days.

For example, if a company creates a "page" for its brand, Facebook said it wouldn't delete the information put there "simply because 180 days had passed."

"Instead, we would delete it when it was no longer needed â€" when the page owner deleted it or closed its account," Facebook said.

Some of the changes give a glimpse of what Facebook might do in the future. Though it doesn't currently show people ads outside of Facebook.com or its mobile apps, the updated policy gives it the option to do so. This is something other companies, such as Amazon.com Inc.'s Zappos.com, already do. For example, people who click on shoes while shopping on Zappos might see the same shoes pop up in ads elsewhere, even if they are not logged into Zappos. This is what cookies do.

Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said Facebook hasn't been very explicit about this possibility before, "but now they seem to be calling it out."

While such ads may "creep people out," he added, it doesn't mean the company would be collecting more information about users than it already does. It's also a new revenue source.

Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry-backed think tank in Washington, said Facebook's overall data use policy is "a really interesting document" that teaches users how the service works â€" sort of like a user's guide.

Most privacy policies read like legal documents, though there are other exceptions, such as Google Inc.

Still, he added, it's a "very small audience that takes the time to read even the most delightful and entertaining privacy policy."

What's more useful, Polonetsky said, is to give users advice and options at the time that they need the information. Facebook already does this in many cases. For example, when users post a status update, they can decide whether that will be visible to their friends or to the broader public.

"That's how people are really going to learn," he said.

____

Online:

Link to Monday's chat with Erin Egan at noon ET: http://on.fb.me/IM6ZBm

Explanation of changes: http://on.fb.me/Jr1ybY

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HP Officejet 150 makes printing truly mobile

Road warriors rejoice! Remember those frustrating times when you’re on your way to an important meeting only to realize you’ve left some important document behind in your office? Well the smart folks over at HP have come up with a solution that should appeal to anyone who needs instant printing wherever they may be.

At the Global Influencer Summit 2012 in Shanghai, China, HP unveiled a host of new products, one of them being the HP Officejet 150 Mobile All-in-One. Weighing in at little over 3kg and measuring 350x171x90mm, the Officejet 150 can hold 50 sheets of paper and can print up to 500 pages on a single charge of its rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The printer can also scan one sheet a time and either print a copy of the scanned image or save it to a PC or memory card / USB stick.

With a speed of around 22ppm for black and 18ppm for color, the HP Officejet 150 seems like the perfect solution to anyone who may need customized client contracts immediately after a meeting, or may need to scan something urgently on the spot.

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Panasonic loss balloons for record red ink

TOKYO (AP) â€" Panasonic's January-March losses ballooned 10-fold to 438 billion yen ($5 billion), completing a year of record red ink at the Japanese electronics maker battered by natural disasters and an ailing TV business.

Panasonic Corp. had racked up a 40.7 billion yen loss the same period the previous year.

The Osaka-based maker of Viera TVs and Lumix digital cameras reported Friday a record loss of 772.2 billion yen ($9.6 billion), a reversal from the 74 billion yen profit a year ago and among the biggest in Japan's manufacturing history.

That comes a day after Panasonic's archrival Sony Corp. racked up a record annual loss of 457 billion yen ($5.7 billion) in its fourth straight year of red ink.

Sony, which makes the Walkman portable audio player and PlayStation game machine, had a 255 billion yen ($3.2 billion) loss January-March â€" its fifth straight quarterly net loss to round out a fiscal year that was the worst in its 66-year corporate history.

Both companies' TV operations, centering around flat-panel sets, have been battered by a powerful Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea and other Asian players.

A strong yen has also eroded the value of overseas earnings for the Japanese.

Like Sony, which is hoping for a turnaround under a new president, Kazuo Hirai, Panasonic has tapped Kazuhiro Tsuga as president. The appointments still need shareholder approval.

Panasonic is forecasting a return to profit for the fiscal year ending March 2013, at 50 billion yen ($625 million) profit on 8.1 trillion yen ($101 billion) sales, up 3 percent.

Panasonic does not have the entertainment or gaming businesses of Sony. But it is struggling as it attempts to strengthen solar panel and battery operations, including auto batteries, to find new areas of growth.

In a strategy released Friday, Panasonic said it will focus on business customers, not just individual consumers. It will increasingly target global buyers such as refrigerators in China and TVs in India, it said.

The company booked 767 billion yen ($9.6 billion) in restructuring expenses over the fiscal year ended March, to turn itself around, including cutting costs in TV operations.

Panasonic's sales fell in every major region, including the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and the rest of Asia.

Quarterly sales slipped 8 percent to 1.88 trillion yen ($23.5 billion). Annual sales plunged 10 percent to 7.85 trillion yen ($98 billion).

"Business conditions deteriorated," Panasonic said in a statement, listing as negatives the supply chain disruptions from the tsunami in northeastern Japan and the floods in Thailand.

It also blamed the European financial crisis for slowing demand and cited worries about a steady and cheap electricity supply as a concern.

The tsunami last year set off meltdowns at several reactors at a nuclear power plant and is putting the supply of cheap power at risk.

Panasonic lost 1.5 percent to close at 570 yen in Tokyo. Trading ended shortly before results were released.

