Scientists have taken a first early step towards escaping the limits of a technological principle called Moore’s Law by creating a working transistor using a single phosphorus atom.

The atom was etched into a silicon bed with gates to control electrical flow and metallic contacts to apply voltage, researchers reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It is the first such device to be precisely positioned using a repeatable technology, they said, and may one day help ease the way towards creation of a so-called quantum computer that would be significantly smaller and faster than existing technology.

Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months to two years, and it’s predicted to reach its limit with existing technology in 2020. Cutting the size of a transistor to a single atom may defeat that concept.

“We really decided 10 years ago to start this programme to try and make single-atom devices as fast as we could, and beat that law, said Michelle Simmons, director of ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “So here we are in 2012, and we’ve made a single-atom transistor roughly 8-10 years ahead of where the industry is going to be.”

Moore’s Law is named for Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp., the world’s largest chip maker. He first described the phenomenon in a 1965 report that was later cited by others with his name attached to it.

There is a limitation to the latest finding: The atom must be kept at minus 391 degrees Fahrenheit to keep it from migrating out of its channel, the report said. Because of this, the result should be seen as a proof of principle rather than an initial step in a manufacturing process, the researchers said. These results demonstrate that single-atom devices can in principle be built and controlled with atomically thin wires, where the active component represents the ultimate physical limit of Moore’s Law, the researchers wrote in the report. Simmons’s group, which included scientists from the University of Melbourne and from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, isn’t the first to create a single-atom transistor. Previous efforts, though, came about as the result of chance and carried a significant margin of error, the researchers said.

The New South Wales scientists used a device called a scanning tunnelling microscope to manipulate the atoms on the surface of the crystal in a way that allowed them to precisely pair one up with the electrode needed to control it.

“If you want to make a practical computer in the long term, you need to be able to put lots of individual atoms in, Simmons said in a video supplied by the university.” “And there you find that the separation of the atoms is quite critical.”

So-called quantum computers would operate by controlling the movement of electrons in an atom. While the latest finding brings science closer to determining whether quantum computing may be successful at a large-scale level, it remains an open question.

Hong Kong/Beijing: Apple Inc’s share of China’s booming smartphone market slipped for a second straight quarter in October-December, as it lost ground to cheaper local brands and as some shoppers held off until after the iPhone 4S launch last month.

China, the world’s largest mobile phone market, has not been easy for Apple, which is grappling with a lawsuit from a local firm over the iPad name and issues at its suppliers’ factories over wages and working conditions.

With the number of mobile subscribers set to top 1 billion in China this year, there is cut-throat competition among South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Nokia , Apple and local firms Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp .

While Apple regained its top spot as the world’s largest smartphone vendor in the fourth quarter and for last year as a whole, it slipped to 5th place in China, overtaken by ZTE. Apple’s China smartphone market share slid to 7.5% from 10.4% in July-September.

In the last quarter, Samsung knocked Nokia off the top slot, taking 24.3% of the market, more than three times Apple’s share, data from research firm Gartner showed. Nokia’s market share more than halved last year, from above 40% in the first quarter to below one fifth by the fourth quarter.

“Chinese handset makers have been actively promoting their smartphones with China’s three telecoms operators, so we saw ZTE and Huawei gain significant market share,” said Taipei-based Gartner analyst CK Lu.

Gartner said this week it expected Apple’s iPhone market share to slip for a couple of quarters as the novelty of its latest 4S model wears off.

In the first quarter of last year, ZTE had a market share of just 3%, but ended 2011 ranked 4th with more than 11% market share.

Chinese firms are gradually shifting up towards the higher end of the market, unveiling more feature-packed smartphones.

“If you want to sell handsets to the mass market, a simple rule of thumb in China is that the handset price has to be close to 70% of the monthly salary,” said Jayesh Easwaramony, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan in Singapore.

“Today, an iPhone is more than two months salary.”

This, said Easwaramony, gives the likes of Huawei and ZTE the opportunity to cater to a mass market that is captivated by the iPhone, but doesn’t have the purchasing power for it.

“The quality of Huawei’s phones is quite high and it’s good value for money compared to the iPhone,” said Dale Dai, a 28-year-old sales executive from Beijing.

Dai, who uses his Huawei phone to write weibo, or Chinese microblogs, surf the Internet and make calls, recently bought a new Honor smartphone for 1,800 yuan ($290), almost a third of the price of a new iPhone 4S at 4,988 yuan.

