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Zune users, you are fired as of today!

Posted: 31 12 2008 20:18:39 CET by Mircea Goia

Tags: News [edit]

We heard that Microsoft is preparing for a mass layoff of its employees/contractors in January.

Well, I guess they are doing a rehearsal today by “firing” their Zune users.

Zune is the Microsoft answer to Apple’s iPod and today many of its users reported en-masse failures of this music player (specifically, the 30 Gb version of it). The player began freezing at the loading point and become unresponsive (and thus useless).

This is what Microsoft support says:

Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We’re aware of the problem and are working to correct it. The Zune Social might be slow or inaccessible. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!

Which, basically, means they don’t have a clue yet of what causes these “blue screen of death - Zune version”.

Some people came up with an un-official fix though (try it at your own risk!).

Many users are disgruntled by this failure and plan on being done with the device. Zune wasn’t anyway a real contestant for iPod with all Microsoft’s efforts.

But look at the bright side of the story: those people can go to a New Year party to listen music (and dance). Which is what I’m just doing tonight ;)! (even if I am an iPod user)

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Are you a Microsoft employee/contractor? Be afraid, very afraid!

Posted: 31 12 2008 19:44:16 CET by Mircea Goia

Tags: News [edit]

Rumor has it (here and here) that Microsoft is preparing for a worldwide mass layoff sometime in January.

The software giant has about 91,000 workers around the world and many of them are contractors, if Microsoft follows the typical pattern for corporate layoffs, it’s likely that the contractors will be hit first. The plan would be to layoff between 10% and 17% of the entire workforce in its worldwide army. For Microsoft, a layoff of this size would not be a small cut: as many as 10,000 to 15,000 workers would get the pink slip.

Microsoft’s layoff numbers will make a sizeable addition to the Techcrunch layoff tracker, and that will send a good signal to Wall Street. Since currently MSFT stock is in a free-fall along with other tech stocks, the company probably would want to make its cuts before the Q2 earning report is released on Jan 22.

Which MSFT division will be the hardest hit? We don’t know yet, MSN could be one, since it is not exactly the shining star in the Microsoft constellation. But Microsoft Europe, Middle East, and Africa might not be spared either.

If the rumor becomes reality, then Microsoft will find itself in the same league as Google and Yahoo, both of whom had to layoff large numbers of employees in the past year.

If the worldwide economic mess continues into 2009, then we might even see the entire MSFT empire collapsing and vanishing from the face of the Earth. Then Linux will declare “game over!” at last!

Ok, I was joking in the last sentences. I hope you all will have a Happy New Year and best of luck to MSFT employees who will be axed if the rumor is true!

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Twitority’s Jon Wheatly about the hype and debates

Posted: 31 12 2008 14:26:59 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Earlier this week, Loic Le Meur asked for authority-based Twitter search. Jon Wheatly, a young coder from the UK, only needed 12 hours and numerous cups of coffee to make this possible. He developed Twitority, with which you can search within tweets from people with different levels of authority (based on how many followers you have). A hype was born. Almost every major tech blog picked it up.

Jon Wheatly

And now we report about it, but not without giving you some background. A story about a young enthusiast like Jon needs more than just a discussion about vanity and the value of Twitter authority.

In an email, Wheatly described the hype: “Things have been pretty crazy since we put the site online on Sunday. After Loic blogged about us the site started getting pick up by other bloggers and just snowballed from there.”

He also responds to some complaints about the somewhat slow search: “Because of the limitations of the Twitter API we were forced to hack around it and scrape the follower numbers for each user, per search that is performed. This is why each search takes so long. It really isn’t ideal but it’s the only way a third party can build any kind of “authority” based search. The server was really moaning last night but it survived, just.”

And what about the debate about the idea behind of Twitority?Erick Schonfeld for example, argues that not the number of followers matters, but how many times someone gets retweeted. Wheatly: “The debate is still raging about whether or not follower numbers are a good way to measure authority and honestly I don’t know. This was just something that Loic (and numerous other people) wanted so we decided to see if we could make it happen.”

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Turkish Web TV provider MYK Medya finds investor with huge network

Posted: 31 12 2008 12:22:27 CET by Şekip Can Gökalp

Tags: News [edit]

On the last day of this very productive year for web business in Turkey, a big investment & partnership news was just announced. Serdar Kuzuloğlu, founder of MYK Medya, posted an article on his personal blog about the incident. Couple of weeks after Adhood (a Turkticaret.net company) started to sell ADs for MYK Medya, Turkticaret.net, which has many different services like domain trade, hosting, ecommerce solutions and partnerships with Turkcell, Alibaba etc., now joins the team as an investor.

MYK has three online products, which are televidyon; a web TV with 9 online channels, all shot, cut and published by the MYK crew, yahoyt, a tech-focused news portal and kaybolduk.biz, a getlost-discover-share platform in cooperation with Nokia. Kuzuloğlu says that they invested more than EUR250K just into their studios last year. A little older than a year, MYK is now 11 M SERDAR KUZULOGLU people and wasn’t funded before, meaning they were profitable from the start. They simply bootstrapped with consultancy jobs and the main revenue at the moment comes actually from adverstisements.