___

Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at http://twitter.com/yurikageyama

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Upgrade to Blackberry OS 7.1 while you shop

Starting this weekend, BlackBerry® smartphone users in the UAE will be given the opportunity to upgrade to the all-new BlackBerry OS 7.1 while they shop at various malls in Dubai and Abu Dhabi through the summer.

Taking only 30 minutes and at no cost, customers can borrow a ‘courtesy’ full-touch BlackBerry smartphone, together with a SIM card, to allow them to continue shopping and stay connected to friends and family while they wait.

With BlackBerry 7.1, BlackBerry smartphone users will now be able to share information and content by simply tapping their NFC-enabled BlackBerry smartphone against another NFC-enabled BlackBerry smartphone. BBM invites, contact information, documents, photos and other content can now be shared with a simple tap.

BlackBerry smartphone users can visit an upgrade station at the following locations:
- Axiom, Jackys, Plug Ins and Sharaf DG at Dubai Mall: 11 May to 02 June; 08-30 June

- Jumbo Electronics at Mall of the Emirates: 11-22 May; 09 June to 07 July

- Sharaf DG at Deira City Centre: 13 May to 07 July

- Plug Ins at Abu Dhabi Marina Mall: 10 May to 02 June; 08-30 June

- Axiom at Mirdif City Centre: 10 May to 10 June

BlackBerry smartphones that can be upgraded to OS 7.1 include the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900, BlackBerry® Torch™ 9810, BlackBerry® Torch ™ 9860, BlackBerry® Curve™ 9360, BlackBerry® Curve™ 9380 and the Porsche Design P’9881 smartphone from BlackBerry®.

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The new iPad officially launching in the UAE next week

If you have been holding off getting the new iPad (aka iPad 3) because you wanted to purchase the official version, well, it’s time to get your wallet ready. While it has been widely available as a grey import in the UAE since it’s launch a couple of months back, the official version of the new iPad is expected to land locally as well as other parts of the region at the start of next week- May 12, 2012.

Along with the United Arab Emirates, the new iPad will also be officially launched in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt. Apple has priced it’s latest tablet pretty much in-line as the grey market imports- right under AED 2,000.

Apple has also chosen to avoid using 4G for marketing the new iPad in the region as they have been sued in other parts of the world where the tablet only works under 3G and not LTE due to the different bands that carriers use across the globe.

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AT&T looking to introduce family data plans

NEW ORLEANS (AP) â€" The head of AT&T's wireless business says he's looking to introduce plans that share a data allowance among family members, similar to the way it sells family calling plans.

AT&T's Ralph de la Vega says the company is working out the details of such plans, but has no firm launch date. Competitor Verizon Wireless has said it plans to introduce family plans this summer.

De la Vega said, "We'll introduce them when we can." He was speaking on the sidelines of the CTIA Wireless show in New Orleans, which opened Tuesday.

The plans could make data service more affordable in families where data-capable devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops proliferate. Right now, each device needs a separate data plan.

CNET reported earlier on AT&T's plans.

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Apple releases iOS 5.1.1 update

The latest version of iOS is a minor revision that works on sorting out bugs- something that should be obvious given the very small increment in the version number. As per Apple, this update contains improvements and bug fixes, including:

- Improves reliability of using HDR option for photos taken using the Lock Screen shortcut
- Addresses bugs that could prevent the new iPad from switching between 2G and 3G networks
- Fixes bugs that affected AirPlay video playback in some circumstances
- Improved reliability for syncing Safari bookmarks and Reading List
- Fixes an issue where ‘Unable to purchase’ alert could be displayed after successful purchase

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website

Available for your iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S as well all models of the iPad and the third and fourth generation iPods, the latest build 9B206 can be downloaded directly as an OTA to your device or through iTunes.

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AT&T barges into home security and automation

NEW YORK (AP) â€" AT&T Inc. will start selling home automation and security services nationwide, taking on incumbents led by Tyco International Ltd.'s ADT.

The installations and services will be sold in AT&T stores, starting with a trial this summer in Dallas and Atlanta.

Several of AT&T's competitors, including cable TV company Comcast Corp. and phone company Verizon Communications Inc., have ventured into the home automation and security field. Dallas-based AT&T is showing more ambition with its stated goal of selling nationwide, rather than sticking to its landline service territory, as Verizon does.

Steven Winoker, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, said about 23 percent of U.S. homes have security systems, so there's plenty of room to grow. Even fewer have automation systems for controlling appliances, lights, heating and cooling.

The biggest player in the field is ADT, but it has only 25 percent of the market. Many smaller companies make up the rest, according to Winoker.

It's a very profitable business, Winoker said, but it's not big enough to significantly affect the earnings of a company of AT&T's size even if it's successful, given that it's a relatively small market.

AT&T's technology comes from Xanboo, a company it bought in late 2010. Its central control panel can connect wirelessly with cameras, thermostats, appliance controls, lights and sensors for doors, windows, smoke and carbon monoxide. Through the panel, home owners can then control their home from their cellphones.

It's highly recommended that the control panel is connected to wired broadband, but it doesn't have to be service through AT&T, said Glenn Lurie, AT&T's president of emerging devices. As a backup, the panel can connect to AT&T's wireless data network.

