Tuesday, December 7, 2010

19 new stories on The Next Web today

19 new stories on The Next Web today

Link to The Next Web

FoursqWAR turns Foursquare into a turf war [TNW Apps]

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 03:28 AM PST

TNW Quick Look

FoursqWAR is a strategy battle game built on top of Foursquare’s API.

Hits:

  • Imaginative use of the Foursquare API.
  • Nicely presented.
  • “Civvy” features let you use it for standard Foursquare checkins too.

Misses:

  • Only works well when friends are playing.
  • Finding occupied buildings to challenge can be tough.

The details:

It’s great when developers build something a bit different with a popular API and FoursqWAR from Irish developers Project Zebra is one such example. This iPhone game sees players compete to reach the top of a leaderboard by ‘attacking’ and ‘defending’ different Foursquare locations.

Selecting a location from the map view, you can occupy it with troops if it’s empty or you can attack if it’s occupied by another player’s forces. Through winning battles and occupying more buildings you gain points thus nudging you up the leaderboard.

Although you start the game with a small number of infantry troops, you’re able to swap them for stronger forces like humvees, a mortar team, bomb technicians and even John Rambo himself. In-app purchases can be used to boost your squadron further if you want a further boost.

The game is nicely presented, with a fittingly smart, military look and Apple Gamer Center medals to earn as you gain experience. Handy ‘Civvy’ options allow you to check in and view normal Foursquare data for each location in addition to playing the game.

The only real problem with FoursqWAR is that if you’re in an area where there aren’t any other players, it’s not much fun. While testing the game I found one location that had already been occupied, and there’ currently no way of telling enemy occupied locations from vacant ones without tapping on each one manually.

That said, if it sounds like fun and you can get a few local friends involved, FoursqWAR could be great fun.

The game is currently available for free, although a charge will be applied soon. So, it’s worth grabbing quickly if you’d like to give it a go. [iTunes App Store link]



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Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Arrested In London [TNW Media]

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 02:30 AM PST

Sky News has confirmed that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested in London.

Assange was arrested by the Metropolitan Police on a European Arrest Warrant, on behalf of the Swedish authorities over allegations he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden.

It is thought that the Wikileaks founder was arrested by appointment at 9:30am and is due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court later today.

You can’t go minutes without hearing something regarding Wikileaks with today being no exception. The whistleblowing website has been subject to intense criticism from governments all over the world when it published confidential cables sent between senior US military officials just over a week ago.

The website then experienced minor downtime when EasyDNS pulled its DNS services that supported the site. Whilst the site remained available via direct IP addresses, Wikileaks immediately set about moving its operation to Switzerland, re-emerging with a new Wikileaks.ch domain.

In an effort to keep its acquired information readily accessible even while under duress the site started accepting mass mirroring across domains around the world. The list of mirrors which you can be found here currently lists over 355 sites with a number of them including IPV6 protocol.

Assange must must appear before the Magistrates court before 12.30pm, unless a judge gives permission for a later hearing. It is thought that he is still not aware of the full allegations against him.

More as it happens.



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Bebo fights back with Chatroulette-style ‘bChat’ [TNW Apps]

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 02:23 AM PST

Remember Bebo? It’s back and it wants to get you chatting to strangers.

Bebo used to be the default social network for schookids and those who hadn’t discovered Myspace yet. That is until Facebook turned up and the kids moved on. With dwindling traffic, previous owner AOL offloaded Bebo to London-based Criterion Capital Partners earlier this year and now it’s starting to fight back.

The first stage of the plan is the launch of a Chatroulette-style video chat service called bChat. The service is a branded version of vChatter, a ‘family friendly’ version of the ‘random video chat’ format which we covered recently.

Just like with the standard version of vChatter, bChat uses an “advanced matching process” to connect Bebo users to new people based on a number of characteristics, such as their social preferences, geography, age and interests.

Unlike ChatRoulette, where the ‘anything goes’ policy quickly turned it into a rather seedy place to visit, bChat promises to be much safer. In addition to being able to report abuse, vChatter’s platform makes random screening by moderators easy to do.