The partnership, where the invested amount is kept secret, means not only extra cash for MYK. Turkticaret.net is one of the oldest players the Turkish scene has to offer and they own domains like mobil.tv or web.tv, MYK will also be involved in projects that will use these domains. MYK owns a single studio at the moment, plans to have more in 2009 and to raise the channel amount to 25, according to the announcement written by Kuzuloğlu.

Serdar Kuzuloğlu is one of the key characters in the Turkish web scene, well known and respected by the new generation of entrepreneurs. After a long carrier as a technology editor at Doğan Medya, he became the Director of New Generation Services, managing the whole web, mobile and IPTV vision of Doğan Holding, which owns pretty much the half of Turkish old school media. After 11 months at that position, he left Doğan Holding and focused on MYK.

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Breaking: Apple Announces it’s Latest Release, The Mactini.

Posted: 31 12 2008 6:05:37 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: How to [edit]

This is breaking news, we’ll update this with more information the moment we hear it.

For now, watch the video:

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Detect Fonts Quick and Easy with WhatTheFont

Posted: 30 12 2008 22:50:08 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

a83da7b9dfafeffc18d429cc20c9718f WhatTheFont is a neat little tool from MyFonts.com which does one thing and does it well, it detects fonts from images for you.

All you need to do is upload an image (or URL) sample of the font being used and WhatTheFont goes to work providing 3-5 possible options for what the font may be.

Take for example the font 37 Signals have used for the text on their homepage. I’ve always been a fan and that was the first to come to mind when selecting a font to detect.

1. I took a screenshot of that area of the page.

2. Uploaded the shot to WhatTheFont and after confirming the letters of both words, I was presented with the following options:

picture-252

It has to be said, not bad - not bad at all. Clearly this isn’t a tool you’ll be using on a daily basis but it’s great to know it’s there and it works. Definitely one to bookmark.

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YellowPages Paid $3.85 Million For YP.com. Bargain…

Posted: 30 12 2008 19:19:18 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

Robin Wauters of Techcrunch shared an interesting little nugget of information today. News that AT&T’s Yellow Pages purchased the domain name YP.com from LiveDeal (formerly YP Corp.) for $3.85 million.

For LiveDeal, a leader in free local online classifieds, it’s a much needed cash injection. After higher than expected cost of services and lower revenues in 2008, the company made a loss of $1.53 million last year.

A year ago, RoyalPingdom collated the top 20 most expensive domain name acquisitions, this acquisition easily ranks up there with the most expensive of them.

picture-181

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Latest Release of Mozilla’s Ubiquity Is Slicker and Faster. Extension of the Year?

Posted: 30 12 2008 18:49:27 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

I installed Mozilla/Humanized Firefox extension Ubiquity the moment it was first released. The Firefox extension adds a collection of user-contributed keyboard commands which allow you to perform any number of often time consuming web-based tasks in a matter of seconds; such as inserting a google map into an email, checking your schedule on Google calendar or checking the definition of a word.

As a Quicksilver fanatic (mac app, similar to Windows Launchy), I quickly adjusted to using the extension as often as possible until the moment I installed the Firefox’s beta versions - which killed Ubiquity off temporarily. You can therefore imagine my joy when I discovered a beta version of the latest release Ubiquity 0.1.3 had been posted for download. After a crazy night out celebrating (I kid) I installed the latest release and to my delight, a number of improvements had been made:

First and foremost, the UI. It looks and fells slick and more like the a Quicksilver UI - which is never a bad thing.

picture-14

You’ll notice by visiting your command-editor (just launch Ubiquity and type command-editor) that you can also change to a couple of alternative UI’s and even create your own (using just a bit of CSS) - so expect a gallery of them to pop up any time soon.

Aside from the UI, there have been a host of other changes to the internal works of Ubiquity as Atul Varma, Ubiquity’s lead developer, explains in a post. These alterations have clearly had a large impact on the speed and reliability of the tool which although useful, felt bloated and slow at its’ first release. Thankfully with the release of the current beta Ubiquity 0.1.3 and the upcoming Ubiquity 0.2, the possibilities are feel endless. Of course, now a few months on, there are an incredible array of useful ubiquity commands out there - my personal favorites being Google Calendar’s “check” command which shows you your schedule for any particular date. I’m also loving the bookmarklet command which lets you turn any bookmarklet into a keyboard shortcut!

For anyone who is interested, particularly the web and Firefox extension developers out there - I highly recommend watching Atul’s video (below) on the upcoming 0.2 release of what is clearly the extension of the year.

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A quarter century of Apple sweetness infographic

Posted: 30 12 2008 15:04:09 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Grab your old Macs, place them on a table, and see the color pattern. Yes, from beige to bright colors to white to silver.

Same in Wired’s infographic shown here. It shows a spectacular timeline of 25 years, designed in an unconventional way. Randy Krum from Cool Infographics notes that “the style also invites the viewer in to explore the details hidden in the image and find the extra images that specifically tagged with a date across the top.” Click for a larger version and see for yourself.

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Developing iPhone apps not worth the effort anymore

Posted: 30 12 2008 12:52:11 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

If you’re an iPhone app developer, you’re basically working for that one big hit. Like the developer of the iFart app, he told VentureBeat ow much profit he makes on a daily basis. A whopping $10,000!