AT&T didn't say what its services would cost.

AT&T made its announcement on the eve of the U.S. cellphone industry's annual trade show, which starts Tuesday in New Orleans.

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79% of UAE mobile users want to be found

Press Release:

Location-based services (LBS) have topped the global league, as the mobile feature set to grow the most after world leading insights consultancy, TNS revealed more than 60 per cent of those that don’t yet use the service globally want to start. This is of even greater interest in the UAE where this figure stands at 79 per cent.

TNS’s annual Mobile Life study â€" which explores mobile use among 48,000 people in 58 countries â€" shows the majority of people around the world now recognise the value of sharing their location to benefit from a range of services.

The key findings, released as a set of interactive visualisations show that the services and apps people use vary considerably from region to region (Available at www.tnsglobal.com/mobilelife).

 

Location-based services move into the mainstream in the UAE

Almost one fifth of the world’s six billion mobile users are already using LBS, with more than three times this number – 62 per cent – aspiring to do so in the future. Navigation via GPS remains the most popular motivation behind the LBS uptake, which currently stands at 52 per cent in MENA.

There is also growing interest in more diverse activities, with 13 per cent of social network users ‘checking-in’ through platforms like Foursquare or Facebook Places, versus 11 per cent in 2011.

LBS users are increasingly using services to enrich their social lives, with one out of four people in the UAE using LBS to find friends nearby compared to one in five globally. Around a quarter use the technology to find restaurants and entertainment venues, while 19 per cent check public transport schedules and 8 per cent to book a taxi.

Savvy LBS users in the UAE have realised that there is something to be gained from sharing their locations with brands and retailers â€" with 11.5 per cent sharing their location in exchange for a deal or special offer; almost at par with the global average of 12.5 per cent.

Beyond current users of LBS, globally a third of people who already or would like to use mobile voucher schemes, highly rate receiving deals when they are nearby a store that they like.  One in five mobile users stated that they find mobile advertising interesting if it is offering them a deal near their current location.

Steve Hamilton-Clark, CEO of TNS MENA explained that location based services are finally ‘coming of age’.

“People are realising that sharing their location often offers some kind of reward in terms of a discount or deal. It is the combination of time and context â€" directing people towards a deal when they can easily redeem it. This unlocks a powerful tool for marketers to develop targeting approaches,” he said.

 

A complex map of global use

He noted that while the study has shown an increasing willingness to engage with LBS, there are also significant variations in people’s reasons for embracing the service across different markets.  Of all current LBS users, Latin Americans most use the feature to find friends, with 39 per cent stating it as the top reason to share their location, compared to 24 per cent in the UAE.

“There a regional variations on what prompts the desire to engage and these highlight the importance of having a targeted strategy when it comes to location based marketing.

“LBS offers marketers an unprecedented level of engagement and targeting, however it has to be done in line with how people in individual markets want to engage with brands to avoid being intrusive. Where brands get it right, we have seen significant rewards in terms of brand engagement, loyalty and sales,” Hamilton-Clark concluded.

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Murdoch scandal follows classic media baron script

LONDON (AP) â€" If the phone hacking scandal gripping Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. empire has a familiar ring, it might be because you've heard the story before. Scrappy outsider turns modest newspaper business into international media conglomerate. Ambition turns to hubris. Mogul dramatically falls from grace.

From William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch, many media barons' stories follow a familiar arc.

"He's one of a series," said James Curran, a professor of communications at Goldsmiths University in London. "He seems to me to be in the same press baron tradition."

Before Murdoch came Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, both of whose careers at the top of the British media establishment ended in disgrace. Before those two came Lord Beaverbrook, the Daily Express owner whose excesses were lampooned by Evelyn Waugh in his 1938 novel "Scoop."

Earlier still was the New York Journal's William Randolph Hearst, who has become linked to the swashbuckling maverick at the center of Orson Wells' 1941 classic "Citizen Kane."

There are huge differences: Unlike Black and Maxwell, Hearst, Murdoch, and Beaverbrook stayed successful. The Hearst Corp. is 125 years old; News Corp. is worth $60 billion; there's still a statue to Beaverbrook in the Canadian city of Fredericton, not far from where he was raised.

But there are important parallels, too.

Britain's media tycoons came from abroad â€" Australia, Canada, or Eastern Europe â€" and rapidly became establishment figures, winning wealth, titles, and friends in high places.

Then, eventually, came the fall.

Beaverbrook's attempt to create his own political party was knocked back in the 1930s, and he found himself cast adrift following the defeat of close ally Winston Churchill in 1945.

Black's and Maxwell's careers were blighted by criminality. Maxwell, having raided his newspaper's pension fund, drowned under murky circumstances in 1991; Black was only released Friday from a U.S. prison following a 2007 conviction for cheating his shareholders.

Once one of the most powerful forces in British politics, courted by Labour and Conservative leaders alike, Murdoch also has seen his clout wither amid the scandal over illegal eavesdropping at his News of the World tabloid.

Revelations of widespread illegality there have led to the arrests of dozens of journalists and media executives, the resignations of high-flying political operatives and police leaders, and hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs.

