iPod innovator leaves Apple

Tony Fadell, who is said to have contributed greatly to the creation of the Apple iPod and iPhone, is officially leaving Apple after a nine-year collaboration with CEO Steve Jobs, reports eWeek.

According to The New York Times, Fadell had an idea for a hard-drive-based digital music player in 1990s, with which he approached RealNetworks.

After clashing with Rob Glaser, RealNetworks' chief executive, Fadell instead brought the idea to Apple in 2001.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency in 2008, he promised that, as president, he would "strengthen privacy protections for the digital age," states CNET.

Whether his administration supports a new privacy proposal released by a coalition including Google, eBay, Microsoft, AT&T, the ACLU, and Americans for Tax Reform will put Obama's two-year-old pledge to the test.

The group is calling for a federal law requiring police to obtain search warrants before tracking Americans' cellphone locations, or accessing their e-mail and documents stored in the cloud -positions that place its members squarely at odds with the Obama Justice Department.

Twitter has given its homepage a makeover with the intention of giving first-time visitors a better idea of what the microblogging and social networking site is, and of the value it can provide, beyond being just a repository of status updates, writes PCWorld.

In addition to a layout redesign, Twitter.com now features a column of recent "tweets", selected by importance and quality through algorithms and refreshed after a few seconds.

Also new is a showcase of celebrities and other public figures with Twitter accounts, as well as a list of hot trends that scrolls across the home page.

Social media tools will contribute to shaping public opinion in the lead up to the election, but will not become an integral part of core campaigning strategies in the UK, according to Ovum, says Computing.co.uk.

The analyst firm says Web sites such as Twitter and Facebook still have some way to go until they play a significant role in the electoral campaigning processes.

Ovum adds that the broadcast of the chancellors' debate and the upcoming leaders' debates make it far more likely that 2010 will be remembered as "TV election" year, rather than a period when politics pressed ahead with well-structured social media campaigns.