The new figures reveal that MySpace’s audience numbers dropped by 49 per cent over the last year, falling from 6.5 million visitors in May 2009, to just 3.3 million in May 2010. The news comes hot on the heels of the site’s major rival, Facebook, hitting 500 million registered users. MySpace, founded in 2003, at its peak had more than 100 million registered members, but its audience has been declining since the rise of Facebook in 2008. ComScore’s latest set of data also revealed that nine out of ten of the 38.2 million UK internet users over the age of 15 used social media in May 2010. Twitter was found to have 4.3 million users in the UK but unlike MySpace, has grown its audience by 62 per cent over the last 12 months.

Telegraph 

Dell and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have agreed on a settlement over accounting alleged accounting violations by the PC vendor. The company said that it would be paying a $100m penalty as part of the settlement. Dell had previously set the cash aside in anticipation of a possible fine. Additionally, chief executive Michael Dell will pay a $4m penalty. The settlement ends an investigation over misleading accounting practices at Dell. The company was accused of taking payments from chipmaker Intel as part of an exclusivity deal and then using the money to pad its financial reports.

Pandora is a streaming music service that recommends tracks based on previous choices. It's had something of a second life on mobile after stuttering progress on the fixed web. Pandora offers songs from over 90,000 different artists. At the current rate of growth, Pandora should pass 100 million listeners at some point next year. And the service is also making money — which prompted a $35m cash injection last year. Pandora is already available on a number of set top boxes and is also looking at in-car.

Profits at Nokia have plunged over the last three months as the company continues to struggle against rivals such as Apple and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, in the smartphone market. The Finnish handset maker reported today that profits fell 40% in the second quarter of 2010 compared with a year ago. Underlying profits were down 27%. Although net sales were 1% higher at just over €10bn (£8.4bn), the profitability of its handset and service division slipped as the company cut the prices of its higher-end phones to make them more attractive to consumers. Nokia's failure to compete better against Apple's iPhone and the growing number of handsets running Google's Android platform has put chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in the firing line. The company is reportedly looking for a replacement, with analysts warning that Nokia needs to get its hands on a "European Steve Jobs" if it is to regain its dominant position in the mobile market.

Just as Facebook announced it achieved a half billion active users, a pesky lawsuit alleging Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg signed over control of the company to an early investor is threatening to steal attention from the company’s impressive milestone The suit, filed in New York district court by Paul Ceglia, says Zuckerberg signed a contract to help develop an unrelated website for Ceglia, but that Zuckerberg also took capital for Facebook in the contract. Ceglia alleges the contract now entitles him to 84 percent of a company that’s gotten investment from companies valuing it at $15 billion.

Wired 

Microsoft trotted out the latest build of its Windows Phone 7 operating at the Casual Connect games conference in Seattle today - and Stuff was there to put it through its paces - including the intriguing possibility of sharing apps with fellow users. (Apologies for the limited photos, I was only allowed to shoot the home screen).The new OS was running on an unidentified Samsung handset - although sadly not the luscious Galaxy S, it fairly zipped along, with an extremely responsive capacitive screen and no lag between screens.

Critical infrastructure including power grids and manufacturing plants is at risk from a newly discovered flaw in Microsoft Windows that researchers warn has already been exploited by hackers. Experts who monitor the stability of the internet and the risks of its breakdown considered raising the "threat level" from green to yellow – the second of four levels. The flaw affects all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 7 back to Windows 2000, and can affect someone who simply opens a folder which contains an "infected" file with a .LNK extension. The vulnerability could pose a serious threat to a wide range of industrial, commercial and consumer systems which rely on Windows, including those used by the military. Microsoft has not yet developed a software fix for the weakness, and has not given a timetable for its delivery.

Future science historians will mark the beginning of the 21st century as a time when robots took their place beside human scientists.

Programmers have turned computers from extraordinarily powerful but fundamentally dumb tools, into tools with smarts. Artificially intelligent programs make sense of data so complex that it defies human analysis. They even come up with hypotheses, the testable questions that drive science, on their own. At the University of Cambridge, Ross King’s program “Adam” designs and runs genetics experiments. At Cornell, Hod Lipson’s Eureqa finds equations to fit data, attaining Newton’s insights in a single afternoon. University of Chicago mathematical biologist Andrey Rzhetsky designs programs less glamorous but equally powerful, able to analyze millions of papers at once. In the future, the human scientist’s job may be “to do the programming, and make sure the robot has enough reagents,” said Rzhetsky, only partly tongue-in-cheek.

 

Here's a tidbit in today's Microsoft quarterly earnings that we previously overlooked: a $240 million cost of revenue "primarily... resulting from the discontinuation of the Kin phone, offset in part by decreased Xbox 360 console costs." In other words, the company took at least a quarter billion hit due to manufacturing, distribution, and support costs of the Kin (according to Microsoft's definition of "cost of revenue"). We don't know how much Xbox 360 offset, unfortunately, but we can add this figure to the$500 million Danger acquisition and the full marketing cost for the product (which we also don't know, but anecdotally, it was on par with other major campaigns) to reach... well, at least $800 million in regret for the folks in Redmond.

Engadget 

 

Spammers are increasingly making use of URL-shortening services to get their messages through to users, reports MessageLabs. The security firm said in its July intelligence report that the service are being used in record numbers by spam botnet operators as a way to evade anti-spam filters. While the tactic has been in use for more than a year, MessageLabs said that the services are increasingly being used by spammers and botnet operators. In June the company found that on 14 days URL-shortening services accounted for more than 0.5 per cent of all spam.

V3