Happy and Safe 4th of July to all those who are celebrating today. Tags: July 4th, Jeff Keni Pulver ...

Things may finally be turning around for troubled satellite radio venture Sirius XM. Following a long and costly merger, the company became desperate for new financing just as credit dried up, and managed to avert bankruptcy only by selling 40 percent of itself to John Malone in exchange for a loan paying 15 percent interest. Last week, Sirius secured another half-billion dollars in high-interest debt, and CEO Mel Karmazin got a 20 percent raise and the option to buy 120 million new shares to c...

Join the most influential investors, mobile industry executives, entrepreneurs, press and analysts at MobileBeat 2009 for one day of in-depth discussion, debate and power networking, held on July 16 at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco. MobileBeat will focus on apps: the people who use them, the people who make them, and the people who fund them. MobileBeat will also have a Top Startup competition and is actively soliciting submissions from startups younger than 3 years old and in two categori...

There are lots of things to like about Montreal - the nightlife, restaurants, cafes, parks, shopping, et al - but the thing that has really impressed me over the past week has been a system called Bixi that lets people use bicycles when needed. There are stations scattered throughout downtown Montreal where you can pick up a bicycle, travel to where you want to go, and then park it at another station. The system, which can be accessed and monitored online (that’s the technology angle here...

In 1988, “Saturday Night Live” aired a parody commercial deriding clumsy business models. “At First CityWide Change Bank, our business is making change,” said actor Jim Downey, portraying a naive “service representative.” After listing various ways in which his company could break a five, he explained how money is made. “The answer is simple: volume.” More than 20 years later, I wonder if some digital entrepreneurs think the same. “Simple: ...

Millions of people logged onto the web when the news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death broke last week, and they’re continuing to flock to eBay to get their hands on the pop king’s memorabilia. The online auction site said it’s since seen the percentages of daily searches, listings and sales of Michael Jackson memorabilia rise dramatically. As of yesterday, eBay said the number of searches for Michael Jackson items had surged 235 percent over the week prior to his deat...

We’d like to say thanks to this week’s GigaOM sponsors: PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions RackSpace: Experience fanatical support StrataScale: It’s your infrastructure – On Demand Fuze Meeting: HD Meetings – From Fuze Meeting Mozy: Back up your photos, music, and files with Mozy for as low as $4.34 per month. Juniper Networks: Demand more security and performance OSI Hardware: Quality, […]Tweet This ...

The launch of Apple’s new iPhone 3GS was the best sales day ever for AT&T’s retail stores, while the number of orders taken at its online store also hit an all-time high, according to an internal memo obtained by MacDailyNews, a blog devoted to all things Apple. While the memo doesn’t outline the precise number of devices sold, it does reveal other details. On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday...

A range of publications wrote about our Call Distributor announcement this week: Speech Tech Magazine - Ifbyphone Unveils Virtual Call Center Service Focus - Ifbyphone Introduces Hosted “Cloud” Call Center ...

Akamai today said it would provide adaptive bit-rate streaming to deliver video content from web sites to the Apple iPhone 3G and devices running the iPhone OS 3.0 operating system. Basically, using adaptive bit-rate streaming means folks can watch streaming video on their iPhones or iPod Touches with fewer stops and starts. Adaptive streaming adjusts the video content to a lower or higher bit rate, depending on how robust the web connection is. Akamai offers a similar service for MicrosoftR...

Will Michael Jackson’s funeral be live-streamed? (NewTeeVee) Is Obama building new energy policy council with cleantech leaders? (Earth2Tech) Must-have iPhone apps for air travel (WebWorkerDaily) 14 free iTunes visualizers (TheAppleBlog) With the rollout of Symbian’s OS platform, expect a shakeout (OStatic) MIA: One of the few apps in Palm Pre App Catalog (jkOnTheRun) Tweet This ...

As MySpace struggles to regain ground it’s lost to Facebook and sort out its revenue woes, executive departures from MySpace Latino, a combination Spanish-English site targeted at U.S.-based Latinos that launched a little over a year ago, indicate it may be on the chopping block. MySpace Latino’s VP of Hispanic sales and strategy, Manny Miravete, has left the company, and the site’s managing director, Victor Kong, has reportedly left as well. The site itself hasn’t been...

