Research firm Strategy Analytics has reported this morning that Android now has a 39% tablet OS market share as of the fourth quarter 2011. Apple still has the lead at 58% market share in Q4 2011, but they are down from 68% in the fourth quarter of 2010. However these numbers are based on “sell-in” rather than over-the-counter sales. What this means is that the numbers include Android tablets may still sit on retail shelves and never be bought. The Amazon Kindle Fire was also included in the Android market share numbers. [TechCrunch]

At a town hall meeting today, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook talked about new employee benefits. Cook announced that Apple employees will soon be given $500 discounts on purchases of new Macs and $250 discounts on purchases of a new iPad. The new discount program will be applied at some point in June 2012. The Apple employees may utilize the discount opportunity once every three years and the employee must have been working for Apple for at least 90 days. The Mac discount includes the Mac Mini. Current employees already have a 25% discount on Macs.

This past May on a Friday evening, there was an explosion at Foxconn Building A5 which is the factory that the iPad was manufactured. Two people were killed immediately and dozens of people were injured. Two years ago 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical ot clean iPhone screens. Apple’s growth is leading to unfair working conditions in China.

I have spent a countless number of hours visiting Techmeme.com. The website was recently overhauled with a new design and makes reading more pleasant. Techmeme followed the footsteps of Google News by removing the hideous underlines on the links. Now Techmeme is not as ugly as The Drudge Report said Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera pointed out on a blog post. Other changes include adding Sponsor Posts above the fold and sidebar navigation being moved to the top of the page. Eventually these design changes will be applied to Techmeme sister sites like Mediagazer.

The next generation Microsoft Xbox console will be powerful. The next Xbox is expected to ship to retailers in late October or early November next year with six times the amount of processing power that the Xbox 360 has according to sources with IGN. Mass production of the console is expected to start this year and the GPU will be based on a processor similar to the Radeon HD 6670. The 6670 has support for DirectX11, multidisplay output, 3D and 1080p HD output. The current market price of this processor starts at $79.99. This processor also has 20% great performance than the Nintendo Wii U. Development kits are expected to be available this August.

United Kingdom-based telecommunications company O2 has just fixed a glitch that allowed website owners to collect the phone numbers from people visiting their website on the O2 network. Lewis Peckover created a website with a script on it that showed the phone number of the visitor that came in from O2′s network. Since O2 fixed the problem now, I doubt it Lewis’ website will work any more. The Information Commissioner is currently investigating O2 over this issue.

It’s been an intense couple of weeks at Yahoo! It has been about two weeks since Scott Thompson was hired as the CEO of Yahoo! and Jerry Yang stepped down completely from the company. Yesterday the company announced their quarterly results and it turns out that they saw a revenues loss from the year before.

Google has over 30,000 employees and several of them are the world’s best engineers. A good number of these engineers do not like the recent Search Plus Your World feature built into the results of the search engine. The core of Google’s corporate culture was “Don’t be evil,” but this new strategy seems to be a very aggressive move against Facebook.