Tim Conneally

The grand unveiling of Google Voice apps for BlackBerry and Android was two weeks ago, but an iPhone app for the service was conspicuously absent. Now it has come out that all Google Voice apps are being pulled from the iTunes app store on the familiar grounds of "duplicate functionality."

Apple has done away with a lot of notable apps that provide a service which the iPhone already presumably provides. The most famous instance of this happened in 2008 with Podcaster, which duplicated the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes. It also happened with Opera Mini, which duplicated Safari's functionality.

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In anticipation of AOL's spin off from parent company Time Warner, Google has sold its 5% stake in AOL back to Time Warner for almost 75% less than it paid for it in 2006.

According to an SEC filing released today, Time Warner paid $283 million for Google's 5% share of AOL on July 8, which Google spent a billion dollars on in 2006.

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As a run-up to the Windows Mobile Marketplace launch, Microsoft has officially opened submissions for the Race to Market developer challenge in 29 countries.

The contest will begin when the Marketplace opens and continue until the last day of 2009, at which time four apps will be selected to win a Developer Edition Microsoft Surface table each. Registered Windows Mobile devs and independent software vendors can now upload their apps for certification in the Marketplace and expect them to be ready within around 10 business days.

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The Australian Federal Government's controversial plan to install ISP-level content filters has managed to make it to the widespread testing phase, and challenging the long-held criticism that such filters would slow down Internet speeds as much as 75% percent, ISPs testing the filters now report minimal slowdown.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority began testing the filters in February 2008 in Tasmania before open testing was slated to begin. In these tests, one of the filters tested registered 2% "network degradation," while three registered under 30% and two degraded network performance by more than 75%.

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In its "State of the Mobile Web" report, which analyzes aggregated information from Opera Mini's servers, browser company Opera Software today said that in June 2009, 26.5 million users viewed more than 10.4 billion pages. In annual performance, that represents a 143% increase in users and a 224% increase in pages viewed.

Now it's well known that Opera is one of the most widely ported browsers in the mobile device realm, with more than 40 million phones shipping with the software built in, but where is it being used the absolute most, and on what devices?

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Sun Danyong, the 25-year old employee of Apple contractor Foxconn who committed suicide after losing a prototype iPhone reportedly had a history of misplacing secret prototypes, Foxconn told reporters yesterday.

After a prototype next-gen iPhone that was Sun's responsibility went missing, he became the target of an investigation that allegedly involved physical violence and humiliation. Shortly thereafter, Sun plunged off of a twelve story apartment building to his death. Investigators said there were no other suspicious markings on his body and determined that it was suicide.

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Western Digital today announced its new terabyte storage solution in the 2.5" category, the WD Scorpio Blue SATA drive.

The 5200RPM 3Gb/s, 8MB Cache WD Scorpio Blue comes in both 750GB and 1TB capacities for $189.99 and $249.99 respectively. They feature three of Western Digital's trademarked technologies, WhisperDrive sound dampening, ShockGuard shock tolerance technology, and SecurePark technology, which reduces the time the record head is in contact with the spinning disc surface, ostensibly lengthening the lifespan of the drive.

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Telecommunications company Verizon will be eliminating 8,000 positions in the next six months, said CFO John Killian in the company's earnings call this morning.

"Although we are taking steps to mitigate the negative impacts of the economy in the short-term, we also need to more significantly reduce the wireline cost structure over the next 12 to 18 months...As part of our ongoing program to resize and reduce the cost structure, we reduced headcount by more than 8,000 over the last 12 months. We plan to do more than 8,000 in force and contractor reductions in the second half of this year," Killian said.

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AT&T reportedly blocked sections of message board 4chan, the popular wellspring of memes and clearinghouse for humor of questionable taste. For a short time yesterday, AT&T was blocking image boards (/b/ and /r9k/) with no explanation to its DSL and U-Verse customers or to 4chan's admins. Later in the evening, AT&T restored network access, but the site remained under a large-scale denial of service (DDoS) attack which continued into the morning.

While AT&T's blockage of img.4chan.org was confirmed, the relationship between the blockage and denial of service attack remains unconfirmed. Some reports (and some posters on /b/) claim that the DDoS attacks were coming from AT&T customers.

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In the vinyl age, the packaging of a record album was integral to the overall experience that album gave the listener. A good cover could help sell more albums, and detailed liner notes could serve as an enhancement to listening. As packaging shrunk with changing formats, most of the impact of the album packaging was lost. Meanwhile, album purchases have been on a steady decline for years as digital consumers favor single songs over whole albums.

Apple and the "big four" major record labels are hoping to change that by re-inventing the packaging of the MP3 album. In a project reportedly codenamed "Cocktail," Apple, Sony, Universal, Warner, and EMI are working on packaging interactive content with digital albums. Albums packaged with song lyrics, production and liner notes, video clips and photos could be the next new type of bundle in iTunes.

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Yesterday's introduction of Google Latitude for iPhone could have been a big deal if the product being announced was actually an application. Instead, Google's social Geolocation product is a Web app that must be run from inside Safari. As such, it's being described as toothless, crippled and worthless by reviewers all over the Web today.

Why was it released as a Web app when it has been available as a standalone app on all the major mobile platforms for five months? Google has been quite upfront about that, saying, "We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a Web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles."

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Thanks to Apple's well-publicized complaint about Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" advertisements (Kevin Turner, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer called it "the greatest single phone call in the history that [he'd] ever taken in business,") the ads have been changed.

Apple's legal department called demanding that Microsoft change the "Laptop Hunter" ads because they are factually inaccurate. In response, Turner said, "We're just going to keep running them and running them and running them."

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Only nine days ago, Palm Inc.'s flagship touchphone, the Pre, lost its unofficial compatibility with iTunes when Apple updated the media management software to fix "an issue with Verification of Apple devices." After users updated the software, and plugged in their Pres, they found the software no longer recognized the device for syncing.

Already, an over-the-air WebOS update (v1.1) has been made available which renews the device's ability to be paired with iTunes. The update includes new feature support in Exchange ActiveSync, the ability to include emoticons in e-mail, MMS, and SMS, and the new NFL Mobile Live app from Sprint. As an additional jab at Apple, when Palm's Vice President of Business Products, John Traynor announced the update in the company's blog yesterday, he listed all of these features, but saved the iTunes fix for last, and prefaced it by delivering Steve Jobs' now trademark line: "Oh, and one more thing..."

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Afternoon of July 23, 2009 • David Letterman's comments about Twitter being "a waste of time" earlier this week gave fans of the service a good laugh, but the 62-year old chat show host who doesn't "know anything about the Twitter" actually posed a sound question. When posting a message, where does it go?

This kind of question probably wouldn't even occur to a regular user of the service, but to those unfamiliar with feeds, status updates, live blogging, and the like, Twitter offers very little to grab onto. Getting started is not as easy as it could be.

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In case there was any doubt of the momentum Netflix has been able to build as video stores continue to cede market dominance to on-demand streaming and by-mail and kiosk-based rentals, the company today announced that it has 40% more subscribers, 21% higher revenue, and 22% higher profits than last year.

"We believe that the inclusion of streaming in our service has broadened the appeal of Netflix and is driving growth...essentially, both Netflix and Redbox are growing at the expense of video stores." said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in the company's earnings call this afternoon.

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