But given the sheer size of the Chinese market, just targeting the highest end users should be enough for Apple, though it’s not always been a smooth ride.

Last month, shoppers in Beijing threw eggs at the Apple store and fought with police when they were told the iPhone 4S would not be on sale as scheduled.

In Shenzhen, some genuine iPhones and iPads are smuggled in from Hong Kong, while sellers also take advantage of Apple’s popularity by packaging fake iPhones in iPhone 5 boxes – even before the 4S was launched.

In Hong Kong, Apple resorted to an online lottery reservation system for the 4S model after crowd control issues disrupted initial sales.

Analysts expect Apple to stem its slide in market share in China by signing up another carrier.

China Unicom , the country’s No.2 telecoms operator, is currently the only carrier to officially carry the iPhone. It has not officially given its iPhone sales, but analysts estimate it has sold around 3 million iPhones since signing a contract with Apple in 2009.

China Telecom Corp Ltd, the third and smallest operator, is expected to be next to clinch a similar deal with Apple later this year, and analysts predict it would sell about 1.4 million iPhones this year if it can reach a deal with Apple by May, rising to 2-4 million new iPhone users in 2013.

San Francisco: Buying ads on Twitter is about to get easier for small businesses as the online messaging service adds a key piece to its moneymaking model. Twitter is unveiling a long-awaited automated system that will enable advertisers to manage their marketing campaigns and budgets without having to deal with sales representatives.

Before Twitter opens the system to all comers later this year, the self-service approach announced Thursday will only be available to advertisers who accept or use American Express cards. To get the ball rolling, American Express Co. will buy $100 in Twitter ads for each of the first 10,000 qualified businesses in the US that sign up at http://ads.twitter.com/amex.

The ads, which Twitter calls “promoted products,” will begin appearing within the flow of users’ messages in late March.

Flipping the switch on self-service advertising is the latest sign of Twitter’s ambition to build a powerful online marketing vehicle in the mold of Internet search leader Google Inc, by far the Web’s most profitable company, and online social network Facebook Inc, technology’s fastest-rising star.

It marks another stepping stone toward an eventual initial public offering of stock from Twitter, which has attracted more than 100 million users since its creation nearly six years ago.

The timetable for Twitter’s IPO remains a mystery, although chief executive officer (CEO) Dick Costolo said in an interview, Thursday, that the company’s decision won’t be influenced by how well Facebook fares in its stock market debut this spring.

“I don’t look at what other companies are doing,” he said. “We don’t think in terms of building this company for a particular IPO date. We are trying to build this company for the long term.”

The company, which is based in San Francisco, isn’t in desperate need of capital, having raised at least $700 million last year.

Twitter also probably needs a little more time to prove its financial chops.

Last year, Twitter generated ad revenue of about $140 million, according to the research firm eMarketer Inc. That compared to $36.5 billion at Google and $3.2 billion at Facebook.

This year, eMarketer expects Twitter to sell $260 million in advertising, helped in part by the new self-service platform.

The automated system will be similar to Google’s. Advertisers will be able to specify how much they are willing to spend, pick the cities or regions where they want their ads to appear and write their own commercial messages, which will be confined to Twitter’s 140-character limit per tweet.

Twitter will only charge for ads that get a user response, such as when a viewer decides to follow the business, retweets the message or clicks on a link.

Selling ads through a self-service system will test Twitter’s ability to prevent bad actors from polluting the atmosphere with spam and scams. It’s a problem that still plagues Google, which has gotten into trouble for showing ads from unlicensed pharmacies and other shady operators.

But Twitter’s self-service ad system seems less likely to encounter trouble in the early going because only small businesses that have already been vetted by American Express will be allowed to participate during first few months, said eMarketer analyst Debra Williamson.

Twitter is allowing self-service advertising after about three months of tests with a small group of hand-picked small businesses.

Twitter has been easing into advertising to ensure the commercial messages don’t spoil the ambiance of service that has been likened to a town square teeming with wildly divergent observations and conversations.

The response to the ads so far has been mostly positive, Costolo said, helping to convince him that the privately held company can open up its revenue spigot even more without facing a big backlash. “I have every expectation that we will be able to scale this very rapidly,” Costolo said Thursday.

