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Twitter celebrates its seventh birthday this month with 200 million users worldwide- who now send an average of 400 million tweets every day.The service, originally called “stat.us” and then “twittr”, was launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey.

He says he was inspired by signing up to blogging service Live Journal in 2000 and spent the next six years refining his idea for “a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road”.

Now people use Twitter to campaign, share and discuss news, fundraise, propose marriage, challenge authority – and try to catch the eye of teen heart-throb Justin Bieber, who at time of writing has more than 36 million followers.

On Twitter everyone is so accessible – you can tweet anyone. With Facebook, you have to be friends with them first.

The problem with Twitter – which is the power of Twitter – is that you are publishing into the world. It’s out there with the same power whether you have one follower or whether you have three million followers.

The joy of Twitter is that it’s a stream, you step into it, you step out of it.

You can look at the world in terms of before and after Twitter. Before Twitter, from a consumer standpoint, lots of news and information services were out there, but we hadn’t really been deep into the mobile-app revolution.

In the world after Twitter, suddenly people have access to real-time news and information.

Twitter bites

• Each message posted on Twitter can be up to 140 characters long, including web addresses, user names and hashtags
• There are 200 million active Twitter users worldwide
• Every day 400 million tweets are sent every day
• It took three years, two months and one day for the first billion tweets to be sent
• There are 10 million users in the UK, and 80% of them access Twitter via their mobile phones
• Of Twitter’s global users, 60% check the service on their phones
• Some 40% of Twitter users choose not to write any tweets themselves, but use the platform to follow news and interests

Samsung has launched a new smartphone- Galaxy S4 which allows users to control its 5in screen using only their eyes.The Galaxy S4 follows on from last year’s S3, a product that sold over 40 million units worldwide.

Analysts widely regard Samsung to be the biggest challenger to Apple’s dominance of mobile products as the Galaxy S4 will be rolled out globally at the end of April.

The company’s head of mobile communications, JK Shin said 327 mobile operators in 155 countries will carry the handset.

In the UK, Vodafone, Three, Orange, T-Mobile and EE have all announced plans to offer the device on their networks.

Through a series of role-playing scenes, the South Korean firm demonstrated the phone’s key features.

Much was made of the device’s ability to be controlled without touching it- using “Smart pause”, the user can pause a video by looking away from the screen.

Additionally, the “Smart Scroll” software analyses the user’s eyes and wrist to scroll through emails and other content.

In another scene, depicting a backpacker in Shanghai, the phone was shown to translate English text into Chinese speech – before translating Chinese speech back into English text.

The dual camera feature makes use of the device’s front and rear cameras simultaneously, blending the pictures together to make sure the picture taker is not “left out”.

The rear has a 13 megapixel camera, while the user-facing camera captures pictures at 2 megapixels.

The phone weighs 130g, and is 7.9mm thick – making it slightly lighter and thinner than the S3.

The device uses Samsung’s HD AMOLED technology, giving the S4′s screen – which is marginally bigger than the S3′s – a resolution of 441 pixels-per-inch.

As predicted by several industry experts before the event, most of the presentation focused on the phone’s software rather than hardware.

As well as the “touchless” technology, the company also introduced the Samsung Hub – a multimedia storage facility that can be shared across multiple Samsung devices.

Despite record EU unemployment, the European Commission has launched a “grand coalition” to address the region’s IT skills shortages.Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes told delegates at the CeBIT exhibition that the EU’s competitiveness is “under threat” if it cannot fill the expertise gap.

The shortages come at a time of high unemployment across Europe, she added, calling for greater awareness of IT career opportunities.

Together with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, Ms Kroes said that 1 million euros (£860,000) will be invested into the coalition.

“This coalition is not about reinventing the wheel. It should be about building on existing success,” she said.

“I want people to be open in their commitments, join forces where they see the chance, and recognise we need to do things differently.

“Quite simply, facing hundreds of thousands of unfilled vacancies, we cannot continue as we were; and we must all do our bit.”

The commission’s own figures suggested that there will be 900,000 vacancies for IT-related roles by 2015. There are currently about 26 million people unemployed across Europe.

The number of “digital jobs” – jobs based around IT – is growing by about 100,000 every year, yet the number of skilled IT graduates is failing to keep pace.

Jose Manuel Barroso launched the digital jobs coalition

Ms Kroes said she now wants to have companies move “from ‘wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if’ to, ‘here’s-what-we-are-going-to-do’.”

The commission highlighted several new initiatives already taking places, including Telefonica’s investment in start-ups, and Cisco’s pledge to train 100,000 people to install smart-meters into homes.

The commission’s proposals include simplification of the certification system, making it easier to prove what skills a graduate has, regardless of the EU country in which they have worked or studied.

Technology skills shortages have been cited as a pressing problem for several companies which rely on highly-skilled engineers to further their development.

In January, Google chairman Eric Schmidt announced that his firm was to contribute to a scheme to give schools 15,000 free microcomputers.

The British Raspberry Pi devices will also be used to encourage young children into learning coding skills.

