Microsoft Buys Yammer For $1.2 Billion

Microsoft is buying Yammer for $1.2 billion for office application suite. Basically Yammer is a social network which was launched in september 2008. Yammer is used for communication within a organization and it is a private enterprise social network. Yammer is used by 3 million users and 80,000 companies across the world.

Yammer will remain to run in its San Francisco headquarters by its CEO David Sacks. Yammer will continue its service and  provide its deal with Microsoft separately.


Yammer is similar to Facebook, Yammer connection in a organization or a company by posting ans sharing.

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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan make surprise cameo on

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have inadvertently appeared in a TV documentary in China after a recent holiday in the country.

The couple, who married earlier this month, made a brief and unintentional appearance in a documentary about China's police force while on vacation in Shanghai in March.

In the progamme that was recently broadcast on Chinese television, Mr Zuckerberg and Miss Chan can be seen strolling hand in hand down a busy street behind two officers.

The footage shows the couple wearing the same clothes they were photographed in during a March 27 visit to Shanghai. Zuckerberg wears his custom hooded sweat shirt, this time in brown, and blue jeans, while Chan wears a printed short dress

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg marries girlfriend Priscilla Chan

NEW YORK: Facebook's billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg updated his relationship status on his social networking site to 'married' - after he tied the knot with his long time girlfriend 27-year-old Priscilla Chan in a private ceremony at his California home.




The surprising move came just a day after Facebook went public through one of the largest initial public offerings and its shares began trading on the Nasdaq.

Zuckerberg wrote about the big event in his life on his Facebook timeline, with a status update that read, "Married Priscilla Chan" on May 19.

The ceremony took place in Zuckerberg's backyard at his Palo Alto home in California before fewer than 100 guests on Saturday. An accompanying picture shows a smiling Zuckerberg dressed in a simple dark blue suit, white shirt and wearing a tie. Chan is in an elegant sleeveless laced white wedding gown with a veil falling over her shoulders. A string of bulbs are hung in the background which is Zuckerberg's backyard.

The picture got over 131,000 likes within the first 30 minutes of Zuckerberg posting the status update.

The couple met at Harvard and have been together for more than nine years. Chan's Facebook page also had the updated relationship status with the message "married to Mark Zuckerberg."

The marriage capped an extremely eventful week for the couple. Zuckerberg celebrated his 28th birthday on Monday, May 14. Days later Facebook, which was founded by Zuckerberg in 2004 in his Harvard dorm, became went public through an IPO that pegged the value of the world's most popular social network site at 104 billion dollars.

The same week Chan graduated from the University of California, San Francisco. Chan studied medicine and is now a pediatrician. On her graduation day, Zuckerberg had written on his Facebook page, "I am so proud of you Dr Chan."
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Airtel and Reliance blocked video sharing sites on court order

CHENNAI: Outrage and confusion ruled the internet on Thursday after some internet service providers (ISPs) like Airtel and Reliance Communications pulled the plug on websites apparently hosting copyrighted material following a court order. 

The ban was noticed after users were greeted with the message 'access blocked as per court orders' when they tried to open video sharing websites like Vimeo and DailyMotion.com. Torrent sites like Isohunt.com, thepiratebay.org, torrentz.eu and kat.ph also remained inaccessible in most parts of the country. When contacted, Airtel said: "Access to certain sites has been blocked pursuant to and in compliance with court orders." 

Though the ISPs didn't make it clear which court orders they were acting upon, Chennai-based Copyright Labs said the ban was the result of two John Doe orders they obtained from the Madras high court recently. A John Doe order is issued when the identity of the defendant is not known. In this case, Copyright Labs approached the HC on behalf of the producers of Tamil movie '3' and Telugu film 'Dammu' to take pre-emptive action against those who might create pirated versions of their movies and put them up on the internet. 

Recently, Reliance Entertainment had got a similar order from the Delhi high court directing all ISPs to block video-sharing websites to protect its upcoming films. In January, the United States department of justice shut down the file-hosting site Megaupload.com and commenced criminal cases against its owners for copyright infringements. 

The court order for '3', which was passed on March 29, restrained 15 ISPs, including BSNL, MTNL, Idea, Vodafone and Tikona, from violating the copyrights of the producer. "We sent the orders to all ISPs. This was followed up with letters in which we specified the names of websites that host content illegally. Once the movies were released, we sent another letter specifying the URLs identifying the location of the pirated copies of the movies," said Harish Ram, CEO of Copyright Labs. 

Ram said the response was poor and the ISPs acted only on Thursday. "Also, we specifically asked them to block the URLs and not the websites. They are acting nearly 40 days after the release of '3' and the way they went about it has created confusion," he said. The ISPs must have decided to act as the company is pursuing a contempt of court petition after the delay in implementing the earlier orders, he said. 

Deborah Szajngarten, communications director of US-based Vimeo, said in an email response: "We are working to obtain documentation as to why our service may have been blocked, as we have yet to receive any official notice. We are ready to work with the relevant parties to understand the issue and restore access to affected users as soon as possible." 

Luc Dumont, SVP of International Development at Dailymotion, said: "We are trying to find out more about the reasons for this but there is a lot of confusion at the moment. We will talk to the ISPs about their reasons for this." Internet users are outraged. "Piracy hurts but this attempt has a flawed logic behind it," said a New Delhi-based netizen who didn't want to be named. "It's equal to saying let's ban all traffic on the roads because some drivers break rules," he said. 

"Piracy needs to be tackled but the problem here was with the way the law was applied to block a website as it contained some illegal links," said Na Vijayashankar, cyber law expert and director of Cyber Law College in Bangalore. "Those who have uploaded videos on sites like Vimeo after paying money will be affected," he said. 

Meanwhile, seasoned hackers went about their business as usual, with streaming and downloading content after bypassing the blocks. 
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Facebook Acquires Instagram For $1 Billion

Zuckerberg first announced on his Facebook timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Instagram was released a little more than two years ago as on iOS-only photo sharing application. It quickly rose in popularity, and an app for Android users was released recently as well.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom also commented on the deal on the company’s blog:

When Mike and I started Instagram nearly two years ago, we set out to change and improve the way the world communicates and shares. We’ve had an amazing time watching Instagram grow into a vibrant community of people from all around the globe. Today, we couldn’t be happier to announce that Instagram has agreed to be acquired by Facebook.

Every day that passes, we see more experiences being shared through Instagram in ways that we never thought possible. It’s because of our dedicated and talented team that we’ve gotten this far, and with the support and cross-pollination of ideas and talent at a place like Facebook, we hope to create an even more exciting future for Instagram and Facebook alike.

It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’l be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.

The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love. You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you.You’ll still be able to share to other social networks. And you’ll still have all the other features that make the app so fun and unique.

We’re psyched to be joining Facebook and are excited to build a better Instagram for everyone

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