If you have been in school in the last couple of years, there is most likely a huge chance you have used the popular e-learning CMS program called Moodle. With the help of Packt Publishing, who is notorious from writing about open source projects like Moodle, they have taken it to the next level.

With their brand new release of Moodle 2 Administration not too long ago, Packt has now decided to offer a series of discounts towards their Moodle book collection.

• Buy any Moodle print book and get 20% off
• Buy any Moodle eBook and get 30% off

After the massive failures from the JooJoo tablet and now the Grid 10, Fusion Garage might have disappeared in thin air. The first sign of the disappearance was that their website went down, reporting the 503 database error. As of right now, the website is barely up: certain images won’t load on the site, and when you go to their online store, the button for purchasing a Grid 10 said: “We are currently running out of stock. Thank you.” Also, Fusion Garage hasn’t posted any new content on their Twitter and Facebook feeds, due to the fact that their PR team ditched the company. Here’s a statement from one of FG’s employees:

Unfortunately, none of our efforts have resulted in any communication from the company to the customers. Given all of this, we don’t have any other choice but to cease working with FG effective tomorrow. (Source: Engadget)

While it’s sad to see a small company disappear, it’s hard to be sympathetic when Fusion Garage delivers so little to the market. A great example of this was the JooJoo tablet. It offered some features that the iPad doesn’t have, but ultimately failed because of it’s performance and the web-only UI. Best of all (not really on Fusion Garage’s part), they discontinued the JooJoo after only having 90 pre-orders for the device. Wow.

It’s been less than a year since the Mac App Store was launched by Apple, back in January. Already, the technology giant is celebrating a relatively significant milestone, being 100 million downloads. In comparison to the iOS app store, the number is completely diminished, but considering that Macs have a much smaller market share than their iPhone and iPad counter-parts, it’s a pretty impressive landmark.

The Mac App Store is “home to thousands of apps”, Apple claims – I certainly love using it, what about you?

Here’s the official press release:

 Apple’s Mac App Store Downloads Top 100 Million

CUPERTINO, California-December 12, 2011-Apple® today announced that over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac® App Store™ in less than one year. With thousands of free and paid apps, the Mac App Store brings the App Store experience to the Mac so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes® account, and download and install them in just one step. Apple revolutionized the app industry with the App Store, which now has more than 500,000 apps and where customers have downloaded more than 18 billion apps and continue to download more than 1 billion apps per month.

“In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.”

“With Autodesk products in both the App Store and Mac App Store, we can reach hundreds of millions of Apple users around the world,” said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of Platform Solutions and Emerging Business at Autodesk. “With our free AutoCAD WS and the more powerful professional drafting tools of AutoCAD LT, we’re using the Mac App Store to deliver new products and reach a growing base of new Mac customers.”

“The Mac App Store has unparalleled reach and has completely transformed our distribution and development cycle,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “Offering Pixelmator 2.0 exclusively on the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates to our image editing software and stay ahead of the competition.”

“In less than one year we’ve shifted the distribution of djay for Mac exclusively to the Mac App Store,” said Karim Morsy, CEO of algoriddim. “With just a few clicks, djay for Mac is available to customers in 123 countries worldwide. We could never have that reach through traditional channels.”

The Mac App Store offers thousands of apps in Education, Games, Graphics & Design, Lifestyle, Productivity, Utilities and other categories. Users can browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what’s hot, see staff favorites, search categories and look up top charts for paid and free apps, as well as user ratings and reviews. The Mac App Store is included with Mac OS® X Lion and is available as a software update for any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard®. For more information visit, www.apple.com/mac/app-store.

Mac developers set the prices for their apps, keep 70 percent of the sales revenue, are not charged for free apps and do not have to pay hosting, marketing or credit card fees. To find out more about developing for the Mac App Store visit, developer.apple.com/programs/mac.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

Written Upon the Steam forums, Gabe Newell, Valve’s CEO/President, has notified users of the recent attacks.

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

Newell strongly recommends that you reset your password for both the forums and the Steam service as well as check credit card statements for possible fraudulent activities. Steam/Valve have not yet released an official statement on the attacks.

Today, Motorola officially unveiled the Xoom 2 and Xoom 2 Media Edition tablets. They’re destined for the UK and Ireland, and will come out with Android Honeycomb 3.2.

The Xoom 2 is nothing particularly special when compared to the tonne load of other Android tablets on the market. It features a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. It’s also rocking a 5 mega-pixel camera on the back, with a 1.3 mega-pixel shooter on the front. On board, it has Motorola’s new Splash-guard protection, which claims to offer spillage safety.

