Japanese telecommunications company NTT DoCoMo holds 26% market share in Tata Teleservices based in India. Tata and DoCoMo have decided to merge their brands together to create a brand in India. The new brand is called Tata DoCoMo and it will be a GSM service. Tata DoCoMo will be launching in South India first and then gradually spread across the nation. What this means is that we will most likely see a lot more high tech mobile phones leaving Japan and entering the Indian subcontinent. Tata executives must be singing “Jai Ho” right now.
Samsung Electronics has launched a new viral commercial that features a guy dressed up like Street Fighter‘s Ryu smashing a car with his hands and feet. Coincidentally, there is a bonus stage in Street Fighter II where a character has to destroy a car using their hands, legs, and super moves. The commercial was completely filmed with a Samsung H106 SSD camera.
One of the biggest differences between Facebook and MySpace is vanity URLs. Since MySpace started they have offered URLs to users that are in the format: http://myspace.com/yourusername. Facebook’s user name assigns a number based on the order of which someone joins. The format of Facebook’s URL is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=[random number].
But starting tonight, Facebook users will have vanity URLs. Some companies and people have already been rushing for a one-word vanity URL. At 12:01AM Eastern Time tonight, users can grab a username of choice that will redirect to their profile. I know I’ll be near a computer when this event takes place.
Facebook will be preventing registration of usernames that infringes trademark. The social network recommends that you register a username that closely resembles your name.
This reminds me of when GMail first came out. The service was invite only and people actually traded tangible goods over a forum. In one case, I saw someone giving away a signed Kobe Bryant basketball just for a GMail invite. I bet that person is kicking themselves right now.
Twitpocalypse.com claims that Twitter will hit a standstill soon. The owner of the website claims that the issue that Twitter has works similar in nature as the Y2K bug. Every tweet that is sent out has a unique numeric identifier and when that number hits 2,147,483,647, third party applications may crash because that is the limit that a signed integer has. About 2,136,000,000 tweets have been sent out so far.
The crash was expected to take place tomorrow, but it turns out that the internal Twitter team wants to accelerate the process by creating more artificial signed integers. This ensures that they’ll be in the office to resolve the issue. The actual expected time for the incident to take place was going to be around 3AM Pacific Time tonight. Who wants to be in the office at 3AM on a Friday night?
“The responses to @twitterapi and all discussions internally show a preference to not waiting until the middle of the night. The current plan is to force this issue at 21:00 GMT (2:00pm Pacific/5:00pm Eastern for those in the US). This will let us make sure we have all staff available in the unlikely event something goes wrong on our end. We’ll also be available when people who don’t follow the twitter-dev-talk list start reporting errors. While we did warn developers about the Twitpocalypse I’m sorry we didn’t think about setting a drop-dead date and scheduling this previously. We’ll keep trying to improve on warnings like this. Good night, and good luck,” wrote Twitter engineer Matt Sanford on a Google Groups thread.
Twitterfeed is a service that allows blogs and news agencies to syndicate their articles through Twitter. Twitterfeed is able to syndicate the articles using the RSS feed of the website and combine it with a URL shortening service. In some cases, using Twitter to syndicate articles is working better than RSS because of the speed difference.
Twitter is able to deliver news instantly. As a matter of fact, one of the most followed Twitter users is @BreakingNews. BreakingNews is generally able to deliver news much faster than 24/7 news agencies like CNN.
Twitterfeed has 170,000 users syndicating 300,000 feeds. Twitterfeed accounts for 10% of all the tweets that are sent out. This is why Betaworks and TAG have bought a majority stake in the service. Before the investment, Twitterfeed was merely a side project.
Analytics is one of the newest additional services made on Twitterfeed. The analytics helps track what is going on with the links that are sent out.
Betaworks is a previous investor in Summize, which was eventually purchased by Twitter itself. Other Twitter-related services that Betaworks invested in includes TweetDeck and Bit.ly.
There are currently two high profile RIAA lawsuits taking place. One of them involves a Harvard professor and the other involves Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Now the lawyers in both cases are forming a partnership to file a class-action lawsuit against the RIAA to get back the $100 million that they claim the recording industry stole.
Kiwi Camara represents Jammie Thomas-Rasset in a lawsuit that the RIAA filed against her. There is a retrial taking place in Minnesota next week. Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson is representing Boston student Joel Tenenbaum in an RIAA trial as well. Kiwi and Charles are the ones getting together to file the $100 million class action lawsuit against the RIAA.
Camara did an interview with Ars Technica earlier this week and revealed two pieces of evidence that will help his case. MediaSentry was hired by the RIAA to track down the IP address of those who share files. Camara is arguing that MediaSentry is not licensed as a private investigator in Minnesota. This makes them running an illegal “pen register” and their evidence should be barred.
Another approach that Camara is considering is making the RIAA prove that they own the copyrights in question. If the RIAA or MediaSentry cannot prove any of the above scenarios, then the cases will fall apart for them. Camara’s approach is quite unorthodox.
Camara said that the RIAA basically committed a “technical screw-up” when it came to claiming the proper copyright ownership. The RIAA lawyers provided courts with “true and correct” copies of the evidence, but they were not “certified copies” required by federal rules of evidence.
The RIAA asked the judge to take judicial notice for these claims, but the judge refused. The recording industry will now have a limited amount of time to file for the certified copies. Camara already has rebuttals in mind just in case the RIAA is able to get all of the certified copies necessary for the case.
More news on the trial as it develops. Kudos to Ars Technica for their thorough coverage of this case.
Elektrobit Corporation has recently demonstrated a mobile Internet device that will run on the Intel Moorestown mobile processor using the “Moblin v2 for MIDs” stack. Intel will actually release the mobile processor sometime next year. This means we won’t see the MID Reference Device hit the shelves until next year too.
The device itself is pretty small as it is just a half inch thick and has a 4 inch HD screen. There is an HDMI port, WiMAX or 3G mobile broadband capabilities, and it is voice-powered.
The English language has added the millionth word to the dictionary and it just happens to do with technology. The one millionth word is Web 2.0 and it was added at this past Wednesday morning. About 14 words are added to the English language every day.
The Global Language Monitor tracks usage of words across billions of web sites. Obamamania, wardrobe malfunction, zombie banks, shovel ready, recessionista, noob and defriend were pretty close to being added around the same time.
Linguistic Society of America and University of Michigan linguistic professor Sarah Thomason monitors the Language Monitor’s count closely. Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary Jesse Sheidlower works closely with Thomason as well.
When Pulse 2.0 first started we focused our news exclusively on Web 2.0, but transitioned more towards technology as the news around Web 2.0 slowed down in general during this past recession.
Web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci in an article called Fragmented Future. Tim O’Reilly launched a conference called Web 2.0 in 2004 which caused the popularity of the word to spread further.
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