The days of the tiresome password may be numbered- according to Paypal.The fact is that the way we users typically deal with having multiple passwords for our online accounts makes us too vulnerable to spyware, phishing and identity theft.

Many of us rely on the same password, while many more of us only use three or four passwords.

Ideally, the best password would be at least 16 characters with capitals, numbers and special characters – but you’d never remember it.

So the industry is looking to ditch passwords, and is turning to a variety of solutions, such as voice recognition, key stroke analysis and finger print identification.

Payments firm PayPal is one of those leading the changes, and president David Marcus says the aim is to make the whole process seamless.

“Like magic, you’ll be authenticated, and the payment will go through. We want to move away from passwords, and get to embedded fingerprint scanners on mobile phones.”

“You’re going to start seeing that type of experience later this year, with a mass roll-out in the year to come.”

Earlier this month, PayPal, Lenovo and others announced the formation of the Fido Alliance (Fast Identity Online) to change the way online security checks are carried out.

The idea is that users will be able to select the type of authentication that suits them best – from fingerprint scanning to USB tokens.

“The best protection is the one you don’t see – it’s the one that happens in the background, that verifies your identity accessing your own data,” says Mr Marcus.
‘Untapped potential’

For PayPal, solving the password security problem is important because so many people now use it to make purchases – it has 125 million customers in more than 190 countries.

“You shop offline more than you shop online, but in most of these transactions mobile is involved now,” says Mr Marcus.

“As the offline market is 17 times bigger than the online market, there is still huge untapped potential for us.”

The key driver for this has been the way in which customers are increasingly using phones, tablets and other handheld devices to make purchases.

Last year, PayPal recorded $145 billion (£95bn) in total transactions, of which $14 billion were via mobile devices, says Mr Marcus.  “But the year before it was less than $4 billion.

All of which should be welcome news for those of us who continually have to email our online retailers for new passwords, because we’ve forgotten the one we asked them for the last time we tried to buy something from them.

The Raspberry Pi has announced that more than a million of them have been sold since orders started being accepted on 29 February 2012.In the same way that people buy a smartphone to browse on the move, if they want to try their hand at coding, they opt for the Raspberry Pi or one of its rivals.

The prices of these small form factor machines varies widely but all these gadgets can, with a little help from a few add-ons and peripherals, do anything that used to require the services of a fully functioning, and quite hefty, desktop PC. They start at just £23.

There were two main reasons for the emergence of small PCs- one aesthetic and one technical.

The aesthetic reason was that computers had begun emerging from spare rooms and box-rooms and were taking up residence in living rooms. In some of those cases, people did not want a “beige box” squatting on their carpet, he said. Far better to have something small and unobtrusive.

Those machines being used in front rooms and other places were not “replacements” for the family PC but “were going where the need was felt”.

The technical trend is linked to the driving force of the computer world: Moore’s Law.

Coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, this economic law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip for the same cost will double roughly every two years. More transistors in a smaller space typically translates to more power.

Chip development, memory density and a host of other technological innovations meant that now small does not mean puny.

It’s matured thanks to the growing move to portable computing, which emphasised low power components.

Less power going in means less heat coming out and removes the need for fans and other devices to cool the hot chips and other components doing all the hard work.

Many of the components found in small form factor PCs were more commonly found in phones, tablets or laptops.

For instance, the chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi is more usually found in a handset. Similarly, hard drives and other components used in small machines from Dell, Apple and many others were initially developed for use in laptops.

Increasingly, PC box shifters relied on Intel and other component makers to do the innovation for them. This reduced their risk and left them less exposed should they back a trend that did not catch on with consumers.

Global music revenues had risen for the first time since 1999 according to new research.The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said that accelerating digital music sales had caused a 0.3% upturn in global revenues – a total of  £10.9 billion.

“It is hard to remember a year for the recording industry that has begun with such a palpable buzz in the air,” said Frances Moore, chief executive of IFPI.

“These are hard-won successes for an industry that has innovated, battled and transformed itself over a decade.

“They show how the music industry has adapted to the internet world, learned how to meet the needs of consumers and monetised the digital marketplace.”

Global singles best sellers in 2012

Carly Rae Jepsen, Call Me Maybe, 12.5 million units
Gotye, Somebody That I Used To Know, 11.8 million
PSY, Gangnam Style, 9.7 million
Fun, We Are Young, 9.6 million
Maroon 5, Payphone, 9.1 million
Michel Telo, Ai Se Eu Te Pego, 7.2 million
Nicki Minaj, Starships, 7.2 million
Maroon 5, One More Night, 6.9 million
Flo Rida, Whistle, 6.6 million
Flo Rida, Wild Ones, 6.5 million

Source: IFPI

The music industry has undertaken a sizable campaign over several years to see illegal sites and services put out of business.

In the UK, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) took action to the courts, obtaining a court order to force internet service providers to block access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

The music industry has also started to refocus its efforts by targeting those who make profiting from illegal music possible, such as advertisers, as well as the piracy sites themselves.

Elsewhere, search engines like Google have been pressured to demote piracy websites in their search results.

More needs to be done on that front, IFPI said: “Searches for the names of popular artists followed by the term “mp3″ still return a large number of results for illegal sources on the first page.

