News of Garmin’s plans to acquire Navigon leaked out earlier this month, but we now have official word that the GPS giant will bring the smaller German company under its wing beginning in late July. Pending regulatory approval, the deal would have Navigon, one of the largest GPS brands in Europe, functioning as a subsidiary of Garmin, which has a much stronger presence in North America. The companies were unable to reveal any financial information, though previous estimates priced the deal in the “mid-double-digit million” Euro range. Navigon says it’s not ready to share any details concerning the acquisition, but we’re unlikely to see major effects in the US, where the company has smartphone apps but hasn’t sold dedicated GPS devices in several years, but the same can’t really be said for the international market though.

SOURCE via Navigon

Rogue hacker group LulzSec is at it again, recently boasting on its Twitter that it had hacked the accounts of over 62,000 and provided a dump of emails and passwords free for download.

CRO of F-secure, Mikko H. Hypponen, believes that the emails and passwords were from a database kept by website Writerspace.com, according to the Hacker News. His reasoning: “Why writerspace.com? Well, the most common passwords include these: mystery, bookworm, reader, romance, library, booklover and..writerspace.So basically that’s why I believe the latest Lulzsec password leak originates from writerspace.com. I’m guessing it’s their user database.”

Gizmodo took the database and has made a script for users to input their email address to check it against the release from LulzSec. Unless you were a member of Writerspace, you’re probably not affected, but this is a good way to confirm.

Great news for our readers living in north of Malaysia in Penang! DiGi plans to collaborate with RAPID Penang with its initiative to be the first bus operator in Malaysia to offer free WiFi on all its buses. Now that Penang has free WiFi all over the island and mainland, and even on the bus!

DiGi’s Head of Northern region, Siew Chee Kong said, “DiGi is excited to be part of this effort as we share RAPID Penang’s belief in making Internet services available for all anywhere, anytime. People are now accustomed to accessing Internet content and retrieving information on the go, and by offering them reliable WiFi service while they are on the bus, Internet connectivity becomes more accessible to the public than ever.”

“Over the past months we have worked closely with Rapid Penang and carried out extensive trials to ensure that the WiFi service offered is of high quality in ensuring that the customers will have a seamless online experience.”

Hopefully you Penangites don’t miss your stops while surfing the web and that the free WiFi will make long bus journeys that much more bearable. RAPID Penang WiFi service is currently available on 50 buses including key routes like Bridge Express Shuttle Transit service as well as corridor 1 routes (Weld Quay – Teluk Bahang) and corridor 2 routes (Weld Quay – Farlim – Paya Terubong).

Last night there’s a lunar eclipse, but oddly nobody knew (or doesn’t care anyway), because since last night the most talked about topic on the Internet in our region is this #OpMalaysia, an operation announced by the hacktivist group Anonymous to retaliate against the new “Internet blockage” action by MCMC (Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commision) at blocking ten websites that are related to online free file-sharing.

Apparently Anonymous announced that the planned DDoS (Distributed denial of service) attack will take place at 3:30AM local time and the only targeted website is www.malaysia.gov.my, however plenty Malaysian government sites were already down at about midnight last night, as we tried to access most of them and failed. At the time of writing, www.malaysia.gov.my but plenty are already restored. Read more…

In the world of internet marketing, having a successful Facebook page has become one of the key metrics. Besides being easy to track, maintain and update, social media gurus have a wealth of tools readily available to generate endless pages of numbers to justify a brand’s investment online.

Facebook has stressed that they will never charge money to access their site, be it for your personal page, or a business/brand page. But just how much does it cost to create a Facebook page in the first place? We have a few Facebook pages and we’re glad that it didn’t cost a cent to develop, apart from some people’s basic monthly salary. However, according to local alternative news sites like Malaysiakini and Free Malaysia Today, it costs close to RM300,000 (pictured above). Read more…

Last week 4G WiMAX service providers P1 became Malaysia and Southeast Asia’s first operator to join the ranks of the Global TD-LTE Initiative (GTI) to champion TD-LTE technology. The GTI is a platform formed to create value for stakeholders across the TD-LTE ecosystem and dive early adoption of TD-LTE technology. For the uninitiated, LTE is the next evolution of 4G technology that promises to deliver wireless speeds of up to 1Gbps. Market intelligence firm Maravedis reported that by the end of 2011, there will be approximately 40 countries represented by 110 operators with 2.5 to 2.6GHz spectrum allocation for TD-LTE. P1 is one of nine Malaysian companies allocated the 2.6GHz spectrum as announced in 2010.

