SpaceShipTwo made it’s first flight with crew aboard recently. The ship was attached to Eve and departed from Mojave Air and Space Port for several hours so that a series of tests could be performed. SpaceShipTwo stayed attached to the mother ship for the whole flight and wasn’t released this time around.

Within the last month, four test flights were done with WhiteKnightTwo allowing pilots and crew to practice with the plane and test it.

Virgin Galactic, the company behind the development of SpaceShipTwo and private space tourism, says yesterday’s flight marked the first time SpaceShipTwo flew with a crew on board.

[Read more…]

It is expected that Facebook will announce that it has passed the 500 million user mark later this week. Just over a year ago the company announced that it had reached a 250 million user base meaning that it’s pretty much doubled in size over the last year.

The growth rate is incredible and when detailed along side their images section of the site and the numbers of pictures uploaded each day, it’s just mind blowing. Early on this month, Facebook face detection was added and with that announcement we were told that 100 million pictures a day were uploaded to the social networking site. [Read more…]

Some research was done recently which indicates that 15 million people want the iTunes Cloud service. Many of those said they would also pay for the service.

The numbers were calculated by polling 3862 iTunes users over the age of 13. 25% of those users said they would want a streaming service option which indicates 13 – 15 million people in the US alone could want to stream music.

Of course we don’t get a truly accurate number from a sample of 3862, but it does show that there is a lot of interest in the service. [Read more…]

Apple [AAPL] has purchased a company called Poly9 who deal generally with web-based mapping software for companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo! to name a couple.

It isn’t clear when the deal went through although it appears to have all been sorted now. It also isn’t clear what Apple intend to do with Poly9. Perhaps we might seen some mapping integration on the iPhone which might get rid of Apple’s reliance on Google for that part of the service. [Read more…]

Microsoft [MSFT] has launched the public beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 for download. The complete service pack isn’t available just yet which means that you shouldn’t install this unless you want to test the new service pack.

The download is 1.2GB and fixes a number of bugs and issues that have appeared over the last year. It also ads a few new features that are more in line with what enterprise users would use.

Another thing to note with the download is that it’s not for home users. [Read more…]

Microsoft [MSFT] has extended the deadline for users wanting to downgrade from Windows 7 to Windows XP. The deadline has now moved all the way to 2020.

Microsoft had planned to remove this feature this year and many users would not have been able to downgrade after 2011, but have decided to extend it as many business still use Windows XP and want to standardize operating systems over all their computers.

As well as being able to downgrade to Windows XP Professional, users can also opt to downgrade to Windows Vista if required. The end was supposed to be around the time Windows 7 Service Pack 1 launched but now is a lot further away. [Read more…]

Microsoft [MSFT] and NASA have been working together to create an interactive Mars tour. The tour took three years of data crunching on 100 computers to create and is able to show Mars in the highest resolution images available of the planet.

The system uses Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope program and uses images collected from 40 years ago till now. The latter of the images come from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

There are two ways to view the imagery. The first way is to download the Microsoft software and the second is to use the Web client. [Read more…]

This one is getting a little complicated. Here is what has happened so far. Last week, the Fring iPhone app was updated allowing iOS 4 users to multitask the app, leaving it running in the background to receive calls and messages. For those using an iPhone 4, it allowed you to make video calls over WiFi and 3G to users on other devices. This was a big step forwards making the front facing camera on the phone be useful for things other than iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 FaceTime calls over WiFi which it was previously restricted to.

Shortly after the updated app went live, Skype support was “temporarily removed” due to an overload of users making use of video calling services. This, according to Fring, was done because they wanted to make Fring more reliable until the infrastructure could be updated. [Read more…]

Back in November 2009, Google [GOOG] announced that 1080p full HD video was coming to YouTube. That of course happened and we now have access to 1080p when users upload video at that resolution.

The next step up from there is 4K video that has a resolution of 4096 x 2304 pixels making it four times larger than 1080p.

4K video has an ideal screen size of 25 feet. Google point out that IMAX movies are projected by two 2K resolution projectors. [Read more…]

Google [GOOG] has announce that the Chinese government has renewed the ICP license which will allow Google to continue operating in the country. By approving the license it allows Google.cn to continue operating which brings search results to a good number of users in the country.

Getting the country to renew the license was a bit worrying for Google as it needs to abide by local laws to do so. When they stopped censoring results in China back in January it caused a bit of friction which caused users going to google.cn to be redirected to google.com.hk to avoid problems with the government.

From the original post 28 June…

We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable”and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn”so Google would effectively go dark in China.

[Read more…]

Twitter is a growing website. Since April it is handling 33 percent more queries taking it up to 800 Million queries per day or 24 billion per month. The information comes from the co-founder Biz Stone who spoke recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

It’s hard to compare Twitter’s monthly query volume to that of Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo, since worldwide figures for their traffic are fairly old. Comscore reported that Bing was supporting 4.1 billion monthly queries worldwide while Yahoo was handling 9.4 billion in December.

[Read more…]

Mozilla has finally made the Firefox 4 beta download available which can be found here.

The new web browser has been in development for a while now. The version being released is Firefox 4 Beta 1 and is the first version that’s stable enough to be used by regular users although some bugs could still be present and you might have some compatibility issues with any plugins you have been using on version 3.X.

Several things have changed in the new version of the browser. The first is the user interface. Mozilla have worked to make Firefox 4 more streamlined and modern. Tabs have been moved above the regular menu (similar to where Google Chrome has the tabs). The menu bar has actually gone and has been replaced by a single button called the Firefox Button”. Clicking on the button opens up the menu system. The buttons have had a tidy up too with the stop and reload buttons now being combined in to one button. [Read more…]