“In August 2012, Google announced it would take into account the number of valid copyright notices it receives when returning search results.  That was a welcome step in principle but unfortunately has not been translated into results.”

Online music piracy across the world “declined significantly” in 2012, according to a new report.The NPD Group said last year the number of users on peer-to-peer (P2P) illegally downloading music fell by 17% – down to 21 million worldwide.

The market research firm cited an increased use of legal streaming music sites as being behind the drop.

The NPD Group’s report, based on its annual study of music consumers, said that at P2P file sharing’s peak, in 2005, as many as 33 million people used the services – one in five of all internet users aged 13 and older.

But in 2012 that number was measured as being down to 21 million people.

The report said as many as 40% of people who used illegal music services in 2011 stopped doing so in 2012.

Of those, 20% said this was due to the fact the illegal service they were using had been shut down, or had contained spyware and viruses.

More than half the users who stopped using illegal sites said they now preferred legal services such as the UK-headquartered Spotify.

The music industry has undertaken a sizable campaign over several years to see illegal sites and services put out of business.

In the UK, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) took action to the courts, obtaining a court order to force internet service providers to block access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Party UK – a political group that campaigns for an “open” internet – launched a proxy service to allow UK users to circumvent the block of The Pirate Bay, but that too was closed following legal threats from the BPI.

“In recent years, we’ve seen less P2P activity, because the music industry has successfully used litigation to shut down [P2P client] Limewire and other services,” said Russ Crupnick, senior vice president of NPD.

“Many of those who continued to use P2P services reported poor experiences, due to rampant spyware and viruses on illegal P2P sites.”

The computer maker Dell has reported quarterly falls in profits and sales in what could be its last set of results as a public company.The world’s third largest PC maker said net profit in the fourth quarter fell 31% to £345 million ($530 million)  compared with the same period a year ago.

Revenue fell 11% to £9.34 billion which were hurt by the shrinking consumer business.

Founder Michael Dell has offered to buy the business for £15.9 billion.

But his attempt to turn it back into a private firm has faced opposition over the value of the consultancy side of the business.

Dell’s largest independent shareholder, Southeastern Asset Management, said the offer “grossly undervalues the company”, while reports suggest other large investors also oppose the deal.

In recent years Dell has struggled to compete with cheaper Asian rivals, as well as the boom in smartphones and tablet computers, and has focused more on corporate needs and less on the home consumer.

For the full year ending 1 February 2013, net profit fell 32% to £1.55 billion, while revenue fell 8% to £37.19 billion.

Dell said that it was not providing an outlook for the 2014 fiscal year or for the first fiscal quarter, given the proposed merger agreement to take the company private.

250,000 Twitter users have had their accounts hacked in the latest of a string of high profile internet security breaches.Twitter’s information security director Bob Lord said about 250,000 users’ passwords had been stolen, as well as usernames, emails and other data.

Affected users have had passwords invalidated and have been sent emails informing them.

Mr Lord said the attack “was not the work of amateurs”.

He said it appeared similar to recent attacks on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as the US newspapers reported that their computer systems had been breached by China based hackers.

Mr Lord said in a blog post Twitter had discovered unauthorised attempts to access data held by the website, including one attack that was identified and stopped moments after it was detected.

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” he wrote.

Mr Lord did not say who had carried out the attack, but added: “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

“For that reason we felt that it was important to publicise this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the internet safer for all users.”

The biggest worry for most of Twitter’s 200 million active users is not this attack per se, but the additional new “phishing” scams the attack has already inspired.

Since Twitter users now know to be on the lookout for emails asking them to change their passwords, criminals are sending out very similar messages.

If users click on the links in those they risk – once again – having their account hacked.

Dr Search warns you- don’t click on links in any emails asking you to change your password- instead go directly to the web site, log in normally, and change it using the instructions without clicking on email links.

“You have to be careful if you get hold of one of these emails because, of course, it could equally be a phishing attack – it could be someone pretending to be Twitter.

“So, log into the Twitter site as normal and try and log in to your account and, if there’s a problem, that’s when you actually have to try and reset your password.”

Yahoo has reported fourth quarter revenues of £860 million in the fourth quarter, up nearly 2% on the same time a year before.A one off accounting charge meant that the fourth quarter net income was £174 million, down by 8% compared to £189 million in the same period 12 months earlier.

In trading in New York the shares in the company gained 4.5%.

About 700 million web surfers visit its website every month, ranking it among the top three in the global industry.

However, it shed more than 1,000 jobs during 2012, and has long been divided over whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies.

Chief executive Marissa Mayer was brought in last July from Google to turn the company round, and the latest financial figures are the first full quarter’s under her leadership.

Ms Mayer has been focusing on building better mobile and social networking services.

She said that during the quarter Yahoo made progress “by growing our executive team, signing key partnerships including those with NBC Sports and CBS Television and launching terrific mobile experiences for Yahoo Mail and Flickr”.

Yahoo hired the former Google executive on a pay package of $58 million ( £37 million) which Dr Search thinks is nice work if you can get it.