Matt's Favorites: Oldest Galaxy Yet And Much More
So what's the latest and greatest in the fabulous world of tech and science as the Tech Tour heads into its home stretch? Well, let's dodge the early season snow and sleet to check out these gems...
* First of all, here are links to the Tech Report home page and Tech Report Page Two, as well as a link to our latest report on tech-related events and meetings in Michigan.
* In a study published Oct. 24 in the journal Nature, astronomers from the University of California at Riverside explain that they've discovered the most distant -- and therefore oldest -- galaxy yet. Galaxy z8_GND_5296 formed 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age. The galaxy is producing stars extremely rapidly, much more rapidly than the Milky Way. This is consistent with other galaxies that formed within one billion years of the Big Bang.
* LinkedIn just gave its users another reason to ensure their resumes are up to date. The online professional network has introduced a mobile feature that shows information about people's careers in emails being read on iPhones. The tool, called Intro, pulls details from the profiles of LinkedIn's more than 238 million users so the recipient of an email can learn more about the sender.
* Samsung is making a smaller version of its flagship Galaxy S4 phone -- the Galaxy S4 mini -- available in the United States next month. The Galaxy S4 mini's screen is 4.3 inches diagonally, compared with 5 inches for the regular Galaxy S4. Nonetheless, the mini version is still larger than the latest iPhones.
* BlackBerry's BBM messenger service keeps chugging along. The company said that BBM has racked up more than 10 million downloads in its first 24 hours. "I've seen reports of apps that launched with 1 million downloads in a day, but over 10 million? Amazing," BlackBerry executive Andrew Bocking said on the company's blog.
* Think .biz, .co, and .mobi were a little weird to see at the end of an Internet address? You ain't seen nothin' yet. Because on Wednesday, the first 4 of a planned 1,400 new Net-address suffixes -- called generic top-level domains, or GTLDs -- were built into the fabric of the Internet. The first four new GTLDs, taking advantage of the newer ability to extend beyond Latin character sets, are the Chinese word for game, the Arabic word for Web, and the Russian words for online and site.
* Nearly eight years ago, Google's then-vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, wrote a blog post saying that the company would never run banner ads in search results or on the Google home page. That promise appears to be in the process of being broken, reported SearchEngineLand, as a screenshot by Dallas-based Web marketing app maker Synrgy shows an experimental, enormous banner ad at the top of search results for "Southwest Airlines."
* Is Apple struggling again with content censorship? The second issue of a critically-acclaimed comic book, Sex Criminals, is published online everywhere but iOS.
