IPhone.com domain not registered to Apple

Try to type in http://www.iphone.com although they sell mobile phones, you don't see an iPhone at this site, as this site is not owned by apple, and has probably been registered by some speculate thinking "hey, if people wants to buy a phone they will at this point type in iphone.com".
And yes my guess is this guy is getting a lot of traffic by people just just typing in the address in the address bar.

But this guy it not the only one, according to Name Intelligence, about 450 domains with the word "iPhone" were registered on Jan. 11 and about 375 on Jan. 12 - just days after Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.

Several of these domain names can be found and bought at a very high price on auction sites like ebay.

Source

Myspace Is Loosing Traffic

When talking about social network sites, the most known and spoken of have always been Myspace.

Now some new runners is stealing market shares from Myspace, in May the research firm Nielsen/Netratings saw a drop in UK traffic to myspace, while Bebo and Facebook is attracting more and more traffic.
Facebook has grown its traffic by 500% in the last six month (Damn that's a lot).
Although this is a big step for Facebook Myspace is still in the lead with 6.5 million UK users, compared to Bebo with 4 million and Facebook with 3.2 million.

Rupert Murdoch, who bought MySpace in 2005, has already expressed concern about the growth of Facebook. His executives will now be under even more pressure to find ways of making MySpace fashionable again.

Source

Google Asks for Extension of Microsoft Oversight

Google Inc. asked a federal judge Monday to extend a 2002 consent decree involving Microsoft Corp.

Tuesday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will hold a quarterly hearing in which she will determine whether Microsoft is sticking to the terms of the agreement, which is due to expire in November.

Why Google gets involved in Microsoft matters is the latest in a complicated series of steps it has taken to challenge its rival's adherence to the 2002 consent decree.

"Without an extension, the court may not have effective means to oversee Microsoft's implementation of these changes and determine whether they are effective in meeting the requirements of the final judgment"
Said the Google court filing.

Source

380 new games for Playstation 3

Good news for all the playstation 3 fans, at least 380 new playstation games will be released this year, Sony promises.

Since the release of playstation 3, there has only been about 150 games available for it, this is mainly because there has been so much focus on Sony rival Nintendo Wii. So not much energy has been put into developing games for playstation.

I Japan Nintendo Wii has been selling three times as much as Sony Playstation, so Sony has had some really big startup problems.

Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer says that attractive games will be the key factor to accelerate PS3 sales over the next year.

A lack of attractive games available for the PS3 has been pointed out as the main reason that Nintendo has gained so much of Playstation sales market.

source

Youtube Goes International

The Google owned Youtube is spreading, to support more languages then english.

Each site will be translated into 9 new language specific sites. It will launch versions across Brazil, Ireland, Italy, France, Japan, Poland Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
More international sites will be available later this year.

"We want to create a youtube experience that is local experience"
Steve Chen, YouTube co-founder

And now, what do we need language specific YouTube sites?

"It's not just about translating, it also about creating content unique to
certain countries."

It will be exiting to see if its a good idea to separate countries, instead of the one english based site. Video descriptions and commenting will of cause be in the specific language.

Source

Iran will filter Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) for porn

The Iranian ministry for telecommunication will filter out adult material in multimedia messages for cell phones, to spare the Iranian young people from the corruption from adult material.

Pornographic and erotic materials has got some attention to the Iranian government, we have heard before about filtering the internet for pornographic material in religious countries, now Iran will make an effort to filter out pornographic material from cell phones.

According to Iranian tv The Iranian ministry for telecommunication will begin to remove all adult content such as images and sound files via cell phones, to spare the minds for the Iranian young people.

There has been no information on how they will accomplish this filtering process, on the technical part.
Source: comon.dk

Adobe In The Web Developing Tool Market

Adobe will release their version of a developer tool under Mozilla Public license.
Before the end of this year Adobe will release a development tool called Flex, hoping to attract more developers to their platform.

Flex is a tool for developing complex web applications. Adobe will release all necessary tool for programming of flex applications inclusive actionscript 3.0 and MXML, and components for the graphical user interface etc.