Twitter ads paid off for Glennz Tees, an online merchant in Austin, Texas, that has been testing the self-service marketing system.

The company’s December sales more than doubled from the previous year, said CEO Walter Stokes.

In another sign the ads resonated, Glennz Tees’ followers on Twitter have more than tripled to 22,000 during the test phase. The key, Stokes said, was just doing two or three ads per week. “We didn’t want to go overboard with it because we didn’t want to annoy people.”

San Francisco: Microsoft is hooking up MSN.com with a hipper sidekick to broaden its appeal and stay on top of the Internet’s hottest topics. The trend-tracking service, called “msnNOW,” tunes into the buzz by sifting through millions of Internet searches and links circulating among the hordes on Facebook and Twitter. The chatter is then distilled into the equivalent of a digital water cooler — a place where people can go to keep in touch without taking up a lot of their time. After months of development, the new feature debuts Thursday at http://now.msn.com.

The service is primarily aimed at university-age teenagers and young adults who are increasingly relying on smartphones and other mobile devices to remain plugged into what everyone is talking about from one hour to the next. It’s an “information-snacking” addiction that msnNOW is looking to feed with a smorgasbord of morsels served up a team of about 20 editors who will write 100-word summaries of the stories driving online conversations, said Bob Visse, MSN’s general manager.

Although it’s tailor made for people on the go, msnNOW isn’t offering an app for smartphones or computer tablets. It can be reached on all mobile Web browsers. The service also includes tools to make it easy to share on Facebook, Twitter and email. Taking the Internet’s pulse isn’t new.

The main page on Yahoo Inc.’s website has highlighted the top trends for years and Internet search leader Google Inc. calls out the top queries each day. Twitter regularly updates its rankings of the most-tweeted topics. But MSN believes its new service will prove to be even more effective because it is drawing upon Microsoft Corp.’s expertise in data management and relying on human editors to ensure the real-time site is more compelling than a list of words and links.

Facebook Inc. and Twitter also have negotiated deals that make more of their data available to Microsoft’s Bing search engine than to Google, but msnNOW isn’t relying on that privileged access, Visse said. Instead, msnNOW is conducting its analysis through the public entryways that Facebook and Twitter offers to all websites.

MsnNOW is also leaning on BreakingNews.com, a part of MSNBC that also pores through a variety of social media to find interesting stories as they unfold. MsnNOW’s reliance on Bing to monitor online search activity could be a drawback because it processes far fewer requests than Google. But Bing is picking up more cues now that it’s powering Yahoo’s search engine as part of a 10-year partnership. Combined, Bing and Yahoo have a roughly 30% share of US search volume compared to 66% at Google.

Bing’s second-banana status in search is a big reason why Microsoft’s online division has been a financial albatross. The software maker’s online operations have lost about $8 billion since June 2008. MSN.com remains one of the Internet’s top destinations with about 520 million users. In comparison Facebook boasts 845 million users, Yahoo has about 700 million and Twitter has more than 100 million.

San Francisco: Apple Inc is in very active discussions at the board level about what to do with its cash, chief executive Tim Cook said on Tuesday, responding to calls for the world’s most valuable electronics company to put its massive reserves to work.

Cook, in a rare appearance before investors, also talked about a “jaw-dropping” opportunity in smartphones. He said the iPad tablet trajectory was “off the charts,” adding that he foresaw tablets surpassing personal computers in unit sales eventually – eroding Microsoft Corp’s Windows dominance.

He acknowledged that online retailer Amazon.com Inc was an intense competitor with its Kindle Fire tablet.

Apple’s shares rose to close at $509.46 on the Nasdaq, setting a record high on hopes of strong iPhone 4S demand and investor optimism over the potential launch of a new iPad in 2012.

Investors are increasingly calling on Apple to return some of its $98 billion warchest to shareholders through dividends or share buybacks – even if it is only a one-time deal.

On Tuesday, Cook, who took over from Silicon Valley icon Steve Jobs last August, urged investors at a Goldman Sachs technology conference to be patient about the cash reserves.

“I only ask for a little bit of patience, so we do this deliberately and in the best interest of shareholders,” Cook said.

He joked that Apple will not be holding any toga parties with the money.

“It is not new that we are discussing it. It is being discussed more and in more detail.”

Cook stoked speculation that Apple may be getting serious about television, but cautioned investors the market potential is small compared with tablets and smartphones.

