I’ve been following developments at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week as I like ‘gadgets.’ Well, don’t we all!

Now that most smartphones are looking pretty much the same,
from a physical point of view, the manufacturers are going to be fighting harder for market share amongst each other. If companies such as Apple can’t block another manufacturer from selling in their markets through litigation, it’s going to be open warfare for market share, and to be more about what you can do with your smartphone.

At the MWC I noticed another push for remote control of household equipment, which seems to come around each year. Another technology lauded as adding value is NFC (Near Field Communications). Many smartphones already have NFC built in, and it’s been in use in several countries for some time. I’m concerned about some of the uses demonstrated at MWC. Security is a major issue for me, and if someone gets hold of your phone and uses the NFC they could charge goods and services to your account, or use the phone for identity theft. I didn’t see a demonstration of the security, so i’d like to know more, but as it stands, I like the concept, but I’m not keen on the execution. If NFC is built in to new smartphones I do hope it can be turned off.

In the meantime, i’ll keep watching the developments and the latest gadgets.

---

Last week's WebmasterWorld Weekly is here.

Here's this week's WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup.

This week we reported that Google's Offer Extensions, which pair ads in search result pages with Groupon-like deals and special discounts, is set to roll out to all advertisers by the end of February.



Twitter has stepped up its email authentication of twitter emails by employing Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, or DMARC. This will help fight against email spoofing and spam at providers such as AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and any other email receiver implementing DMARC. Find out more in our thread on the topic.




I heard that a Zendesk security breach affected Twitter, Tubmblr and Pinterest this week. Find out more in our thread.

It seems that Facebook critical bugs resulted in many months of page reach report errors. If these reports were important to you, find out how it's being resolved.





Google has hit out with a penalty at some UK newspapers and flower seller Interflora for failing to comply with its guidelines. Find out what they did wrong in our thread.

This week, major U.S. net providers launched a Copyright Alert System (CAS). It's the culmination of many months of work on this "groundbreaking and collaborative effort" to curb online piracy and promote the lawful use of digital music, movies and TV shows.


What's all this white space on Google AdSense 300 x 600 units? WebmasterWorld Members discuss a bug in Google AdSense's new 300x600 ad unit that causes an unattractive white space to dominate a web page.



There was a great question about converting and publishing old magazines and turning it into an online digital format. WebmasterWorld Members were discussing solutions on how best to convert a resource of printed magazines and turn them into a protected digital archive. Read about the solutions in our thread.




Google announced Google+ application sign-in which is claims is simpler, more secure, and excludes social spam. Find out more about this announcement in our post.




Microsoft said it was making IE10 for Windows 7 available in the coming week. If you've already got IE10 release preview you'll be the first to get notification.




Baidu is to reach out to English speaking developers with the announcement it'll be launching an English language site. If you aren't fluent in Chinese this new site can help you make your apps discoverable on Baidu's Mobile App Center.




There may be a serious Chrome prerender bug when using rel=next which may affect Google AdSense accounts. If you study how the prerender works you'll see where the problem may exist. Either way, prerending is a useful tool to speed browsing, but it causes all kinds of issues for webmasters and, apparently, may affect AdSense publishers. Read about it in our thread on the topic.

Is Twitter worth its $10 billion valuation? Take a look at the assessment and join the discussion.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer caused a bit of a stir this week by suggesting all it's staff should work at their desks and not from home. Can you be more productive from home, or do you believe you achieve more by working at the office.



Now that Instagram is publishing stats, it said this week it had more than 100 Million active users.


Google said this week it was extending it's Gmail search field trial, and anyone wanting to participate should submit a request. Find out more here.

An Italian court ruled this week that Google could not be expected to check every single upload. The court said, "The possibility must be ruled out that a service provider, which offers active hosting can carry out effective, pre-emptive checks of the entire content uploaded by its users,"

In another case in the EU, Google said the public should have access to "valid, legal content." Google's Head of Free Expression for Europe, the Middle East and Africa William Echikson, said, "There are clear societal reasons why this kind of information should be publicly available," continues Echikson. "People shouldn't be prevented from learning that a politician was convicted of taking a bribe, or that a doctor was convicted of malpractice. The substantive question before the Court today is whether search engines should be obliged to remove links to valid legal material that still exists online. We believe the answer to that question is no."

June last year, a security company alerted Google of a flaw in its two-stage login system. It seems Google finally plugged the hole.

Daily offers site, Groupon, has hit stormy waters when it reported a net loss of $81.1 million for Q4, with revenue up 30pc. It appears it's share price took a tumble by 26%.

There was a cPanel hack recently and the alerts are out that users should change root and account passwords immediately.

One other patch came through from Adobe releasing an emergency patch for Adobe Flash zero day exploit. Don't forget to update your system.

Google launched AdWords Editor 10.0 with enhanced campaign support, so if you use the editor, you'll be prompted to download the latest version.

Time for a video on a topical point. How much PageRank is lost through a 301? We have a discussion on the topic, and here's the supporting video by Matt Cutts.

---

Once again, I hope this week's round-up helped keep you up-to-date. If you've spotted some news that we haven't covered or discussed, drop me a message, or post it yourself and let me know.
Until next time, have a productive week!

Cheers
Neil
@engine

Follow WebmasterWorld on twitter. #webmasterworld or @webmasterworld

WebmasterWorld on Facebook.