The Xoom 2 Media Edition, is almost identical to the Xoom 2, but has a smaller 8.2-inch display, rather than the full 10.1-inch. I honestly don’t see why companies do this. In my mind, a tablet should be around the 10-inch mark. Any smaller, and you’re starting to loose the initial point of a tablet, but maybe that’s just me.

It’s also worth noting that Motorola are including stylus technology. Similar to what HTC and Samsung have pushed out this year, it should provide ‘pin-point’ accuracy for accurate note-taking.

Motorola are claiming that the two new tablets have 20% better graphics performance than the original Xoom as well. You can expect to get your hands on it, if you’re in the UK or Ireland, sometime ‘mid-November’.

Extract from the press release:

London - Building on the success of Motorola XOOM™, Motorola Mobility is rocking the tablet world yet again with two additions that bring enhanced experiences to the European market. Wi-Fi variants of the Motorola XOOM 2™ and Motorola XOOM 2 Media Edition™ — boasting powerful productivity, rich entertainment and customizable experiences — are now available: the answer to consumers looking for a tablet that can keep up with their lifestyle. Both tablets will be available at Carphone Warehouse in the UK and Ireland, as well as Best Buy, Dixons, PC World and Currys in the UK.

This morning, HTC announced their earnings for Q3. They have beaten their records from previous quarters by a large margin, and shown incredible growth, with shipments up a huge 93% compared to last quarter.

Revenue for the period was NT$136 billion (up 79%, approx: $4.54 billion), leading the net income for the quarter to NT$18.68 billion (approx: $625 million).

The largest area of growth was, interestingly, in China. Sales there increased by over nine times the period last year.

Altogether, the company shipped 13.2 million units. Those numbers are set to grow, with Q4 predictions leading the way with further records for the ever-growing company.

Thoughts? Did you buy an HTC product in the last few months?

After a long period of wait, the heavily leaked Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7 are finally beginning to see the light of day. The company promised to deliver such handsets earlier this year, and since then, numerous sources have leaked photos and videos. But a short time ago, two Nokia devices were announced, powered by Windows Phone 7.5.

The Nokia Lumia 800 is the flagship device for Nokia heading into the Holiday season. It’s been dubbed as “the first real Windows Phone”, and features a 3.7-inch ClearBlack AMOLED curved display (480×800). Inside, you’ll find a decent punch – 1.4GHz Qualcomm CPU and 16GB of storage (which is backed up by 25GB of free SkyDrive space in the cloud).

The Lumia 800 also has an eight mega-pixel camera, which is packing a f/2.2 aperture. Nokia cameras always deliver, so I’m looking forward to see how this one performs.

Finally, the Lumia 800 has quad-band GSM, so you’ll be getting HSDPA data speeds up to 10.2MBPS. It’s available for pre-order now, and is set to roll out in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, UK and Spain some time in November. Hong Kong, India, Russia and Taiwan will get it before the end of the year, and will hit “further markets” sometime next year. The price is 420 euros/approx. £400 ($585).

The Nokia Lumia 710 is the less exposed of the two, but still sports some of the fantastic features of the 800. It’s got the same 1.4GHz CPU, and features a 3.7-inch ClearBlack display. It comes in black or white varieties, with removable back covers.  It should hit the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain in November for 270 euros ($375) in November, and additional markets by the end of the year and through to 2012.

UPDATE (10/15/11): The port in the video above was rough to say the least but, a video (below) was uploaded showing a much smoother experience. The problem of server side system verification is the next hurdle to jump over.

Today, the day after the company he co-founded back in 1976, released the next generation of their mobile devices Steve Jobs has died. It is a rare and unfortunate time where we are able to look back at all the world has gained due to such a person’s contributions. Jobs recently laid the future of Apple in the hands of Tim Cook, after his second extended medical leave from Apple. His death, is assumed to be related to complication with his fight against pancreatic cancer. As a team, we wish only the best to Steve’s wife and family, friends as well as his co-workers. He will be missed.

If you would like to voice your condolences Apple has set up an email just for that: rememberingsteve@apple.com

Steve Jobs’ family has released a statement:

Steve died peacefully today surrounded by his family.

In his public life, Steve was known as a visionary; in his private life, he cherished his family. We are thankful to the many people who have shared their wishes and prayers during the last year of Steve’s illness; a website will be provided for those who wish to offer tributes and memories.

We are grateful for the support and kindness of those who share our feelings for Steve. We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief.

Today, Apple announced the continuation to the iPhone line. The iPhone 4S was unveiled, after tons of rumors and speculations.