Dutch iPhone developer Vincent Verweij got pretty fed up with this. He burns a lot of money while developing his apps, without seeing much revenue coming back. “To survive in the App Store, you’re only hope is short hits, I don’t want my business to depend on that,” Verweij told Emerce.

He also complains about the low prices for apps - max 3 euros -, the short life-cycle, overabundance, and the cocky attitude of Apple. Verweij developed an app called Camera Pro, which added 15 new features to the camera. That app was a little too good for Apple, so the company rejected the app (for now). Verweij lost around €10,000 because of this disappointment.

So what’s Verweij gonna do now? Hold on to yourself: he’s going to focus on Windows Mobile and Symbian again, since these platforms have more possibilities. I bet he’s also working on Android apps, but he probably didn’t want to tell the reporter.

By the way, Gerard van Enk tipped the readers of Emerce about a research by Mobile Orchard: people are willing to pay more than 99 cents for business and GTD apps

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$100 laptop brings John Lennon back from the dead

Posted: 29 12 2008 11:35:59 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Those of you who live in the States have probably seen tons of OLPC ads lately. The charity organization is looking for new money streams to bring more laptops to developing countries. After trying to get people’s attention with a rather controversial - yet effective - ad in which children’s learning skills are projected on warfare and prostitution, OLPC now brings a dead Beatle back to life.

Yoko Ono has helped the laptop pioneers to create a digitally enhanced advertisement of Mr. Lennon. One of his most famous phrases, “imagine”, is used to convince you to donate some dollars for a good cause.

“Imagine every child no matter where in the world they were could access a universe of knowledge. You can give a child a laptop and more than imagine, you can change the world,” he states.”

I think the result is rather scary, yet it sure attracts a lot of attention.

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Sorry Apple user, you’re just a plain boring sheep now

Posted: 29 12 2008 10:29:14 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

1477994596_3558de5fb1.jpg (JPEG-afbeelding, 500x333 pixels)

Anyone who has spent some time in a coffee bar with wifi already knew it, yet it’s official when Wired reports it. Mac users aren’t special anymore. First of all, every college student has a Macbook, secondly, have you ever seen the sales numbers of the iPhone?! If you need a more thorough analysis of the undoing of the Mac cult, read the Wired article. Here are their eight reasons with links to articles supporting the thesis, the complete story is here.

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Robert Scoble Explains How to Use Friendfeed

Posted: 29 12 2008 2:56:26 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

Robert Scoble; tech journalist and passionate Friendfeed user has released a fantastic video demonstrating why Friendfeed is so useful and why you should be trying the service out too.

FYI, we also have a series titled The Unofficial Guide to Friendfeed, you can read part 1 What Makes Friendfeed Special and part 2 Getting Started.

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This Website is Rated PG. Parental Guidance is Advised.

Posted: 27 12 2008 22:00:24 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

pgwebsite In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the UK’s culture secretary Andy Burnham is recommending that movie-esque ratings should be applied to all English language websites across the web. He plans to sit down with Barack Obama presumably over a lunch or dinner, and suggest all “English” websites are stamped with an age rating.

His goal is to convince ISP’S to offer parents services which are deemed completely safe for children.

Mr Burnham says:

“This isn’t about turning back the clock. The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways, but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around it.”

He continues,

“This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it, it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people.”

Can it Work?

Not a chance. Whilst I do believe Burnham is trying his best to appear pro-active, protect children and make life easier for parents out there - clearly he has no idea how the internet works. The internet contains over 100 million websites, each would need to be scanned/reviewed, not to mention all the new pages added to the web every second. The other option being each new website having to be manually submitted for review like any movie - yes, ridiculous, I know.

Imagine the day when virtually everyone has their own website, not just geeks like you and me. Policing content will become the norm, with over-protective folks spending their days determining whether this image or that ‘quote’ meets the relevant age rating set for that site. It’ll turn into a joke. In fact, this must all be a joke, surely Mr Burnham?

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Amazon has a Very Merry Christmas

Posted: 26 12 2008 19:19:25 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

imageaxd Amazon.com had it’s best Christmas ever with more than 6.3 million items ordered during its peak day December 15th, nearly 1 million more than 2007’s 5.4 million. There has however been no mention of figures for revenues and profits, which is clearly what matters.

As we posted yesterday, shopping online seems to be where most consumers are heading for their Christmas shopping and late bargains. With the economy in the state it is, it seems Amazon (unlike other major retailers) have a particularly successful year ahead.

Interesting Facts

In premarket trading, Amazon’s shares jumped $2.85, or 5.5 percent, to $54.29 Friday morning.
Amazon.com sold enough “Breaking Dawn” books that stacked end to end they would reach the summit of Mt. Everest eight times.
During the period from Nov. 15 - Dec. 10, Amazon sold one copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 every 2.5 minutes.
Amazon sold enough high-performance headphones that everyone attending the last three Super Bowls could grab a set and rock out.
Amazon Grocery sold enough coffee to give each resident of the highly caffeinated city of Seattle a cup per day for two months.
Amazon sold enough Spalding basketballs to fill three C-130 cargo planes.

more info

RWW, TC, Yahoo Finance

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Shoppers Spend Christmas Taking Advantage of Online Discounts

Posted: 25 12 2008 21:50:27 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

windowslivewriternewclothesinthemail-13da6buying-online-2 In the UK, more than five million people are expected to have used the internet to catch early opening Christmas sales today.

