Adam:

“HP have decided that they are not now going to sell their PC business (after making a loss with a firesale on a load of TouchPads). New boss Meg Whitman is picking up the pieces after Leo Apotheker’s rule of terror cost the firm 40% of it’s value and £7bn buying Autonomy ‘focusing the strategy on software and cloud services’.”

Dave:

“‘I’ve finally cracked it!’ Steven P. Jobs, co-founder of Apple, told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.Hot on the heels of the 4S launch, Nick Bilton of the New York Times ponders a Siri enabled television set for late 2012.

Mike:

“Apart from Stallman’s hilarious ‘rider’ demands which did the rounds earlier in the week, the story which stood out for me was this one about paid (or not?) tweets. I can’t even work out any more whether this was deliberate, paid, not-paid, satire, serious…but nonetheless it’s an interesting little story.”

Liam:

“My news is more of a totally cool thing this week. Vitamin T have produced a rather sexy infographic showing a brief history of web standards that’s a really interesting read – complete with fonts for each year stamp which were produced in that year. It’s cool to see how far we’ve come since 1962, and where we’ll be in another 50 years!”

Andrew:

“A great example of the power of social news networks emerged this week when Reddit user zambuka42 posted his positive experience with Amazon customer service and decided to share it on a sub forum of the popular social news site. The story eventually hit the front page and has since recieved hundreds of thousands of views from around the internet.

After ordering merchandise to be delivered to his parent’s house, it was subsequently lost by the postal service and so the Reddit user contacted Amazon customer support to try and find out if he was able to re-order the items without having to manually add everything again.

A screenshot of the conversation is here http://i.imgur.com/aDVuC.jpg

After hearing the user’s predicament, the customer service rep chose to offer to refund the full cost of the lost order, despite the fact that it was the USPS that lost the order.

It is interesting to wonder whether Amazon’s customer service division are purposefully instructed to offer such brilliant service in the hopes of priceless positive advertising such as this going viral, and if not they surely soon will be!”

Adam:

“Now that the furore around Mike Arrington, TechCrunch, CrunchFund and AOL has died down, the nails are quickly being nailed in the TC coffin. Arrington has, as expected, setup his new blog, Uncrunched (ouch!) where he intends to continue blogging about start-ups and life in Silicon Valley. Arrington 1, AOL nill.

Paul Carr has also left TechCrunch to start a publishing start-up, funded by CrunchFund. 2-0. But that’s all old news. The killer came this week as CrunchFund announced MG Siegler would be be joining its ranks, taking a much reduced role at TC. 3-0. Game, set and match Arrington.”

Paul:

“The Italian branch of Wikipedia shut down for several days in protest at an utterly clueless and bat-shit mental new law that is currently being debated. The law requires website operators to change any content that an individual believes is detrimental to their image, without any kind of judge oversight or need for proof. Amendments to the law are in the works, but it’s still not clear if they will pass and what the end result will be.

Also: It would appear that the clue missing in Italy has turned up at Amazon, who acknowledged this week that their new tablet, the Fire, will be hacked and rooted, and they don’t plan on trying to stop it (although it’ll probably void your warranty)…

Finally: …the home of very large amounts of clue during World War II, the Bletchley Park code-breaking station, is to receive £4.6m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, so long as they can raise an additional £1.7m from other sources. The money will be used to preserve the fabric of the site (especially the code breaker huts), and improve the visitor experience in general.”

Mike:

“Less news, more a thought: Do Less and Do It Slowly“

Liam:

“Siri, write me a news post”

…Liam was confused by people not understanding that the iPhone 4S is the iPhone 5 (not to mention the shameless ripping off by Apple of Google Latitude…). Meanwhile, he bookmarked: Amazon’s new Kindle without keyboard now shipping in the UK (but apparently UK folks don’t get the Kindle Touch, or ad-supported Kindles). He also discovered the reasonably awsome Layer Styles which lets you use a Photoshop-like web interface to build complex CSS3 shadows and borders. Nice!

Layer Styles: nice. New iCal design: not nice. Nicola: “REVOLTING. It’s not Apple’s sexy style, looks dated and ugly – it has ‘stitching’…”. Ouch.

Andrew’s bookmarks included this Smashing Magazine blog post on Conversation Techniques for Designers which he says will come in handy as he spends more time liaising with clients than doing design work…

Paul tells me it’s been another bad week for security: Russian software company Elcomsoft announced that they could recover Blackberry device passwords, while a massive security hole in HTC’s Android phones allows any app with permission to talk to the internet to extract any private information from the phone…

From Adam: “Cube is really neat looking open-source system for visualizing time series data created by disruptive credit card processing start-up Square. It let’s you really easy build a realtime dashboard of anything that can be tracked over time. It uses some very clever data processing techniques to deliver results as quickly as possible. It’s definitely a library I’m now looking for a reason to use!”