The move is part of a wider, rolling programme of changes to Bebo reported on today by The Telegraph. New Bebo CEO Adam Levin told the newspaper  that the site is now all about self-expression. "I think we can coexist really well with Facebook as Bebo is a platform now focused on self-expression. Not everyone wants to be on a platform where their Mum and Dad are members.”

Can Bebo turn its fortunes around? Myspace, another former success story looking to get back on top, recently launched a new design and integration with Facebook and yet we’re still not 100% certain what it actually wants to be. Bebo is going to need one compelling product if it’s going to lure its members back from the temptations of Facebook.



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Sky Songs closes, service “unable to reach a large enough customer base” [TNW UK]

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 01:34 AM PST

BSkyB’s Sky Songs music subscription service is to close, just over a year after the service launched as another high-profile competitor to Apple’s dominant iTunes platform and popular streaming service Spotify.

Sky Songs launched as an ad-free service, offering 5 million tracks initially for a flat fee of £6.49 per month, with a second subscription available at £7.99. As the service faltered, BSkyB reduced its pricing, offering the service for as low as £4.99.

The company has admitted that the music service was “unable to reach a large enough customer base”, even with the backing of all the major music labels, EMI, Universal, Sony and Warner, something that Spotify, one of its main competitors has up to now failed to do. Whereas Spotify offered unlimited streaming of tracks, coupled with advertising, to non-paying customers, Sky Songs restricted users to 30 seconds, offering a download service should users want to listen to the entire song.

Virgin Media was said to be in talks with Spotify to deliver a streaming service for the UK company whilst it prepared to launch its own service. It is almost a matter of time until Apple moves its iTunes music service to the cloud, allowing users to take their downloaded music wherever they go. With its own service not penetrating the market BSkyB has seen the potential competition and decided it should exit the market before it loses too much revenue.

Sky Songs customers will no longer have any payments taken from their accounts, according to an email from the company, with the service closing on February 7.

A Sky spokesman said:

“We’ve taken the difficult decision to close Sky Songs. Although we are extremely proud of the service we built and the experience it offers, we just didn’t see the consumer demand we’d hoped for.

“As Sky Songs demonstrates, we’re a business that takes risks and innovates, but at the same time, we’re pragmatic and act decisively when a new venture isn’t working out.”



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Motorola’s Gingerbread Android tablet demoed by Google’s Andy Rubin at D: Dive Into Mobile conference [TNW Google]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 11:59 PM PST

Google has had a busy couple of days. Not only did it announce and release its new eBook service yesterday, the search giant finally pushed out the SDK for Android 2.3 and unveiled the Samsung Nexus S, its next officially supported Android smartphone.

It appears Google didn’t want to stop there either. Whilst demonstrating the Nexus S handset to delegates at the D: Dive into Mobile conference, Google’s Andy Rubin also pulled out a new Motorola Android-powered tablet, all but confirming rumours Google had been working with Motorola to release the first Gingerbread-powered tablet.

Back in August, it was suggested that smartphone manufacturers were in negotiations with Google to secure rights to develop an Gingerbread tablet, at that time Motorola were reportedly Google's "priority choice". Digitimes speculated that Motorola's tablet would feature Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform with a 10.1 panel supplied by Sharp and it appears they weren’t far off.

Rubin noted that the tablet was indeed sporting an NVIDIA dual-core 3D processor and from photos, the device looks to be bigger than the 7-inch devices currently on the market, leading us to believe the Motorola tablet is of a similar size to the Apple iPad.

All signs point to this device being the Motorola Stingray but nothing is confirmed just yet. If it does indeed turn out to be said device, the tablet is said to be Verizon bound and might support paid TV services, aiming at Hulu and Netflix in the process.

Thanks to Engadget for the photos:

Image Credit



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New Twitter Worm on the loose, don’t click suspicious links. Details here. [TNW Twitter]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 10:54 PM PST

Updates at the foot of the post.

