By Jamie L.

SAN FRANCISCO: The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) released on July 19, reported on consumer satisfaction with the Internet, including social media was found that Facebook was the lowest ranked site of its kind.

This year in the category Internet Social Media the report scored three websites - Wikipedia, Facebook, and You Tube including others but MySpace was not included in this year's report.

Wikipedia scored highest with 78, You Tube came in second place with 74, followed by social media websites under the category of others with a score of 67; social networking Facebook came last with a score of 66.

Whether customer dissatisfaction with Facebook will lead customers to switch to Google's new social network Google+ remains to be seen; but it does appear that customers are moving away from Facebook.

It was shown in a separate report released June 12 by Facebook monitoring site inside Facebook, which found the amount of active users on the social networking site to be declining throughout the North America and parts of Northern Europe.

By Jamie L.

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Inc. is in talks to possibly bid for video-streaming service Hulu, according to a person close to the situation.

The person spoke on state of obscurity because they are not authorized to talk about the matter.

An acquisition of Hulu could bolster Apple's iTunes store, which gives videos users can rent or buy, and help it contend with Netflix Inc. Hulu offers a subscription streaming service. It also brings in incomes from ads that accompany content it streams to users free-of-charge.

Hulu, whose owners include The Walt Disney Co., News Corp. and Comcast Corp., started presenting its financial information to interested bidders late last month, after an unwelcome offer prompted its board to look for other offers.

By Sonia S.
   Apple has overthrow Nokia to become the world's number one smart phone seller. In its second-quarterly results on Thursday, the Finnish cellphone company reported that shipment of 16.7 million smart phones. But during the same period Apple shipped 20.3 million iPhones, the Cupertino, California-based company had announced in its quarterly results on Tuesday.

According to the analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) which tracks information technology markets, Nokia now accounts for just 16 % of smart phone sales globally - down from 37 % last year.
However, Nokia still continues to dominate the basic-feature cellphone market even though Samsung is now breathing down its neck in that market also.

In both smart phone and basic-feature cellphone markets, Nokia's share of the global market has slipped to 25 % from 34 % a year ago. But Nokia beat forecasts to post a net profit of $551 million during the period.
"Nokia is now bleeding on all fronts. On the smartphone segment its portfolio is not attractive in terms of user experience, ecosystem and even price. Since the company started struggling in 2009, a price differentiation strategy was pursued to keep volumes high, but even this does not working anymore. Consumers can already find better Android devices at lower prices than Nokia smart devices.

"This could even get worse in the next quarters as Apple is ruptured to be launching a cheaper iPhone in September. If this is true, Nokia will continue losing market share until the new platform from Microsoft is fully deployed. From the feature phones perspective, the high volume driver for Nokia, the situation won't get any better," according to the analyst firm.

The only hope for Nokia to reverse its decline now lies in the new Microsoft Window Phone 7 platform it is adopting from next year as its main smart phone strategy.

By Sonia S.

Facebook was originally named TheFaceBook and it was developed by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. The first use of the FaceBook was on the Harvard campus and it was limited only to Harvard students. Soon the FaceBook spread like wild fire around the other major U.S. Universities. Mark Zuckerberg drop out of Harvard and pursued his facebook dream to become one of the 4th most-trafficked websites in the world with more than 90 million active users. The FaceBook website is built on PHP-MySQL technology and it is probably the most popular PHP website ever built. Interesting fact is that the facebook.com domain was purchased for $200,000 and FaceBook has more than 24 million photos uploaded daily.