At first, Jelly Bean looks almost identical to its predecessor, the equally stupidly named Ice Cream Sandwich, because many of the new features are technical. It is now much faster than before, making animations slick and the whole device faster. It even predicts the user’s movements and animates the screen to reflect that. The speed of the device matches that of the iPhone without doubt. New animations also work well and look good. The updated notifications menu crushes the Apple competition, as it can perform various actions without breaking a sweat.

An offline Google Maps system has also been introduced, whereby you can download maps to use at a later date without needing internet connection. This is a great idea, especially for when travelling abroad, so you can avoid expensive charges from networks.

Google Now is Jelly Bean’s most important new feature. It’s like Apple’s Siri, but unlike Siri focuses on searches, which is arguably more useful. It uses Google’s “Knowledge Graph” to provide the best answer to your query, and if it’s not what you wanted you can scroll through more results.

It’s a very smart piece of kit, as it remembers your favourite sports teams, alerts you ahead of meetings and plans routes to get you there on time, and updates helpful information constantly.

Best of all is Google Now’s speed. It returns results instantly, whereas Siri can sometimes take several seconds.

However, it isn’t all good news. The Google Play store still gets the best apps a while after Apple, and as Android is used by many systems, not all apps work on all phones. Also, it doesn’t have music from some labels and TV programmes from some networks. Whilst it has vastly improved, it is still lagging behind the iPhone.

Finally, it’s only being released in the Galaxy Nexus series to begin with; so many people will have to wait to try it. It will be in the hands of partners to bring Jelly Bean to their device, which could take a long time.

This month BSkyB launches its new internet service, Now TV. The service allows people to watch Sky shows and films on-demand, either on subscription or on a ‘pay and play’ deal. BSkyB believe they can rival other companies such as Netflix and LOVEFiLM, but how competitive will the service really be?

At £15 a month, Now TV would be over £20 cheaper than the cheapest Sky TV package, so for households not willing to pay such an amount Now TV may be an appealing proposition. Also with the ‘pay and play’ deal for casual viewers, films and shows will be priced from 99p to £3.49, which is fairly cheap.

BSkyB also have the advantage of many exclusive deals. They can show films a year before anyone else in the UK, so customers won’t have to wait as long as they would with LOVEFiLM or Netflix. There is also Sky Sports, which has Premier League, Formula 1, Cricket, Rugby League and much more, all exclusive to Sky. The broadcaster also has Sky Atlantic and Sky Arts, which broadcast shows that cannot be seen anywhere else.

Sky plan to launch Now TV on all major platforms, so anyone can gain access to the service one way or another, meaning people without Sky TV can gain access to Sky’s shows. However, the issue with Now TV is that it is £9 more expensive than Netflix and LOVEFiLM.

This price difference could dissuade people from buying into Now TV, preferring to wait a bit longer to see shows and save money. Also, Netflix and LOVEFiLM, as they have no network connections, have a bottomless pit to get TV shows from, meaning that they have much more choice, such as classics like Blackadder or Magnum P.I.

Whilst Now TV may help Sky entice a few more customers into buying Sky packages, they already have a firm stranglehold on British pay-TV broadcasting, so a few more subscribers won’t make much of a difference. LOVEFiLM has been established for a decade and is tried, tested and trusted by customers, so Sky will struggle to take its customers easily, and Netflix, although only recently launched in the UK, has been fairly successful. Now TV will enter a tough marketplace, and it seems to us that it will struggle to be a successful venture for Sky.

Over the past 10 months or so, speculation has been rife as to the capability of the new operating system to provide sustained and serious competition to Google’s Android. Some remain skeptical, but others believe that B2G has a pretty good chance of becoming a serious rival to Android.

The aim behind the B2G OS is to bring the sort of discipline, standards, and level of control Firefox users experience every day on the web to the mobile phone industry, with the Mozilla Foundation seeking to hand users greater control over what their mobile phones do, how they operate, and which applications are allowed to function.

Telefonica, for whom Brazil is a key market for their business, currently has 90 million customers under its Vivo umbrella, so the potential for the new mobile phone is clearly great, especially since the price is not thought to be a dissuading factor. With smartphone usage not yet widespread in Brazil, yet growing at a promising rate, the uptake of the new mobile phone should provide hints as to the long-term chances of success and dominance for the B2G project.

According to an article published by the Guardian, UK internet advertising spend is likely to reach £5bn this year, with a surge in Facebook ad spend set to boost figures significantly.

