August
Amid more signs that the world was starting to emerge from its economic crisis, the future of the media became a hot topic as media mogul Rupert Murdoch proposed making end-users pay for News Corp content they had become accustomed to getting for free.
A further threat to the mainstream media was the growing influence of social media, with Face book and Twitter becoming ever more prominent. However, both faced growing pains, with Facebook deciding it was time to snap-up competing social media site Friendfeed, while Twitter became the focus of a new type of malware attack, leading to a suspension of services.
Microsoft was busy once more. It finally found a way to appease European regulators - by offering Windows users a choice of web-browsers - and moved to protect its interests in the mobile space by cozying up to Nokia. It also joined Amazon in opposing the Google Books settlement.
Having made all these alliances with the giants of the PC world, Nokia decided it was time to get into the PC business and launched its own netbook with, of course, integrated 3G connectivity. Nokia chose Intel's Atom platform for its offering but, ironically, the ARM ecosystem it had traditionally relied on for its processors was ramping up the messaging around smartbooks.
The infrastructure around mobile Internet also saw a few developments this month, with BT announcing faster broadband speeds and Europe throwing its weight behind LTE as the preferred 4G wireless technology. This was more bad news for Intel, which had invested a lot in competing standard WiMAX.
