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Tech Companies Manage Their Reputations Well, Apple Does it Best [STUDY]

Apple has the very best corporate reputation score among all major brands and companies in America, according to Harris. The firm's 2012 Reputation Quotient survey uncovered this year's best reputations and, once again, technology companies performed well overall.

At the top was Apple, a clear leader with a score well above 85 out of 100. In second was Google at just under 83. Amazon, in fourth place, is the third tech company in the top five with a score of nearly 82. Last year, Google was first overall, with Apple in 5th and Amazon in 8th.

It's worth noting that Apple's score of almost 86 is the highest score ever awarded to any company in 13 years of Harris polling. Apple's one-year leap is also among the greatest ever, and is particularly impressive during a year that saw most companies stagnate or drop in score.

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What Happened When the BBC Hunted a Facebook Troll to Question His Online Behaviour in Real Life [VIDEO]

The modern definition of "troll" is someone who dedicates themself to stirring up anger online. A pitiful existence, to be certain, but the immoral bravado that internet anonymity seems to give people has nonetheless fostered such a breed of human.

Everyone has seen the bizarre behaviours of trolls online—but what are they like in person? What does a man who spends his days insulting others online look and act like in real life? The British Broadcasting Corporation wanted to find out.

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First Ever Ship Wars Competition Held At Google Waterloo

Google WaterlooOn January 24th, Google hosted their first ever Ship Wars Programming Competition at Google Waterloo, allowing many Kitchener-Waterloo software engineers to participate.  The competition is the brainchild of Google’s Aaron Kemp and Garret Kelley.

Nearly 40 participants took place in the competition, and were given only three hours to code a space ship in any language they choose.  The ships were then uploaded to a Google server, and pitted against each other in a virtual environment.

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Google Wallet launch delayed in Canada?

In October Techvibes reported that Google Wallet would be coming to Canada in early 2012. No word yet on when the official launch will be but it looks like its introduction to Canada could be delayed because of a number of reported vulnerabilities.

According to Security Watch's Neil Rubenking, if Google Wallet is installed on a rooted Android phone, a quick and simple brute force attack can extract the PIN and allow a thief to spend your Google Wallet funds.

A Google spokesperson responded to Rubenking's post saying that "there is no known vulnerability that enables someone to take a consumer phone and gain root access while preserving any Wallet information such as the PIN". And added "we strongly encourage people to not install Google Wallet on rooted devices and to always set up a screen lock as an additional layer of security for their phone."

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13 Samsung Smartphones offered by the Big Three Carriers

What kind of smartphone - or "superphone" you have as Bell is calling some of these feature-laden mobile devices these days - is a hot topic of discussion at a social event.

The person struggling for a conversation piece takes out their phone and the guy next to them goes: "I have a Samsung smartphone too! We have the same phone!".

That's not the case very often with Samsung though as there's stunningly an unlucky thirteen different smartphones you could potentially own from the big three carriers- many of which look the exact same. 

Click the jump to figure out how your Samsung phone stacks up to what else is out there.

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Smartphones Outsell PCs For the First Time Ever, Tablets Lead Growth by a Long Shot [REPORT]

For the first time in history, smartphones are outselling PCs worldwide.

Canalys released its full report on smartphone and PC shipments for the fourth quarter of 2011 and the numbers are incredible. Over 158 million smartphones were shipped globally in Q4, blowing away PC shipments—which include notebooks, netbooks, and even tablets! PCs sold a combined 120 million—58 million notebooks, 29 million desktops, 7 million netbooks, and almost 27 million tablets. Many people don't bundle tablets in with PCs, so if you take them out, smartphone shipments nearly doubled PC sales, 158.5 to 93.7. Wow.

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Mediative Shows in iPhone Study That Mobile Listings Need Social Proof to Be Effective in Google Places

This past fall and just recently, we've talked about a various number of newer advertising optimization technologies on Techvibes as part of our advertising technology series. One of them is known as eye tracking which produces a heat map in the image to your right. Mediative, a division of Yellow Pages Group says the red areas represent which areas where more time was spent looking at the screen on the iPhone when using Google Places.

Eye tracking techniques for "content and ad optimization" on websites have been somewhat widely used by marketers online, but Mediative set out to see what changes when taking the iPhone into consideration due to a considerably smaller screen size and easy scrolling ability compared to the web. You can download the full whitepaper here.

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Tennis Video Goes Viral and It's Not Even About Tennis

Tennis fans will have had their eyes glued to the boob tube these past couple of weeks, which saw several epic matches, crowned by a record-breaking finals match between the world number one, Novak Djokovic, and the world number two, Rafael Nadal. As the sport of tennis continues to delve deeper into social media—both Novak and Rafael have Twitter accounts—tons of game highlights were added to YouTube. And the most-watched of them all—by far—wasn't even of people playing tennis.

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