The company currently sells an Apple TV set top box player, a device it calls a hobby.

“Apple doesn’t do hobbies as a general rule,” he said. “With Apple TV, despite the barriers in that market, for those of us who use it, we’ve always thought there was something there, and if we kept following our intuition and kept pulling that string, we might find something larger.”

He declined to say whether Apple is planning a major push into television.

Addressing persistent criticism that Apple’s partners may mistreat their workers, Cook stressed that the iPhone and iPad maker takes labor conditions in its globe-spanning supply chain seriously.

Apple said on Monday the US non-profit labor group Fair Labor Association has begun an “unprecedented” inspection of working conditions at its main contract manufacturers, including Foxconn’s plants in southern China, as the maker of the iPhone continues to grapple with persistent image problems there.

Cook, who took over after Jobs became too sick to continue as CEO, said he has continued the co-founder’s policy of focussing on only a few products.

“I am not going to witness or permit the slow undoing of Apple because I believe in it deeply,” he said.

He added that seeing people use iPhones or iPads at coffee shops brings a smile to his face.

“There is no replacement, no substitute for that,” he said.

Mumbai: Business from emerging markets will help India’s flagship information technology sector counter slowing demand in Western nations, the country’s technology minister said Tuesday.

Solutions “will come from IT growth in emerging markets,” information technology minister Kapil Sibal said at the start of the three-day conference attended by more than 1,600 policymakers, analysts and investors from 25 countries.

Emerging markets are “where half of the population exists and innovations are rapidly emerging to take care of problems,” Sibal told the conference.

The outsourcing sector has been a crucial driver in India’s transformation into a major emerging market economy and accounts for at least 5% of gross domestic product (GDP).

But India’s IT export revenues will slow in the next financial year due to “global uncertainty,” according to the country’s IT lobby group National Association of Software and Services Companies, or Nasscom.

It forecasts export growth of up to 14% to $78 billion in the 12 months starting April 1, down from the estimated 16.3% expansion in the current financial year.

Most of India’s top software outsourcing firms reported strong third-quarter profits but said the global outlook remained difficult.

US and European clients contribute nearly 80% of the sector’s revenues.

But to counter a slowdown in those markets, India’s IT industry is starting to seek business opportunities in the newer markets of Africa, Latin America, Russia and China, said Nasscom president Som Mittal.

“The industry is still very resilient and able to cope with the current economic problems,” Nasscom chairman Rajendra Pawar told the conference.

The sector’s share in global outsourcing by businesses seeking to reduce costs has touched 58%, up from 55% a year earlier.

US and other foreign firms have been drawn to India by its vast English-speaking workforce and lower labour costs.

The industry is aiming to achieve $225 billion in export and domestic revenues by 2020, up from $101 billion this year, for which Nasscom says it needs to achieve 13 to 14% average growth over the next eight years.

“I think we can maintain that,” said Mittal.

New Delhi: Microsoft India’s retail website was down on Monday after an apparent hack, with a purportedly Chinese group called Evil Shadow Team posting doctored screenshots that seemed to be of partially obscured customers’ usernames and passwords.

“Microsoft is investigating a limited compromise of the company’s online store in India,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

“The store customers have already been sent guidance on the issue and suggested immediate actions. We are diligently working to remedy the issue and keep our customers protected,” she said.

The Microsoft Store India website showed an error message promising to restore access as quickly as possible.

The hackers obscured the full usernames and passwords in the screen shots posted on a blog run by Evil Shadow Team member 7z1. Writing in Mandarin, 7z1 describes himself as a “patriotic hacker”.

The hacker, 7z1, told the news agency the data had been found unencrypted on the website.

The Indian edition of Microsoft Store is operated by local company Quasar Media. A spokesman said the company was investigating.

“I am not sure when the site will be up again or what happened,” spokesman Rahul Roy said.

Mumbai: Privacy and freedom of expression are gradually being compromised in cyberspace, say advocacy groups, with social networking sites and Internet companies buckling under pressure from governments to monitor and block “objectionable” content.

Take the case of Twitter Inc., which on 26 January posted on its official blog that “…starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country—while keeping it available in the rest of the world”. While Twitter reasoned that as it continues to grow internationally, it will have to deal with “countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”, activists and bloggers cautioned that the new censorship policies could muffle online freedom.