The narrative of the hacking scandal may echo earlier stories of overreach, but Murdoch's story has little to do with those of Black or Maxwell, said Tom Bower, who has written biographies of the latter.

"There is a sharp difference," said Bower, explaining that Murdoch built "a huge and successful business" based on hard work and sharp elbows, while his competitors failed because they had created "flimsy businesses based on fraud."

Murdoch's story bears a stronger resemblance to Beaverbrook, a turn-of-the-century entrepreneur who would help revolutionize London's Fleet Street newspapers, according to Jacques Poitras, the author of "Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy."

Born William Aitken in the small maritime province of New Brunswick, Beaverbrook had a modest start selling insurance and magazines door to door before moving on to bond promotion and striking it rich.

He moved to England, where he was knighted, invested in the populist Daily Express, and â€" with the help of innovations such as crossword puzzles, gossip columns and society pages â€" turned it into the biggest-selling paper in the English-speaking world. That title was later claimed by Murdoch's News of the World.

"Both men published fabulously successful newspapers, and they were good at it," Poitras said. "They knew what people wanted (and) they delivered it."

Beaverbrook became fantastically influential, serving as a powerful Cabinet minister and Churchill adviser.

"His power in the 30s and 40s in London was unmatched," said Poitras. "I don't know if you could have someone of that clout now. ... Murdoch is the only one who seems to have made waves in the same way."

Compared to Beaverbrook and Murdoch, Maxwell and Black are a "second division of press baron," said Curran, the professor of communications.

Black, a member of the Canadian elite, eventually came to own The Daily Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post, and a string of U.S. and Canadian newspapers before his embezzlement plunged his empire into crisis.

Maxwell's rags-to-riches-to-ruin story is in some respects more compelling.

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the destitute Carpathian mountain region of what was then known as Czechoslovakia, Maxwell narrowly escaped a Nazi concentration camp to move to London. He set up a successful publishing company and moved into politics, throwing his support behind the left-wing Labour Party.

As early as 1969, there were signs of trouble. Britain's trade department investigated Maxwell in the wake of a botched takeover deal, branding him unfit "to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company" â€" nearly the same language used by Labour lawmakers to condemn Murdoch in a critical report on phone hacking published last week.

Maxwell survived the trade investigation, spending the next two decades expanding his empire and racking up an enormous pile of debt. By the time his body was recovered from the waters off the Canary Islands â€" no one knows precisely how he died â€" his company was more than 2 billion pounds in the red.

Murdoch, who outmaneuvered Maxwell and Black to stay at the top of the British newspaper scene, has so far avoided falling into the same abyss that swallowed his competitors. Even his most strident critics don't accuse him of anything worse than "willful blindness." He remains at the head of a fabulously successful media company, responsible for record-smashing films like "Avatar" or TV hits such as "The Simpsons," and News Corp.'s share price is riding high.

His influence in Britain, however, has undeniably suffered. Politicians who once scrambled to kiss his hand are now lining up to boast about how independent they were. Prime Minister David Cameron, who in 2008 flew out to the tycoon's yacht to seek his blessing, acknowledged last week that "we all did too much cozying up to Rupert Murdoch."

In that respect, Murdoch's isolation â€" in Britain at least â€" seems redolent of the last scene of Citizen Kane: Successful, wealthy, but unloved.

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Samsung Galaxy S III launched

Samsung unveiled their latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III over the weekend in London. The follow up to one of last year’s most successful smartphones, the Galaxy S II, the S II promises a host of new advances and features for techies everywhere.

Packing a quad-core 1.4GHz Cortex A9 processor using Samsung’s Exynos 4212 Quad chipset, the Galaxy S III is one of the most, if not the most, powerful smartphones on the planet right now. Helping the colossal processor is 1GB RAM, wile internal storage will come in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flavors.

Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi a/b/g/n along with GPS are also par for the course, which means the huge 2100 mAh battery maybe good enough for long life. The rear 8MP camera can record 1080p @ 30fps, while the front facing 1.3MP camera should be good enough for video conferencing. Interestingly the rear camera has a voice activated control for remote controlling the trigger, with up to 3.3 fps image capture. Additionally that improved shutter also supports zero lag, with shot-to-shot time being under a second. There’s also the option to snap a photo while recording a video.

The Galaxy S III adorns the TouchWiz 4.0 UI with the Android ICS 4.0.4 OS running underneath. Displaying this will be a gorgeous 4.8-inch 1280×720 (giving it 306 ppi) Super AMOLED screen supported by Gorilla Glass.

Have a look at the hands-on video below by GSM Arena for a quick look at the phone.

Samsung officially haven’t announced any price details of availability within our region, but given it’s European release of 30th May, expect it to come out in UAE in mid to late June. Pricing, going by what the S II launched at, should be around AED 3,000.

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Yahoo CEO faces calls for ouster after inaccuracy

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) â€" Scott Thompson's reign as Yahoo's CEO is in jeopardy after just four months on the job because he allowed an inaccuracy about his academic credentials to recur for years.

