Archive for: July 2, 2009

Mollie Sugden died today. If you're a big fan of British comedy (and really, who isn't?), you likely know her best as the star of the long-running department-based BBC sitcom, Are You Being Served?

In honor of the beehived actress, who passed away after a long illness, the hashtag #mrsslocombespussy shot to the top of Twitter's Trending Topics. The phrase is a reference to a not-so-subtle joke involving the character's cat.

Clicking through the phrase, however, popped up a page with zero results. If it was, in fact, such a popular tag, why were there no instances of it? One had to wonder whether Twitter has taken up the practice of filtering potentially offensive material. We put the question to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who chalked the disappearance up to a bug, explaining,

We don't filter out offensive content from search. There's a bug involving hashtagged words with more than 16 characters. If you search for the same world or phrase without the hashtag you would see it in results.

Stone explained that, searching the phrase with the "#" provides zero results. Pulling the "#" out, however, displays all the tweets using said phrase. "We've got someone fixing the bug," added Stone.

Skype may have just released version 1.1 of its iPhone app, but the eBay-owned company can't catch a break on cell phones. After years of poor-performing mobile apps, Skype seems to have made another mistake: the new version lacks push notifications, which first became possible with iPhone OS 3.0.

FierceMobileContent reports that it basically defeats much of the purpose of the app. Since the iPhone doesn't multitask, you can't Skype running in the background and then do something else--which means the app can't notify you if someone is messaging you or calling you.

As one comment on Skype's blog reads: "Skype iPhone is kinda useless with no push notifications so 1.1 is still kinda useless. Why even include IM capability without it, what are people supposed to do--send me an email that we should Skype chat?" Beats me.

Will shopping via cell phone take off soon? Visa seems to think so. The venerable credit card firm has acquired a $13 million stake in Monetise, a mobile payment and banking services company, according to the Wall Street Journal, in a move that could signal a potential maturing of the fledging mobile banking industry.

Monitise said in the report that the five-year agreement, which includes ongoing license and service fees on top of the $13 million, will focus on a suite of mobile payment services Visa wants to develop. That includes "services like paying bills using a mobile phone, checking an account balance and transferring money to a bank account," according to Monitise Chief Executive Alastair Lukies in the article.

The first products will be available to Visa users by early next year, Lukies added.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. There's been a bit of talk over the past half-year about Twitter search eclipsing Google in terms search immediacy. Microsoft--who, let's face it, wouldn't mind doing a little Google eclipsing of its own--announced today that it has added tweets to the list of content discoverable through Bing, its new search engine.

Now Bing users can search content posted by a handful of prominent Twitter users, including "Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest." Twitter content can be found by typing in queries such as "Twitter Al Gore" or "@algore."

Results will be limited to a few thousand Twitter users at first, but Bing will be adding more in the coming months.

If you're looking for a family-friendly getaway for a weekend trip or even a day off of work and school, you might look for a budget-conscious way to do in your own backyard. Alternatively, you may be looking for a longer vacation, a cruise to another country or a flight across the world may be in order. In either case, you might consider taking the family to an amusement park, whether it's a local water park, a nationally known theme park, or even a fancy resort and entertainment venue in another country.

Enter Parkr, a Google Maps mash-up that marks amusement parks around the world on a map, from the well- known to the ones that you may not even know are in your zip code. If you're looking to make the most of a weekend or to take a day trip or you're planning a cruise and want something fun to do at the next port, take a look at Parkr to see what amusement parks are in your own backyard. 
Parkr isn't just for American audiences; if you live in another country or you're traveling abroad and want something fun and family friendly to do while you're there, you can always choose your country at the bottom of the page to see what theme parks are in your area. Alternatively, you can click and drag the map to your region and zoom in on your specific location. Parks are marked on the map with Parkr logos.

If you'd ...

Well, it was fun while it lasted, I suppose. Just weeks after Skyfire Labs launched version 1.0 of its stellar Windows Mobile Web browser--complete with Flash, AJAX, and JavaScript support--Hulu has decided to block the Web browser from streaming its videos, according to WMExperts.com.