There’s a worm spreading rapidly across twitter. It appears to be a tweet with no text but just a URL. A twitter search highlights the extent of the problem.

The URL appears to be identical: http://goo.gl/R7f68 on every tweet but it’s highly likely that it will alter itself at some point.

What we’ve been able to learn is that the worm seems to be either creating or using a number of spam/newer accounts – that said a few influentials have also tweeted the URL. The results of the search only go back about 6 hours, so it hasn’t been around that long and appears to stem from mobile.twitter.com.

More interesting is this screenshot from a tool that lets you check the full URLs behind short ones. It apparently redirects to http://artcan-developpmement.fr/tw.html. Very odd.

Update: Nils Geylen posted the following in the comments section, highlighting that attackers look to have compromised a legitimate French furniture website and then loaded forwarding scripts to take users to a number of different malicious domains which look to serve malware:

http://artcan-developpement.fr (without the extra m: oppement instead of oppmement) is a regular French site selling design furniture of some sort. The bit after the slash of course redirects to various exe or php files on several other domains (e.g. detecproforyou.us/twit.php or robsearch.info/tre/sena.exe) then results in a 404 for that file. But at the source for that page and it’s empty. Tried this on a secondary Linux machine. Not sure what was supposed to happen.

Update 2: There are a number of tweets showing up in many users’ streams that are advertising the service Fllwrs, all links are cloaked using the Goo.gl domain shortener. If you see a tweet in your stream that says the following, its best to stay away from it:

Just found the easiest way to track who follows and unfollows you – http://goo.gl/kLE5M

At the moment, we are not sure if the two links are related. If you have found yourself to be compromised by this service then you should head to Twitter.com and revoke access for Fllwrs. To do this, head into: Settings -> Connections -> Find Fllwrs and REVOKE ACCESS!

Marshallk



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What Happened The Year You Were Born? [TNW Apps]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 10:36 PM PST

Have you ever thought about what was going on the year you were born? Not only major world events, but the other stuff too. What was the popular movie, TV show, book, who won Oscars, maybe what was invented when you were born. A very cool site called, simply, “What happened in my birth year” can answer it for you in a really, really cool way.

Rendered in what must be HTML5 (because I have Flash block installed) is a great 10 minute look back at the year you were born.

Yes, I said 10 minutes. That might be the only criticism I have for the site, that you have to wait a while to get the whole picture.

That said it’s really cool to get the perspective on where things have been and maybe where things are going.

Here’s a short (edited) look at what happened in 1969…

If you watch the entire thing, there are some points of note:

  • John Wayne won his only Oscar for “True Grit”, a remake of which is coming out this month with Jeff Bridges in the role Wayne played
  • Rupert Murdoch started to build his media empire
  • The Internet (ARPANET) was born
  • Video tape and digital photography was invented
  • and of course…we landed on the Moon

photo credit



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Laughing out Loud in Asia: Why is the www so funny in Japan? [TNW Asia]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 10:33 PM PST

We’re all familiar with internet slang.  We’ve all LOLed with the rest of them at the latest online joke or witty tweet.  If it was really funny, we may even have ROFLMAOed as well. Then, when we disappear mid-chat most of us will send a simple BRB  to cover our absence, which TBH, is much better than telling the truth about our trip to the toilet.

But, these are all anglocentric acronyms and abbreviations, they’re based on the English language.

In Asia, as in Europe, the internet has much more fragmented than in, say North America.  English may still be dominant but, in the social networks and chat-rooms, local languages hold sway and all have their own unique abbreviations for commonly used phrases.

This short list will enable you to scan the forums and, at least, work out if what’s being discussed is funny or not.   Often, where western internet slang is based on abbreviations and acronyms based on the first letters of a phrase, Asian slang, because of the pictographic nature of the languages, is based on homonyms, i.e. the sound of a word. This especially so in China where a whole numerical chat language has developed based on the sounds of the numbers used.

So, in no particular order, here’s The Next Web’s guide on how to LOL in Asia.

