China’s Tencent beats $1 billion revenue mark

A billion dollars in revenue in a single year? Not even MySpace, currently the most profitable social network outside China, has managed to accomplish that. But publicly traded Tencent, a leading Chinese web portal, instant message client, social network, game developer and more has done it, and largely through the use of virtual goods and other “Internet valued-added services,” like avatars, dating services, online memberships, music and community sites.

Overall, the so-called IVAS revenue category contributed to 70.5 percent or $719.1 million, a 95.5 increase over 2007; mobile and telecom services contributed $204.7 million and online advertising contributed $120.9 million. This stands in contrast to American social networks. MySpace brought in around $800 million a year, coming in at less than the hoped for $1 billion goal set during a healthier display-advertising market. Facebook brought in $250 to $300 million (it’s not focused on monetization, it says). Both of those companies have minimal virtual goods services but continue to get most of their money from various forms of online advertising.

Read More

Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements, especially around performance. Starting with this beta, I’m able to use Fennec as the primary browser on my N810. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our frontend code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. We’ve enabled TraceMonkey bringing to mobile the huge JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas. A number of performance hotspots have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship final – in fact, we have fixed number of issues already for the next beta.

On the feature front, we’ve enabled plugins so you can now watch videos on your favorite sites, and we’ve got in our first pass at improved bookmark management and support for bookmark folders. A lot of time was spent on infrastructure that we could use to build the rest of our app with. You’re now able to scroll things like preferences and the new bookmarks list. One of our main focuses for the next milestone will be on polishing the user interface — areas like the extension manager will get a face lift and we’ll start working more on some of the usability issues people have reported.

Vision

Fennec will bring a true Web experience to mobile phones and other non-PC devices, yet take advantage of the specific opportunities for new and useful user experiences enabled by mobility and telephony. Fennec will do what users need out of the box, enabling access to their favorite content and rich internet applications. It will integrate smoothly with device features, including easy initiation of phone calls from Web pages, access to local search, maps and directions. It will solve basic usability challenges have generally prevented the mobile Web experience from being pleasant and enjoyable, even though people have a critical need for data when on the go.

Fennec will be the mobile Web browser that content and application developers can target to create great software for mobile phones, rather than the plethora of native platforms and programming languages required to reach people in a mobile environment today. Any developer with skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript will be able to develop for mobile.

Microsoft will tout at the Mix09 conference in Las Vegas this week its planned Silverlight 3 rich Internet application technology along with a host of other developer-related offerings, according to the conference Web site.

Other efforts to be pondered at the conference include the planned Visual Studio 2010 IDE, the Azure Services Platform for cloud computing and Expression Web, for building Web sites.

[Read More]

Mozilla announced it will dump Version 3.1 as the name of the next edition of Firefox and instead call it Version 3.5.

“As recently proposed, the version number of the Shiretoko project will be changed to Firefox 3.5 before the upcoming fourth beta release,” said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s director of Firefox, in a brief entry to the company’s developer blog.

The name change has been under discussion for several weeks, prompted in part by calls from developers who thought that the “3.1″ moniker didn’t properly reflect the amount of new features and changes from last June’s Firefox 3.0.

“The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey  and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that’s gone into everything from video and layout to Places and the plug-in service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label ‘.1,’” Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, said in a message to a company forum last week. “[Firefox] 3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that’s packed into Shiretoko.”

Read More

It’s a simple checkbox, but it has big implications. During a detailed examination of a recent beta build of the forthcoming Windows 7 operating system, Aeroexperience bloggers Bryant Zadegan and Chris Holmes discovered an option to turn off Internet Explorer 8.

Read More

Microsoft on Tuesday confirmed it is testing a new Internet search engine it hopes will power the US software giant out of distant third place in a market dominated by Google.

A Kumo.com search engine being privately tested by Microsoft workers is reportedly based on semantic technology that enables it to understand sentences and relationships between words.

Current search engines, including software used by Google, rely on matching words typed into search boxes with those found at websites and in data found on the Internet.

“There’s a good deal of excitement brewing over this test, both internally and externally, which we’re always glad to see,” Microsoft Live Search general manager Mike Nichols wrote in an online message.

“Our hope is that our employees will give us great feedback on our new features and that it all becomes part of the external experience soon.”

[Source Via Yahoo]