Royal wedding a top destination for Web users

Im posting two blogs today so its okay if one of them is about the royal wedding and the billions of ppl who have been search it online! it happens once every 30 years!

The royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton went off without a hitch today--both in Westminster Abbey and online.

According to global CDN provider Akamai, "early data" has revealed that the number of concurrent users streaming the royal wedding around the Web outstripped the highest peak of concurrent users who watched the World Cup last year. Akamai plans to provide final numbers on that later today.

Even so, comparing the royal wedding's performance with other major events can be difficult. For one, workers in the U.K. were given today off, which means many of them were likely watching the festivities at home from their televisions. Moreover, the event occurred when many in the United States were still sleeping, which could have negatively affected the live feed of the event, but buoyed viewership figures on videos watched later in the day.

"There are a lot of factors involved with these live events, which is why we can't call one event the biggest or larger than another," an Akamai spokeswoman told CNET in an e-mailed statement today. "It's like comparing apples and oranges sometimes."

At 3:30 a.m. PT today, Akamai said that it saw traffic to global news sites spike in Europe with 1.6 million page views pelting pages every minute. As North American viewers started joining in this morning, page views hit nearly 5.4 million per minute to the news sites it services. At that time, worldwide traffic to news sites was 64 percent higher than it is normally.

Broadband analyst Sandvine reported today that "real-time traffic in North America" was up 20 percent at 3:30 a.m. PT this morning, compared to the same time period last week.

Users have also taken to social networks to discuss the royal wedding. Both worldwide and in the United States, the royal wedding and items related to Prince William and Kate are trending topics on Twitter. A quick search on Twitter for royal Wedding-related tweets reveals people are still updating the site every few seconds with comments on the festivities.

YouTube, which partnered with the royal family to deliver the official live feed to the Web, told CNET today that it doesn't have any numbers to share just yet.

Original Article.

Free Movies, TV, Seinfeld Available on Crackle App

OO i love watching Tv shows! just bring the Office next and I'm sure lots will tune in! haha I'm sure its already on there but its a slow news week because the white iphone, playbook, and all the other tablets being released.

Other video services may be raking in the eyeballs and subscription dollars with their movie and TV offerings for the iPhone and iPad, but Sony's new Crackle app may become master of its domain for one simple reason: It has Seinfeld.

The Crackle app launched on Monday with hundreds of movies and TV shows from Sony properties such as Columbia Pictures, Tri-Star, Screen Gems, and Sony Pictures Classics. But it might be Seinfeld--which remains popular in syndication and in DVD sales 13 years after it went off the air--that gives Crackle an edge over the competition: The show isn't available from Hulu, Netflix, or iTunes. The downside? Only 10 episodes of the sitcom are currently available.

The upside? Unlike other video services, the content on Crackle is free for viewing--there's no subscription fee required to view shows and movies. You can choose to create a user account that offers some of your personal information to Sony, which comes with the ability to create a viewing queue that's available both on the app and at Crackle's online home.

Original Article.

Facebook hops aboard T-Mobile's Bobsled service

Good Afternoon! well i was checking my forms as well as google news and besides the white iPhone coming out and the blackberry playbook theres really not many other releases, but i was able to find something i thought was pretty interesting, i don't know how interesting it might be to you but I'm sure i probably wont use it but still its a cool little feature.

Facebook's 500 million-plus customers are now able to make live voice calls via Facebook Chat across the world.

T-Mobile's new Bobsled service lets PC and Macintosh users make calls between Facebook pages, add voice to any Facebook Chat and leave voice messages and wall posts on Facebook.

"We're bringing a voice to social networking," says Brad Duea, senior vice president of T-Mobile USA.

The service is fairly simple. No download or log-in is required. All of the calls are free. (Eventually, the service will be available to iPhone and iPad users.) T-Mobile may bring Bobsled to other social networks, Duea says.

"It's a good service for PC, but will be more valuable when it's available on mobile phones," says Yankee Group analyst Tole Hart, who has been briefed on Bobsled. "It should be pretty useful for Facebook's (more than 250 million) mobile users. And it fits T-Mobile's user demographic of young, heavy-duty data users."

Users interested in Bobsled need to go to www.letsbobsled.com. It's also available for free download from Facebook's application page.

Original Article.

Report: Finally, Nintendo to Announce Wii 2 This June

I love my WII!, i love just dance super Mario bros and all the wii resorts and fit games, i mean its simple i use it probably once a week or so and its the perfect console for me, so i think it all depends on the buyer. anyways im sure i wont buy the wii 2 but it will ne neat to see what they have come up with.

So it comes as no surprise that on Friday, the blogosphere was rife with reports, led by IGN and Game Informer, that Nintendo is announcing its next-generation console at the E3 Expo on June 7-9.

French tech publication 01.net reports that the console is codenamed "Project Café" and will feature an in-built sensor bar, dual analog sticks, a standard d-pad, and trigger buttons. Game Informer said the new Wii will have HD support, while Kotaku reports that the console's specs will be "more powerful" than an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

Nintendo "declines to comment on speculation or rumors," but IGN and Game Informer both cited anonymous sources claiming that Nintendo will announce the next-generation console in at E3 this year and launch it in 2012.

Targeting casual gamers with its novel motion sensor technology, the Wii was once the hottest console in the U.S. but has seen its popularity dip considerably as newer motion sensor technology, like the Kinect for Xbox 360, launched. In February Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said Wii sales dropped 31.5 percent in January (usually a big month for console purchases), more than rivals Sony and Microsoft. It's a far cry from the time PCMag editor called the Nintendo Wii the Best Product Ever.

For more, see PCMag's review of the Wii, which was launched in 2006.

Original Article.

Android: Over 3 billion apps installed; 350,000 device activations per day

Hello! Happy Friday! Ive never been happier for Friday to come, even tho i have a busy weekend ahead i just want to sit back relax, turn on the office and just enjoy the weekend,anyways recently got an android phone.. probably about 3 months ago, and I'm loving it, love all the apps i had a blackberry and the app market wasn't too great. hope you enjoy the article!

Android falls short in the apps category when compared to Apple’s trademarked App Store, but current figures show the Android Market is doing pretty well. According to Google there have now been over 3 billion apps installed from the Market. Most impressively the last billion apps were installed in the last three months, a huge jump in activity (11 million/ day). The app numbers are accompanied by an update from Google that there are now 350,000 activations of new Android devices every day. That puts the platform on a pace to hit over 127 million activations in a year.

Google didn’t share any information in the financial conference call about how many of those apps are free apps. Most likely most a few of them but if even a low percentage of the apps installed from the Market are paid, there is some money to be made by app developers. These figures from Google don’t include any app installation numbers from the young Amazon Appstore. The Amazon storefront doesn’t have many apps on the shelves and likely isn’t selling enough to include in Android numbers.

Android tablets don’t factor into these numbers in any numbers as companies are only just getting them to market. This year will see a lot of Android tablets go on sale, and it will be interesting to see how it affects these two key metrics for the platform.
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Original Article.