Japan:

  • www –  In Japanese, the word for laugh is warau so www is literally an abbreviation for laugh laugh laugh.
  • orz – This is actually an emoticon.  The meaning is disappointment, failure or despair. The image, formed by the letters is of somebody bowing in despair (the o is the head, the r is the arms and the z is the legs).
  • wktk – waku waku teka teka “just can’t wait” (for what’s happening next).
  • ksk - kasoku, literally acceleration or hurry up.

Korea:

  • ^^ – LOL or happy face based on ^_^
  • ㅋㅋㅋ  and ㅎㅎㅎ are usually used to indicate laughter. ‘ㅋ’,  represents a “k” sound, and ‘ㅎ’ represents an “h” sound.

Thailand:

  • 555 - LOL, the sound of 5 in Thai is ‘ha’ so 555 is literally hahaha.

China:

  • 哈哈哈 – LOL, like the Thai 555, this Chinese homonym sounds like hahaha.  However, if you see…
  • 555 – it means crying in China, literally wuwuwu.
  • 88 – Many Chinese chats end with 88, pronounced Ba Ba or Bye Bye.
  • 520 – Wu Er Ling, often used because it sounds like Wo Ai Ni, I Love you.  But be careful not to mix up the numbers because…
  • 250 – Means ‘idiot’ and could lead to a sudden 88.

I hope this short list has raised a smile.  If you have your own favourites from the region that you’d like me to add, get in touch via the comments below.  Are you in Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia? I’d love to be able to add some internet slang from your countries too.

TTFN, 88.image, Love Love China, image



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Google Maps on Android to get dynamic and 3D building rendering, offline maps [TNW Google]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 08:48 PM PST

Google’s head of Android development showed off a new version of Google Maps for Android that will be rolling out within the next few days that looks like a significant improvement.

The largest improvement will be the inclusion of dynamic rendering of the map – replacing the slower and jerkier tiles based maps. This will not only lead to much smoother zooming and swiping, but place titles, street names, etc will also be dynamically resized which will make reading easier as well.

The new Maps will also support tilting (using the phone’s accelerometer we’re assuming) so that maps can be viewed at a ‘bird’s-eye’ angle, and about 50 cities will also feature 3D buildings.

Another major feature will be the addition of offline maps, which will be stored on the phone. However, the app will only store maps for areas that you frequent (based on your location activity we’re assuming), and will be updated every time you visit that area, according to the New York Times report. Another added bonus: turn-by-turn navigation should continue to work even if you don’t have a wireless signal in an area you already have a stored map.

Yet another cool feature of the new interface will be the ability for the map to rotate based on the direction you are facing (using the compass of course) as well as being able to rotate around locations from different angles (like in Google Earth) on multi-touch enabled phones.

As we mentioned, this update is rolling out for Android first and will require more recent phones to enable all of the new features. Engadget was able to get a list from Google of all the phones that will support all of the new features, with the brand new Nexus S of course being one of them. They are the: Galaxy S; Droid; Droid X; Droid 2; Droid Incredible; Evo; Nexus S; and G2.

Frankly, we can’t wait to see this update in action.Engadget, New York Times, Image: Engadget



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10 Canadian Startups You Should Know About [TNW Canada]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 08:37 PM PST

Canada is ripe with startups, but being a huge country it’s easy to miss some of the really cool ones that we should be keeping an eye on. With the help of some friends (David Crow and Jeremy Wright), I came up with a list of some of the startups we should all have on our radar. These aren’t all new startups, or “hot” startups, or “whatever” startups, but they all are doing something interesting that we should have our eyes on (in no particular order, btw):

1) ThoughtFarmer: Maybe Intranets aren’t sexy or really cool or getting huge headlines, but the fact of the matter is that lots of companies use them. Maybe “use” is too mild a word…rely might be better. ThoughtFarmer has been doing a lot of really, really cool things under the radar for years now. Recently they launched version 4.0 of their Intranet toolkit, which makes the things I wanted to do with an Intranet 10 years ago, child’s play. ThoughtFarmer’s focus is leveraging social media and social connections to make an Intranet stronger. ThoughtFarmer runs on the Microsoft suite of tools (.NET, SQLServer, Sharepoint, etc) and is a system well worth the look.

