All together now: iPhone and Palm Pre, likely to both grace O2's UK portfolio
European wireless network operator O2 has reportedly reached a deal to exclusively carry the Palm Pre in the UK. O2, a subsidiary of Telefónica, is Britain's largest wireless carrier, and has a similar exclusivity agreement with Apple for the iPhone.
UK paper The Guardian reported last May that O2 was vying for an exclusive agreement with Palm for the Pre, and that competition with rival carrier Orange was fierce.
Vista's dead: Microsoft kills an OS and no one cares
For anyone still burning a torch for Windows Vista, its time is rapidly approaching. Buy now or forever hold your peace.
I can't say I'm surprised at how any of this has turned out. After all, Vista's launch was, to be charitable, rocky. When it first arrived just before Christmas 2006, it was late, bloated and, for some, expensive. It may have looked pretty on the outside, but critics quickly pounced on it for driver incompatibility, sluggish performance on mainstream -- and sometimes even high-end -- hardware and enough bugs to fill a family-sized tent on a weekend camping expedition. Microsoft didn't help matters with its ill-fated "Vista Capable" designation -- a public relations debacle that convinced buyers who were too lazy to read the fine print that Vista would run just as well on hardware barely suited for XP.
Dish users may continue using DVRs as appeals court stays injunction
As first reported by Dow Jones this morning, the ongoing technology infringement battle between DVR pioneer TiVo and Dish Network has only entered yet another new chapter. A federal appeals court early this morning granted Dish Network's request for a stay of an injunction that would have barred the continued sale and use of Dish's DVRs, after a district court ruled last month they infringed upon TiVo's patents for timesharing technology.
The stay does not mean that Dish is out of the woods. An appeal of last month's decision was inevitable, and courts will typically delay injunctions pending appeal, even if it ends up that the appeal is upheld.
Google talks spam trends, spiffs up Gmail labels
The first of the month always brings a bountiful harvest from Google's blogging troops, and two posts yesterday pointed us to some nifty changes to Gmail's labels features and passed along some cheerful numbers concerning spam levels as measured by the company's Postini group.
With one notable exception, those who rely even moderately on Gmail's labels ought to like where things are going. The section is finally positioned above the chat area, for starters, and your labels can be easily grouped and rearranged for your convenience rather than only in alpha order. (Gmail attempts to help you out by picking a few to put at the top of the list, hiding the rest, but we found that it didn't guess well at all; fortunately, sorting it out was drag-and-drop simple.)
ASCAP wants money for your ringtone
Not only do people in your vicinity fantasize about smacking you for that annoying "Play The Funky Music" ringtone you've been rocking since dirt was invented, ASCAP says that every time your phone rings, you're executing a public performance of the tune. And they want money.
ASCAP -- the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers -- has advanced the matter to (PDF available here) Southern New York's District Court, suing AT&T and Verizon over royalties the group says are due for content using music. That can mean, as ASCAP tells its members in a statement on its site, "delivery of full track songs, music videos, television content, ringtones and ringback tones." In other words, if your phone audibly rings, you've entertained someone and now you must pay.
The law vs. the right to know: Whose news is it anyway?
How far would you go to save a life?
How far would you go to save a business model?
What's Now: Recording industry wins big against Usenet file sharing service
Yesterday's WN|WN was singing the refrains of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" from the classic group "War." Apparently, we've got more readers in Australia these days (g'day mates!). Yesterday, the crew at Sydney-based digital advertising firm Amnesia Razorfish spent Wednesday trying to get Coke and Pepsi to friend each other on Twitter, and both companies did within 24 hours. "As long as we can live in ha-a-ar-mo-ny!" (We could have used these guys for Norm Coleman and Al Franken.)
Recording industry wins one against Usenet supplier
A Michael Jackson post-mortem on Internet journalism
The first I heard of Michael Jackson's death was six minutes before he was pronounced dead. That's saying something, because I'm not exactly the expert on pop culture, so my ability to have prognosticated the near future, based on something a little bird told me, on the subject of a fellow I seriously believed was still living in Tokyo, would normally be suspect. But there it was, in one of my IM feeds at about 5:20 Eastern time last Thursday, "Michael Jackson died."