A major Yahoo shareholder who exposed the fabrication is now leading the charge to oust Thompson for unethical conduct. In a letter Friday, activist hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb demanded that the board of the struggling Internet company fire Thompson by noon EDT Monday or face possible legal action.

"CEO's have been terminated for less at other companies," wrote Loeb, who controls a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo through his hedge fund, Third Point LLC.

Yahoo reiterated Friday that "the board is reviewing this matter and, upon completion of its review, will make an appropriate disclosure to shareholders."

Thompson's troubles revolve around an exaggeration about his education at Stonehill College, a small Catholic school near Boston where he was graduated in 1979.

Since announcing Thompson's hiring in January, Yahoo had included two bachelor's degrees â€" one for accounting and the other for computer science â€" on the executive's biography. The dual degrees appeared on Yahoo's own website and in an April 27 legal document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

After being confronted Thursday by Loeb, Yahoo confirmed that Thompson received only an accounting degree from Stonehill. Yahoo has since removed all references to Thompson's education from his bio on its website. The company hadn't amended its SEC filing with the inaccuracy as of late Friday.

It's unclear whether the inaccuracy about the computer science originated with Thompson or someone else at Yahoo.

But Thompson's bio with dual degrees periodically cropped up before he joined Yahoo. He was listed with a computer degree on a website touting his appearance at the Web 2.0 technology conference in 2010 while he was running eBay Inc.'s PayPal payment service. The computer science degree also has appeared in Thompson's bio in connection with his 2008 appointment to a Silicon Valley startup, Zuora.

EBay listed only Thompson's accounting degree in its SEC filings while he was working at PayPal.

Even if Thompson didn't personally write his biography, he almost certainly reviewed the information at some point and should be held accountable for the distortion, said Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

Elson believes Yahoo's board needs to dump Thompson or "it will face questions about its own effectiveness."

Yahoo blamed an "inadvertent error." After that excuse was ridiculed on the Internet, Yahoo issued another statement late Thursday about the board's intent to look into what happened. The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., didn't give a deadline.

The uproar over Thompson's qualifications and integrity is the latest tempest at beleaguered Yahoo, which has been reeling since it turned down an opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $33 per share four years ago.

The company has been losing ground to rivals Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. ever since, causing its revenue to steadily fall and leaving its stock price below $20 since September 2008, a few months after Microsoft's final offer. Yahoo's shares fell 25 cents to close at $15.15 Friday.

Thompson, Yahoo's fourth full-time CEO in the past five years, had just started to revamp the company, but he probably won't be around much longer, predicted Kirk Hanson, executive director for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley.

"The board really is boxed into a corner," Hanson said. "If this individual is prone to exaggeration or excessive claims, they have to be worried it might happen again down the road.

"They also have to ask themselves, 'Can this leader serve as a moral example or moral leader for our company?' Behavior rolls downhill. If the CEO exaggerates a little, then others in the organization will exaggerate a lot."

Although he was well-respected at PayPal, Thompson isn't getting much support in Silicon Valley.

Thompson alienated much of the technology industry in March when he decided to sue Facebook for alleged infringement on some of Yahoo's Internet patents. The lawsuit has been skewered in Silicon Valley as a cheap shot at Facebook Inc. as it prepared to complete an initial public offering of stock that is aiming to raise as much as $13.6 billion for the company and its current shareholders. Yahoo critics also viewed the lawsuit as the desperate act of a company that has run out of good ideas.

In his Friday letter, Loeb argued that Thompson has to be dumped to avoid "irreparable damage to Yahoo's culture." He argued that Yahoo's own code of ethics justifies firing Thompson "for cause," a move that probably would prevent him for qualifying for a severance package. Yahoo's code states that information filed with the SEC "must be full, fair, accurate, timely and understandable."

If Yahoo fires Thompson, it will be the company's second ouster of a CEO in less than a year. The company fired Thompson's predecessor, Carol Bartz in September after concluding her turnaround strategy wasn't working.

Thompson so far has been focused on cutting costs. Just last month, Thompson laid off 2,000 Yahoo employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the company's biggest payroll purge in history. He has also promised to close or sell about 50 Yahoo services that haven't been attracting enough online traffic or generating enough revenue.

Loeb is trying to oust Thompson as he seeks four seats on Yahoo's board of directors â€" one for himself and three for his allies. Yahoo instead added three other directors in late March. Thompson told Loeb he wasn't qualified to be on the company's board.

The search for new directors was overseen by Patti Hart, whom Loeb is also attacking as an ethics liability. Loeb is upset that Hart's bio claimed she held a bachelor's degree in marketing and economics from Illinois State University. On Thursday, Yahoo clarified that Hart graduated from the college with a bachelor's degree in business administration with specialties in marketing and economics.

Loeb ended his letter by pressing Yahoo to appoint him and his three preferred candidates to avoid a showdown at the company's annual meeting later this year. Yahoo hasn't scheduled the meeting yet.

"The company can ill afford to continue this misguided fight with its largest outside shareholder while it has so many other fires to put out," Loeb wrote. "There has been enough damage already."

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Yahoo CEO misrepresented degree on his CV

Recently Yahoo filed a lawsuit against Facebook claiming that the social networking site had violated 10 of its registered patents. Of course this is nothing new, people tend to like suing Facebook for reasons unknown.