2) Status.net: Roll your own microblogging server? Need I say more? There are two parts to this pretty interesting product. First is the hosted service, which can even be white labelled , you can run something like trishussey.status.net (which I do have, btw) to have a personal Twitter-like environment (that can connect and cross post to Twitter as well). Second is the install yourself option, which has become popular enough large hosts (like Dreamhost) are offering it as a “one-click” install. Why do we need this? Because while Twitter is great, if you wanted to build something private or custom, or even just more of your own you need the tools to do it. This is the tool. Status.net might also be our best hope for a decentralized, interconnected microblogging system independent of Twitter (like how email is today).

3) Shopify: So you want to sell stuff online. Like, dunno, Angry Birds stuffed toys, but you don’t want to mess with having to build the online store and such (eeewww code! Ewwww!) how might you do that? Well I’d Shopify is your answer. Shopify lets you quickly make a entire online store, complete with templates, and the connectors needed to receive payments. Yeah, I said templates. From the looks of things, it looks like most people could have a functioning store up in an evening (or maybe a weekend). Shopify is a hosted service, so you don’t need to know how things need to be set up to work, they are just supposed to work.

4) Geotoko: I profiled these folks for Launch Party 10 earlier in December. Their business is simple, help other businesses manage all the location claims, offers, and deals for the various location services (Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla, and others) as well as provide metrics across all the services to see which ones work best for you, with which user segments. Location services might be fun for consumers, but they are starting to mean business to businesses. The problem is that the location service area is very fragmented without an overwhelming leader right now. It’s not like just using AdWords for online ads. Geotoko is trying to take the pain out of having your business be involved in location services buy just consolidating and managing it for you.

5) HootSuite: I know that I have a soft spot for HootSuite, but from the 20,000 foot level, looking at other Twitter apps out there, HootSuite is rolling out more features faster than anyone else. They are a busy shop, no doubt. HootSuite seems to be on a flight path for becoming a central social media dashboard for the social media junkie. They aren’t without their challenges. The recent move to the freemium model is ruffling more than a few feathers, but maybe this is just a bump in the road? Regardless HootSuite’s suite of tools are pretty hard to beat for cohesiveness and connectedness, I’m looking forward to what’s next from them.

6) Well.ca: Another startup I talked about recently, Well.ca is selling things that people don’t often buy online— toiletries—and seem to be doing a darn good job of it. Maybe selling stuff that people need for a good price (and hello, free shipping in Canada!), isn’t sexy, but just ask Amazon how well it’s working out for them.

7) Freshbooks: I’ve a Freshbooks user for years. Freshbooks is pretty much the only thing that made sure I got paid regularly over the last three years (recurring invoices FTW). While they have expanded their project management tools and such, their core is still easy, painless invoicing.

8) CommunityLend: Working from the idea that sometimes people need a loan for lots of reasons and for lots of other reasons a bank won’t lend them the money. Maybe it’s to start a company or go to school or pay off some debts, but the factors that banks use to decide if a person should be lend money are strict (and for good reason). But what if other factors could be considered, some of the more human things? This is where CommunityLend comes in. CommunityLend is a peer-to-peer lending program (BC, ON, and QC only) where people are loaning to people. You still have to go through the credit check and such, but that isn’t the final word. Also, lenders compete to lend you money, so it isn’t a matter of “take or leave it” it becomes, what’s the best offer. It might not be the whole solution, but it certainly could be part of it.

9) Mobio: Have you noticed that QR codes are finally starting to crop up in North America? Yeah me too. Well Mobio is working on tools and apps to make QR codes more interesting, dynamic, oh and profitable. Mobio first started to get into interesting QR code waters with connecting QR codes to payments. Get your bill at a restaurant, scan the QR code and the credit card tied to your account is billed. That was the start, Mobio is making QR codes more dynamic by putting a server between the code and the destination letting one QR code go different places long after the code was created. Ah flexibility in QR, that’s handy.