“The decision of Twitter to censor its content based on the political masters’ wishes in each country is an indication that commercial interests are always higher than democratic interests for these companies. The move of the Indian government to arm-twist the major intermediaries is, therefore, expected to succeed in due course once the initial resistance wears off,” cautioned Na. Vijayashankar, a Bangalore-based e-business consultant and founder secretary of the Cyber Society of India.

In December, minister for communications and information technology (IT) Kapil Sibal said in New Delhi that the Centre had no option but to “evolve guidelines” to ensure that “blasphemous content on the Internet or television is not allowed”, since Internet and social networking sites such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Twitter, Yahoo Inc., and Facebook Inc. failed “to respond to and cooperate with” the government’s request to keep “objectionable” content off their sites.

A few days later, Sibal clarified that “…this government (of the United Progressive Alliance) does not believe in censorship”. And in an interview to Mint on 1 February, Gulshan Rai—head of the elite Indian Computer Emergency Response Team and coordinator of a committee on cyberlaw—said, inter alia, “We value the freedom of speech. We do not interfere there.”

Internet censorship is a rising trend, with approximately 40 countries filtering the Web in varying degrees, including democratic and non-democratic governments. YouTube and Gmail (both from Google), BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd, WikiLeaks, Twitter and Facebook have all been censored, at different times, in China, Iran, Egypt and other countries.

“The clampdown on online free speech and the roll-out of a multi-tiered blanket surveillance regime via the draconian IT Act and its associated rules in India is part of a global trend,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society. “Big brother tendencies with the government have found common cause with powerful rights-holders, who are keen to crack down on intellectual property rights infringements. This, combined with the dramatic growth of the surveillance industry, has resulted in civil liberties being undermined across the world for a variety of pretexts ranging from child porn, obscenity, hate speech, organized crime, terrorism and piracy.”

According to the Google Transparency Report website—which logs content removal requests it receives from governments—the Internet company received 67 requests from the Indian government for the removal of 282 content items (such as videos critical of politicians) from YouTube and blogs during July-December 2010. Google said it complied with 22% of the requests. For the January-June 2011 (latest data available) period, Google received 68 content removal requests for 358 items from Indian government agencies. Google complied in 51% cases.

Even as they face pressure from governments, companies such as Google and Facebook are tweaking their policies to allow for sharing of user data across multiple product offerings. They claim it will give their users a more “intuitive” experience, but advocacy groups say the policies are being altered to give advertisers more bang for the buck at the expense of user privacy.

Google, for instance, is making changes to its privacy policies and terms of service, which take effect from 1 March. “Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies—and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the Web,” said Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering, on the official company blog. Google has begun notifying users of these changes since 24 January.

For example, a search for restaurants in Mumbai may throw up Google+ posts or photos that people have shared with other users, or that are in their albums. Usability can be enhanced, for instance, by allowing memos from Google Docs to be read in Gmail, or adding a Gmail contact to a meeting in Google Calendar. Google, according to Whitten, does not sell personal information nor share it externally without permission “except in very limited circumstances like a valid court order”.

Facebook, on its part, introduced its “Timeline” feature in December, which digs up a user’s past and displays it, but does not allow opting out of the service. The feature is being introduced for all 800 million users, around 40 million of whom are in India. Those not accustomed to checking their privacy settings will have a hard time going through the hundreds of messages they’ve posted over the last few years (Facebook was founded in 2004).

The Electronic Privacy Information Center said the launch of Timeline forces more privacy setting changes on Facebook users, “which flies in the face of both privacy and a settlement reached between the firm and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)”. On 29 November, Facebook agreed to an FTC order that bars it from “deceiving” consumers about privacy practices and requires it to submit to monitoring for 20 years.

“Privacy is certainly a very serious concern for Internet users. Some of the big brands like Facebook and Google simply have access to too much information about the life of their users, and this information could easily be misused by the brand or wilfully by someone else. Our guidance to consumers and clients is that first and foremost, they should be very conscious of these privacy challenges. If we put out any communication on a social network, it is akin to broadcast communication. By default, choose the tightest privacy setting and then gradually loosen up instead of accepting the default privacy setting of Facebook or Google. Don’t give out information like cellphone number, date of birth…or even names of close relations on social networks,” said Hareesh Tibrewala, joint chief executive officer of Social Wavelength, a company that advises clients on social media strategies.