Flex is based on Flash, the popular multimedia player, which we have enjoyed for some time now for both websites, small online games etc.
Adobe’s biggest competitor will be Microsoft with their new silverlight project, which we have heard some things about for some time now.

As for me, I’m just happy to see some new steps in the flash area, have been waiting for something new for some time now.
I will definitely keep an eye on this development.
Source: comon.dk

Sony Playstation 3 eye camera launching this summer

Sony will release its PlayStation 3 Eye camera for the Playstation this summer in Europe, and possibly with it will be released with the karaoke title SingStar.

We are still waiting on many specifications on the eyes abilities we don’t know more then its video frame rate should be up to 120 frames per second, and be able to work in low light conditions.

Still no price or exact date has been announced, but we are waiting to see what this will bring, Sony have been talking about it for some time now so the audience will have some expectations.

Also for the inbuilt microphone there will be some noise reducing technology to remove background and focusing on speech and voice recognition.
Source: t3.co.uk

Google’s ads victory in China

Google has just won the right to sell ads on 400 Chinese websites owned by China Telecom, and thereby also kicked Microsoft’s and Chinese search engine Baiudu.com’s ass, on the Chinese online advertising market.

The effect of this market share Google has the opportunity to make even more money on the Chinese advertising market, which is worth billions.

The profit from this new advertising deal will be shared between Google and China Telecom.
By the end of 2006 China had 137 million internet users, so that’s a lot of people watching ads.
Source: epn.dk

Man Gets 5,000 Calls, the power of YouTube

Ryan Fitzgerald is a 20 year old man who decided to post a video on YouTube on Friday with his cell phone number, and the generous offer that he was willing to listen to what ever anybody had to talk about.

"I never met you, but I do care," Ryan Fitzgerald said on his video post, which led more then 5000 people to call him this weekend as he told The Boston Globe.

On Monday at 5 a.m., his T-Mobile cell phone payment will begin charging him for the call he takes, but this does not scare Ryan Fitzgerald he will not hang up on people and disappoint them.

"Some peoples own mothers won’t take the time to sit down and talk with them and have a conversation," Fitzgerald said. "But some stranger on YouTube will. After six seconds, you’re not a stranger anymore; you’re a new kid I just met."
Source: yahoo news

Froogle renamed Google Product Search

Froogle has been the name of Google product search engine since 2002, but has never had much success.
Now Google will try to re-brand Froogle as a Google brand, http://www.google.com/products and with almost the same design as Google search engine.

"We were a really young company, and I don't think we really understood the burden of a new brand," said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. "I also think it was very hard to build awareness. Our product offering was very robust, but it will fare better with a Google Product Search name."

Now we will see if a new and more serious name as Google Product Search will attract more popularity and visitors.
Source: techcrunch.com

Google Makes StumbleUpon Competitor

Yesterday I wrote about Ebay buying StumbleUpon for 40 million dollars.
Now Google announces that they are making similar function to their already existing toolbar.

The new Google toolbar icon for their “stumble” is a couple of dices, when you click them you will get to a new website based on your previous searches on Google.

The concept is not an exact duplicate of StumbleUpon, because StumbleUpon find websites for you based on other peoples ratings of the sites, and Google is finding websites for you by looking and analyzing your last search queries.
Source: techcrunch.com

Ebay buys StumbleUpon.com

The last couple of weeks has been all about big companies buying smaller companies, (Google buys DoubleClick and Google buys stocks in Maxthon browser).
Now very reliable rumors has it that Ebay is just about to buy StumbleUpon for the large amount of about 40 – 45 million dollars.

StumbleUpon is a web browser toolbar for users to share website favorites and rate them, giving more popularity to sites that people like and then mark as ”Stumbled”. A very interesting and new concept.

StumbleUpon users say they like it because of the surprising factor in what the next random site to see is when they ”stumble”.
Source: techcrunch.com

Adobe Makes Media Player For Flash

While Microsoft challenges Macromedia Flash player then Adobe is developing their own media player for flash.

This player should difference from Windows media player and iTunes by focusing on local content, while, while the applications are supported rss feeds to receive flash video.
There will also be a possibility to download content information online.