In 2011, as spend on mobile advertising reached an all-time high, companies invested £4.78bn on all forms of online advertising in Britain, a figure which represented a whopping 14.4% year-on-year growth from 2010. This means that the market needs to grow by just over the modest figure of 4% this year in order for the market to be worth a whopping £5bn.

Meanwhile, spend on search advertising grew by 17.5% in 2011 to over £2.75bn. Search, viewed as a cost effective and innovative means of advertising online, now accounts for almost 60% of total UK digital ad spend.

Now, though, TripAdvisor has turned the tables, to become the critical voice among many critical voices currently directing their rage at search engine behemoth Google.

TripAdvisor is the latest in an alarmingly (from Google’s point of view) large number of companies, which includes travel company Expedia, to complain to the European Commission about the apparently overly aggressive behaviour of Google, which some believe is anti-competitive.

The problem for TripAdvisor arose when Google launched a new product to add to their ever-growing product suite. Google Places provides users with reviews of hotels and restaurants, much in the same way TripAdvisor does, while the search engine’s flight search tool, launched in autumn last year, has also placed it in direct competition with the likes of Expedia and lastminute.com.

The concern now is that Google is using its dominance of the search market to eradicate authoritative, established, and highly relevant websites from its natural search results, in a bid to make products such as Google Places the go-to product for consumers online.

Google may end up being formally charged over Easter, which would only add fuel to the fire surrounding the Google “bully rumours” that tend to surface every couple of months in some form or other.

There’s no doubting that many services and products,TripAdvisor included, would never have got off the ground had Google not invested dollar after dollar in making organic search an established daily activity in many people’s lives, but in order for businesses to continue to thrive in an ever more crowded online space, competition on the web needs to remain intense, and ultimately fair, and Google, whether they like it or not, have a responsibility to help that quest for fairness.

Take the most recent example of Liam Stacey, a young lad who probably assumed that nothing would come of a couple of extremely offensive racist remarks on Twitter made whilst Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba was fighting for his life less than a fortnight ago. Fast forward not even two weeks, though, and Stacey has been left facing the prospect of a 56-day prison spell.

Stacey’s case is not an isolated one; just cast your mind back to the comment tweeted by a certain Paul Chambers in 2010. It seems unlikely that when Chambers tweeted in frustration “”Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”, he had no idea that just weeks later, Stephen Fry would be offering to pay his legal fees, and thousands of other Twitter users would join together to retweet the original comment to highlight the pitfalls of how to judge whether or not a message posted online in a moment of apparent jest is “menacing” and worthy of a conviction.

It seems clear that we haven’t quite got it right yet in terms of deciding how best to vet online spaces, and how much data, and of what sort, is morally, and legally, right to analyse.

Interestingly, yet predictably, there has been more public outrage this week after the FBI announced their plans to develop an early-warning system that will use “mash-up technology” (which would scrape data from the likes of Twitter and Facebook) to make judgements regarding possible domestic and global threats.

According to the FBI, “social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events”, but such a proclamation has done little to quieten the voices of those who believe that freedom of speech online is once again being placed under serious threat.

As well as these concerns, critics have also expressed anxiety over FBI agents becoming bogged down in data and apparently significant information from social networks, which actually ends up being little more than everyday internet interaction.

Ultimately, whatever can be done to make societies safer and more secure is clearly a positive thing; it just remains to be seen whether the likely hundreds of thousands of social network users who are critical of the app (if it does come to fruition) can restrain themselves from “doing a Paul Chambers” to make a statement en masse.

Perhaps more important than this, though, is the need to promote brand awareness in emerging markets, where the potential growth in mobile phone usage could increase exponentially over the coming years.

It’s no secret that China is perhaps the best example of a mobile phone market sleeping giant that has been slowly but surely waking up in recent years and this week, Nokia and Microsoft took a huge step forward in their quest to satiate this particular giant’s growing appetite by launching the Nokia 800C, the first CDMA Windows Phone to be made available in the country.

With over 132.33 million subscribers on the books of China Telecom, which operates on a CDMA network, the potential for Nokia isn’t difficult to see, especially with the company opting to keep prices relatively low compared to offerings from rival brands yet keeping the shiny, up-to-date appearance and usability features uniquely and sensitively tailored to the needs of the Chinese market (users will receive special offers on apps that are currently popular in the country).

Nokia hasn’t had the best of times in the fierce mobile phone industry in recent years, slipping behind brands such as Apple, so they’ll just be hoping that concentrating on emerging markets in such a focused manner is a decision that pays off.

