Twitter: Olympics opening ceremony saw 9.66 million mentions

Talk of the London 2012 Olympic Games was expected to take over Twitter, and its community of 140 million active users worldwide didn’t disappoint.

On Friday, Twitter saw more tweets in a single day than it saw during the whole duration of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, according to a blog post by the microblogging service.

Google shows ISPs how to build a superfast network

Google is showing the cable companies and telecommunications providers how a broadband network should be built.

On Thursday, the company took the wraps off its new Google Fiber and Google Fiber TV services, which through a fiber connection directly to the home, delivers broadband speeds of 1Gbps on both the upload and download links. It also announced its new Google Fiber TV service that offers a vast array of high quality HD video content broadcast to TVs and is also available on demand.

The services that Google is delivering to lucky residents of Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kansas, is leaps and bounds above what they can get currently through providers, such as AT&T’s U-verse service or Time Warner Cable. But it’s also much more advanced than what the average American is able to access from any cable operator or telco broadband provider in the country. And Google is offering it at prices that beat the local and even national competition.

How Google products go from creepy to cool

Google’s products often initially terrify us because of their potential for privacy risks, but their convenience wins us over.

On April 1, 2004, Google announced its new and capacious Gmail service and said it would serve up contextual ads, a move so radical that people initially thought it was an April Fool’s joke. It wasn’t.

At the time, more than 30 civil liberties groups urged Google to suspend Gmail, arguing that targeting people with ads in their e-mail was setting a dangerous precedent and letting the “proverbial genie out of the bottle” for privacy abuse. California Sen. Liz Figueroa drafted a bill aimed at restricting this use of Gmail (later dropped), privacy groups asked the California Attorney General to investigate whether Google was violating wiretapping laws, and one Google critic created the “Gmail is too creepy” site.

Fast-forward eight years — 425 million Gmail people are using the service, and contextual ads are regularly ignored in e-mails on Yahoo and other free e-mail services. It’s not that people are now apathetic about, for example, seeing a Viagra ad when they are asking someone for a date. It’s that people do not seem to feel threatened by the notion that Google’s all-seeing computers are eyeballing the messages and serving up ads. We see the ads everyday in our e-mails, next to our Web searches, and on the most popular sites — they have become part of the accepted Internet landscape.

Android battery-saving tips & apps

Upgrading to an Android smart phone from a bog-standard mobile feels like a massive step into the future. At least, that is, until you notice the battery running flat after a couple of hours.

Even after the initial urge to play with the phone’s bells and whistles has worn off, you’ll be lucky to get much more than 24 hours out of it. For many, needing to recharge every night is a huge disappointment.

With a big screen and fast processor draining power, a smart phone’s battery does have its work cut out. That’s no reason to settle for a phone that won’t last the day. We’ve put together 10 Android battery-saving tips to help you get the most from every charge. Hit play on the video above or read on for all the details.

Want to know how EA creates the cars for Need for Speed?

We start by picking an awesome car, say the BMW M3 Coupe. It makes the grade, because it’s a timeless car: fast, powerful, tough.  Perfect for the kind of rough and tumble, highly physical gameplay we have in mind for the all-new Most Wanted.

The first thing we do build a wireframe mesh of the car. It evolves through various different guises, before we get to something you’d recognise as an in-game car. These wireframes show it at various points in development.

Once we’ve got a basic-looking version of the car in the game, we get to work on the handling. We’re all about great handling. It’s what keeps us up at night. We spend nearly every minute of every day of development playing the game and iterating the handling until it’s right.