Current news items regarding technology, tech companies, the Internet, the government, etc.
Newsweek’s Dan Lyons (a.k.a. “Fake Steve Job”) is stirring up unhappy AT&T customers to protest poor network performance by trying to use as much data as possible on Fri 19 Dec at noon. It’s not clear whether this will work or just end up in users becoming even unhappier! AT&T can also retaliate by arguing that this amounts to an attack of sorts.
Last month, Facebook’s traffic #s showed that it became the 4th largest website in the US sneaking past Aol. Not surprising. What’s is that Aol still has those types of atmospheric numbers.
Offline Gmail has been a Gmail Lab for quite some time now, and is now being sanctioned by the Gmail team as ready for general consumption and will become a regular feature of Gmail.
There will now be an Offline tab when you visit your Gmail Settings. From there, you can initiate and control how a copy of your Gmail account will be downloaded and synchronized to your computer.
If you’re an iPhone app developer, you probably already know how fickle Apple is about accepting your apps. But you should now know that you should not try to scam the gadget giant.
Chinese developer Molinker has been booted from the App Store, and oh yeah, their 1000+ apps too. They were caught buying 5-star ratings in exchange for free copies of their apps.
If you’re an e-mail client user, then you should consider Mozilla’s latest version of Thunderbird (version 3) released this week. New features include tabs a la Firefox (and other web browsers), better integration with Gmail, a new archiving feature, and more.
Open-source Thunderbird 3 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
The Google Chrome team has released beta versions of its browser for the Mac OS X and Linux platforms. You can download the latest versions from the Chrome website.
In addition, there are now over 300 extensions that are available for the Windows and Linux platforms for extending the browser’s functionality.
Google has thrown their hat into the realtime search arena, joining other services such as Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. Although those Web2.0 websites have had real-time search for some time, Google has been surprisingly absent until now. Google announced this today at their Search Event conference.
However, at this point in time, not every single Google account has the realtime feature turned on. To check whether you have this feature, visit Google’s main search page, and enter a search term. Once the results appear, click the Show Options link at the top, at which point you will (or won’t) have the “Latest” option in the time parameters section. The search results will now start updating automatically in a very similar fashion to those on Facebook or Twitter.
If your Google account does not have the realtime feature, you can see a video captured by TechCrunch:
Sony is using just about the most-viewed event on Earth (the FIFA World Cup) to test out and promote their 3-D technology. Sony is going to record up to 25 of the soccer games in 3-D. Unfortunately, the end result is only going to be visible at special FIFA events in June and July during the World Cup next year (2010), and then for highlights when Sony starts selling their 3-D TVs and video cameras.
As much as the gadget and soccer geeks in me is drooling at the thought of 3-D footie, the realistic part of me is saying that this is really 1st gen tech, and home 3-D very well may be pricey and not live up to the probably hype.
LaLa is a music streaming service that I’ve been toying with lately. I quite like the interface; they’ve done a great job with it. They also have an interesting business model in that they charge 10 cents for every song that you want to add to your ‘collection’, which you can then put into playlists. There are also free ways to listen to music as well and you can buy MP3 versions for $0.89-0.99 in most cases.
Turns out that Apple likes what LaLa is doing and have decided to snap them up. I wonder whether this will be an autonomous subsidiary or integrated into iTunes in some manner. My guess would be for the latter.
No, don’t get too excited. This only lasts until Jan 15th 2010.
