Facebook has added a feature in its mobile phone app that allows free calling for US iPhone users.


Users can now make calls to each other via the Facebook Messenger app anywhere they have a wi-fi or a cellular-data connection. The feature could be a boon for heavy talkers as they would avoid carrier call charges. Facebook said it was working on adding the feature to its Messenger app for Android and BlackBerry users. Within the app, all a person needs to do is open a conversation with a partner, tap the "i" icon in the upper right hand corner and select "Free Call". The calls, however, can only be made to another user who has Messenger installed on their iPhone. Users can neither call a Facebook friend who is logged in through the website or call a landline. The latest mobile-to-mobile development was independent of the free video-calling software Skype, which was already integrated into Facebook's website, a spokesman said. The Messenger app is limited to voice calling. The official said Facebook was expected to roll out the feature in its Messenger app for other operating systems and expand it overseas. On Tuesday, Facebook unveiled a smart search engine - called Graph Search - that allows users to make "natural" searches of content shared by their friends.







17 January 2013 Last updated at 11:41
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21059611

Anger over huge phone bills caused by purchases made within mobile applications has grown.

Regulator PhonepayPlus has noted a 300% increase in complaints from consumers faced with an unexpectedly large phone bill. Many apps can be downloaded for free, but users are then encouraged to buy extra items. Other free apps contained malware that tricked users into running up bills, the regulator added. Children's "naivety" on social media was also causing concern among parents, PhonepayPlus said. The regulator said it was working with Facebook to make sure rogue offers and promotions were removed from the site as quickly as possible. In most mobile app stores, it is free games that make their way to the top of the most downloaded charts, so many games makers have opted for the in-app sales business model. Burning holes Many titles, such as the massively popular Angry Birds, give players the chance to progress more quickly in the game by spending small amounts of money. PhonepayPlus said its figures suggested that two in three 11- to 16-year-olds had downloaded their own apps. The regulator warned that parents could see bills of "hundreds or even thousands of pounds" as a result of these in-app purchases. In one of the more extreme cases, it was reported that children had downloaded counterfeit versions of games from Google's Android app store. These games were infected with malware which, whenever opened, billed £15 to the user's phone bill without their knowledge. PhonepayPlus' chief executive Paul Whiteing said parents must be vigilant. "Connected devices will define the age in which today's children live and we are determined to ensure that they can receive the benefits while being protected from the risks," he said. "Smartphones in children's pockets can burn holes in parents' wallets, so we are working with partners across industry and other agencies to prevent this. "This is a real challenge for parents and for us as a regulator, but this plan meets that challenge head on."











16 January 2013 Last updated at 12:11
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21042379

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided not to take legal action against Google at the end of a 19-month investigation into the search giant.

 It found Google had not biased its search results to favour its products. Google has agreed to give advertisers access to more information about their campaigns and has agreed not to use other providers' material such as product reviews in its search results. Google is still awaiting a competition ruling from the European Commission. Another key concession applies to how Google uses the patents it bought when it acquired Motorola Mobility last year for $12.5bn (£7.9bn). Google has said it will charge "fair and reasonable" rates to companies that need to use its standard essential patents. Standard essential patents are ones that are critical to industry standards, for example, the technology that allows devices such as smartphones and tablets to connect to the internet over wi-fi. It has agreed not to take out injunctions forcing licensees to remove their products from sale if there are disagreements about how much a fair rate should be. 'Disappointing and premature' Rivals had called for stronger sanctions to be taken against Google. Fairsearch, an organisation representing several of Google's critics such as Microsoft, said in a statement: "The FTC's decision to close its investigation with only voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature, coming just weeks before the company is expected to make a formal and detailed proposal to resolve the four abuses of dominance identified by the European Commission, first among them biased display of its own properties in search results." The FTC was asked to investigate whether Google was favouring its own products in search results. FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz told a press conference that the commission had found no evidence that Google's search engine was biased towards its own services.

 "Some may believe the commission should have done more, but for our part we do follow the facts where they lead," he said. "We do it with appropriate rigour. This brings to an end the investigation. It is good for consumers, it is good for competition and it is the right thing to do." One of the biggest changes to be implemented by Google will allow advertisers to copy ad campaign data to other search engines, such as Microsoft's Bing. Google is also promising that it will stop copying content from other websites to use in its summaries, even though the company had insisted the practice was legal under the fair-use provisions of US copyright law. In response to the settlement, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said in a blog post: "The US Federal Trade Commission today announced it has closed its investigation into Google after an exhaustive 19-month review that covered millions of pages of documents and involved many hours of testimony. "The conclusion is clear: Google's services are good for users and good for competition." Big fine It does not mean that the search giant is out of the woods on the issue of anti-competitive practices. Alongside the FTC investigation, Google is still under scrutiny from the European Union. In December, the EU's Competition Commission gave the search giant a month to address four key areas: the manner in which Google displays "its own vertical search services differently" from other, competing products how Google "copies content" from other websites - such as restaurant reviews - to include within its own services the "exclusivity" Google has to sell advertising around search terms people use restrictions on advertisers from moving their online ad campaigns to rival search engines Google is expected to respond to these concerns shortly. If found guilty of breaching EU anti-trust rules, Google would face a fine of up to $4bn (£2.5bn).












3 January 2013 Last updated at 22:14
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20899032

An ambitious plan to update classic space trading game Elite has hit its funding target.

The game first appeared on the BBC Micro in 1984 but one of the game's original creators wanted to make a modern PC version. David Braben sought £1.25m via crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter to fund the 21st century update. A last minute surge of pledges helped it reach its goal about 48 hours before Friday's funding deadline. Funding squeeze Elite: Dangerous debuted on Kickstarter on 5 November and set itself 60 days to raise £1.25m. In November, Mr Braben said Elite was a game he had wanted to come back to for a "long, long time". Although some early work on the multiplayer title had been done at Mr Braben's game studio Frontier Developments, but needed the cash to turn the code into a finished playable product. If the game did not hit its funding target then development work would stop.

 Getting the cash via Kickstarter was preferable to using an established publisher because it gave Frontier and those who backed it total control over how the final game would turn out, said Mr Braben, The finished game, he said, would keep the central trading, travel and spaceship combat elements of the original but add far better graphics, physics and feature a much larger chunk of the universe for people to play in. Fund tracking site Kicktraq showed that after an initial surge the number of people backing the project tailed off dramatically. On its second day on Kickstarter raised more than £271,000. However, soon after pledge totals rarely got over £10,000. A surge of pledges came forward in the closing few days of Elite's fund-raising drive thanks to an appearance on social news site Reddit by Mr Braben and with the help of comedian Dara O Briain who urged his 1.2 million Twitter followers to back it. "It is really great to have exceeded the goal already," Mr Braben told the BBC. "I was delighted and touched by how many people really want this game to be made, and it was doubly good that it happened on my birthday!" He said the Elite team were now pushing to reach "stretch" goals which would produce a Mac version of the game and add more ships to the game. "It was an ambitious target but that is so that it was set at a realistic level to be able to make the game," he said adding that watching the total pledges get close to the target made for a "tense time".












3 January 2013 Last updated at 11:41
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20897768