Online retail group IMRG estimates more than £100m will be spent online, compared with £84m spent last year. It’s estimated 5.24 million people will have taken advantage of big discounts today, outnumbering church service visitors of approximately 4.5 million people.

Many high street stores have begun their sales on Christmas day including John Lewis and Marks & Spencer. With other high street stores offering sales of over 70% from early morning Boxing Day.

I personally feel it’s a sad case of affairs when people are choosing to spend this special day shopping for early bargains rather than spending quality time with family. However, it’s clear the economic climate has taken it’s toll and whether it’s Christmas Day, New Years Day or a birthday - people will sacrifice whatever is required to keep money in their pocket.

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UK Newspapers Thrive Online but the Guardian is in a League of it’s Own

Posted: 24 12 2008 16:24:01 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

picture-31 The UK’s newspaper websites have all shown promising growth however it is the Guardian.co.uk who broke the 26 million unique user mark for the first time in November.

According to officially audited web traffic figures from ABCe, The Guardian News and Media site has shown a 48.8 per cent year-on-year increase in traffic - edging further away from Telegraph.co.uk by more than 3m.

The Times Online regained the third place from Mail Online. The Sun Online fell back below the 17m mark with 16,427,790. The Independent recorded 8,888,221 unique users in November, up 92.43 per cent year on year which although still small in terms of numbers, is still incredible growth.

The Mirror Group websites gained an extra 83,000 unique users compared with October, posting a traffic figure of 5,916,155 in November.

abce_nov_09 UK unique users

Guardian.co.uk: 9,548,426 (36.7%)
Telegraph.co.uk: 7,394,866 (32.2%)
Times Online: 7,231,485 (33.4%)
Sun: 6,936,051 (42.2%)
Mail Online: 6,441,804 (30.9%)
Mirror Group: 3,372,104 (57%)

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Find people you know (and fake users) on Twitter

Posted: 24 12 2008 13:04:10 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Some people I value highly weren’t in the list of people I follow on Twitter yet. But this morning, I found them all. I started following 52 people. I gotta thank the Twitter team for this, as they’ve relaunched the “Find people you know” feature. And, like Adam Ostrow from Mashable says, “it’s blazing fast“.

Within thirty seconds, Twitter imported my whole Gmail address book. There are a few things I noticed:

First of all, a lot more people than I expected are active on Twitter. This probably goes for you too, so you can imagine the viral boost Twitter will get.
Secondly, some fake twitter accounts were revealed. I noticed that one guy even posted Twitter updates for a Dutch political party
I miss one thing in the address book finder: the date of the last update. I don’t want to follow someone who hasn’t updated for four months. That’s just clutter. And I don’t want to check every user manually. Help me out Twitter!

Twitter / obama - Twitter Name Search

You can either search for someone’s name, or import your address book from GMail, AOL, Hotmail, and some other major email networks.

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Nine-year old Indian girl youngest Microsoft Certified Professional

Posted: 24 12 2008 11:30:49 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Do you call yourself ambitious? Think again! What were you doing at the age of nine? Ha! Playing on the streets with your friends? And you call yourself talented? No, you’ve started way too late. You’re too old now, sorry.

M. Lavinashree, she knows what she’s talking about. When she was three years old, she could recite all 1,300 couplets of a 2,000 year-old Tamil epic. And now that she’s nine, Lavinashree figured it was about time to work on her IT career.

Nine-year old girl is youngest person to become Microsoft Certified Professional - Engadget

Thus she passed Microsoft Certified Professional Exam. That’s all there is to it. Lavinashree is ready to enter the magical world of outsourcing - what a dream start.

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You like WordPress 2.7? Help making 2.8 even better!

Posted: 24 12 2008 11:05:11 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

When you’re blogging every damn day of the week, Wordpress becomes your main living environment. Thus a little disclosure would be correct. If you feel my reports about Wordpress are a little bit over the top (maybe ecstatic), it’s only because I spent too much time working with it. Now that we’ve got that out of our way: let’s talk about Wordpress 2.8.

In an article on the official Wordpress blog, Jane “working on experience stuff” Wells writes that after 600,000 Wordpress 2.7 downloads, it’s about time to work on Wordpress 2.8. Screw Christmas, let’s prioritize. That’s basically her message.

Instead of chewing away turkey, you better complete the Wordpress 2.8 survey before noon on December 31, 2008 UTC. In this long list, you can rate which new possible feature you’d like the best. Do you prefer an “Embedded theme browser/installer” or will a “Threaded view in comments admin for replies” improve your work flow? Cast your votes at Polldaddy’s.

Oh and you know what? The best thing of the story is that you don’t have to manually upgrade Wordpress anymore. Just hit an ok button, and 2.8 will be yours.

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Europeana.eu Makes Europe Proud.

Posted: 23 12 2008 22:43:34 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

picture-241 On the 19th November, Europe saw the launch of a highly anticipated site devoted to European culture, Europeana.eu. Unfortunately, Europeana sprung to life with so much excitement that by the end of day one it was left on it’s last legs unable to handle the amount of interest - close to 10 million hits per hour it is reported. Just two days later, the site shut up shop temporarily and announced it would return in December after a much needed hardware review. Today, Europeana.eu relaunched albeit quietly and with much less fanfare.