My friend and colleague Angela Gunn suggested last Friday that something changed in the fabric of online journalism that day -- a high water mark had at last been reached. And indeed she may be correct, because if this Internet thing is capable of predicting the future even six minutes down the road, then I may want to get into the stock trading business.
The final score: Firefox 3.5 performs at 251% the speed of 3.0
Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows from Fileforum now.
For a good part of Tuesday, the Web Standards Project's Acid3 testing server was offline. With it went 25% of our browser performance testing capacity, which kept us from being able to publish our initial Mozilla Firefox 3.5 performance index as originally planned. As Acid3 started coming back, browsers were posting curiously low scores (for instance, Opera 10 Beta below 100%) that led us to dispute the test more than the browser.
New beta of iPhone 3.1 SDK shows signs of life for MMS on AT&T
Registered developers who log onto the Apple Dev Center this morning are being given an interesting little message (and 9to5Mac.com has a screenshot): With the iPhone 3.0 SDK having just been released, the first beta of the version 3.1 SDK began distribution last night.
Perhaps topmost on the list of iPhone 3.1 features that developers have been searching for, but were denied with the 3.0 release, is evidence that instant messages may at last include MMS. This blogger shows screenshots of images that can be cut-and-pasted to the text entry line, which implies that they can be sent using MMS protocol...at some point. AT&T has not enabled that protocol over its network yet, though the carrier is saying it will enable that feature this summer.
USAspending.gov shows where the money goes
The White House on Tuesday launched USAspending.gov, designed to give the public a look at thousands of information technology projects underway around the federal government. The site breaks down Fiscal Year 2009 spending on contracts, grants, loans, insurance, direct payments, and other assistance -- who's getting the money, who's allocating the money, and which agencies can't seem to keep their projects on track. The site so far tracks over $539 billion budgeted dollars in 781 "investments" comprising over 7,000 projects.
The agencies represented by the site are the 24 responsible for complying with the CFO Act of 1990. and the information is mainly derived from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and the Federal Assistant Award Data System -- or, for those familiar with the paperwork, Exhibit 53 and Exhibit 300 data, covering all investments and major investments respectively. Most of the data is about a month old, though some agencies are slower to submit data on grants or loans; going forward, the site should be updated with fresh FPDS data every two weeks.
Bing bites Google very, very slightly
The latest usage share data tabulated by StatCounter, a private Web analytics service, confirms that Microsoft's new Bing search engine really did capture usage share of US Web users from rival Google, without damaging share numbers for #2 search engine Yahoo. Just how bad was the damage? Bing gained 0.42% usage share in June from predecessor Windows Live's US numbers, while Google's declined by about that much.
Bing's US-based usage share now stands at 8.23%, StatCounter estimates, based on numbers that closed out yesterday, June 30. This compared to Yahoo at 11.04% and Google at 78.48%.
What's Now: Joost squeezes out employees, Pirate Bay to squeeze out...royalties?
Joost so done with the consumer-video space
Afternoon of Tuesday, June 30, 2009 • Once it aimed to compete with YouTube, but that goal has backfired on bigger companies than Joost, which on Tuesday announced that it would be converting to a white-label video hosting service. Joost's CEO, Mike Volpi, is also stepping down in favor of Matt Zelesko, the current senior VP of engineering.
Twitter tweaks its follower management tools
Someday, somehow, Twitter or one of the other social-networking services will release a tweak to its interface that every user will love and no user will whine about. We'll all be dead by then, of course, but for now the latest changes to Twitter give as little legitimate reason for complaint as anything we've seen lately.
The Following and Followers sections have been changed to expand the user's options for keeping track of who's following and what people they're following are up to. There are two views for each section -- List, which shows username and real name, and Expanded, which shows all of that plus location and their last tweet. In addition, in the Followers list you can see which people also follow you. (Why isn't that offered in both? We may never know.)
Myka's Linux-based BitTorrent box great home theater PC for lazy people
With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo's was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.
Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn't carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you're a little bit lazy...you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.
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