That kills one of the best uses of the app, as I had found in our full Skyfire 1.0 review on PCMag.com. Nonetheless, the report said that there's no workaround as of yet--and that it could indicate Hulu is planning to release a mobile client or upgraded Web portal of its own.

Still, the whole thing strikes me as incredibly cheesy. This isn't the first time Hulu has done something like this. But that doesn't make it any better.

Q: The warehouse people are tired of having to use an ink stamp in order to print a sequential number three times in three separate printed forms (Original, and two copies). So they came to me asking if we could have this form made in MS Excel or Word with some sort of counting field that prints through a laser printer three copies with the same number, adds one and prints another three, and so on within a range of consecutive numbers. Is this possible with these tools? - Tony Malvarez.

A: The solution will require both Excel and Word. Start a new Excel workbook. Put a column header in A1, like "Number". Now fill the column with the desired numbers. Maybe you want to start at 1000000 and go upward. Here are three ways to perform that fill operation:

Enter 1000000 in A2 and 1000001 in A3. Select both and grab the +-shaped "handle" at the bottom right of the selection rectangle. Drag it down as far as you want to fill the column with sequential numbers.Enter 1000000 in A2. Click the Home ribbon and pull down the Fill item within the Editing panel. Choose Series. Check Columns. Enter the stop value, say, 1001000. Click OK.Enter =ROW()+999998 in cell A2 and copy it down as far as you want.

Save the workbook and close Excel.

Open the form in Word and save a new copy of the file. Highlight the entire form, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it on a new page twice. You should now have a document that prints three copies of the form. Start a mail merge operation ...

It's not exactly 50,000 apps, but it's better than 19: Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile will have 600 mobile apps available for download or purchase on its launch date, according to InformationWeek.

That's a decent-sized start, and roughly comparable to the just-under-500 apps that BlackBerry App World had when it opened earlier this year.

The difference with both Windows Mobile and BlackBerry OS is that there are thousands of third-party apps out there that aren't in the vendor's own portals; head over to Handango for a sampling.

Fans of the Twilight vampire series take note: the publisher, Little, Brown Book Group, has announced that the saga will soon materialize on June 29th in e-book form as an iPhone app, according to MediaPost--giving fans another Apple-related option aside from downloading the movie in HD form from the iTunes Store.

ScrollMotion, the company behind the app, is also looking to bring titles from best-selling authors Kelley Armstrong, Iain M. Banks, Patricia Cornwell, Dorothy Koomson and Alexander McCall Smith, the report said.

According to recent data from Bookscan, some 16 percent of all books sold in the first quarter of 2009--about one in every seven books sold--was a Twilight novel.

Internet radio stations got a second chance to hammer out a royalty agreement with copyright holders Tuesday when President Obama signed the Webcasters Settlement Act.

The bill gives both sides 30 days to come to an agreement over how much Web radio stations should pay to stream their music. A similar bill signed by President Bush last year set a deadline of Feb. 15, 2009 but a deal was not reached.

The debate dates back to March 2007 when the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) - a government body within the Library of Congress - handed down royalty rate fees that Internet radio claimed would put them out of business. The two sides battled back and forth for ages, finally agreeing to the Webcasters Settlement Act, which vacates the CRB's decision if the two sides agree on a deal.

Check back in 30 days to see if that becomes a reality.

YouTube has increased the size of its standard uploads from 1GB to 2GB.

"The increase means you can upload longer videos at a higher resolution as well as large HD files directly from your camera," YouTube wrote in a blog post.

Users can also now share links directly to the HD version of their videos, and embed the HD version on their blogs or web sites. More details on the blog post.

In other YouTube news, The New York Times reports that YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has left the video site and is now working on an engineering project at Google, which owns YouTube.

"Steve shifted his focus to help with some Google engineering projects. He's still involved with YouTube and invested in its success," a spokesman told the Times.

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