Europeana.eu is devoted to providing free access to 2 million+ objects from various cultural landmarks from over 27 European countries. From museums and galleries to libraries and private collections, Europeana is striving to to have them all available online for the world to see. You would think that would be all, however they’ve pushed the format boundries too with access to audio, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, photos, paintings…I could go on.

picture-251

With headquarters at the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek; Europeana was originally known as the European digital library network (EDLnet). A partnership of 90 heritage and knowledge organizations as well as IT experts from throughout Europe. Funded by the European Commission and with a reported staff of 14, Europeana.eu’s development began in July 2007 aiming to make Europe’s cultural history accessible to people across the globe irrespective of location or language. By 2010, the Europeana portal plans to provide access to 10 million digital objects in all EU languages, no easy feat.

The site itself is particularly well designed; clean, easy on the eye, nice use of colour and a strong focus on the core elements of usability. To start with I advise performing a basic search, you’ll notice the arrangement of objects in the center of the site with further refinement of the search to the left. In addition to search, you can browse by timeline, format of object, or ideas that “People are currently thinking about.”

A number of additional, possibly more “web 2.0″ oriented features are to be provided once registration is enabled, but for now I highly recommend you give the site a visit - no matter where you are - and marvel at what 27 countries with pride for their respective cultures can do. Europe should be proud.

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Embed Any File or URL with Embedit.in

Posted: 23 12 2008 18:35:24 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

picture-131 From the team at Increo, creators of online feedback tool Backboard, comes Embedit.in. Based on the technology built for Backboard itself, the team have released a deceptively simple tool which lets you upload virtually any document, URL, image or text file and have it converted into an embeddable flash player which can be placed onto any website.

The player itself as you can see below is pretty slick, and can be expanded to various sizes by altering the dimensions in the embed code. You are also able to view the documents/image/text file in full screen by clicking the icon to the bottom right of the player.

What’s more, the service is completely free and all you need to get it working is an open id, Gmail, AOL or Yahoo account. Bravo Increo.

Example of PDF embedding:

Example of URL embedding:

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Kirtsy Has Porn, Users Blame Twitter

Posted: 23 12 2008 18:28:01 CET by Andrew Hyde

Tags: News [edit]

Kirtsy Kirtsy, a ‘digg for chicks’ recently (and still does) have a problem with users submitting porn sites. Sunday, a Twitter account @kirtsynews created quite a stir after it posted some very sexual updates, not aligned with the brand or userbase. Users complained, and blamed twitter for letting ‘brand hijacking’ happen, demanding that the account be suspended. A fan of the site created the account, growing the following to over 4000 users.

The only problem? The links of the account were directly from the Kirtsy RSS feed, and linked to the articles on the site. The only thing the account was guilty of was being exactly what the site was, user submitted links. In this case, a few adult industry website owners posted links to their site, and the bot published them.

Twitter Owl So Kirtsy removes the porn, problem solved, right? No, in this digital lynchmob culture, users chose to place the blame on Twitter. The weird thing? It worked. Twitter removed the account for unspecified reasons. The account now reads “Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity.”

Yes, republishing an RSS feed is strange.

Couple this with the recent pulling of usernames and you must ask, do you just need a good story and a handful of friends to fake outrage to have a username pulled from twitter? Or would Twitter having a policy and sticking to it work?

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Mac versus PC, the battle continues on Twitter

Posted: 23 12 2008 12:48:33 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Looking for some humor during the work day? Try following MACvPC, a Twitter account based on the famous Mac ads in which a typical cool dude (representing an Apple) makes fun of a sloppy corporate guy (a PC). Those chats are now continuing on Twitter.

Here’s the Twitter account bio:

Hi, I’m Mac. I’m cool, fun, easy, and I voted for Obama. Hello, I am PC. I am hard working, always on the job, and I voted for McPalin.

According to their Twitter location, Mac and PC are currently enrolled in a “12 Step Dueling Personality Issues Program”. They have enough time to chat though, considering the large amounts of funny updates. Like this one:

MACvPC only has 329 followers now - but believe me, it will be a HIT! Especially since the people behind the account makes the effort of replying to almost everybody. Who doesn’t want to hear a joke based on your own remark?

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10 Russian start-ups that rocked the web in 2008

Posted: 23 12 2008 11:37:52 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: Russia [edit]

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, especially when you’re a web professional. Not reindeers, but lists keep flying around your head. On The Next Web, we already presented the Five Favorite Apps - now it’s time to be more specific.

We have an international focus at this blog. When The Next Web launched on January 7th, we told you we wouldn’t limit our coverage just to the Valley. I think it’s safe to say we’ve kept that promise. Also when it comes to Russia. With the help of Yakov Sadchikov, we’ve covered almost every million euro deal, emerging trends, and cool start-ups coming from Europe’s largest Internet market.