Users will have the possibility to download video to watch locally, including padcast, tv shows and movies, but Adobe has focused on making it a player for developers and publishers, so there will be ways to lock the digital media (DRM).

Adobe’s media player will be supported for both windows and Mac.
Source: comon.dk

Microsoft Silverlight Challenges Macromedia Flash

Silverlight is going to be Microsoft’s new video streaming technology, its going to be a browser plugin supported for both windows and mac.

Silverlight has been under development in more then two years now, and can show web applications in both windows and mac with IE browser, firefox and safari.

Even though Windows media video (wmv) is very popular video format macromedia flash still is dominating on web streaming in both youtube.com and myspace.com.

Among possible partners for this new Silverlight project is mentioned Major League Baseball, and some web based video companies such as Netflix and Akamai Technologies.
Source: smh.com.au

Google’s rivals fear for advertising competition

In a previous news I announced that Google had just bought the advertising company DoubleClick for a price of 3.1 billion dollars.
Now some of Google biggest rivals, are fearing Google’s overwhelming power in the advertising market.
"If Google becomes the dominant force in terms of Web advertising and becomes the broker, that would be clear evidence of market power and dominant position." Said senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs Jim Cicconi.

Also this acquisition of DoubleClick gives Google a great amount of information on customer behavior on the internet.

"This proposed acquisition raises serious competition and privacy concerns," said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general
Source: yahoo.com

Google Buys DoubleClick For 3.1 Billion Dollars

Again Google is out buying new stuff, this time its the online advertising company DoubleClick.
The amount of 3.1 billion dollars is twice as much as what Google paid for YouTube back in November.

And why this amazingly high price for an advertising company, when Google already has a big advertising market already with adwords?
Well still Google is mostly based on text ads, and DoubleClick has a big advance in video and banner ads.

So now the question is, will this event have any effect on online advertising in the future?,
I think yes, I will for sure keep an eye on this event.
Source: businessweek.com

Party Trashed By Myspace Users

17-year-old Rachel Bell advertised her "Skins"-themed party on myspace.com attracting hundreds for party people doing more then just party.

Her parents Alan and Elaine returned home the following day to find plastic buckets filled with vomit, cigarette butts littered throughout the house, and even Elaine's wedding dress pulled out from a wardrobe and urinated on. ´

The myspace title for this party advertisement was suitable enough “Let's trash the average family-sized house disco party,” though the teenager denies posting the message.

All in all this small party left the parents with a 48.000 dollar bill.

Source: smh.com.au

China goes to war against pornography

The Chinese authorities has now promised to clean the internet for porn, all audio and video clips available on the internet will be erased as 10 government departments spends the next six month working on removing pornography.

"The boom in pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds," Xinhua quoted the public security ministry's vice minister, Zhang Xinfeng.

Pornographic has been illegal for a while in China, and has already done a lot to filter porn, but porn is still to be found, they just have to do a little more effort to find it.

Xinhua cited a report from a Beijing rehabilitation centre for juvenile delinquents as saying that 33.5 percent of its detainees had been influenced by violent online games or erotic websites when they committed their crimes.
"The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic controls is to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace," Zhang said.
Source: smh.com.au

Yet Another Spiderman 3 Trailer

Spiderman the incredible fast, flying and crawling human, aka Tobey Maguire, we have seen him in Spiderman and Spiderman 2, and we loved it, (yes I’m talking to the fans).

Now a new release of a trailer to the Spiderman 3 that should be released 3 may this year (2007).
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/spiderman3/site/

In this third Spiderman movie we will see a strange black entity from another world bonds with Peter Parker and causes inner turmoil as he contends with new villains, temptations, and revenge.

One more time we will have the pleasure of seeing Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson and James Franco as Harry Osborn.

2/3 Of All Internet Searching Goes Through Google

64 percent of all of all internet searches is going through Google’s search engine, and thereby Google increases their market share in the war against MSN and Yahoo and all other search engines.

Yahoo and MSN is struggling to gain market share in the search engine way, but apparently they don’t succeed, because Google is still growing bigger and bigger, attracting more and more users.

The American opinion-research institute Hitwise made a research that shows Google is in the lead with 64.1 percent of the American search market.
Last year Google had 58.3 percent of the market.This research is based on 10 million American internet users.

