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Smart TVs sets with the ability to stream online content, run apps and show television channels simultaneously dominated the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) exhibition.At the end of 2011 there were 82 million connected TVs in homes worldwide according to research group Informa. By 2016 it forecasts that number will have ballooned to 892 million.

For years much of the tech industry has pursued a vision of the computer as the home’s digital hub. Owners used their PCs to copy photos off digital cameras, download music and movies and then transfer the material to other compatible devices.
Camera built into Samsung smart TV Samsung’s built-in camera allows its TV to recognise gestures and identify users

Advanced users might have connected their laptop to their TVs or streamed content to the sets wirelessly, but the televisions were at most at the end of a spur coming off the hub, rather than its heart.

The roll-out of cloud services allied to faster internet speeds now offers televisions the chance to usurp the PC’s place, and offers users further freedom from the confines of broadcasters’ schedules.

Samsung – the world’s best-selling TV-maker – has been at the forefront of efforts to deliver this vision.

One of the promotional videos it showed at this year’s event claimed watching television by appointment would become a foreign concept in the future, and its executives talk of the TV being the centre of the home.

Users are offered thousands of apps allowing them to use social networks, play video games, run educational software and follow exercise routines.

But smart TV makers recognise that people still want a sit back rather than lean forward experience most of the time.

Furthermore they acknowledge that increasing numbers of homes own other connected devices. So users may still find it preferable to tweet about a show via their tablet or smartphone rather than shrink the TV picture to pull up an app alongside.

However, manufacturers insist there are instances where it makes more sense to have everything on one screen.

While Samsung and Panasonic are developing their own system software, Google is taking a second crack at offering its own smart TV service.

At the show, LG and Vizio unveiled new sets with the search firm’s Android-based software built in. Sony also added the facility to two devices – a set-top box and a Blu-ray player.

The first version of Google TV launched in October 2010 to much fanfare, but proved a flop – enabled devices were criticised for being too expensive, and several TV networks blocked the US-only service from accessing their web content.

This time round a focus on apps may tempt content providers to co-operate, but for now it remains reliant on its own YouTube service as well as streams from Netflix, Amazon and several niche operations.

UK-based Canonical was punting a rival Linux-based Ubuntu operating system at the trade show. It says it offers a solution to clients who do not want to develop their own software and content deals, but feel uncomfortable linking up with Google.

Whichever operating system proves most popular, the internet poses a threat to the rest of the pay-TV market.

Furthermore, it says that recent developments have spurred pay-TV providers on to furnish its boxes with more material.

For now, the smart TV market looks fragmented from the point of view of content, and immature in terms of some of the technologies involved.

But as smart TVs become ever smarter, previous generations of unconnected sets may soon appear only slightly less antiquated than the black and white models of yesteryear.

Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!, has resigned from its board of directors with immediate effect.Jerry Yang founded the online company in 1995 with David Filo and was its chief executive from June 2007 until January 2009.

His resignation comes two weeks after the company hired former PayPal executive Scott Thomson to be its new chief executive.

Mr Yang annoyed some shareholders by turning down a £31 billion ($47.5 billion) takeover offer from Microsoft in 2008.

Since then the value has plummeted and the company’s current market value is only about £13 billion.

Mr Yang has also resigned from the boards of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group and said in a statement: “The time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo!”.

In addition to leaving the boards, Mr Yang is also giving up his title of “Chief Yahoo”. He also expressed support for the company’s current management.

“I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future,” he said.

Some observers had seen Jerry Yang as an impediment to the sale or restructuring of the business as it provides a more objective and unemotional approach to the variuos strategic alternatives which are being considered as the company attempts to reinvent itself.

Wikipedia has taken its English language site offline as part of protests against proposed anti piracy censorship laws in the US.Anyone attempting to access the site just sees a black screen and a political statement: “Imagine a world without free knowledge.”

Wikipedia, which attracts millions of hits every day, is opposed to the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) being debated by Congress.

The legislation would allow the Justice Department and content owners to seek court orders requiring search engines to block results associated with piracy.

The site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, told the BBC: “Proponents of Sopa have characterised the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy”.

“But that’s not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it’s going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don’t have anything to do with stopping piracy.”

The message replacing the normal Wikipedia front page on the internet says: “For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopaedia in human history. Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: ”These bills are very badly written”

Even Google.com joined the protest, blacking out its logo and linking to an online petition urging Congress to not censor the web.

Sopa’s supporters in the House of Representatives say the legislation is designed to stop revenue flowing to “rogue websites”. A similar bill, Pipa, is making its way through the US Senate.

A sign of how bad this legislation may be is that even the arch hacker Murdoch- whose media organisation has been likened to the mafia for it’s “industrial illegal activities” aka phone and email hacking- supports these bills.

On Saturday the White House issued a statement that appeared to side with critics of the legislation.

It said: “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet.”

Despite the hint of a presidential veto, Wikipedia said that the English site’s administrators had decided to stage its first ever public protest because the bills “would be devastating to the free and open web”.

It added: “We don’t think Sopa is going away, and Pipa is still quite active. Moreover, Sopa and Pipa are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms.”

