Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap. Also make sure to subscribe to The Next Web’s Podcast (iTunes or XML) where we analyze, rant and have fun with the weekly tech news.
This week saw Twitter reach a profit as well as suffer a massive security breach, the release of full specs and a video demo of Google’s upcoming Nexus One phone as well as many more Apple tablet rumors.
The Next Web Weekly Podcast
A slow news week led to a variety of rants on our weekly podcast. Rants surrounded the never ending Apple tablet rumors (that Alex can’t stand), Twitter’s inability to stay up, Rackspace’s big outage, the injunction on the sale of Microsoft Word as well as some of our favorite apps and gadgets of 2009.
Twitter Grows up and Makes a Profit
While the critics can’t stop ranting about how Twitter will never make any money Twitter announced that Twitter made a small profit off of $25 million in revenue in 2009. However, Twitter’s investors who have put in a massive amount of funding to date have their sights set on making a lot more than a slight profit off selling the firehose to search engines. Everyone is excited to see what their ad model will look like in 2010. However, it wasn’t all sunny for Twitter this week as their DNS records were temporarily compromised causing all Twitter visitors to be redirected to the hacker’s webpage.
More Details Revealed Regarding Google’s Nexus One Phone
The week started with some screenshots and initial specs about Google’s upcoming branded phone. More details were soon to emerge including a 5 minute video that went through the UI. Google’s Nexus One is likely to be the first step it what many believe will be the biggest technological disrupter in recent memory. In the not too distant future, it’s not hard to imagine Google giving out free ad supported mobile phones as well as laptops and netbooks.
The Endless Apple Tablet Rumors
This week was packed with information and more rumors about the upcoming Apple tablet, the most hyped product since the iPhone. It was announced that Apple will be hosting an event in January to demo the tablet running applications. The device is likely to be very impressive and certain people within Apple who have seen the device have nothing but great things to say. While the name of the tablet is still uncertain, the latest rumors point to it being called the ‘iSlate’.
Quick Hits
- Firefox 3.5 is officially the world’s most popular browser.
- Mixer Labs, the company behind GeoAPI, was acquired by Twitter.
- Facebook released their top trends of 2009. It was also estimated that Facebook will do $1 billion of revenue in 2010.
- Microsoft’s Word and Office risk being banned from selling as Microsoft lost a major patent lawsuit.
- Instapaper, the must have “read-it-later” bookmarking service just launched a major redesign.
- If you’re looking for royalty free images, make sure to check out Sprixi.
- Avatar, the most expensive movie made in history, is crushing it at the box office.
- I probably violate most of these but you should definitely check out these laptop positions to avoid.
- European telecommunications Company O2 to acquire Israeli startup Jajah for $200 Million.
- Is location sharing just a game? Our Martin asks the question and offers his thoughts.
- Concerned about losing your online data? Make sure to check out Backupify, the service for backing up online data – offering free for life until January 31st!
- While last week was filled with URL shortening news, this week also saw YouTube release their own URL shortener.
- Seesmic’s new release of their Twitter Android app rivals some of the best Twitter clients on the iPhone.
- Evernote iPhone users rejoiced as the latest version was released which finally allows offline access to all notebooks.
- Finally, make sure to check out The Next Web Team’s favorite software and gadgets.
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