And finally – from me, another stunning example of how Amazon is building fiercely loyal customers by going way beyond the call of duty with their customer service. I’ve had a similar experience with the ‘zon when my Kindle case malfunctioned – instant phone call, totally intelligent customer service person, instant money back into my account. This is how it should be done…

Cake fine? Clearly it should be Dave for 1) Failing to contribute and 2) Being on holiday :-)

Liam:

“This week I became increasing concerned by Facebook’s policies and privacy, with various changes coming up which are concerning. The biggest of these for me is Facebook’s request to form a PAC, or Political Action Committee. This will give Facebook the power to give money to political candidates they choose, as well as collect money to funnel into political candidates. Facebook stores an awful lot of data on people and trends which could be very useful for someone standing for political office, and it worries me that my data could be used that way.”

Adam:

“This week saw Amazon unveil their new Kindle lineup including the Kindle Fire – their first offering in the tablet market. At a ridiculously competitive price and with all of Amazon’s content ready to purchase I think it’s sure to be a success. But there was one feature of their announcement that caught my even more. Their new web browser, Amazon Silk. Silk is a split browser, part on the device, part in the cloud. Nobody has worked out quite what will happen where, when it’ll do it or won’t and how the magic occurs. We just know that Amazon say webpages will load faster. Lovely.

However, this does raise a couple of questions. Firstly, as web developers, we have Yet Another Bloody Browser to test in when we launch a new site. Silk is based on the WebKit rendering engine, so hopefully it will be sane, but browser manufacturers love to changes things just enough to piss us off. The second question concerns privacy. With Silk, Amazon is, by default, receiving and interpreting the content of every page you look at – including encrypted traffic. This may trouble you personally or you may not care – but the Data Protection Act will probably have something to say about it. The legality of Silk is being raised as a potential reason for it’s no show outside of the US. Time will tell.”

Paul:

“Google made those of us who remember when it burst onto the search scene and promptly wiped out the competition feel very old, by turning 13. They celebrated in the usual way with a doodle. Storm favourite B3ta.com also chose to celebrate it – in their own inimitable style…

Also on my list: Stripe.com launched their new developer friendly payment platform that doesn’t require a merchant account, but costs about the same as PayPal and has an exceptionally nice APi, with lots of client libraries already available. Fingers crossed this will help shake up an industry that seems to think that excessive charges, awful APIs and terrible user experience is somehow ok.”

Dave:

“Well everybody likes winning really don’t they! One offline thing we’ve all really liked this week was our evening at Bath Racecourse for the Bath Business Awards. We came away finalists in both the Small Business and New Business categories, and I was lucky enough to pick up Young Business Person of the Year – which goes to show what a fantastic team we have here, without whom I wouldn’t have stood a chance. You can read a little more about it over on the Storm site.”

Andrew:

“My winner for ‘Mildly amusing shitstorm over nothing’ award this week goes to the Carsonified hiring-a-designer debacle that sprung up yesterday.
Part of the application process for the job was to design and code a one page dashboard app. It seems that a number of designers took exception to being asked to do what they deemed ‘spec work’ and the fact that some people already busy with client work would be ruled out of the running was also raised. My take on the issues? Suck it up. For such a fine opportunity you should be prepared to go above and beyond the call of duty, your present circumstances be damned. I think it is a brilliant test of somebody’s talents to be asked to design something on the fly, and is definitely a technique i will be using in future Storm interviews”

Mike:

“Well, given that Adam chose to write about Silk (dammit, I wanted that one…!), and Liam stole the endless rant interesting paragraph I had composed about Facebook….

I guess the thing that caught my eye this week was probably news that everyone’s favourite browser – Chrome – is likely to take 2nd most popular browser spot sometime in December 2011. Pretty impressive stuff, although when you consider how blazingly fast it is, maybe not a huge surprise…”

The program, which allows users to share digital media files across multiple devices, breaks the Apple iTunes DRM copy protection allowing files purchased from the iTunes music store to be played on music players other than the iPod.

“The digital media landscape has become a tower of Babel, alienating and frustrating consumers. Our goal is to provide a simple and well integrated solution that the average consumer can use to eliminate the headaches associated with their expanding digital universe” said Monique Farantzos, co-founder of DoubleTwist.

According to DoubleTwist, around 100 songs can be converted to a DRM free format for other devices in little over 30 minutes.

So what do we think about this? Well, I think its fantastic. Here in the UK, the price of a single song is higher than for example the States (currently £0.79 or $1.50 in the UK v $0.99 in the US) and for my money I expect to be able to do what I like with my music.

As for the effect this will have on the music industry..? Maybe it will convince iTunes to fall in line with the rapidly growing list of providers of DRM free such as Amazon (US only at the time of this post) and if so, it looks like its simply speeding up the inevitable sweep towards freedom of sharing.