Even technology has different colors.

Windows 7 is now for sale around the world. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is officially kicking off the Windows 7 launch at an event in New York City. Microsoft's partners will be unveiling new hardware and OEMs are now no longer recommending Vista to consumers and are switching their default choice to Windows 7. Today is easily the most important day for Microsoft this year (the operating system's RTM date of July 22, 2009 comes in at a close second place). Here's everything you need to know about what's happening today. The editions Windows 7 comes in six editions, and while this may seem like a lot, don't worry, you only really have to worry about two: the Home Premium Edition and the Professional Edition. Home Premium is what you want if you use your computer for personal use and entertainment purposes. ...

It’s been an eventful day: among all the breaking news about Microsoft signing a search deal with Facebook and Twitter, Google doing the same with Twitter and later announcing social search, one can easily forget that today is the day that Vista gets replaced by something better: Windows 7. As we wrote earlier, the interest for the new OS from Microsoft has been huge, making Windows 7 the biggest pre-order item in the history of Amazon UK and a perpetual trending topic on Twitter. The reactions from users and reviewers have been mostly positive, but after the lukewarm it’s-ok-but-why-should-I-switch-from-WinXP attempt that was Vista, the fact that people can’t wait to get their hands on Windows 7 is hardly a surprise. And, for the most part, it’s true. Annoying security features such as UAC have been fixed in Windows 7 (you can now ...

This rumor simply has to be taken with a grain of salt, but word has it that Verizon and Apple are testing a version of the iPhone on Verizon’s upcoming 4G LTE network. For those unfamiliar with the landscape, 4G is essentially the next-generation of cellular networks, designed to carry data and increase the speed and capacity of mobile networks. Although the rumor is unconfirmed, it would make a lot of sense for Apple to hold out for the LTE deployment in order to get more mileage out of the R&D dollars it needs to spend to make a version of the iPhone compatible with Verizon’s network. The rumor sources note that Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam has been making bi-monthly trips to Mountain View to visit with Google (Google), culminating in an announcement of Android phones coming to Verizon. Apple’s headquarters are ...

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Walt Disney Company is close to unveiling new technology to allow entertainment companies to distribute media to consumers using computers and cell phones, rather than on DVD and television. The technology is code-named Keychest and sounds like its the for-pay web service that Disney CEO Bob Iger announced back in July. The service would basically let consumers pay one price for permanent access to content from a number of different devices — like set-top boxes and mobile phones. As the WSJ points out, this type of system could really bring the idea of movie downloads to the mainstream — because content would be stored and accessed from the cloud on your different devices, rather than downloaded and then stored for playback. Digital Media Served From the Cloud Think of the service kind of like Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace ...

Microsoft’s latest effort to gain relevance in the search wars is about to get a whole lot more interesting. According to All Things Digital, the company is set to announce deals with both Twitter and Facebook (Facebook) to integrate status updates into its Bing (Bing) search engine. Details are expected to be announced later today at the Web 2.0 Summit, but the stage has been building for this for some time. Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook back in 2007, and has since signed search and advertising deals with the social network. Meanwhile, Twitter (Twitter) has been known to be exploring search partnerships for at least the past month, though it’s long been suspected that the company would eventually eye significant revenue in this space. Although Twitter has been said to be willing to offer a full stream of tweets to search providers ...

Google’s Vice-President of Search Marissa Mayer has just made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo: a new Google Labs feature called Social Search. They just gave a quick demo of the new feature. While the details are still sparse, here is what we currently know (and we’re still updating, so check back for more information): - The bottom of search results will soon have social networking information from your friends, like their Flickr photos or their status updates. It’s a blended search integration, similar to seeing news or image results. - These are pulled from social networks connected to your Google Profile. The more that are connected, the more social information that will appear in search results. - They have also improved searching for images using social networks. Images become more relevant using social networking data. - It ...

While we’re still digesting the news of Bing adding Twitter to its search engine, Google has some news of their own: they’re about to do the same exact thing. The search giant has just announced that they have reached a deal with Twitter to include tweets in search results. From the Google blog: “Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, ...

