The American Dialect Society, an association that studies the English language late last week announced that “tweet” is the top word of 2009, and “Google” — the verb, not the noun - is the top word of the past decade.

“Both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy curiosity and to broadcast to a select following, both via the Internet,” said Grant Barrett, chair of the society’s New Words Committee, in a statement. “I really thought ‘blog’ would take the honors in the word of the decade category, but more people google than blog, don’t they? Plus, many people think “blog” just sounds ugly. Maybe Google’s trademark lawyers would have preferred it, anyway.” Read the rest of this entry

Life in present-day Dubai is not for the faint-hearted. But for those who fear neither heights nor financial crisis, the Gulf city-state is to offer an entirely new experience: the chance to spend the rest of your days thousands of feet up in the air.

Monday sees the long-awaited opening of the Burj Dubai, not only the world’s tallest building but the world’s tallest building by some 1,000 feet. At 2,683 feet tall, it is the height of the current highest skyscraper, Taipei 101 in Taiwan, with the Eiffel Tower perched on top.

It has been designed so that those who wish to do so will never have to leave, or even descend below the 108th floor, at about 1,300 feet. Read the rest of this entry

Futuristic 3D animation movie “Avatar” shot past a worldwide total of more than one billion dollars in less than three weeks, making James Cameron’s latest blockbuster the fastest-ever to reach the $1 billion mark. Hollywood blockbuster “Avatar” surged to a box office haul of more than one billion dollars globally on Sunday, faster than any other movie in history, an industry tracker reported.

“It has made 670 million dollars international, for a total of more than one billion dollars,” box office analyst Chad Hartigan of Exhibitor Relations told AFP. Read the rest of this entry

The latest Guinness Book of Records has named Pac-Man the most recognisable computer game character of all time, edging out rival Mario by the narrowest of margins.

Pac-Man is certainly one of the most iconic figures in gaming history, and this has now been confirmed by Guinness, which recognises the yellow circle with a mouth as number one.

This is based on a US survey which suggests that 94 per cent recognised the character; that’s even more impressive when you realise that less would recognise President Obama. Read the rest of this entry

The birth of Wikipedia, the death of Napster, the iPhone, Facebook and Twitter have been named by the Webby Awards as among the top 10 Internet moments of the decade.Other events singled out by the New York-based International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences which bestows the annual Webby Awards were Iran’s election protests, Craigslist’s expansion and the launch of Google AdWords. Read the rest of this entry

In 1985, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was forced out of his own company after he and then-CEO John Sculley began to fight over the direction of Apple (this coincided with major layoffs at the time). For the next decade, Steve flexed his entrepreneurial muscle by starting NeXT Computer and turning Pixar into an animation powerhouse.

In 1996 however, NeXT was bought by Apple, returning him to the company he created. He quickly took the reigns as CEO. You probably know the rest of the story: iTunes (iTunes), Mac, Macbook, iPod, iPhone (iPhone), the iTunes and iPhone App Stores, and other products vaulted Apple from turmoil into one of the world’s largest and most respected companies. Read the rest of this entry

After five months, we have a new heir to the supercomputing throne. With 1.64 petaflops of peak processing power, Cray Inc.’s XT4 “Jaguar” supercomputer has surpassed IBM’s “Roadrunner” to take the top spot.

So what does $100 million get you? According to Engadget, this beast-of-a-PC features 45,000 (yes, fourty five thousand) Quad-core Opteron processors (which makes up 180,000 processing cores, for anyone keeping score), 362 terabytes of memory, and 10 petabytes of storage in a hard-disk array. Read the rest of this entry

GeoCities, once the Internet’s third most visited domain, will be shutting down on Oct. 26, taking with it thousands of user home pages and decades of data. All that information will be history…. Fortunately, some historians are making sure it’s not lost to the annals of time.

Founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, what is now Yahoo GeoCities was one of the first services to offer an easy way for early Internet surfers to publish their own Web pages. Whereas most hosting options of the 1990s were expensive, thus limiting their use to more entrepreneurial pursuits, GeoCities’ free hosting space became the home for thousands of sites built around thematically oriented “neighborhoods”: conservation, fashion, military, sports, finance, travel, and more. Read the rest of this entry

Microsoft Windows 7 has finally launched, bringing the critically acclaimed latest version of the world’s most popular operating system.
In keeping with the build up to the launch, Microsoft chose a low-key launch event, in stark contract to the glittering affair that launched the badly-received Windows Vista.

Windows 7 has been a different beast throughout, however, and Microsoft’s brave decision to release the beta for a huge public trial has very much paid off. Bringing a whole host of enhancements, Windows 7 is designed to be less irritating, better supported and more scaleable than Vista. Read the rest of this entry

The pictograms representing the sports of the London 2012 Games have been unveiled.
The 38 pictograms will be used on signs, merchandise, tickets, posters and at venues during the Games.
They come as a black and white silhouette or as a more dynamic outline.
London 2012 chairman Lord Coe hopes they will be useful for spectators seeking directions during the Games.

He said: ”But by unveiling them now we have a fantastic opportunity to use them as a tool for people to find out more about the Olympic sports. Read the rest of this entry