Mahesh Murthy, founder of digital marketing firm Pinstorm, acknowledged that “in reality, there is virtually no privacy online. Governments and companies try to assure apprehensive citizens about privacy, while at the same time doing everything to destroy it in reality”.

He advises marketers to be upfront about their data collection and management policies, and declare them prominently on their online properties. On an individual level, Murthy takes comfort “in the fact that I could just be one of those 3 billion+ Internet users worldwide with my data a small part of the swarm out there that no one might take a special interest in”.

India has a history of exerting pressure on companies for access to communications data. According to Cryptohippie Inc., a provider of communication security services, India ranked 26 among the most policed states in the world in 2010—“one in which every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cellphone ping…are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases”, according to the company that discontinued the report in 2011, stating that “…most people are defending their ignorance; not much good will come from us repeating ourselves”.

Currently, the Indian Telegraph Act and the IT Act, 2008 (amendments introduced in the IT Act, 2000), give the government the power to monitor, intercept and even block online conversations and websites. Moreover, under section 79 of the IT Intermediary (Rules and Guidelines), 2011, intermediaries—telcos, Internet services providers, network services providers, search engines, cyber cafes, Web-hosting companies, online auction portals and online payment sites—are mandated to exercise “due diligence” and advise users not to share/distribute information violative of the law or a person’s privacy and rights. Intermediaries are expected to act on a complaint within 36 hours of receiving it, and remove such content when warranted. In case the intermediary doesn’t find the content objectionable, the matter will have to be contested in a court of law.

“The Indian government can, and should, monitor conversations and websites if it believes the content can harm the security, defence, sovereignty and integrity of the country,” maintained Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court lawyer and a cyberlaw expert, but wondered how it would go about implementing the task of monitoring conversation on an unstructured Internet. “The intention is good, but the path is not clear,” said Duggal, who envisions a lot of cases being filed against misuse of these laws.

“While the affected party can lodge a complaint with the intermediary, removal has to follow a due process, which should include suitable documentary evidence placed by the party. There should be a process of examination through an ombudsman, a process of arbitration where the request is disputed or a court order as may be required on a case to case basis,” said Vijayashankar of the Cyber Society of India.

If you’re a techie, then The Crunchies Awards,is probably one of the highlights on your completely synched calendars across all PDAs (personal digital assistants). And if you’re not, then The Crunchies are probably something you should keep an eye out for, because if the winners and even those nominated haven’t made inroads into your life already, rest assured, they will pretty soon.

Currently in its fifth year, this annual technology award ceremony is organized by TechCrunch, the leading online magazine in the digital world. This year’s edition was co-hosted by VentureBeat and GigaOm. Held on Tuesday at the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, US, the night was hosted by the witty Harris Wittels who goes by the Twitter handle @Humblebrag, where he retweets “boastful and humble tweets” across the Web. In fact, the comedian-writer started the night reading out (and he read out everything!) a couple of samples of humble bragging by celebrities. Sample these:

M.G. Siegler (@parislemon), columnist for TechCrunch: “Trying to catch up on a billion emails before game time.”

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief, Huffington Post: “Helicopter from Munich to Switzerland had to land 100km away because of snow. Gonna have to rough it in an armoured snow hovercraft the rest of the way#FirstWorldProblems.”

You can view Wittels introduction at The Crunchies here.

This year, awards were presented in 20 categories, in which Dropbox, the most popular cloud service in the world, won the Best Overall Startup of 2011 as well as the Best Cloud Service, beating worthy contenders such as Box, Asana and CloudFlare.

Indian-born American venture capitalist VinodKhosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, was nominated for the VC of the Year award, alongside bigwigs such as Benchmark general partner Matt Cohler, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Aileen Lee, and founders-partners of Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who won the award.

Best Technology Achievement: Siri, the voice recognition personal assistant on the iPhone 4S.

Other nominees: Lytro, NFC, OnLive, Tesla Flat Pack Battery

Best Social Application: Google+, the latest offering from Google, aimed to take on social networking site Facebook.

Other nominees: Facebook Timeline, Instagram, The New New Twitter, Path 2.0

Best Shopping Application: Fab, which features daily design inspirations and sales at upto 70% off retail. In 2010, GroupOn won in this category.