Michael Lai, CEO of P1 explained, “For any technology to be cutting edge, there has to have mass adoption. The GTI consists of founding members who are heavyweights namely China Mobile, Bharti Airtel, Softbank Mobile, Clearwire and Vodafone Group. These operators collectively have a market potential of over half the world’s population. With its global scale, TD-LTE will also bring the widest selection and most cost effective high performance consumer devices like modems, routers, smart phones and tablets.”

To date, the total 20 members of GTI are Aero2-Poland, Belltell-Philippines, Bharti Airtel-India, China Mobile-China, Clearwire-USA, Datame-Finland, E-Plus – Germany,  FarEastone-Taiwan, FITEL-Taiwan, Korea Telecom-Korea, Omantel-Oman, Nextwave-USA, P1-Malaysia, Smoltelecom-Russia, SoftBank-Japan, Tatung Infocomm-Taiwan, Vividwireless-Australia,  Vodafone-UK, Voentelecom-Russia and Woosh-New Zealand.

SOURCE via Lowyat.NET

Yea, TM (both Streamyx and Unifi) and Maxis have started blocking those site listed by MCMC last night at 7pm. P1 WiMAX has also blocked these sites as of this morning. Maxis have implemented a DNS block that sends queries to the 10 websites to the localhost IP. At time of writing, the remaining ISPs namely Jaring, DiGi, Celcom, YES and Time have not implemented any blocks.

The current DNS block implemented by these ISP’s can be circumvented in a variety of ways as we’ve tested ourselves. Whether more stringent blocking methods will be implemented in the days to come remains to be seen.

More info at Lowyat.NET

Nokia is expected to suffer a major blow this quarter as Nomura analysts said that the company will lose its rank as largest smartphone manufacturer this quarter. For the first time in 15 years, Nokia will drop below competitors: Samsung will take the lead, followed by Apple and Nokia, Nomura said.

Nokia maintains that it will be launching Windows Phone 7 devices later this year, but the company has been criticized that it virtually destroyed its current sales potential by telling consumers that it will phase its Symbian operating system out. All current Nokia phones have, at least as far as platform support is concerned, little to no value. Nokia’s credibility is badly damaged these days and its sales appear to be in a free fall, as the company is not even providing a business outlook anymore. However, Microsoft will depend on Nokia to make Windows Phone 7 a success.

IDC mentioned in early May that Samsung had surpassed in mobile phone sales in Western Europe during the first quarter of this year. However, if Nomura’s forecast is correct, it now seems as if Nokia loses its global leadership in the fastest growing segment of the cell phone market.

SOURCE via Reuters

Apple has their iTunes on iCloud in iOS 5 already, and it seemed that HP is going to join aboard! According to Billboard.biz, HP’s discussions with the major record labels about a cloud-based service of some sort are now “heating up,” although that apparently doesn’t mean an actual launch is imminent.

One major label exec told Billboard that the service could be “something like Qriocity for a variety of media, which can be delivered on any HP device,” but added that “we don’t know how serious they are,” which isn’t exactly an encouraging thing to hear.

That uncertainty was echoed by other unnamed sources, who were reportedly unsure about how quickly HP could launch such a service (at least six months away, according to some), while one other said that HP is still “trying to narrow down what their service will look like.”

SOURCE via billboard.biz

It’s been a big weekend for hackers. Over the last month or so, Sony has been bombarded with attacks from hackers. However, Sony is not the only one under attack. Nintendo and the UK’s National Health Service have also gotten some attention as of late, though the breaches weren’t quite as damaging as the one that saw Sony lose the personal data of 77 million users. Over the last few days, Codemasters, Epic and the International Monetary Fund were added to the list of companies targeted by hackers. Read more…