HTC’s new smartphone Raider 4G HTC is the world’s number four smartphone maker.Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has reported a 25% fall in fourth quarter profit, as its models struggled to compete with those of its rivals.

Net profit dropped to 11bn Taiwan dollars (£235 million) in the three months to December, from 14.8 billion dollars in the same period a year earlier.

Sales for December fell 20.3% from a year ago to 26.3 billion Taiwan dollars.

In October the firm said it expected lower revenues in the fourth quarter due to “uncertainties from new models”.

But its latest update also revealed that net profit for the whole of 2011 rose 57% to 62 billion Taiwan dollars.

HTC is the world’s number four smartphone maker, behind Samsung, Apple and Nokia.

Many of the world’s technology companies have also been hit by the recent floods in Thailand- which knocked the global supply chains of may manufacturers.

The most pirated game of 2011 was PC title Crysis 2, according to technology blog TorrentFreak.It was downloaded illegally an estimated 3.2 million times after its release in March last year.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, FIFA 12 and Portal 2 made up the rest of the top five most pirated PC games.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 was the most downloaded Wii game while Gears of War 3 took top spot on the Xbox 360 list.

The PS3 isn’t included in the list as far fewer games are illegally downloaded for that console.

TorrentFreak says the number of downloads of the top titles in each category is slightly lower than last year.

Super Mario Galaxy 2, released in 2010, is the most pirated Wii game for the second year in a row.

Meanwhile, Fast Five was the most pirated Hollywood film of 2011.

TorrentFreak estimates that the movie was illegally downloaded more than nine million times last year.

The Hangover II, Thor, The King’s Speech and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 were also in the top 10.

The data for the estimated download numbers is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.

PC game downloads on BitTorrent in 2011
1. Crysis 2 (Estimated 3.9 million)
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (3.6m)
3. Battlefield 3 (3.5m)
4. FIFA 12 (3.3m)
5. Portal 2 (3.2m)

Wii game downloads on BitTorrent in 2011
1. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (1.2 million)
2. Mario Sports Mix (1m)
3. Xenoblade Chronicles (950K)
4. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean (870K)
5. FIFA 12 (860K)

Xbox 360 downloads on BitTorrent in 2011
1. Gears of War 3 (890,000)
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (830K)
3. Battlefield 3 (760K)
4. Forza Motorsport 4 (720K)
5. Kinect Sports: Season Two (690K)

It is not just humans that are growing in size- web pages are getting bigger too.

The average web page is now about 965 kilobytes in size- reveals a study of top sites by the HTTP Archive trends.

The figure is 33% up on the same period in 2010 when the average webpage was even then a not so slim 726 kilobytes.

Keeping web pages small is vitaly important as not only are an increasing number of people browsing with smartphones, but also because Google use download times as a key search ranking determinant.

Analysis suggests the bloat is down to user demands for more interactivity, as well as the tools used to watch what happens when people visit a site.

To gather its figures, the HTTP Archive run a series of tests every month on the web’s top 1,000 sites.

These showed that average webpage sizes were trending steadily upward throughout 2011 and jumped sharply in October. Big pages generally take longer to load, which can mean visitors quit if a page takes too long to appear.

The metrics the HTTP Archive gathered suggest some causes for the growth. Images are a big proportion of the average webpage, and the higher resolutions people expect have led these to grow.

However, the statistics reveal that the category showing the biggest growth is that for Javascript.

This scripting language is widely used to make webpages more interactive and responsive.

The growth in the amount of Javascript on webpages may be down to the growing use of HTML5.

This is the latest version of the formatting language that defines how web pages should be written.

Mozilla has announced that it had “negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement” with Google for the next three years.Some people had wondered whether Google would back out of the deal as it tries to grow the market share of its own Chrome browser.

Mozilla relies heavily on the income generated by search partnerships.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, Mozilla’s chief executive.

Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice-president of search, said: “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come.”

The foundation said the exact terms of the deal would not be disclosed.

In its accounts for 2010, the Mozilla Foundation said it earned £77 million ($121.1 million) from agreements with Google, Microsoft and others. The Google agreement was thought to make up about 85% of that amount.

The previous deal, which ran out in November, was signed before Google’s Chrome browser had gained a presence in the so-called “browser war”.

Some internet monitoring organisations suggest Chrome has overtaken Firefox to become the world’s second most widely used browser, behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Many put this down to lavish advertising campaigns undertaken by the search company across the world.

Chrome’s launch and subsequent growth has now put it in direct competition with Firefox, yet Google remains financially responsible for Mozilla’s survival.

Firefox 9, the Mozilla browser’s latest incarnation, was launched last month.

Mozilla said it was “30% faster” than previous versions – a problem that has been cited by many users switching to Chrome.

Google was the most visited website with US users in 2011 but Facebook was not far behind according to market researchers.Nielsen suggests more than 153 million visitors clicked onto Google branded pages each month, as Facebook attracted close to 138 million visitors.

Yahoo came third with about 130 million visitors each month.

But analysts warned Yahoo’s tally might be at risk if young people continued to turn away from web-based email.