The iPhone 4S is just like the iPhone 4 in design, being just that it’s a slight difference in weight. It’s also featuring the fabulous A5 processor, and an 8 megapixel camera. The 8 megapixel camera shoots in 1080p, producing great video’s!

It also has some great battery improvements, 8 hours talk time on 3G, 14 hours talk time on 2G, 6 hours of data on 3G, 9 hours data on WiFi, 40 hours audio, 10 hours video.

So what do you think of the new iPhone? Did you think it was going to be the iPhone 5 and not the 4S?

You can get the Xperia Ray for $450 without a contract and on Newegg for $350.

Apple finally announced the iPhone 5 event date and honestly I can not wait for it! Apple has the date scheduled for October 4th at 10AM at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif. campus. It’s very clear that the event is all about the iPhone as you can see in the invite that they sent out.

So what do you think will be new in the iPhone 5 when it comes out? Other than iOS 5.

During Facebook’s F8 speech on September 22 in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new Facebook feature, the Timeline. Mark stated that the timeline will basically be a part of all 800 million user’s life scrapbooking their content throughout the day they were born and the current day.

Mark also stated what he thinks of the Timeline:

We wanted to make Timeline a place that you could feel proud to call your home. -Mark Zuckerberg

Not only did Mark address the new features, but F8 was also for the web-developers out there. During the conference, Mark mentioned of some of your favorite applications and services like Nike+ that will connect into the Timeline using their next version of Open Graph.

We’re going to connect all of those different graphs together to form the Open Graph, and when we connect all of those graphs together, the Web is going to get a whole lot better. -Mark Zuckerberg

Now I know what you’re thinking, how do I get it before release? Well, it’s very simple! Just do the following to make yourself a developer on Facebook and activate the new Timeline feature. Please note though, only developers will be able to see your new Timeline once you make it live.

• Enable developer mode. To do this, search for “developer” in the Facebook search box at the top, click the first result, and add the app into your account.
• Go to the app if you aren’t there. To get there, just go to the following line: https://developers.facebook.com/apps
• Create a new application. No, you really won’t be using this nor will anyone else will see it. Just fill out the app name, display name, and namespace that works for you. I probably wouldn’t write anything bad in there though…
• Do the legal stuff! Go ahead and agree to the Platform Privacy agreement to get your app verified by Facebook.
• Visit the apps settings page. Your app’s name should be near the top of the page.
• Enable Open Graph. Look for the Open Graph header and click on the “Get Started using open graph” text.
• Create the action and object. I’d just go for “play” a “game” or something like that…
• Save it out. You’re almost there! Just go ahead and save the object.
• Wait about 2-3 minutes. Now you simply need to wait for Facebook to recognize your account as an Open Graph developer…
• Click on your invite! You’ll see an invite on the main Facebook homepage (all of your walls of your friends…). Don’t be shy, accept it!

Just over a month ago, I wrote a post here talking about HTC’s $300 million investment into Beats Audio. HTC promised to bring Beats to phones very soon, and they didn’t disappoint. The HTC Sensation XE brings a host of new features over the original HTC Sensation (4G).

The processor has been bumped up to a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU over the original 1.2GHz (which wasn’t slow by any means!). A beefy 1730 mAh battery lives inside, as well as, of course, Beats Audio technology.

Specs:

• 1.5GHz Dual-Core CPU
• 768MB RAM
• 4.3-inch qHD Super LCD display
• Android Ginergbread 2.3
• 8MP Rear Camera
• VGA front-facing camera
• 4GB Storage, expandable via microSD slot

Throughout the medical leaves that Steve has taken he still made keynotes, etc. but something must have happened to cause him to rationalize that he no longer can “meet his duties”.

So we as a team wish Steve and his family luck, as well as Time Cook luck as CEO of Apple.

Just 16 months after the acquisition of Palm, HP announced that they will be discontinuing the TouchPad and webOS related operations. With this, the unreleased Pre 3 and the unsold TouchPads will remain unclear, but HP will still explore and optimize webOS.

“In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.“

Not only will HP discontinue webOS, but they will pull the plug on the Personal Systems group (PCs, mobile devices, storage, monitors, etc.). HP will now focus onto being a software company and are in talks with Autonomy Corporation about a possible offer for HP.

We now all hope that a company will buy webOS and make the OS live on.

We’ve all heard about the delay of the PSP Vita until early 2012, but it looks like Sony still want a new kid on the block for this holiday season – at least, in Europe. In conjunction with the new PSP, they also cut the price of the PS3, interestingly.

It’s sporting a slightly modified design to previous iterations of Playstation Portable, and curiously rids the device of wi-fi connectivity. It’s hitting Europe this fall for the attractive price of 99 euros. It will eventually come to other PAL territories, but that could be next year for all we know.