But the decision to sue Facebook for millions of easy dollars might be a decision Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson will regret. A recent discovery points out that apparently Thompson inflated his college degree a bit on his CV, something that is bound to haunt him for the rest of his career.

Noe people tend to lie or over-inflate their CV on a daily basis, but for the CEO of a tech company to that is just plain stupidity. On his CV, Thompson stated that he earned a bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Computer Science, however it was discovered that he only earned a degree in Accounting. The flub could have been an accident or something done on purpose, but apparently Thompson had the same degree listed on his credentials when he worked at eBay. The discovery has now prompted the Yahoo board to undertake a full investigation, the outcome of which certainly won’t be pretty for Thompson.

The discovery about Thompson’s degree was pointed out by Dan Loeb, current CEO of hedge fund Third Point. When more voices joined in to cry afoul, Yahoo decided to take matters into their own hands. It’s safe to say that Thompson’s glorious days as Yahoo’s CEO could quite possibly come to an abrupt end.

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Etisalat launches new LTE offerings at the LTE MENA 2012

Press Release:

Etisalat announced new LTE service packages at LTE MENA 2012 (Dubai), the region’s first and only conference on LTE â€" the fourth generation (4G) wireless technology. As the Strategic Operator Partner of the event, Etisalat’s participation featured top management key note speeches and the launch of value-packed LTE USB modem offers.

Etisalat has extended the LTE service offering by making the LTE-compatible USB modems available to customers subscribing to My DataPlan ‘Plus’, ‘Extra’ or ‘Ultra’ pack bundles. Customers can choose and enjoy the LTE super-speed of up to 100Mbps for FREE or for competitive monthly rentals on any My DataPlan pack, subscribed on a six or 12 months contract. For a limited time, customers can also buy the standalone LTE USB modem at AED599, enjoying a 25% discount from AED799 offered at launch in December 2011.

Based on customer’s data requirements, My DataPlans offer the most competitive data bundles, including the ‘Ultra’ pack which provides the UAE’s largest data allowance of 20GB. In addition, customers get free hours of unlimited Internet usage and downloading from midnight to 3 am every day on every pack.

 

LTE USB modems on My DataPlan packs are available as follows:

Speaking on the first day (29 April) of the LTE MENA event, Etisalat’s Senior Vice President for Mobile Networks at Etisalat, highlighted during his interview session, “Etisalat’s LTE network is capable of providing customers with a transformational mobile broadband experience. Starting with value-packed offerings on the LTE USB modems, Etisalat is working its way up to provide customers with more LTE devices, such as tablets and voice enabled smartphones, by the third or fourth quarter of this year. Customers will soon be able to enjoy more devices and services options on our network.”

On mobile trends in the industry impacting the network, Dr. Muneer Zuhdi, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at Etisalat, stressed on the importance of having a good fixed network as a pre-requisite to having a good mobile network. Dr. Zuhdi elaborated on some of the features in LTE and LTE-Advanced, and the importance of taking an end-to-end view to provide customers an excellent quality of experience. Dr. Zuhdi concluded his talk by remarking that the investments Etisalat has made in the fiber network, coupled with the ongoing deployment of LTE, will place Etisalat in a very strong position to continue to offer differentiated services and superior customer experience.

 

At the event, Dr. Mohamed Nadder, Director Mobile Network capacity planning at Etisalat, highlighted during his presentation and panel discussion, the latest industry standards and technology trends for carrying voice over the new LTE radio environment. He discussed new methods of ensuring superior speech qualities on LTE network, over the existing 2G and 3G legacy systems utilizing voice over IP technology.”

 

For more information on LTE and data plans, customers can call 101 or visit www.etisalat.ae

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Viacom 2Q earnings up 56 percent

NEW YORK (AP) â€" Viacom Inc., the owner of Paramount Pictures, MTV and Nickelodeon, on Thursday said its net income rose 56 percent in the latest quarter, even though a slate of movies that was lackluster compared with last year held back revenue.

Viacom earned $585 million, or $1.07 per share, in the January to March quarter. That compares with $376 million, or 63 cents per share, it earned in the same period last year. Viacom has bought back shares, reducing stock outstanding and boosting earnings per share.

Excluding special items, earnings were 98 cents per share in the fiscal second quarter, 9 cents above the average analyst estimate as polled by FactSet.

The New York-based media company said its revenue rose 2 percent to $3.33 billion, matching analyst estimates.

Revenue rose 5 percent at Viacom's TV networks, and fell 5 percent at Paramount, as movies like "The Devil Inside," ''A Thousand Words," and "Jeff, Who Lives at Home," did not match hits from last year like "Rango" and "No Strings Attached."

However, the lower movie revenue was more than offset by lower distribution costs, so Paramount's operating income expanded, contributing to the overall profit increase.

Viacom's Class B shares rose $1.49, or 3 percent, to $48.92 in morning trading.

An issue that's been hanging over the company since the fall is a ratings decline reaching nearly 30 percent at Nickelodeon, one of the Viacom's flagship networks. Analyst Todd Juenger at Sanford Bernstein has pointed the finger at Netflix Inc., which streams some Nickelodeon shows, like "Dora the Explorer."