The study is based on data collected between January and October and included visits from home and work computers. It involved a sample from a global panel of 200,000 people.

Website                                  Unique visitors per month
1. Google                                        153,441,000
2. Facebook                                     137,644,000
3. Yahoo                                         130,121,000
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                 115,890,000
5. YouTube                                     106,692,000
6. Microsoft                                      83,691,000
7. AOL Media Network                        74,633,000
8. Wikipedia                                      62,097,000
9. Apple                                           61,608,000
10. Ask Search Network                     60,552,000

Source: Nielsen

Although Google trumped Facebook as the most popular web brand, the search giant’s Google+ network came far behind Mark Zuckerberg’s site in Nielsen’s ranking of the most popular social networks and blogs.

Google+ came eighth in the list with 8.02m unique monthly visitors.

That also put it behind Google’s weblog publishing tool Blogger, as well as Twitter, Wordspace, Myspace, Linkedin and Tumblr.

Google’s YouTube was identified as the most popular destination for online videos, attracting more than three times the number of monthly visitors as the music video service Vevo.

While Yahoo maintained its position as one of the top three web brands, an earlier study cast doubt over its ability to retain the position over coming years as it’s email system faces a declining market share.

TalkTalk remains the most complained about UK broadband service provider according to regulator Ofcom.The ISP has “topped” the list for four consecutive quarters, although it has been reducing the number of complaints over the past six months.

In the same period, Ofcom found that 3 was the most complained about mobile operator, driven by disputed charges and customer service issues.

Virgin Media also saw an increase in mobile complaints over the past year.

Ofcom bases its data on complaints sent to the regulator rather than to individual operators. In general, mobile services are less complained about than fixed line or broadband.

The regulator’s quarterly report aims to inform consumers as well as incentivise telecoms providers to improve their performance. Ofcom only monitors complaints against telecom providers with a market share of more than 4%.

Complaints about TalkTalk’s broadband service peaked for the first three months of 2011 with an average of 0.81 per 1,000 customers. This fell to 0.55 by the third quarter of 2011.

LANDLINE COMPLAINTS Q3 2011

• TalkTalk – 0.77 complaints per 1,000 customers
• BT Retail – 0.29
• BSkyB – 0.28
• Virgin Media – 0.19

A lot of the problems experienced by TalkTalk are blamed on billing errors following its amalgamation with Tiscali in 2009.

As a direct result of the 1,000 complaints it received last year, Ofcom fined TalkTalk and its Tiscali UK subsidiary £3 million  for incorrectly billing more than 65,000 customers for services they had not received.

It was the largest fine that the regulator has given to a telecoms firm.

TalkTalk has since paid more than £2.5 million in refunds and goodwill payments to affected customers. Last month it admitted that it had lost more than 43,000 customers as a result of customer service issues.

The ISP was also the most complained about provider when it came to landline services, with 0.77 complaints per 1,000 customers in the third quarter of 2011, again driven by billing and customer services issues.

MOBILE COMPLAINTS Q3 2011

• Three – 0.14 complaints per 1,000 customers
• Orange – 0.07
• Virgin Mobile – 0.07
• Vodafone – 0.07
• T-Mobile – 0.06
• O2 – 0.02

The least complained about provider for the fourth quarter in a row was Virgin Media with 0.19 complaints per 1,000 customers.

But in mobile, Virgin Media saw its complaints rise from 0.03 complaints per 1,000 customers from of 2010 to 0.07 by the third quarter of 2011.

It has some way to go to catch 3, which was the most complained about operator over all four quarters. Its complaints have been on the rise, up from 0.09 per 1,000 customers from October to December of 2010 to 0.14 by the third quarter of 2011.

O2 remained the least complained about mobile operator over the year.

Research in Motion (RIM), which makes Blackberry phones has announced a delay to the launch of its new Blackberry 10.There was also disappointment at the prediction of sales of between 11 and 12 million smartphones in the current Christmas quarter, down from 14.8 million in the same period last year.

It reported net income of  £171 milion ($265 million) for the quarter to 26 November, down from £603 million in the same period of 2010.

RIM shares fell more than 6% in after-hours trading.

The Blackberry 10 phones were supposed to be on sale in the first three months of 2012, but RIM now says they won’t be available until late in the year.

It blamed the advanced chips for the phones not being available until the middle of the year.

RIM has also taken a charge of £222 million for unsold PlayBook tablets, which were launched with much hype earlier this year.

The new phones will operate the QNX operating system, which is seen as crucial to the company if it is to compete with phones using Google’s Android software or Apple’s iPhone.

The company has had a difficult few months, with a service outage knocking £25 million off its net income.

“As part of our commitment to improving our performance to better meet the expectations of shareholders and customers, we continue to evaluate ways to improve in several areas of the company’s operations,” RIM’s joint chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said in a statement.

“It may take some time to realise the benefits of these efforts and the platform transition that we are undertaking, but we continue to believe that RIM has the right set of strengths and capabilities to maintain a leading role in the mobile communications industry.”

The two chief executives said they had reduced the cash element of their pay packages to $1 per year.