Digital + Electronics Life + Pinoy

eBay topped the most trusted company in terms of privacy according to a recent study. Facebook stole the spotlight by securing the 10th place.

The two-part study from Ponemon Institute and Truste – both privacy specialists, surveyed more than 6,000 U.S. consumers. The latest survey mostly reflects which companies were seems to have the best privacy practices based on consumer brand perception and doesn’t necessarily translate to the most trustworthy companies.

Top 10 Most Trusted Companies In Privacy

1. ebay
2. Verizon
3. US Postal Service
4. WebMD
5. IBM
6. Procter & Gamble
7. Nationwide
8. Intuit
9. Yahoo
10. Facebook

This is the first time a social network company – Facebook, to break the top 10 list. Facebook had been on the privacy blunders in the past but because of  the new privacy features that Facebook has offered, they were able to convinced the panel of judges to give the company a top spot on the “trusted list”. Some of the features added recently is the include friend list and increased control over public listings.

Among the criteria that were used in assessing the level of trustworthiness is whether a company:

• has a clear readability and easy to find privacy statement
• provides adequate access to account information
• uses cookies and discloses that to users
• shares data with other companies and affiliates
• has a data retention policy
• has a chief privacy officer
• whether they disclose a user’s e-mail during password reset
• and whether they use Web beacons.

What companies do you trust to guard your privacy?

Thew new iPod shoots video, a larger screen, and FM radio.

Want to post video on Facebook or MobileMe? Thew built-in video can record  either in portrait or landscape mode – perfect for sharing to any social network communities.The video camera in iPod nano lets you shoot video – with video effects.It lets you record fun wherever you are. Upload and share it with friends on the Internet with a single click.

This iPod is amazing, the video quality is really surprising.

The superb music player has now a built-in mic too. All the surroundings audio can be recorded together with the video.

Why a video camera for the nano? “iPod nano is the world’s most popular music player with over 100 million sold,” said Jobs, Apple’s CEO.”The company was inspired by the popularity of pocket flash memory-based video cameras like those from Flip and Kodak,”Job said.

Special Effects Feature

Apple throws in fifteen special effects which include:

• Thermal
• Mirror
• XRay
• Motion Blur
• Sepia
• Cyborg
• Film Grain
• Black and White,
• Security Cam
• Bulge
• Kaleido
• Light Tunnel
• Dent
• Stretch
• Twirl

Another new addition to the nano 5G  is an FM radio. Read the rest of this entry »

Asus, one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics businesses, confirmed last week that it is planning to launch ebook by the end of this year.

Asus ebook will about to start a new revolutionize way on how an ebook reader should be. Not only it will be the cheapest digital reader to be sold in the market but Asus claims its new ebook reader will be smarter and more versatile that any current available reader in the market today.

According to Jerry Shen, the company’s president, they plan to unveil the device before the end of the year -with different models.

This futuristic ebook reader has a hinged spine, like a printed book. It’s like you are just reading a normal book, using the touchscreen to turn on the pages. It has also a feature to browse the web while seeing the current text on screen.

Asus screens boast a full color unlike the current ebook readers that have monochrome screens only.

And  lastly, you can also make a cheap phone calls over the internet using this device  because it has a “speaker, a webcam and a mic for Skype”.

Facebook mobile users is now at 65 million.  This is almost one-third of the total population of Facebook which is around 200 million already.

The recent growth is due to the mobile service which Facebook started in 2006. Facebook’s mobile web site m.facebook.com works on any mobile browser. It has  x.facebook.com also which is designed specifically for touch screen phones like Android, Palm, iPhone and Nokia.

Facebook introduced a new feature called ‘Facebook Connect’. It is a system wherein a developer can integrate with Facebook for their own services. This will also provide the users a single log-ins for all Facebook services.

Mobile access is becoming increasingly important for Facebook in order to expand globally. Currently, the best mobile interfaces are found on iPhone and Blackberry. Facebook recently launch Facebook for iPhone 3.0 and people have been very pleased with the new features.

Nokia is also gearing on the same direction.  Nokia just announced a new handset, the N900, which uses a Linux-based operating system called “Maemo.”  This new gadget will have a Facebook application that allows users to update their location with their status.

Google’s Gmail service was inaccessible last Tuesday in a severe outage that  affected a majority of users  who are relying on Google’s popular free e-mail service.

Google explained that  Tuesday’s widespread outage occurred when the company took some servers offline to perform their scheduled routine maintenance. This  caused  its remaining routers to become overloaded with traffic.

Ben Treynor, a Google vice president of engineering apologized on their blog ““Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such,”. He wrote” We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom”.

Twitter users were trading updates about Gmail’s problems and became the a top trending topic on that day.

Google reported Tuesday afternoon that it fixed the problem.