But Juenger acknowledges that Netflix can't explain the all of the decline. On a conference call with analysts, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said viewing of Nickelodeon content on Netflix is 2 percent of the time spent on watching the TV channel, so the "Netflix effect" is minimal.

"The Nick issue is complicated. There are ratings measurement issues. There certainly has been some compelling programming on some of our competitors, which we can clearly address," Dauman said. "We will do what we always do: We will research our audiences, we'll review our pipeline, add more diversity in our programming."

The ratings decline hasn't had an effect on Viacom's overall ability to sell ads, executives said, because the demand for advertising has been increasing.

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Think you can text and drive?

Ever seen those morons on the road looking at their mobile phone and trying to stay in their lane? Yup, there are thousands of them on the road, endangering both themselves and other drivers.

So a safety organization in Belgium, Responsible Young Drivers, decided it would be great to educate young drivers on the dangers of texting – by making it part of a driving test.

The unsuspecting applicants were asked to text a few phrases while taking their actual driving test. There were a number of reactions, from downright disbelief to absolute rage. And when the examiner fails them for not spelling their texts properly, things really take a turn for the bizarre.

Check out the video below to see just how dangerous it can get when you try to text and drive.

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Comcast 1Q earnings up 30 percent

NEW YORK (AP) â€" Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, reported a 30 percent profit increase in the first quarter, beating expectations on the strength of Super Bowl advertising and its popular broadband service.

The Philadelphia-based cable company said Wednesday that its net income rose to $1.224 billion, or 45 cents per share, for the January to March period from $943 million, or 34 cents per share, a year ago.

Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting earnings of 42 cents per share for the latest quarter

Revenue rose to $14.9 billion, above analysts' expectation of $14.4 billion. The increase was 9.6 percent compared with the combined cable and NBC Universal results a year ago.

Comcast's acquisition of a majority stake in NBC Universal, which owns TV channels and movie studios, closed at the end of January last year.

NBC Universal's results shone in the quarter. It accounts for a third of Comcast's revenue, but grew much faster, at 18 percent from last year. Revenue at the NBC broadcast network grew 37 percent thanks to the Super Bowl. Fox broadcast it last year.

Excluding the Super Bowl, NBC's revenue grew 17 percent, helped by improving prime-time ratings and shows like "The Voice" and "Smash."

At Universal Studios, revenue grew 22 percent on the theatrical success of "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" and "Safe House."

Comcast's more predictable cable business revenue grew at lower pace â€" 5.7 percent from last year.

CEO Brian Roberts has suggested that Comcast might be able to reverse the long-standing industry-wide trend of cable-TV subscribers cancelling in favor of satellite and phone-company TV services, but that prospect was not in evidence in the first quarter: Comcast lost 37,000 cable subscribers, roughly the same number it lost in the same quarter last year.

"We believe we can continue to make steady progress" in retaining video subscribers, Roberts told analysts on a conference call Wednesday. As one of the improvements the company is making, he mentioned Streampix, a Netflix-like Internet video service that Comcast launched in February, only for its video customers. "A couple of million" of customers have access to it, he said.

Comcast added 439,000 Internet subscribers. That was the best quarterly result in four years. Meanwhile other cable companies report a slowdown in the recruitment of new subscribers, since most households already have broadband. Comcast appears to be gaining subscribers from households with slower phone-company "DSL" broadband.

Comcast shares fell 83 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $29.77 in morning trading Wednesday. On Tuesday, the shares hit $30.88, the highest price in 12 years.

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Acer Introduces the V3 Series

Press Release:

Acer has unveiled the V3 Series, a range of notebooks optimized for today’s digital needs, available in 14-, 15.6- and 17.3-inch models. With excellent performance, entertainment enhancements, communication tools and a classy design, these notebooks are intended for tech-savvy users who want daily high-definition audio and visual experiences.

The latest generation Intel Core family processors, plus NVIDA GeForce GT Series graphics ensure excellent performance for multitasking with lots of apps, music, Internet video, movies, games and more.

Specialized entertainment enhancements include the Acer CineCrystal HD+ 1600 x 900 LED-backlit display on the 17.3” screen and , Dolby Home Theater v4 and a Blu-ray Disc drive. Users can even enjoy notebook entertainment on an HDTV via the HDMI-out port.

The V3 Series features Acer InviLink Nplify Wi-Fi CERTIFIED wireless connectivity and Gigabit Ethernet to keep users online, and the Acer Crystal Eye HD webcam guarantees high-resolution face-to-face communication.

Acer clear.fi 2.0 automatically connects all digital-home devices. This lets users manage, share and enjoy media from any device in any room at home.

Sharing files among other digital devices is also possible via a multi-in-1 card slot, Bluetooth 4.0 and USB 2.0/3.0 ports (with USB power-off charging).

Design-wise, the cover has a glossy finish and its color matches the screen bezel and palm rest. The Acer chiclet keyboard is stylish, ergonomic and complemented by a multi-gesture touchpad for enhanced comfort and productivity. The V3 Series comes in Midnight Black, Dawn Gold, Nightfall Gray and Thunderbolt Silver.