10) Mobify: So have you used your smartphone to browse a website lately? Cool. Now, have you built a mobile-optimized version of a site? Yeah I didn’t think so. Right then, making a mobile version of a site can be a pain. Oh what about commerce on devices that don’t support Flash? Ah, the plot thickens. Mobify has these things under control. They have their own set of technologies to make sites mobile savvy, without you having to mess up your own site. Mobify got our attention in Vancouver by making the first mobile app for our transit system. They’ve seen how the market is changing and have expanded in the last year into mobile commerce. Not bad, not bad at all.

Now, there is no doubt in my mind that there are a lot more than 10 great startups out there. These are the ones I think are particularly cool. Have others? Please, post them in the comments!photo credit



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iPad 2: Half a million reportedly shipping from China in February 2011 [TNW Apple]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 07:58 PM PST

Digitimes is reporting that ‘sources from Taiwan-based component makers’ have said that Foxconn will initially ship between 400,000 to 600,000 iPad 2′s in February 2011 for an April 2011 launch.

The sources also were reportedly said that Apple originally wanted to have the first batch of iPad 2′s ship in January, but testing of the firmware has pushed back the ship date until February.

Digitimes says this batch of the new iPads – which at the very least should have a front facing camera – will be produced by Foxconn’s Shenzhen plants and not from its new plants in Chengdu. Also, the report points out that Apple should have somewhere around only 1.6-1.8 million units in stock of the current iPad model, meaning that it will probably have to put in another large shipment to carry it over to the April. After which, it’s pretty unlikely anyone will be buying first generation iPads anymore, if even half of the new rumored feature set comes true.DigiTimes, Electronista



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Webcam suicide prompts closure of Thai chat-room [TNW Asia]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 07:50 PM PST

A webcam chat-room in Thailand has been shut down after a 24 year old woman broadcast her suicide on the service.

The woman hanged herself in front of a webcam broadcasting on the Camfrog internet service.  Before doing so she is believed to have posted messages in the “ghost radio” chat-room to say that she was unhappy that her boyfriend had split up with her.  Thai police are treating the death as suicide based on this information.

The suicide has sparked an outcry in Thailand over the improper use of webcam based chat-rooms.  Authorities have been urged by mental health experts to stop any video copies of the suicide from being distributed over the internet to prevent copycat suicides.

This is not the first time webcam based chat-rooms have caused concerns in Thailand.   The same site, Camfrog, was in the news a few years ago when it was found that youngsters were stripping off for sex chats with strangers.  The are also reports that the site has been used by teens to sell drugs.

The “ghost radio” chat-room where the woman broadcast her suicide, has now shutdown.  It’s not known at this time if it will reopen.image, Bangkok Post



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Tumblr Explains Its 24 Hours of Downtime [TNW Apps]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 06:50 PM PST

There were rumors abound as to why microblogging site Tumblr went down for about 24 hours and most of them were centered on the folks over at 4chan. Turns out, at least according to Tumblr, that it wasn’t 4chan after all.

It was an issue during a planned maintenance period.

Tumblr, in an official blog post from CEO David Karp (that’s right, they can finally post on their own blog again) states that during  planned maintenance that wasn’t supposed to interrupt service, a problem took down a critical database cluster which in turn brought the entire network down. After that, their engineers worked round the clock to bring it back online, an effort that took an entire day.

That’s it.

That’s the entire explanation and one that is not going to sit well with its user base some of which still can’t access their blogs, Timeline or Dashboard.

For a site that not only sits in the top 50 U.S. websites in terms of traffic and one that just recently ventured into the world of e-commerce, 24 hours of downtime is horrific to say the least. Tumblr even admits that they weren’t prepared for the amount of traffic that hits the site on a monthly basis stating that:

Frankly, keeping up with growth has presented more work than our small team was prepared for — with traffic now climbing more than 500M pageviews each month. But we are determined and focused on bringing our infrastructure well ahead of capacity as quickly as possible. We've nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone, and continue to distribute and enhance our architecture to be more resilient to failures like today's.

