IDUKE Technical Services

Windows Phone has struggled to differentiate itself in the market against established rivals such as Android and iOS, but through it all Brandon Watson was the developer evangelist making sure a lack of apps was never the reason people opted for the competition. His commitment to platform has helped to inspire app development beyond Redmond’s wildest expectations, however ZDnet blogger Mary Jo Foley has just confirmed that Brandon is moving on, and being tasked with leading Amazon’s cross-platform Kindle efforts. 

So far Microsoft hasn’t named any successor for Watson, and did little more than confirm his departure. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, “We can confirm February 6th is Brandon Watson’s last day at Microsoft. Brandon did a great job helping us build a vibrant developer community and we wish him well with his next adventure.”

Watson’s departure isn’t the first, and likely won’t be the last important loss to the Windows Phone team, but its still a mighty blow to a platform that is in desperate need of passionate community leaders.

The Facebook IPO is not just long awaited, but one of the most interesting public offerings of our generation. Unlike the countless tech companies that came before it, Facebook doesn’t offer anything tangible; rather it’s simply a platform to help share our private information. This week however we’ve learned ultimately what the market valued this type of service at, and it’s a staggering $75 billion right out of the gate. 

The fillings revealed that Facebook is still far behind advertising market leaders such as Google when it comes to monetizing the value of it’s users, but Wall Street as we know doesn’t only reward immediate financial performance, rather they consider what’s possible given the platform. Facebook made about $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, which while accounting for 85 percent of it’s total, is still only a small fraction of the $36.5 billion Google took in during the same period. 

The big take away this week is that our personal information is worth a fortune in the right hands, and now that Facebook has finally gone public, you should expect them to start exploiting that value much more aggressively going forward. From the looks of it, they’ve only just scratched the surface.

Google Docs and Office Web apps have gone a long way towards offering a compelling solution for storing our documents online, but for those in need of offline access, Open Office used to be the best free alterative to Microsoft around. Fast forward to 2012 however, and Open Office hasn’t just fallen off the map, it has been lapped several times by a new community fork called LibreOffice. 

According to new statistics offered up by the community, LibreOffice monthly commits is now in the 1500-3000 range, with the vast majority of new code coming from TDF volunteers, as opposed to large corporations such has Red Hat, Oracle, or Canonical. 

The LibreOffice community is also celebrating over 10 million users, a significant milestone for a project that only launched in late 2010. With version 3.5 just around the corner promising tons of improvements sometime next week, the future of LibreOffice is looking very bright indeed. 

This isn’t the best time to be in charge of a file-sharing site, with authorities around the world  — everywhere from the United States to Middle-earth (or New Zealand as it’s known more popularly) to Sweden — currently on a rampage against online file repositories brimming with unauthorized content. Ukrainian authorities are the latest to crackdown on online file sharing, having taken down popular file-sharing site Ex.ua a couple of days back. But that’s not where the story ends. You know the drill: hit the jump for more.

Usually, such takedowns quickly become a cause célèbre among hacktivists, who flock to avenge their demise. This particular case is no different. Following Ex.ua’s takedown by the Ukrainian authorities, enraged Internet users attacked government sites in retaliation. These people targeted the official sites of the country’s president and interior minister using the tried-and-tested distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) technique.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Ukrainian authorities said Ex.ua had been under investigation since July last year, apparently after a number of companies complained against the site. But Microsoft Ukraine, one of the companies named as a complainant in the matter by the Ukrainian interior ministry, is said to have denied being the “immediate initiator of the EX.UA inspection” as is being claimed.

The ministry claims to have seized 200 servers containing as much as 6,000 TB worth of files in a raid on the site’s office.

While the uproar over Google’s updated privacy policy has lessened in the U.S., European officials are taking things a step further today. The European Commission has asked Google to delay implementing its new privacy policy so the matter can be fully investigated. The search giant has apparently been taken aback by the proposal.

The Commission is in the process of updating its rules on data protection, and that might account for the new-found interest in Google’s policy. According to Google’s Brussels spokesperson, Google briefed the Commission on the proposed change before it was even announced to the public. He went on toe say Google would be happy to talk things over with regulators if there are any new concerns, but he did not say Google would delay implementation of the new policy.

Google’s new privacy policy is essentially ‘one policy to rule them all.’ Over 60 individual privacy policies from various services are being rolled into one document that spells out what information Google can share internally between services. Do you think the European Commission is justified in asking for a delay?