Up to 31st March, Sony’s net profit was 43bn yen ($436m; £280m). This is a great improvement from the 457bn loss from last year.

Against the US dollar, the yen has fallen over 20% since last November. This has been due to aggressive measures being enforced to encourage growth in the economy.

The previous fall in profits has been due to a number of factors. These include falling prices and tighter profit margins which have hit the TV sector.

To overcome the profit loss, Sony have been reducing their costs and restructuring their business. Sony have also sold some of their assets which have resulted in gains of nearly $2.5bn over the last financial year.

Therefore the rise in profits isn’t a true reflection of Sony’s success and there is still work that needs to be done to improve their sales.

Adding a subscription to channels will allow content makers to gain money for their creativity. For example the Sesame Street channel will allow viewers to see full episodes on a subscription basis.

Other YouTube subscription channels include National Geographic Kids and Fix My Hog Premium for Harley Davidson enthusiasts.

YouTube join other subscription channels such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Ian Maude, an online media expert at consultants Enders Analysis says,

“The YouTube move will make it much harder for smaller standalone online subscription-based platforms because Google has the infrastructure to make it easy for content to be hosted, delivered and billed for.

“But it was always inevitable that Google was going to do this.”

Currently there are 7.1 billion people and 6.8 billion of them have a mobile subscription. By early 2014 the International Telecoms Union predict the number of people with a mobile will rise to over 7 billion.

Other findings from the ITU World in 2013 report include research which found that more than a third of the world’s population is online. However this means that two thirds are missing out on the world’s biggest market.

India is showing the slowest mobile growth. However mobile use is growing in developing countries. They help to deliver ICT applications in all sorts of different areas including health, education and business.

Viber are aware of the bug and are preparing a fix to repair the problem. The bug was discovered by a Vietnamese security firm who found that it works in various ways depending on which type of Android phone the victim is using.

Viber is similar to Skype and lets Android users send free messages and make free calls. It has been downloaded more than 50 million times from Google Play according to Google statistics. The security firm found that they could bypass lock screens by sending pop-up messages and through using other parts of the Viber app.

“The way Viber handles to pop-up its messages on smartphones’ lock screen is unusual, resulting in its failure to control programming logic, causing the flaw to appear,” said Nguyen Minh Duc, head of the Vietnamese security division at the firm Bkav.

Viber are aware of the bug and are giving advice to people on their support forum who fall victim. They are working on a fix and hope to resolve the problem soon.

The popularity of social media is always growing and its a great way to interact with the public. It is a simple and free way to contact thousands of people. Your business will also be targeted at the right market, connecting with the people who are most interested in your business.

A hotel company in Denver, Colorado have used social media to help ensure their dinosaur themed renovation is a success. They decided to invest in social media and use it to post dinosaur related content every day. You can read more about their story and how social media has helped to develop their business here.

Manteresting is a new website which allows men to share blokey images of things they like. Instead of ‘pinning’ your images like you would on Pinterest, you nail them to your Manteresting board known as your ‘workbench’, for extra grrr.  You can also like other users images by ‘bumping’ them. The website has a social networking aspect to it as well and the site promises to help users “be more awesome at life”.

There are already 75,000 items shared and a pattern is emerging of images of tattoos, cars and women (surprise surprise!). Think i’ll stick to cupcakes and fluffy animals on Pinterest thanks

EE have announced that their faster 4G mobile broadband service will now be available in Bradford, Bingley, Doncaster, Dudley, Harpenden, Leicester, Lichfield, Loughborough, Luton, Reading, Shipley, St Albans and West Bromwich in addition to the 37 towns and cities already covered.

YouTube

YouTube which is owned by Google has announced that they have reached one billion users a month posing a competition between them and Facebook who reached a billion users in October last year.

YouTube has said that the growth was due to the recent growth in smartphone users visiting the site every month. Its popularity is a great way for Google to sell advertising alongside its core search business.

Google paid $1.76bn (£1.16bn) for YouTube in 2006, which at the time had an estimated 30-40 million users world wide.

This large audience is a great marketing tool for businesses.

“Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences. Advertisers have taken notice,” it said, adding that the top 100 brands listed by trade magazine Advertising Age were now running campaigns on YouTube.

YouTube was launched in California by three former PayPal employees. The first video uploaded was from co-founder Jawed Karim called Me at the Zoo.

Google Keep

Google have launched a new service called Keep which allows users to keep checklists and voice notes. The digital memo market is growing and Google will see themselves competing against services who already have an established position in the market.

Other digital memo providers include Evernote who have 15 million active users, Microsoft’s OneNote and smaller rivals such as Springpad and Catch.

“Every day we all see, hear or think of things we need to remember. Usually we grab a pad of sticky notes, scribble a reminder and put it on the desk, the fridge or the relevant page of a magazine,” said Google software engineer Katherine Kuan in a blog post.

“With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you,” she added.

The information from Keep is stored in Google Drive and users can speak memos which are then saved as transcribes. You can also use the search facility on Keep to quickly find information you’re looking for.

Currently there is little difference between Keep and other digital memo services on the market so Google may struggle to make an impact.

“My gut instinct is that Google may have come too late to this. It has a track record – with cloud services and social networking – of coming too late and struggling to make an impact,” said Chris Green, principal technology analyst at Davies Murphy Group.

“But, if anyone can make an impact, it will be Google,” he added.

“If there is a 800lb gorilla like Google behind you you are going to be worried. Evernote cannot rest on its laurels but it does have a huge user base and they are not all going to desert it overnight.”

However Google may benefit from users who already use their services such as Google Apps.

“If you are a converted Google user it represents a good option. There is a level of convenience about having access to a range of services using one log-in,” Tony Cripps, analyst at research firm Ovum said.

“I use Evernote but I’ll give this a spin and see if it works for me.”

The tweets appeared on Thursday afternoon and were about fake weather conditions in Middle Eastern countries. The BBC hacking is the latest in a number of attacks to large corporate Twitter feeds.

All inappropriate content has been deleted from the accounts and the BBC has taken control of them. A BBC spokeswoman said: “We apologise to our audiences that this unacceptable material appeared under the BBC’s name.”

The BBC Twitter weather feed showed a number of strange tweets from early Thursday afternoon. These included: “Saudi weather station down due to head-on collision with camel.”

Another read: “Chaotic weather forecast for Lebanon as the government decides to distance itself from the Milky Way.”

Other firms which have been attacked include Burger King and Chrysler who had their twitter feeds hijacked and a quarter of a million Twitter users had their passwords stolen.

“The BBC is an obvious place to attack as it a trusted brand and so anyone who wishes to broadcast a message can reach a audience that are likely to pay attention, certainly initially,” said Prof Alan Woodward from the department of computing at the University of Surrey.

“The most likely source of the hack is via social engineering – someone managing to elicit the password by fooling the user who keeps the password,” he added.

Experts are increasingly asking for Twitter to increase their security and offer two-factor authentication, essentially a disposable, single-use password for its users.

“The good news is that the hack doesn’t appear to have been done with the intention of spreading malicious links or scams. Instead, it appears that the Syrian Electronic Army are trying to spread political messages about Syria instead,” said security consultant Graham Cluley.

“You should always use hard-to-guess, hard-to-crack, unique passwords for your online accounts that you are not using anywhere else on the web.”