It was a shock to learn earlier on that Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. No one had an hint that it was coming, but the biggest question is why?

Why did Google splash some money out their pocket? 

Google CEO Larry Page released a statement upon the news earlier, which explained the ongoing commitment to Android the company had been making in past years.

(Small extract from Statement):

“Motorola has a historyy of over 80 years of innovation in communications technology and products, and in the development of intellectual property, which have helped drive the remarkable revolution in mobile computing we are all enjoying today. Its many industry milestones include the introduction of the world’s first portable cell phone nearly 30 years ago, and the StarTAC—the smallest and lightest phone on earth at time of launch. In 2007, Motorola was a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance that worked to make Android the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.”

You’re probably still asking yourself, as was I initially, what will this mean for HTC and Samsung, who uses Android as the OS in their flagship products? I don’t think it will have much influence on other companies and their sales at all. The biggest change will probably be the death of Motoblur, finally!

Motorola will push out handsets running pure Android, most likely. This will most certainly mean that Google will not have to hire other companies like HTC and Samsung build the official Google Phone (like the Nexus S, Nexus One etc ).

What do you think? Are you going to buy a Motorola Phone when they start coming from the Google Labs?

Now that jailbreaking, or the unlocking of devices for custom software, is now one-hundred percent legal in the US, we haven’t seen too many phone manufactures do anything about this change just yet… except until now.

HTC has been known for their customizable phones. You can run many operating systems on a good number of their phones (seriously, just check out XDA-Developopers), and with all of these modifications, we haven’t seen HTC take any offense for any of this software modification, unlike other companies.

HTC has now official released full documentation on how to unlock for their 2011 model of phones and on. HTC has always been very kind to its developers; they just let practically anyone do whatever, but now that HTC has released the potential to do whatever you want with your phone, the possibilities are endless.

Sure, most consumer-end users won’t need to unlock an Android device as they’re already very free to begin with, but now that HTC is officially allowing it, I would love to see what some of the brillant developers are going to come up with now. Sure, there’s always those security issues when unlocking your mobile devices, but if you’re going to be unlocking your bootloader on your device, you’re probably already knowledgeable about those risks.

Anyways, what do you think about HTC finally allowing an official unlock of their bootloader? I can’t wait to see what will come in the future. I’m sure this is going to push some developers for further on expansion of HTC’s amazing devices. Sure, there might only be one phone supported (HTC Sensation (EU)FOTA 1.45.401.2) but HTC says the EVO 3D on Spring and the Sensation 4G on T-Mobile will be soon.

Question is, what will AT&T think about this major change? Please leave your comments below on this major change in the mobile industry! HTC is one huge company; it’s great to see them finally taking the stage for once.

“Beats has found a unique way to harness popular culture in a manner that is unlike any other brand today. It’s an exciting brand that has been built around providing something very special, and we believe our strategic partnership will provide customers with unbeatable sound on HTC phones. We obsess over every detail of a consumer’s mobile experience, and audio is a critical part of that experience.” (HTC Senior Executive)

It will certainly stop the heavy critism that HTC have been getting in their current generation devices about audio, but will it be a deal-breaker? I doubt it, but nonetheless it will make HTC fans very happy.

Today, Apple started to crack its whip in deactivating accounts which were suspected of being non-developer run. Now this doesn’t seem too bad until you start to look at the devices registered under the accounts. Each one deactivated and sent to the Wi-Fi setup page which in a deactivated state is like a wall that is impossible to get by. So, a word from the wise, if you bought your way into the developer program, get out and back where you belong be downgrading before your device is deactivated and bricked.

We have been seeing some iOS 5 beta’s around for a little while now, but we see a new Apple beta rise, the iCloud.

During the WWDC conference Steve Jobs announced iCloud and that it would be free to your apple devices. Your Mac’s, iPhone’s, iPad’s and your Windows PC. You will also be able to back your device up wireless and store everything in the cloud.

This week apple finally announced that iCloud will now be available to use for developers, however some non-developers were also allowed a sneak peek. To see if you are eligible then just visit iCloud.com, you will be prompted to sign up. Also this will only work on OS X Lion and iOS 5.

When the 3DS was launched, people were skeptical about it’s high price tag, which made sales ‘disappointing’, according to Nintendo. To make sales potentially faster, Nintendo has lowered the price from $249 to $169, which is almost half the price. For existing owners, Nintendo has a thank you gift, which allows you to download ten NES virtual console games on September 1st, plus 10 more GBA virtual console games.

Nintendo points out that Star Fox 64 3D, Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7 and Kid Icarus: Uprising will arrive around the holiday season.