A 15-year-old schoolboy in Britain was killed in a merciless attack with samurai swords and machetes that was apparently planned on social networking website Facebook.

Sofyen Belamouadden was hunted down by an armed group of 20 teenagers before being stabbed nine times during rush hour at Victoria station, jurors at the Old Bailey court were told.

The mobile applications industry will be ruled by Apple and Android mobile operating systems in the coming years and the mobile application store sale is expected to hit $15 billion in 2011, a new Gartner study reveals. The dramatic rise in sales is mainly due to the popularity of iPad and other tablet computers.

The total revenue made from mobile application downloads in 2010 was about $5.2 billion. The research firm predicts that the trend will continue to rise and in the next three years, the mobile app industry revenue will touch $58 billion.

Apple has released a maintenance and stability update for iTunes - media-playing, iOS-device-syncing and app-shopping tool. The company's press release says "iTunes 10.1.2 provides a number of important stability and performance improvements."

iTunes 10.1.2 delivers certain improvements and support for the soon-to-be-released CDMA-based Verizon iPhone. The debut date for CDMA iPhone on Verizon is on February 10.

Today we are on the verge of a time when app-capable non-PC devices will out ship PCs. The mobile sector will be the main growth driver, with mobile voice revenue advancing at a 8.1 percent CAGR in India during the 2010-15 period (in contrast to 2.7 percent for Asia-Pacific as a whole) and mobile data service revenue growing at a 27.3 percent CAGR during the same period. What ruling the picture today are mobile phone and its close cousin, mobile apps. Technologies like 4G and LTE, Near Field Communication (NFC) will witness increasing amount of hype in 2011, and as a result of it, the use of mobile/social/location combinations will soar. Adding to it, recent industry reports from InMobi and Synovate have revealed that consumers are showing a greater inclination towards receiving mobile advertising and marketing messages. So what are the fresh mobile trends that the coming year has in its store for us? Here are the five that topped our list. 


1. More personalized mobile marketing:



Thanks to the popular portable smart devices and advances in wireless technologies, mobile marketing is increasing quickly. Short message is regarded as one of the most efficient modes of mobile marketing. While mobile advertising boosts communication with consumers, the messages without a required permission from users cause privacy violations. But the adoption of more translucent and permission-based marketing will increase the credibility of mobile as an effective marketing tool. 

 Hyper-fast quantum computers have edged a step closer to reality after scientists generated 10 billion quantum bits in silicon for the first time.

The achievement in silicon, the basis of the computer chip, has important implications for integration with existing technology, according to a team of researchers.

 Giving importance to online privacy are Google and Mozilla who have initiated a new feature in their browsers, Chrome and Firefox, which lets users to choose if online advertisers can track their activities online or not.Mozilla has formally announced that future Firefox versions will come with a built-in do-not-track feature. On the other hand, an extension called Keep My Opt-Outs has been released by Google for its Chrome browser. Through this, the users can permanently opt out their Chrome browser out of online ad personalization via cookies.

Scientists have developed a new phone application to identify potential paedophiles. The software, called Child Defence, enables kids to scan webchat on their mobile phones to verify the age of people they are messaging.

Designed by Isis Forensics based in Lancaster University, the software uses the latest advances in technology to identify language quirks peculiar to different age groups, a Daily Mail report said.