Let’s celebrate that with a list of Russian start-ups that rocked the web in 2008. It’s compiled by Yakov, whose blog you should definitely check out. He’s the CEO of visual search engine Quintura and managed to get articles from his corporate blog on Techmeme, TechCrunch, and The Next Web on a monthly basis. How’s that for a successful blogger? Alright, here we go:

russian2008

List by Yakov Sadchikov

WomanJournal.ru, leading women-centric online site, raised €6 million from Ventech Capital, XAnge Capital and AGF Private Equity.
KupiVIP.ru, online shopping club, raised several million dollars from Mangrove Capital Partners, ABRT Fund and Arlan.
Tvigo (Tvigle.ru), online TV community and content production, raised $8 million from Moscow Venture Fund (Allianz Rosno Asset Management).
EZtalk, mobile call-back service operator, raised $4 million from VTB Venture Fund.
Mobile Direct, mobile internet advertising solution provider, raised several million dollars from Ru-Net II.
MoySklad (LogneX), online inventory management solution provider, raised seed round from Ambient Sound Investments.
MirTesen.ru, location-based social network, raised $5 million from Finam.
JS-Kit, social application widget provider, raised $3.6 million from Altos Ventures and TEF3.
EnterMedia, in-game advertising solution provider, raised first found from Mangrove Capital Partners and ABRT Fund.
Evernote, provider of electronic note applications, raised $5 million from Troika Venture Fund.

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When Twitter becomes mainstream, we won’t miss anything

Posted: 23 12 2008 10:00:13 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

You might have heard about Mike Wilson, the Twitter user who was onboard of the Continental airlines 737 slid off the runway in Denver on Friday (38 people got hurt, nobody died). After his first tweet (pictured), he kept on sending updates on how the airline handled the aftermath.

This guy is now a hero in the US. He gets interviewed by everybody from Fox News to the Guardian. All because he was the only passenger sending updates.

You could call Wilson a citizen journalist, but that’s dangerous. Before you know it, you find yourself once again in an endless discussion about the differences between journalists, bloggers, twitter users, and PR persons.

Therefor, I’d just like to say that when Twitter really goes mainstream - nothing in the western world will happen unnoticed. Bank robbery? Twitter user present! Political assassination? See the body on Twitpic! Think about how that will change the fine profession of reporting! As soon as you want to cover something, do a quick Twitter Search and find the eye witness stories.

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If they’d only known: tech ads from the 70’s and 80’s

Posted: 22 12 2008 18:09:33 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Advertisements like these two from Apple and BASF make me wonder how we will look at recent ads in about twenty years. “Haha, check out that vintage iPhone, with that ridiculous touch screen”. More at Royal Pingdom.

[Hat tip: Dennis Goedegebuure via StumbleUpon]

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Create Short URL’s with Your Own Domain Name

Posted: 22 12 2008 17:36:46 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

You have probably noticed a rapid influx of URL shortening services over the last year - from bit.ly to tinyURL and literally 50+ more. Well now you can create your own.

Shorty is a simple tool which provides a tinyURL-like service for your own domain. So, you can have a URL like yourdomain.com/keyword and redirect to any URL on the web. What’s great is that it’s a piece of cake to set up and you can even track how many times each of your short URLs has been used.

5ThirtyOne gives a great run down of how to install the tool, and the wonderful MakeUseOf blog have an in depth review of the app too.

**Update**

Robin Waulters of Plugg and Techcrunch has just recommended a service in the comments below which I hadn’t yet heard of.

The service is called Hover and by the looks of it, it offers a slicker and hosted service which you can also use your own domain for!

Thanks Robin.

More Information

Shorty, Make Use Of, 5ThirtyOne

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Alert Thingy Releases Major Update. With and Without Friendfeed Support.

Posted: 22 12 2008 17:00:44 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

picture-37 AlertThingy which originally launched as a Friendfeed desktop tool has released a major update however this time round, it’s not what we all expected. The team at Howard Baines have released two versions of the application, one supporting a number of different social networks title AlertThingyV2 and another (called the Friendfeed Edition) which is specifically for Friendfeed.

With AlertThingy V2 a number of changes have been made. Firstly, the team have steered away from AIR with AJAX, HTML and CSS to a purely Flex based application. Secondly, you can now not only tweet but also update your Facebook status, post to Tumblr, upload to Flickr, Digg items in the stream and it also has it’s own built-in RSS reader.

The new Friendfeed edition of the application doesn’t seem to have too many new features however it has apparently been “revised” with more updates on the way.

The reasoning behind excluding Friendfeed entirely from the main version:

“AlertThingy wants to be the social desktop application of choice but this actually interferes with the reason for being of FriendFeed, that pulls together all your social networking data inside your browser.

Forgive my negativity, but I am disappointed.

As wonderful as the AlertThingyV2 may be, if there was one company/application which I had hoped would really pull off Friendfeed on the desktop - it was Howard Baines and Alert Thingy.

I hope I’m wrong here but I don’t believe we’ll see many Friendfeed Edition updates. Lets face it, Alert Thingy’s most recent update has taken months and that is just one application. Now the Howard Baines boys have two to manage and I for one, just can’t see it working out. Part of me just wishes they had focused on developing solely for Friendfeed, it’s a clear niche waiting to get filled and they already had a lengthy step into with the amount of coverage they received from V1.

Above all howver, I’m beginning to feel that Friendfeed on the desktop is just too big a pain for anyone to pull off. On Friendfeed, you’ve not only got the main stream to manage but also lists, rooms and the sharing/subscription between them…(sigh) maybe Friendfeed is best left on the web?

