Global roundup – this week’s top stories

Nokia releases N9

On 21 June, Nokia released its latest MeeGo-based smartphone, the N9. The N9 is Nokia’s first pure touch smartphone and it runs on Meego 1.2. The phone spots a curved glass 3.9 inch AMOLED display, a 8megapixel camera and comes with storage capacities of 16GB and 64GB.

“All it takes is a swipe!”, Nokia’s tagline for the N9 is in reference to the simplicity of navigating the phones features with a finger swipe. The N9’s display has 16:9 FWVGA (854×480 pixels) resolution. You can read Nokia’s blog post on the phone here. You can also read Engadget’s Nokia N9 hands-on review here.

Facebook hits 750 million active users

Through popular tech blog TechCrunch, news came out yesterday that Facebook has reached 750 million users globally. Facebook itself hasn’t confirmed this and the blogosphere generally believes Facebook plans to do an official update when they hit a billion. Facebook announced reaching 500 million users in July 2010 and in January this year had 600 million users. TechCrunch writer, Jason Kincaid notes that Facebook’s user count is based on users that actually logged into the social network in the last 30 days.

Mozilla releases Firefox 5

Version 5 of Firefox, the second most popular web browser after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, was released this week. The new Firefox is Mozilla’s first rapid-release version. A release will be coming out every 3 months from now on. While Firefox has managed to take on the dominant Microsoft Internet Explorer, it’s losing market share to Google’s Chrome.

More on the filter bubble

Talking about internet browsing, there was generally more talk about the filter bubble on the internet this week. DuckDuckGo, a search engine emphasising privacy and not tracking users, took advantage of this to graphically show just how (too) much personalized, and therefore biased, search results by Google and Bing are.

ICANN approves corporate web suffixes

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the creation of website addresses (domain names) ending in corporate names like .econet and .delta, to use local examples. Analysts have referred to this as one of the biggest shakeups of the domain naming structure since the introduction of domains.  The new address format has also received wide criticism as causing confusion to domain naming. You can read more about it here.

ICANN is responsible for managing the Internet Protocol address spaces and assigning of address blocks to regional Internet registries like Zimbabwe’s ZISPA.

Google building its own Skype into Chrome

CNET reported this week that after acquiring Global IP Solutions last year, the search giant is building its own audio and video chat software its Chrome web browser.

Google has part of the software, a project called WebRTC as open-source.

Google hits 1 billion unique visitors

Comscore, an Internet marketing research, announced this week that Google registered some 1 billion unique visitors to its web services in May this year.  Google effectively registered the most unique visitors on the internet. Second was Microsoft with 905 million people visiting its web properties. Facebook is third with 714 million and Yahoo followed with 689 million unique visitors.

ComScore obtains its numbers from a “global measurement panel” of 2 million Internet users. More here.`