Other nominees: Birchbox, Gilt Groupe, Lot 18, Warby Parker

Best Mobile Application: Evernote took over from last year’s winner Google Mobile Maps for Android. This nifty online application allows users to take notes on any device and sync it across platforms.

Other nominees: Flipboard, Pandora, Spotify, Square, Task Rabbit

Best Location Application: Grindr is the first one to win in this newly introduced category. This is the largest all-male location-based network in the world.

Other nominees: Airbnb, Foursquare, RunKeeper, Uber

Best Tablet Application: Fotopedia, which is THE platform to create visual content for mobiles.

Other nominees: djay, EventbriteAt the Door, GarageBand, Netflix, StumbleUpon

Best Design: Path 2.0, combines all the features of its predecessor With, with some added features, like your sleeping habits!

Other nominees: Gojee, Orchestra, Pinterest, Quora

Best Bootstrapped Startup: Imgur, the photo-sharing site made popular by the Reddit community.

Other nominees: Github, Instapaper, One Sheet, Tap TapTap (Camera+)

Best Cloud Service: Dropbox. Need we say more?

Other nominees: Asana, Box, CloudFlare, Okta, Twilio

Best International Startup: PeixeUrbano, the first and largest Latin-American local commerce website.

Other nominees: Badoo, Klarna, Rovio, SoundCloud, Wonga

Best Clean Tech Startup: EcoATM, the team which intends to solve the world’s eWaste problems.

Other nominees: Alta Energy, Array Power, Eco Motors, Hara

Best New Device: Nest, the hottest and coolest thermostat on the market this year. Last year, it was the iPad.

Other nominees: Galaxy Nexus, iPad 2, iPhone 4S, Kindle Fire

Best Time Sink: Words With Friends, a social mobile game challenging players to create the highest-scoring words.

Other nominees: Modern Warfare 3, Quora, Skyrim, Turntable.fm

Biggest Social Impact: Twitter. The social networking site came to the forefront as a social tool especially during last year’s Arab uprising.

Other nominees: Charity—Water, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Practice Fusion

Angel of the Year: Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn.

Other nominees: Ron Conway, Paul Graham, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant and BabakNivi, Kevin Rose

VC of the Year: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders-partners of Andreessen Horowitz.

Other nominees: Matt Cohler, VinodKhosla, Aileen Lee, Yuri Milner, David Sze

Founder of the Year: Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter)

Other nominees: Leah Busque (Task Rabbit), Brian Chesky (Airbnb), Susan Feldman & Ali Pincus (One Kings Lane), Drew Houston (Dropbox)

CEO of the Year: Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn)

Other nominees: Dick Costolo (Twitter), Daniel Ek (Spotify), Phil Libin (Evernote), Mark Pincus (Zynga)

Best New Startup of 2011: Pinterest, the social networking site which allows users to collect photos and products they love and create their own “pinboards”.

Other nominees: Codeacademy, Fab, Nest, Turntable.fm

Best Overall Startup of 2011: Dropbox takes over from last year’s winner, Twitter.

Other nominees: Instagram, Gilt Groupe, Spotify, Square, Tumblr

San Francisco: Twitter announced on Thursday that it would begin restricting Tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.

“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” Twitter wrote in a blog post published on Thursday.

It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries. “Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there,” it said.

Twitter gave as examples of restrictions it might cooperate with “certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

A Twitter spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the blog.

“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” the Twitter blog said.

Twitter’s decision to begin censoring content represents a significant departure from its policy just one year ago, when anti-government protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries coordinated mass demonstrations through on the social network and, in the process, thrust Twitter’s disruptive potential into the global spotlight.

As the revolutions brewed last January, Twitter signaled that it would take a hands-off approach to censoring content in a blog post entitled “The Tweets Must Flow.”

“We do not remove Tweets on the basis of their content,” the blog post read. “Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.”

And last year, Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray declared that the company was “from the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

In the interest of transparency, Twitter said on Thursday, it has built a mechanism to inform users in the event that a Tweet is being blocked.

Twitter’s move comes at a time when Internet companies such as Google and Facebook have wrestled with foreign governments over freedom of speech and privacy issues as they expand rapidly overseas.

In 2010 Google relocated its web search engine to Hong Kong, following a very public spat with the Chinese government over its refusal to bow to Beijing’s Web censorship requirements and a hacking episode that Google said it had traced to China.