The team at Small Batch Inc. is back at it again.  During election season, the company put together a Twitter Election tracking website.  About one night after the team built the site, they stumbled upon a repository of Wikipedia server logs.  There were gigabytes of data available about what was being searched for on Wikipedia.

Using the data, Small Batch put together a service called Wikirank.  Wikirank is a way to track what is popular on Wikipedia.  Currently the most read Wikipedia pages in the last 30 days were The Beatles, Watchmen, Natasha Richardson, YouTube, Deaths in 2009, Saint Patrick’s Day, Twitter, Rihanna, Lost (TV Series), and Slumdog Millionaire.

In the blog post that was written about the new service, Jeff Veen wrote about how it is interesting when big news stories take place, there are dramatic spikes in places that did not exist before.  For example, the Hudson River airplane emergency landing had a page created within minutes.  Over the next two days, that was one of the most popular pages on Wikipedia.

The website also has a feature called Trending Topics that displays the percentage increase that certain pages have on a single day.  I highly recommend checking it out on a daily basis out of time pass and just to stay informed.

The new Microsoft advertising campaign focuses on bashing Apple’s product prices. This may work well for Microsoft because we’re in the middle of recovering from a recession. In the commercial, Lauren revealed that there is only one Apple laptop under $1,000 and it has a 13″ screen. For less than that, Lauren was able to find a better Windows-based computer and it had a 17″ screen.

In the ad, Lauren ended up spending $699.99 on an HP DV7-1245DX. Joel Domingo asked PC Mag laptop lead analyst Cisco Cheng whether they had one of those in stock, but it turns out that he said “DV7? That’s an old laptop.”

Sure Lauren was able to get a old PC on the cheap, but you can also do that with Apple laptops too. As a matter of fact, the team at Pulse 2.0 attained a MacBook for about $500 on eBay in order to look into Mac software development.

Regardless, Microsoft found a way to retaliate against Apple’s biggest weakness in an entertaining way. It really is payback time for the way that Apple hammered on the features of Vista with the Mac vs. PC advertisements. I think it would be funny to see Microsoft make a commercial that makes fun of Apple fanboys directly.

[via PCMag]

Verizon Wireless will begin selling netbooks as early as next quarter according to a Bloomberg report.  This strategic move is a direct challenge to AT&T who currently has plans to sell netbooks on the cheap with new account activations.

Verizon is working with several PC makers and the plan is still in progress.  AT&T and RadioShack have an agreement in place where the electronics retail company sells netbooks that run on the telecommunication company’s 3G network.

The Verizon-branded netbooks would sell in the company’s retail stores initially.  Verizon would later partner with other retail companies.  AT&T sells primarily Acer netbooks.  Verizon would sell the netbooks for about $100 and subsidize the rest of the cost.

[via Bloomberg]

Apple will really be testing the loyalty of their consumers starting April 7.  They will begin charging $1.29 per track for individual singles and selected classic tracks.  This breaks the psychological barrier of the $0.99 per song.  Apple is trying this higher price at a pressing time in the economy where consumers are forced to stretch their budgets.

This move is part of a variable pricing strategy put together by the company which will also see some songs receive a lower download price.

“This will be a PR nightmare,” stated former EMI Music executive Ted Cohen, currently a managing partner of TAG Strategic. “It is for the music industry what the AIG bonuses are for the insurance industry.”

Apple made the announcement about the changes to iTunes this past Janaury.  The songs being downloaded at the new price will be DRM-free.  This means you will be able to copy these songs from multiple computers to your iPod.  Currently the iPod erases all of the music if you want to copy files from another computer.  Many people complained about that.

Will the trade-off be worth it?  We’ll find out in April.

[via LAT]

Feedburner has been on the brunt of criticism since it was acquired by Google.  Some people believe that this was the worst transition Google has made with all of its acquired companies.  No new features have been added to the service except for Google Ads in RSS feeds and the reliability of reporting RSS analytics is unreliable at best.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wrote a lengthy piece about how Feedburner may not be hearing your pings.  Its getting to be such a serious problem that bloggers and other news agencies may look into alternatives.  FeedBlitz decided to take advantage of the Google-Feedburner situation.

Earlier this week the company announced that they have opened a brand new RSS management service to the public.  The service was previously in private beta.  The FeedBlitz RSS management system has better branding for RSS feeds, a one stop social media marketing solution, smarter SEO, better metrics, and control over content and viral marketing.

“You’ll see that the FeedBlitz RSS feed service will rapidly evolve over the coming weeks as we learn more about its real-world behavior, what we inspire you (with luck!) to ask for, and what we could do better at. There are more features we have in the queue to add, and we’ve had some great suggestions already from the private beta that we’ll be implementing,” stated Phil Hollows founder of FeedBlitz on the company blog.

One of the advantages of using FeedBlitz immediately is the real-time reports and analytics functionalities.  Feedburner generally waits until each morning to deliver the previous days analytics. Eventually I’ll switch Pulse2.com to FeedBlitz to see if the switch is worth it and will report my experiences.

Until then, if I were Google they should use this as a wake up call.

The new service is available [here]

Details about the Verizon Alias2 phone are starting to leak out and it has some decent features.  The phone can be opened vertically or horizontally and the phone uses dynamically-changing button labels for mode switches.   The predecessor of this phone was the Verizon Alias U740 which launched without much fanfare.  Hopefully this phone will have some better luck, but judging by its appearance, I don’t expect a lot of consumers to bite.

[via Engadget/PhoneArena]

Intel CEO Paul Otellini was on a Webcast earlier this week to discuss the company’s stock options program.  The subject of IBM’s interest in Sun came up during the Webcast and Otellini gave his two cents about the Java-producing company.  One employee asked Otellini whether Cisco’s entrance to the storage market drove Sun to seek a buyer.

Oh, I don’t know if the Cisco entry spurred IBM. I think (a) cheap Sun price–a low price–spurred a lot of interest. I can tell you that Sun was shopped around the valley and around the world in the last few months. A lot of companies got calls or visits on buying some or all the assets of the company. It looks like IBM is in the hunt now. And at a hundred and some odd percent premium, I suspect they’ll get it.

I don’t think it had anything to do with Cisco. I think IBM is trying to consolidate architectures. IBM has the strongest Java license in the industry. By picking up Sun–which is the creator of Java–they really consolidate their position not just in Linux, but also in Java.

I think the stuff on Solaris and SPARC is likely to see EOLs over time through the IBM acquisition. But no strategic reason for IBM to maintain that except to attempt to convert the very large Sun SPARC Solaris base to power. I think that would be their most likely strategy as part of this.

Is it good or bad for us? I don’t know. I’d rather have Sun be independent, I guess.

Those statements were published on an SEC filing on Wednesday.

It will be interesting to see who does end up buying Sun or if are forced to compete directly against Cisco. Whoever ends up buying Sun will end up owning MySQL too. MySQL is an integral part of today’s web technologies.

[via CNET]

LG has announced three new phones in South Korea dubbed as the Lollipop line.  The three phone models are the LG SV800, the KH8000, and the LH8000.  These handsets are targetted towards a younger audience and they come colors come in “Cutie Pink,” “Aqua Blue,” and “Boyish Titanium.”

The LEDs on the phone display different patterns such as heart shapes, animals, cars, etc.  The phones look interesting, but the specs aren’t unique.

This phone will be available in South Korea starting this month through SK Telecom, KTF, and LG Telecom.

The main specs include:
- CDMA and HSDPA connection
- 2.8″ TFT internal display
- Media player
- 1.3 megapixel secondary camera
- microSD card support

[via Unwired]