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UK lawmakers: Rupert Murdoch unfit to lead company

LONDON (AP) â€" News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch must take responsibility for serious failings that caused Britain's tabloid phone hacking scandal, lawmakers said Tuesday in a scathing report â€" as a narrow majority also insisted the tycoon was unfit to lead his global media empire.

In a report on the malpractice at Murdoch's now shuttered News of The World tabloid, legislators accused Murdoch and his son James of overseeing a corporate culture that sought "to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing."

Parliament's cross-party Culture, Media and Sport committee unanimously agreed that three key News International executives had misled Parliament by offering false accounts of their knowledge of the extent of phone hacking â€" a rare and serious censure that can see offenders hauled before Parliament to make a personal apology.

The panel said the House of Commons would decide on the punishment meted out to the three executives: New York Daily News editor Colin Myler, a former News of The World editor; the British tabloid's longtime lawyer Tom Crone and Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and former board member of The Associated Press.

Members of the panel said Rupert Murdoch, 81, had insisted he was unaware that hacking was widespread at the News of The World, blaming his staff for keeping him in the dark. That explanation was not accepted.

The legislators said if that was true, "he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies."

In a ruling opposed by 4 Conservative Party members of the 11-member committee, the panel cast serious doubt on Murdoch's credentials as an executive.

"We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company," the report said.

The judgment on Murdoch implies that News Corp., which he heads, is also not fit to control British Sky Broadcasting, in which the company has a controlling stake of 39 percent.

Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, said it is reading the report with interest.

"Ofcom has a duty ... to be satisfied that any person holding a broadcasting license is, and remains, fit and proper to do so," the statement read. "Ofcom is continuing to assess the evidence."

Louise Mensch, a Conservative Party member of the panel, told reporters the committee had been divided over the harsh criticism of Murdoch. Four Conservative members opposed the suggestion that Murdoch was unfit to lead a global company, but that stance was endorsed by four Labour Party members and one Liberal Democrat. The panel's chairman, a Conservative, did not vote, in line with convention.

Conservative panel member Philip Davies said the conclusion was "not only over the top, but ludicrous."

Legislators agreed, however, that Murdoch's son 39-year-old son James, a former News International executive chairman, was also badly at fault in the scandal. They said phone hacking at the tabloid dated back to at least 2001, and insisted that James Murdoch could have halted the practice as early as 2008.

"As the head of a journalistic enterprise, we are astonished that James Murdoch did not seek more information," legislators wrote.

But they stopped short of accusing the younger Murdoch of misleading lawmakers when he claimed not to have fully read a 2008 email which he had received and outlined that hacking was widespread.

The committee also criticized Hinton, who worked as a top Murdoch aide on both sides of the Atlantic for decades and resigned as the publisher of The Wall Street Journal last year amid the hacking scandal. The report said he misled them over his repeated claim that hacking was not rife at the News of The World.

Myler and Crone had also failed to present factual accounts of what they knew, the report said.

In a statement, Myler said he stood by his evidence and believed ongoing U.K. police inquiries would "establish the truth" of his account. "I have always sought to be accurate and consistent in what I have said to the committee," Myler said.

Committee chairman James Whittingdale said "it is for the House (of Commons) to decide what consequences follow" from misleading Parliament.

News Corp. said it was "carefully reviewing the select committee's report and will respond shortly."

"The company fully acknowledges significant wrongdoing at News of the World and apologizes to everyone whose privacy was invaded," it said in a statement.

News Corp. has been buffeted by the scandal, which has claimed the jobs of a string of his senior executives and several top British police officers amid allegations that Scotland Yard failed properly to investigate tabloid wrongdoing for years.

Murdoch closed down the 168-year-old News of The World tabloid last July amid public revulsion at the hacking of voice mail messages of celebrities and victims of crime, including murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

A total of 43 people, including at least 25 past and present employees of News International have been arrested by police investigating phone hacking, bribery and computer hacking. Murdoch has paid out millions to settle lawsuits from about 60 celebrities, sports stars, politicians and other public figures whose voice mails were hacked. Dozens more lawsuits have been filed.

It was not clear what impact Tuesday's report would have on Murdoch's key U.S. properties, which include The Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

___

Associated Press Writers Jill Lawless, Bob Barr and Meera Selva contributed to this report.

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UK ISPs to block The Pirate Bay

Five of the UK’s largest ISPs have been ordered to officially block access to The Pirate Bay. Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media have all received instructions to roll out the block in the coming weeks, following a court ruling that decided The Pirate Bay was infringing on copyright across a variety of mediums and should be stopped.

Virgin Media issued a statement confirming the block, and stated that they would fully comply with the court’s orders. Virgin Media has received an order from the Courts requiring it to prevent access to The Pirate Bay in order to help protect against copyright infringement. As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives.”

While this may be a a necessary and somewhat drastic move to curb online piracy, many think that blocking access to The Pirate Bay will only fuel efforts to have other websites spring up and offer the same access to copyright material. When it comes to piracy, ISPs and media labels are fighting a serious tug of war, and actions such as blocking access to websites could only be the first step of more drastic actions to come.

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