According to Hitwise Yahoo comes in on second place with 21.3 percent and MSN with 9.2 percent.Source: digi.no

Lynda.com Exclusive Producer of training material for Adobe Creative Suite 3

Lynda.com has been around for years providing tutorials and other learning materials for Adobe products has now been chosen to be the exclusive producer of the training solutions to Adobes new Creative suite 3.

Press Release: lynda.com, the company specializing in self-paced career and computer training in digital media and design, announced today that it has been chosen as the exclusive producer of in-the-box video training for the new Adobe® Creative Suite® 3. More than 200 lynda.com-produced training videos will be included with all of the new Creative Suite 3 editions. Additional Creative Suite 3 training courses, created by lynda.com, will be on display during the NAB conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center, booth number SL2028, April 16-19, 2007.
Source: photoshopnews.com

If any learning material provider company deserved it, its lynda.com congratulations.

Google buys stake in Maxthon Browser

When we hear the word Google most people thing of the most used search engine on the internet, but now you can also relate Google to a web browser, or part of it to be exact.
Google has just bought a minority stake in the Maxthon Browser, at a presumably price of about 1 million dollars.

The Maxthon Browser is free to download and have been downloaded more then 80 million times, and about 25 % of all downloads is from China, which is also the main reason of why Google has bought stakes in this Browser, because this will increase Google’s position in China.

Google has indicated that they may integrate Google functions into Maxthon browser which would be a good strategy against competing search engines.

Source: downloadsquad.com

In Stores Now – The Terabyte Harddisk From Hitachi

Now you are able to buy a PC harddrive with 1 terabyte, but maybe we should wait untill the price it right.

The harddisk is from Hitachi Storage Technologies and is named Deskstar 7K1000, with the capacity of 1 terabyte, with 7.200 rpm and a maximum transfer rate at 1070 Mbit/s, 32 MB buffer.
Hitachi has calculated that this harddisk would aproxemetly have room for about 330.000 images (with 3 MB each) or 250.000 mp3 files (2.5 MB each).

And now to the astonnishing price at 399 dollars, this is alot compared to a harddisk with a capacity at 750 gb, to half that price.
I guess I will wait till some competition will force the price down a bit.
Source: comon.dk

But can’t wait to get my hands on this one, I will never have to worry about storage problems anymore.

Two Days A Month Wasted On the Internet

More than two-thirds of UK Internet surfers in this research admit to occasionally surfing the web aimlessly. Nearly one-third admit to do this more then 30 percent of the time they are online at work.

So what are these people searching for?
Sporting events pose a particular lure for workers, particularly men. At the end of February, on the eve of the NCAA basketball tournament known as "March Madness," Websense reported that employee productivity in the U.S. was threatened by a 31 percent increase in traffic at online sports sites and a startling 56 percent increase at gambling sites.

Now this new phenomenon has also been given a name, “wilfing” which stands for What Was Looking For). Good name for an endless internet surfing for nothing.
Also according to a British market research firm this ”wilfing” phenomenon is becoming a national epidemic.

Source: toptechnews.com

Damn, I thing epidemic is a strong word for an internet addiction (as I have), but have they ever tried to thing of some surveillance at work so keeping people in short leash while at work.

Windows Messenger Live On Your Xbox 360

Yes now its time, finally, Microsoft have been talking about a messenger live for Xbox 360 for some time now and now we got a date on when this would be possible.

Now its possible, you can connect and talk to your fellow xbox 360 friends or accross platforms to windows based PCs or even Windows mobile devices.

”Beginning the week of May 7, 2007, the Xbox 360 Spring Update will provide Xbox 360 owners worldwide with access to Windows Live Messenger features, broadening the communication options on the Xbox LIVE social network”

The only thing you will need to do is to plug in a virtual keyboard accessible on Xbox 360, or by connecting a USB keyboard to the console, then you can chat via text messages through Windows messenger live on your Xbox.

Well the only thing I need is the keyboard and an Xbox 360 to test it on, but i’m still very exitet, and hope this will bring yet more users to the messenger network, which is my favorite online communication channel.