Top 12 Yahoo trends in India in 2012

Yahoo India has announced its list of tech topics that trended on Yahoo in 2012. Here goes the list. 

1. iPhone 5 and the iPad mini: Apple unveiled the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini in September. The iPhone 5 was launched in India in November, while the 7-inch iPad mini hit the Indian market in December.



2. Google glass: Google announced a wearable computer - a pair of Internet-connected glasses - that Google Inc. began secretly building more than two years ago. The technology progressed far enough for Google to announce "Project Glass" in April. Now the futuristic experiment is moving closer to becoming a mass-market product. 

3. Facebook IPO: The historic initial public offering of Facebook Inc did not go as planned on May 18, as the social networking company's sky-high valuation combined with trading glitches left the stock languishing near its offering price at the market close.

4. Facebook buys Instagram: Facebook closed its purchase of Instagram, the wildly popular photo-sharing app that it agreed to buy before its initial public stock offering in May. 

5. Crowd funding comes of age: Crowd funding is a capital-raising strategy in which investors buy small stakes in ventures through various websites. It started as a way to ask many people for small amounts of money to fund everything from documentaries to community projects, often in exchange for a free service or product.

6. SOPA Blackout: The legislation, known as SOPA in the US House of Representatives and PIPA in the Senate, was designed to curb access to foreign websites "dedicated to theft" through techniques such as disabling links to those sites. 

7. Google driverless car: Google came up with a concept of self-driven cars. Google's self-driven cars rely on video cameras, radar sensors, lasers, and a database of information collected from manually driven cars to help navigate, according to the company.

8. Pinterest: It is a social photo-sharing website. Its users 'pin' photographs on virtual boards sorted by 'interests'. Though launched in 2010, but it became popular this year. 

9. Apple wins copyright infringement: A US jury found Samsung had copied critical features of the hugely popular iPhone and iPad and awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages in the most closely watched patent trial in years.

10. Cloud computing: In cloud computing, end users are not required to buy software or devices as they are provided by service providers on a rental basis. "Cloud computing market in India is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 40 per cent by 2014. With our end-to-end telecom solutions bundled with the latest technologies like 3G and 4G, Bharti Airtel is poised to lead this space," Bharti Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor said in a statement.

11. Facebook blows past a billion users and other social media player keep growing: Facebook is now a billion users strong. Facebook's CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone on his Facebook profile. In June this year Facebook had announced that it had 552 million daily active users and 955 million monthly active users.


12. Microsoft debuts the Surface: In a bid to revive interest in its flagship product and regain ground lost to Apple and Google in mobile computing, Microsoft launched the Windows 8-powered Surface tablet this eyar.