Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie 12-09-11

This week's edition of Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie™ covers the controversial Carrier IQ software that may be installed on your mobile phone, an Instagram for Android update and tech companies that are gearing up for IPOs.

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Audio Transcript

Hello, this is Patric Welch, otherwise known as Mr. Noobie™. And this is the Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie for Friday, December 9th, 2011.

You may or may not have noticed that I didn't do a weekly wrap-up the past couple of weeks. This isn't because I forgot. Instead it's because of this... and this....

Let me clarify. The first week I missed was because I was celebrating Thanksgiving with my family and the second week I missed because I was celebrating doing nothing on a weekend cruise to the Bahamas. I know, rough life, right?

But even though I took a break from technology, the rest of the world didn't. So I'll do my best here to quickly catch you up.

The big news in the mobile phone market is a piece of software called Carrier IQ, made by a company with the same name. No, Carrier IQ isn't the latest and greatest app. Far from it. Instead, it's a piece of software that may be hidden on your phone, recording everything you do.

As you might have guessed, this has a lot of people up in arms with privacy concerns. For starters, the software is hidden so most people don't even know it exists. Second, there is no way to remove or opt-out of the software. And worst of all, it's still not even clear what the software actually does.

Some people claim the software logs every keystroke and action you take on your phone. Carrier IQ claims the software is only "counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools." They further state that the data collected is only used by the wireless carriers.

Yeah, that makes me feel a lot better.

On a brighter note, Instagram announced their popular app will soon be coming to Android phones. If you've never heard of Instagram it's a nifty little app that allows you to take pictures on your iPhone and apply creative filters to them to transform them into professional-looking snapshots.

As of now, the Instagram app is only available on the iPhone. And although Instagram hasn't given an official timetable for the Android version, I suspect it will be available sometime in early 2012.

Tech IPOs are making a comeback. Zynga, maker of popular games such as Words with Friends and Farmville, is up first and plans to raise $3.8 billion. But perhaps the bigger announcement is that of a Facebook IPO, most likely in the middle part of 2012. Facebook is hoping to raise $10 billion, putting its value at right around $100 billion. Wow.

That's it for this week's edition of the Weekly Wrap-up with Mr. Noobie™. I'm Patric Welch, otherwise known as Mr. Noobie, and I'll see you next week.