Techcrunch, Howard/Baines Blog, Alert Thingy

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StickyScreen. Absurdly Simple Reminders.

Posted: 22 12 2008 16:11:05 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

StickyScreen is an incredibly simple site which takes the concept of “sticky note” reminders and puts it on the web for you.

The site is simply a url with a dark grey background and elegantly placed sticky note in the center of the screen. On that sticky note is an editable short paragraph of text (3 lines) which is where you place your reminder.

The idea being you use StickyScreen as your homepage (or for whenever you open a new tab) to remind you to do whatever it is you want to remind yourself to do. :)

No login/plugin is required as everything is stored in a browser cookie. Looking for something a little more feature rich, try iGoogle’s Web Sticky Mod.

It might infringe on it’s simplicity but I do like the idea of having a login to enable more functionality. For example, it would be great to have this possibly on the iPhone/Mobile wallpaper/screensaver. I would also love it if someone else edit the sticky to leave reminders for me - now, that would be useful.

via digital inspiration

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Mischievous Monday Mornings: ⌘O, Favicon & Porn humor

Posted: 22 12 2008 13:23:04 CET by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Tags: News [edit]

Check out this beautiful combination of old and new technology by Jules Tardy:

The favicon was great but maybe they should have used more gradients and rounded corners?

Appropriate for the holiday season?

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Adgator: Africa’s First Advertising Network for Bloggers

Posted: 22 12 2008 10:12:40 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

When this blog just got started, Johan Pretorius tipped us about the rocking South African 2.0 community. Well, this industry just got more mature since Afrigator - a social media search engine - has launched the first ad network for African bloggers.

The network - called Adgator - is still in testing phase which is limited to a small group of South African bloggers. Kenya and Nigeria are next in 2009. The “early days” should prove whether it’s possible to make some money out of blogs aimed specifically at the continent of Africa.

What are the reactions in the South African blogosphere like? Well, pretty positive. Here’s the most triumphant one: “Adgator takes on Adsense in Africa,” writes Appfrica:

The South African social media aggregator Afrigator is taking on Google’s Adsense by offering a platform for Advertisers and bloggers interesting serving their local audience. Afrigator has a reach of 1.7 million African bloggers. Platforms like Adsense often fail in foreign markets because of their size; a significant portion of the ads they place aren’t relevant to local audiences at all. By focusing on South Africa specifically, Adgator can make sure that the ROI for advertisers remains pretty high.

[Via Global Voices Online]

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Food for thought: in which Twitter stage are you?

Posted: 22 12 2008 7:00:49 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Here’s one to get you started and inspired this morning. In which Twitter stage are you? Recognition is the first step to improvement, so maybe realizing that you’re in “Dumping” helps you getting to no. 5.

One tip to get you started: send @replies which aren’t too interesting for other people via a DM.

Some people I know are already there and it’s just awesome to follow them. They find great stuff, have funny conversations, and thus enrich my Twitter experience. Check out Pixites for an example. Who’s your favorite Twitter user?

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iPhone 3G Unlocked Video

Posted: 22 12 2008 2:20:12 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

We let you know recently that the iPhone Dev team had managed to finally unlock the iPhone 3G.

Well today the team released a live video demo of the unlock codenamed “yellowsnOw”. Enjoy.

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Goodbye Warner Music! A step back in the evolution of YouTube

Posted: 22 12 2008 0:03:23 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Last August, we celebrated companies like Lionsgate, CBS, Universal Music, and Electronic Arts who realized that people using their products for YouTube videos weren’t pirates, but just fans. Instead of hurting their brands, the mash-ups are boosting the company’s brand experience. Therefore, these major companies have been enrolled in an YouTube advertising program.

Whenever somebody uploads a movie which violates one of these companies’ copyright, YouTube offers them the possibility to view the video stats and to run ads. Yeah! A classic win-win model. Media company profits, user has an outlet for his creativity, and YouTube remains the video platform.

hq-madonna-for-louis-vuitton-ad-campaign-on-flickr-photo-sharing

No more Madonna on YouTube?

Unfortunately, one of the major players lost faith in this construction and abandoned the program. We’re talking about Warner Music, and therefore about superstars like Led Zeppelin, Madonna, TI, Eric Clapton, REM, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Grateful Dead. None of them will be able to use YouTube as a platform for their music.

Details are undisclosed, but it sure is a pity. A step back, really. Here’s Warner Music’s explanation:

“We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists’ content to the site. [..] Until then, we simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”

Surprisingly enough, Universal Music’s digital chief Rio Caraeff recently raved about how much revenue the YouTube deal generated. He talked in terms of “tens of millions of dollars” and a rise of 80 percent compared to last year. Stories like this one are stimulating, which makes the withdraw of Warner Music even more painful. Let’s just hope it’s part of the negotiations.

[Via Cnet News]

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Tweetwrappr - Just in time for Christmas

Posted: 21 12 2008 19:58:57 CET by Zee M Kane

Tags: News [edit]

picture-101 Tweetwrappr is a beautiful if slightly useless (not pointless) Twitter tool which lets you send “wrapped up” tweets. All you need to do is send an @tweetwrappr tweet with your message and tweetwrappr tweets you back a link (as below) to the wrapped up message for you to share with whomever you wish.

picture-92

I wish we could send “wrapped up” christmas tweets or dm’s to specific people but for now…

Here’s our Christmas Tweet to you! Thank you everybody!

