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10 Billion Dollars Paid To Apple App Store Developers

According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple has paid app store developers $10 billion since 2008 -- more than three times that of all the other platforms combined! Apps have been downloaded over 50 billions times, and the numbers are rising every day.

In fact, half of that $10 billion has actually been paid out within the last year -- showing the astronomical growth of the industry. Not only within the Apple App Store, app developers are seeing a boom in their field like never before.

English: Firefox 3 mac os x (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Foxconn Developing A Minimum Of 5 Firefox OS Devices

The nascent Mozilla Firefox OS, which hopes to become the third most popular operating system in mobile devices, has added an important ally to its roster. Foxconn, the frontrunner in contract electronics manufacturing has announced that it will be developing at least 5 devices running on the FireFoX OS.  Young Liu, Foxconn's general manager has indicated that the company may develop smartphones, laptops, televisions and tablets for Firefox. Meanwhile, Li Gong, Mozilla's senior-VC for mobile devices has expressed the hope that the partnership with Foxconn will help the company in attracting other manufacturers for its new OS.

English: The logo of the blogging software WordPress. Deutsch: WordPress Logo 中文: WordPress Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Happy Blogging Birthday To Wordpress!

Wordpress has now been around for a full and fabulous decade.  Bloggers from all over the world should send a gift, or, at the very least, post a happy birthday message on one of the over 66 million Wordpress sites that exist around the world.  According to company's own stats, over four billion pages are viewed each month.  The power of Wordpress cannot be overstated.

Brute Force (1947 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wordpress Users Under Attack

Recently, Wordpress, an extremely popular blogging site, has undergone a major spike in brute force attacks that threaten to either penetrate the site or bring it down. At the very least, these brute force attacks have caused access issues for Wordpress users.

Brute force attacks are a simple but effective hacker onslaught against weak user names and passwords. Accounts most vulnerable to these last attacks were the ones using "admin" as a user name and those with the simplest passwords, such as "12345."  The brute force attack employs software that floods the login with various combinations until it hits on a correct one. 

Screenshot of Android 4 on Galaxy Nexus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What To Expect At Google I/O

This year Google I/O plans to outdo last year's presentation, but the bar is set pretty high.  After revealing the Nexus 7 tablet last year this year Google plans to not outdo itself in presentation but to be relaxed.  A common rumor is Google Glass, Chrome, Wallet, Music and Google Maps are getting updates.

dropbox (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dropbox Holding Its First Developer Conference

Recently, Dropbox announced its first conference for developers, referred to as DBX. The conference will be held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California, on July 9. Space is limited, though, and developers need to request an invitation from the company. For now, tickets are going to cost attendees $350.00 apiece. These tickets should be in high demand, so the available spaces are going to disappear quickly.

Instagram - 8 (Photo credit: BrentOzar)

Photo Tagging On Instagram And Its Online Marketing Potential

Instagram now allows users to tag others in their online photos. Without a doubt, this news comes as a welcome addition to the site's features. A user can tag any other username in their own photos to increase the social interaction between members. The fact of the matter is that marketers can utilize this feature, too. Fortunately, online marketing opportunities just expanded thanks to Instagram.

The AdSense Code (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google Affiliate Network Closing

Google Affiliate Network was set up to connect publishers with advertisers.  Publishers could use the network to promote products to earn a commission from sales, and publishers could earn a percentage of each sale from a link generated on their site.  Google has recently announced that Google Affiliate Network is closing soon because they are concentrating on different products and services for both publishers and advertisers. 

Google feels that other products will be more beneficial to advertisers and publishers, so they want to devote more time and resources to developing different products with hopes of better results. 

GAN closing will take several months, and Google will continue to support their customers during this period of time.  They are offering AdSense as an alternative to Google Affiliate Network, and they encourage publishers to use AdSense to earn money on their blogs and websites. 

English: Ray Ozzie on the PDC of Microsoft announcing Windows Azure Español: Ray Ozzie en la PDC de Microsft anunciando Windows Azure (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Microsoft's Launch Of The Elastic Compute Cloud

In the never-ending battle of tech superiority, Microsoft is pulling out its big guns in order to compete with Amazon's hugely popular EC2 service.  Known as the Elastic Compute Cloud, this infrastructure service cloud will be able to give a user access to virtual hosting and data storage, on computers running Windows as well as Linux.

This second attempt at a challenge to Amazon's super-service is no surprise.  The June 7th launch will be a means of edging into what should be a huge market as more individuals and corporations begin to store more and more data on cloud computing.  The existing Microsoft Azure cloud, however, has no Linux compatibility, a major limiting factor for those who prefer to run third-party programs. 

cloud computing (Photo credit: kei51)

AWS Compared Google Compute Engine Cloud Services

Both Amazon and Google have lowered what they charge for their Cloud services among many others. The thing is, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Engine (GCE) have brought down their costs significantly in an all-out competition. Besides this, Google has gone a step further and increased the number of virtual servers it has, providing great choice. It has also made its service Euro-friendly.