Chief among those recent PR glitches have been the appalling reported conditions from one of the Chinese factories that supply Apple with electrical components.

This week, though, the company has been forced to fight fires (thankfully not literally, despite the alarming heat “issues” the new iPad seems to suffer from) in an entirely different market, with Australian customers outraged at being misled by the brand about the 4G capabilities of the new model of iPad. The iPad does not actually work on Australia’s 4G network, but is still marketed in the country as coming complete with “wi-fi + 4G”.

So angry are the Aussies over this issue that the country’s consumer watchdog has made the brave decision to take Apple to court, accusing them of false advertising.

Apple’s lawyers have stated that the company is more than happy to publish a clarification on the issue in Australia, but perhaps the most worrying aspect of this case is the fact that Australia was the first country where the new model of iPad was made available. With Australians some of the most tech-savvy individuals on the planet, the company were quick to boast, in what seemed like a PR dream, about the success of their latest product launch in the country, as consumers lined up at Apple stores around the country overnight to be among the first to get their hands on the new iPad.

As awful as the reports we hear indirectly regarding Apple (and other major tech companies) every few months from countries such as China are, a PR disaster of this scale in a developed country such as Australia does automatically hit home a little harder with consumers in North America and Europe.

No doubt Apple and their monstrous PR machine will recover from their latest product stumble, but surely there is only so much even the most hardcore Apple brand disciples will put up with. Isn’t there?

However, with Facebook and Twitter, alongside a constant deluge of shiny new apps, continuing to dominate our daily lives, it could just be this touch of nostalgia that hands momentum back to those long-forgotten pioneers of the social networking world.

This week, Friends Reunited, the UK-based network that first hit the web 12 years ago, relaunched, this time with the sole intention of igniting that rare, yet valuable in more than one sense of the word, emotion of nostalgia. When the website was first launched back in 2000, the aim was to encourage users of all ages, and from all corners of the country, to reconnect with old school friends.

The value of the service, however, quickly plummeted in the face of increased competition from social networks with more of a global appeal that seemed to offer a more seamless, integrated, and less niche service. Friends Reunited, just four years after being snapped up by ITV, saw its value slip by almost £150m.

Now, the site’s owner, Brightsolid, has made the brave decision to jump on the nostalgia bandwagon, which has long proved itself an effective marketing weapon both on and offline. If you need proof, just think back to successful marketing campaigns from the likes of M & S, Persil, Hovis, and of course Coca-Cola (how many times have you heard someone, after watching the advert in early December, proclaim that “now Christmas has really started?!).

Even Facebook are starting to realise that when it comes to users’ online activity, it’s not all about forward-thinking attitudes, with the introduction of their controversial timeline proving that the past still has an important role to play in the future of the web.

Friends Reunited’s take on the nostalgia theme will see it take advantage of collaboration with the PA and the British Library to offer users the ability to attach old material, including clippings from old newspapers, to a virtual memory box.

The real challenge for Friends Reunited will be to monetise their new service effectively, both in the long-term and the short-term, even if that means some sort of integration in the future with Facebook.

The pitfalls of relying too heavily on marketing through nostalgia have long been known (is it wise for a brand that hasn’t touched the lips of the online public for the best part of a decade to align itself, upon its relaunch, with associations of old-fashioned, out of date concepts?), so clearly the service has it all to do to start seriously competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Will Friends Reunited’s foray into the past succeed in the present? Only time will tell…

The move comes after a Japanese man sought legal action when he noticed that his name was being linked with crimes he had nothing to do with, with the autocomplete function effectively sullying his reputation by giving a false impression to users typing in certain search terms.

Google, never one to bow down to external pressure, including legal pressure, stated that they are yet to carry out the request from the court, which relates to the removal of a small batch of search terms, rather than the disabling of the search function altogether, but are currently in the reviewing stage.

The court case isn’t the first involving an individual or company, the search engine giant, and the autocomplete function, but, depending upon the eventual reaction from Google, it may just lead to an avalanche of similar court cases from individuals unhappy at their names being unfairly tainted by negative associations on the search function.

For some, the news is just the latest cause for complaint when it comes to a perceived spy culture at Google, with the ever-paranoid critics of the company always quick to jump on any hint that individuals are fighting back against the mechanically generated search results.

For the individual involved with this particular case, however, at least he can rest easy at night knowing that an inadvertent effect of his court case will be to push related search terms which do reflect the truth higher up on Google’s autocomplete function over the coming weeks and months!