Social networking site Facebook's founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg plans to enter the digital-music business in the wake of the launch of News Corp's MySpace Music last month, the New York Post said. Zuckerberg is talking to a number of song-streaming services and music community sites, including Rhapsody.com, iMeem.com, iLike.com and Lala.com about an outsourcing deal, the Post reported, citing sources familiar with the situation. Facebook executives have been busy meeting major record companies about the strategy, the paper said on its website. The Post quoted sources saying that unlike MySpace, which traded equity in its music venture in exchange for licenses to stream ad-supported songs, Facebook doesn't want to secure licenses to distribute music, or build a proprietary service from scratch. Sources further cautioned that nothing was imminent, and Facebook may ultimately walk away from the plan altogether, the paper reported. Facebook did ...

One of the most actively discussed topics in the Twitter universe over the past couple months has been the idea that teens don’t tweet – at least not as much as older demographics, and certainly not as actively as teens who use other popular social networking sites. Now, it appears that this story may be shifting. According to new data from comScore, younger users – specifically those in the 12-17 and 18-24 year-old demographics – are Twitter’s fastest growing audience segment. Here’s what the audience measurement company has to say on the trend: “As the Twitter audience has mushroomed in recent months – to 21 million U.S. visitors in July 2009 (note: this number represents visitors to the Twitter.com website and does not include API or mobile Twitter usage) – the younger age groups are the ones flooding in the fastest. The share ...

Note: Even if it says Facebook 2.5, it is actually Facebook 3.0 due to caching. Delete the old app and reinstall or wait until Apple updates its cache. - We knew it was coming in all of its glory. With additions such as events, creating photo albums, photo zoom, and a new home screen, how could we not be excited for the Facebook for iPhone 3.0 update? Well, the wait is over: Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone has arrived. The new update completely upgrades the Facebook iPhone app, still the #1 most popular application in the iTunes store. And let’s be clear: this upgrade was absolutely essential. While Facebook 2.5 allowed you to browse your friends, update your status, check your notifications, and use Facebook Chat, that’s really all it could do. So what’s new in the app? Joe Hewitt, the developer ...

The rise of social gaming is happening more quietly than one might think given the statistics. Today we’re hearing about another potential milestone: Facebook application FarmVille claims to be the fastest growing social game in history, reaching an impressive 11 million daily users in a little over two months. To put that in perspective, World of Warcraft is the largest massively multiplayer game that dominates MMO marketshare with at last report 11.5 million active subscribers. Its publisher Blizzard hasn’t revealed any new population statistics since the end of last year, but assures the press that its figures are still growing. It took WoW four years to reach that many subscribers after its launch in late 2004. Compare that to FarmVille, which only launched June 19 of this year. If its daily active stats are accurate, that would mean FarmVille is close to ...

At the end of 2005, Google made an interesting investment: $1 billion dollars for 5% of AOL. The move made sense for AOL – it provided it with a ton of new advertising, search, and revenue opportunities via a strong partnership with Google. Google, in return, got a 5-year deal to be AOL’s default search engine. But the value of that deal has only dropped like a rock in a lake since then. AOL has continued to deteriorate, despite highlights like the acquisitions of Bebo and Socialthing. Thus, Google’s decided to cut its losses and has sold back its AOL stake for $283 million. According to Business Insider, Time Warner (AOL’s parent company) has made a regulatory filing with the SEC to confirm the transaction. On top of the sale, it was also revealed this afternoon that Time Warner has ...

Facebook grew from 100 million to 200 million users in just 8 months. Now, the company has announced that it has gone from 200 million to 250 million in just over 3 months. In other words, despite its already massive size, Facebook’s growth actually appears to still be accelerating. More important than the raw user count though is what users are actually doing on the site. And earlier this week, we reported that Facebook is also number one in terms of the amount of time users spend on the site, beating out the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft with each user spending an average of 4 hours, 39 minutes on the social network in June. In spite of all that success, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would like you to think the best is yet to come. In a blog ...

There’s a growing fascination with the so called “real-time Web,” with Google, Facebook , and Twitter all reportedly working on major changes to their search tools that leverage status updates and tweets to do a better job of indexing the Web. But Microsoft’s Bing has beaten them all to the punch – at least in being able to say they include Tweets side-by-side with Web search results. The implementation actually isn’t very exciting. Essentially, all Bing is doing is showing recent tweets from well-known people, and only when you search for that person’s name and Twitter in the same query. And it’s all just done via Twitter’s API, making it not a whole lot different than simple widgets that show someone’s most recent tweets. The Bing team explains on their blog: “Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real ...