The impact of the outage remains to be seen. Many users, on here and on other forums like Twitter, said they planned on leaving the site for good because of this. And if they weren’t threatening, they were complaining. And if they weren’t complaining they were laughing about how ridiculous it was that a site as big and as popular as Tumblr’s could be down for 24 hours.

Some users even said that the downtime didn’t bother them and not because they were patient but because happened so frequently, something that Karp even acknowledges in his post:

While you might feel like you've gotten used to seeing errors on Tumblr recently, know that this is absolutely unacceptable to our team, and unacceptable for a platform determined to be the best place in the world for your creative expression.

While there are many lessons to be learned here but if there is one greater than the others, it’s this.

If Tumblr plans on expanding, plans on becoming a major player, plans on keeping a large user base, then things like the past 24 hours can never happen again.



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Google Wants to Help Your Business Go Global [TNW Google]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 06:09 PM PST

Today businesses and the Internet go hand in hand. The promise of the Internet has always been that your business could be located anywhere and be able to do business around the corner or around the globe (a tired cliché, I know). The reality, though, is that if you’re a small business in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, there are still huge hurdles jump over before you can really take advantage of the global promise of the Internet.

Starting today, Google wants to help take the pain some of the pain out of internationalizing your business for the Internet. Announced in a blog post, Google has taken the wraps off a new Adwords Global Advertiser portal to coordinate important things like translation of your content, ads, and business as well as a new Global Market Finder that gives you insight into where searches for product names are coming from.

The Adwords Global Advertiser isn’t a tool in itself, but pointers to the translation and market finder tools you’ll need to help you make the global jump. Even if you don’t want to translate your whole website, it’s really worth it to look at the Market Finder to learn about potential markets you might be overlooking.

Here’s how the Market Finder works.

In Google’s blog post, they used the example of a custom tailor, so by extension I tried “custom shirts”, starting with being in Canada and got this very interesting result:

Of course the U.S., France, and Italy are right up there…but would you have guessed Brazil as well? Not only is the term searched for often, the bid price for ads is low. So now from this tool I can translate my ads into Portugese … and my website … and make sure I can receive payments from my (potential) new customers.

All that I’ll have to do is ship the items to them!

If you are a small (or large) business and already have an online presence (especially if you’re already an Adwords customer), you should check this out. If you don’t have an online presence and are wondering how you might be able to manage in a global market….looks like Google is handing you the tools on a silver platter.Adwords blog, Google blog, Photo credit



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Why Google Should Buy Instagram [TNW Social Media]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 05:38 PM PST

Google has been fairly active in buying up companies in the last year in the social space and was just this week eyeing up a $6 billion acquisition of group buying site Groupon. The reasons that Google has been so active in buying companies? Well we all know they are launching a new social product in the new year and secondly they have a massive $50 billion in cash sitting on their balance sheet burning a hole in their pocket. Most of their acquisitions have been in the social gaming space this year but there is one services that they should be eyeing up in my opinion and that is Instagram. Here is why.

Instagram Is Perfect To Add Social Layer

Instagram is pretty light on features at the moment. You essentially take photos, add a filter and then share with your network via 3rd party social networks like Twitter or Facebook. The site works well at the moment but surely it is ripe to add a social layer on top and add the ability to share photos with your own network on Instagram. People love looking through their friends photos and if your social graph was introduced it would make the site infinitely more powerful. Google might just be able to leverage that with their 100s of millions of users across various products if they were smart enough.

Facebook's Success Was Built On Photos

There were a few factors that resulted in Facebook's runaway success but even Mark Zuckerberg himself says that the photo product was one of the main reasons why Facebook grew so explosively and become so social in the early days. There were hundreds of other photo sharing sites on the web many with more features and better quality photos but Facebook became the photo sharing giant because it was so easy to tag users and the product was inherently social. Google does of course have Picasa but that's just the same as all the other photo sharing sites out there and is pretty stagnant.