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Proper TV on your iPhone with Livestation

Posted: 21 12 2008 19:25:27 CET by Peter Evers

Tags: News [edit]

Call it the beginning of a new era, or just another iPhone app. In the infamous area of mobile tv, one of the big promises of the mobile phone that doesn’t really seems to take off, Livestation comes with the first mobile tv app for the iPhone. The UK based company runs in closed beta during the festive period and tries to gain as much learnings from a small userbase that is testing the service in the coming days. Livestation already runs a TV app for PC/MAC in beta, and now they have managed to bring the same technology to the iPhone.

Who needs DVB-H anyway?

Being one of the lucky ones to test the Livestation app first I must say I had a real ‘wow’ experience when I opened the app first. Even on a 3G connection the app offers a seamless TV watching experience. Livestation really shows that watching mobile TV through an internet stream doesn’t have to be lagged and pixely and that, with mobile connections becoming faster and faster, there’s no real sense in building expensive DVB-H chips in phones anymore. And even from people owning Nokia’s DVB-H equipped N96, all I hear is complaints about the tv connection being too slow or not even working.

Russia Today and France 24!?

However, the available channels on Livestation are not the most appealing ones. Obscure titles like Euronews, Russia Today and France 24 aren’t my favourites to watch. But I have to say that watching BBC World News, ITN and Bloomberg Television can be a quite relaxing way to gain motivation for that decisive step out of the bed every morning. And who doesn’t want to watch astronauts working on their special space projects on NASA TV?

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Three ways to keep in touch with the UK Tech scene

Posted: 21 12 2008 17:01:23 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

The British tech scene is one of the most vibrant around. Although some companies, like Last.fm, have been facing difficulties - I keep seeing positive news coming from the United Kingdom. Here’s how I stay in touch with the geeky ladies and gents across the Canal.

1. Zee’s news flashes and updates

My co-editor Zee M. Kane reports from London daily about the ups and downs of his fellow Internet entrepreneurs. The concept of day and night seems irrelevant to him. Whenever something interesting happens - like a revolutionary new Twitter feature - he’s there to immortalize it on The Next Web.

// Read Zee’s articles

2. Mike Butcher’s in depth-analysis.

Ain’t no party like a party with Mike Butcher. Other than that, this former New Media Age magazine and The Industry Standard Europe editor never hesitates to provide some deep insights on the start-up activity of the Brits. If he must, Butcher even goes on Sky News. Whatever it takes to spread the tech word, Butcher will do it.

// Browse to TechCrunch UK

3. Watch Techfluff

It buzzed around in the Le Web venue. Supposedly, there was this cool British girl asking A-listers cheeky questions (She even dared to refer to Arrington’s buttocks - how brave is that?). Even my co-editor Boris was fascinated by this whirlwind blazing through one of Europe’s “hottest” conferences. Host Hermoine Way’s fame will probably go beyond Le Web, as her show is just plain fun to watch. Here’s episode three:

// Watch Techfluff

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Tew did it again: easy money with Bush bashing

Posted: 20 12 2008 12:38:53 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Remember Alex Tew? The British entrepreneur who frustrated and inspired millions of people by getting rich with The Million Dollar Homepage? The then 21-year old student needed some money for his study and decided to sell pixels for 1 dollar each. He made 1,037,100 dollars.

In December 2006, Tew gave it another shot with Pixelotto: a lottery where the winner who clicked the right advertisement would win 1 million dollars. The idea “failed“, but Tew still made 153,000 dollars out of it.

These days, Tew is working on a humor start-up called PopJam. But every now and then, he can’t resist the temptation of creating a fun app.

So when a shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist aims for Bush’s face, Tew sees an opportunity: “a stupid little flash game”. Just like some other games concering the same subject, Sockandawe.com attracted million of hits.

That’s where Tew’s business instinct comes in. Instead of desperately trying to cope with the enormous crowds visiting the site, he puts the game up for sale on eBay.com. Guess how much money Tew got himself for Christmas? A sweet total of 7,818 dollars.

“It was just a bit of fun, a bit of an experiment,” Tew told Reuters. “It’s actually turned out to be a useful fundraising exercise for our start-up, which is good given the present economic circumstances.”

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Upcoming: First Android DevCamp in Amsterdam

Posted: 20 12 2008 11:34:51 CET by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Tags: News [edit]

Organizer Peter Robinett with Android

On January 8, Amsterdam will welcome a bunch of Android geeks from all over Europe. The organizers - who are also responsible for the Dutch MobileMonday and the iPhone DevCamp- want to offer the attendees the possibility to get a lot of hands-on experience with both the phone and the Android platform:

Google and Android specialists will be attending as well as developers of popular Android apps. Also we will have many APIs (some exclusively at this event!) available to use. Some API builders will be there to support you in creating your Android application

A quick Google Search finds that Bangalore and Dallas have also hosted a DevCamp for the platform that many see as the future for mobile. Now it’s time for us, Europeans, to learn how to master the fine art of developing Android apps. Sign up here.

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