Flappy Bird Returns!

Today we are going to be covering several technology based news topics that you may find interesting or useful to know. One of the topics that have been the buzz on several news websites is flappy bird creator Dong Nguyen is re-releasing Flappy Bird this august with some new improvements including a multiplayer feature so that others can compete against each other. Dong Nguyen has also stated he is going to try and make the game less addicting, how exactly he is going to be doing that is unknown. But good fortune will come to Dong Nguyen, because of the mass hype of the first Flappy Bird game; it shouldn’t be hard to meet maximum sales within the month of the game being released.

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Facebook Buys Oculus

One of the biggest purchases of this week which surprised both me and the tech community was Facebook’s recent buyout of the Oculus Company and device. The Company was bought out for $400 million dollars in cash, $1.6 Billion in Facebook stock, and an additional $300 million will be given if the product meets certain performance quote. Although this may seem like a lot of money (which for any other person it is) I don’t believe the Facebook stock would be worth it. Facebook is a Social Media based website much like Myspace, it’s a fad that might die out in the future. If you look at a quote for the Facebook stock you’ll notice the odd traveling pattern for its odd stock pattern. But if I were to think about it in the long run, Facebook is a Company willing to make investments to make something better, so they could be the next Apple.

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How To Block Adverts on Facebook & Youtube

Blocking adverts on Facebook & Youtube is just as easy as blocking other ads on the internet. Simply Install and activate Adblock Plus.

The kinds of adverts you see on Youtube and Facebook are very different. On Youtube you get some banners, overlay adverts and video adverts. The video adverts are short videos played before content, I often find they are actually the same adverts I see on TV! The overlay adverts pop-up a little way into the video, can either be text or banner and obscure the video. That's exactly the kind of advert, one that obscures the content, that is explicitly forbidden in the Adblock Plus acceptable ads policy. Luckily all 3 of the ad types on Youtube get blocked by default with APB.

Facebook Adverts are something altogether different, they have 7 standard formats and many more supplemental formats. Blocking all of those is a bit more complicated, luckily Adblock and their awesome community have you covered.

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Facebook to Acquire Instagram for 1$ Billion

The CEO of FaceBook Mark Zuckerberg updated his FaceBook status which informed us that FaceBook will acquire Instagram for 1$ Billion. That's exactly what Mr.Zuckerberg wrote:

"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."

Since people learned about this, they started complaining because whatever Facebook buys, it "destroys it".

What do you think? Will this collaboration of FaceBook and Instagram have a good or a bad outcome? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.   

Source: FaceBook

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Review: Joby GorillaPod

The Joby GorillaPod is certainly a great tripod if you don't mind the size. It is very sturdy, flexable and most of all, fun! This tripod isn't ment to be used for serious photography as it is very lightweight, but for taking the odd photo or video, this is a great little accessory. There are many colours available for the Joby GorillaPod, these include the following:

• White (as shown on video)
• Yellow
• Red
• Green
• Pink
• Blue 
• Orange

The advantages to this mini tripod is that you can wrap it round more or less everything with it's bendy legs. In the video shown above, I had the tripod wrapped around my monitor (Acer S243HL), lampshade and also my guitar! It is seriously amazing. I also like how cheap the GorillaPod is, on Amazon UK , you can buy this tripod for just £11.70! This is a bargain. The third thing I like about this tripod is the large variety of colours, they look great.

The disadvanteges to the Joby GorillaPod is that it is literally tiny! Also, when you bend the legs, it tends to nip your skin, which is very annoying! But other than that, I can't complain!

Over all, I give this tripod a 9 out of 10!

Buy - "Joby GorillaPod" 

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