Growth Curve

Instagram is growing at a furious rate. It's not just the numbers below which show how fast it is growing but all the key early adopters are on there. For want of a better word it is the "cool" place to share photos online now. It feels like something that has legs and will continue growing and not disappear as a fad because the product is so good and people just love using it.

Cheap

In relative terms it would be pretty cheap. Google would probably have to pay over 10 million for it which seems like a lot for a service that has only just launched and doesn't have any revenue but that amount of money is a drop in the ocean when you consider that they were willing to pay $6 billion for Groupon. It's the potential that Google would be paying for and given how this could be integrated across a number of Google's products and their upcoming social layer I think this would be money well spent.

Even Google Couldn't Mess This One Up

As we've said in the past Google is slow at integrating start ups they acquire. Just think about Grand Central and Dodge Ball. The problem is that it usually takes a lot of time to get things working and before Google gives it a proper push. Having said that the timing on this one could be perfect because Google has a huge team working on their new social product and this would be a talent acquisition of sorts. Buy them, slot them in with the rest of the team as Instagram grows and opening the services up to hundreds of millions of users via Google's hoer products would not be out of the question. Photos are one of the most social products on the web and I think Google would do well to snap up Instagram while it has early traction and is still relatively cheap.



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Gmail Tweaks Priority Inbox With Info & Refinements [TNW Apple]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 05:15 PM PST

From the Gmail blog, we’ve got word that the wildly popular Priority Inbox (well wildly popular around TNW for sure) has gotten some new tweaks and features that should make us all love Priority Inbox a little more. The updates are on the usual Gmail rollout pace, so some of you might have the update, and others (like me), not yet.

So, what’s coming?

First change is that when you hover over the importance marker you’ll get a reason why Gmail thought it was important:

I think this is a “nice to have” feature, sure it’s interesting to know why Gmail picked something as important (especially if you didn’t set it yourself), but it’s what’s really cool is the next bit…

The other change is more invisible, but probably more important. Gmail is now adapting and reacting to changing what you mark as important/not-important more quickly. This should make the already very useful Priority Inbox even more responsive and useful, especially for new users who are just setting it up.

If you haven’t tried Priority Inbox, go to your Gmail settings and turn it on. You might not see stunning results right away, but over the next few hours you certainly will. One thing that will help, especially now with the changes tonight, to mark things important or not important. This helps Gmail learn what’s really important to you and what isn’t.

So, gmail users…hover over those yellow markers and tell us what you see…Gmail blog, photo credit



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Social Media in 24 Hours [TNW Shareables]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 05:12 PM PST

Vimeo



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Why is Apple apparently sending out free iTunes movie rental codes? [TNW Apple]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 04:43 PM PST

According to 9 to 5 Mac, which provided the screenshot below, Apple is apparently giving out free movie rental codes over iTunes. Assuming this legit, then great, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that, but why?

Our best guesses are that either Apple wants get the Apple TV jump started, have people watching movies on their iPads/MacBook Airs on planes during the holidays (for the wow, I want one factor) or rentals on the whole are down and it is looking to get people hooked before the last-minute-gift-of-iTunes-credits-wave hits. Or maybe they just like giving away stuff for free. 9 to 5 Mac says that the giveaways seem to be random, and we haven’t seen any ourselves, so assuming this isn’t a very limited offer, please let know if you’ve received a notification on this.

9 to 5 Mac



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1979: Hi! I’m Steven Jobs, VP at Apple Computer Inc., here’s my card! [TNW Shareables]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 04:12 PM PST

It’s 1979. You’re in the Bay Area at a business mixer and you run into this guy Steven. He says a few things about a computer that you can have in your home (probably talking about some science fiction book he just read) and he works at some fruit company or something. He gave you his card, now where is it…oh right, here it is:

Edible Apple, Pascal Finette Twitter



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You heard about the new Batman villain? [TNW Shareables]

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 04:05 PM PST



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