Germany’s Yello Strom might be the coolest utility in the world — it’s embraced the intertwining of energy and home broadband connections and is one of the few that manages its smart meter service directly via its customers’ broadband link. That means it can easily offer consumers web-style smart meter applications, including Google’s PowerMeter energy management tool, and potentially a twitter feed of energy consumption. From Yello Strom’s perspective, leveraging br...

Today we’ve received an email and seen multiple tweets alerting us to the fact that Google’s App Engine software development platform is down. We’ve emailed the company for details, but in the meantime, a check of the App Engine status page won’t even load at 11:30 a.m. PDT, and updates on the site indicate that it’s been put into unplanned maintainance mode after experiencing problems this morning. We’ve seen several complaints about the impersonal way Googl...

Several marketing associations supported by Google have banded together and released seven principles that they believe should govern online privacy. Are you ready for a journey to the Emerald City? Because the principles are the online advertisers’ attempts to stave off government regulation around protecting consumers’ online privacy by diverting attention to the Great and Powerful Principles rather than the data scavenging that’s going on behind the curtain. Kind of like a ...

In the market for a new TV? These days, there are bargains galore, especially when it comes to those with plasma screens. The Wall Street Journal reports that the growing popularity of their LCD cousins has TV makers such as Pioneer and Vizio phasing out their entire plasma TV line-ups. Others may soon follow suit. One can hardly blame them — there were 30 million LCD TVs sold in the U.S. in 2008 vs. 4 million plasma TVs, according to Display Search, a market research company. That’...

Orange, a UK ISP and mobile phone company, is reportedly close to signing a deal with an ad-supported mobile virtual network called Blyk that would offer certain Orange customers credits on their service in exchange for receiving text-based ads on their mobile phones. According to an article in New Media Age, Orange has been in talks with Blyk for months to offer subscribers aged 16-24 credits of £15 ($25) if they receive ads on their phones. The partnership looks similar to an effort by Germa...

You have to give Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, a lot of credit. Since the launch last month, it has done a terrific job of winning over a growing number of people with some savvy public relation efforts. The latest is the launch of results that show Twitter updates….as long as you’re famous. Dipping its toe into the real-time search market, Bing now presents Twitter updates from “prominent and prolific Twitterers”. “We’re not indexing all of Twitter ...

You have to give Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, a lot of credit. Since the launch last month, it has done a terrific job of winning over a growing number of people with some savvy public relation efforts. The latest is the launch of results that show Twitter updates….as long as you’re famous. Dipping its toe into the real-time search market, Bing now presents Twitter updates from “prominent and prolific Twitterers”. “We’re not indexing all of Twitter ...

I was happily surfing the Web reading the Google News Top Stories when I saw a headline that said “No public viewing at Neverland, but Michael Jackson may get laid“. Say what? I had to do a double-take. Then I couldn’t help but laugh at how funny this headline was. No public viewing of Michael Jackson getting laid? Bummer, I’m sure that could have been a pay-per-view event. It’s The 40 50 Year Old Virgin movie come to life! Course that might be a problem unless it&...

When a SaaS application gets popular enough, features matter less and the underlying ecosystem matters more. There’s a tipping point at which network effects outstrip software features. When that happens, users get the benefits of additional functionality — and the risk of new kinds of lock-in. Salesforce.com, for example, started as a replacement for in-house software. Now it’s a software ecosystem complete with a programming language, developer conferences, and a marketplac...

The two national agencies responsible for allocating $7.2 billion in broadband grants as part of the stimulus bill today released the rules governing the process and said the government would provide about $4 billion in loans for the first of three funding rounds. That money will start flowing to projects in November. It’s a bittersweet moment for folks hoping for better broadband in the U.S., as the rules don’t mandate faster speeds or abide by current net neutrality regulations, ...

Facebook is testing a set of changes to its privacy settings that will make it easier for folks to control what they share and with whom. Essentially the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network is betting that if its users have more control over privacy, they’ll share more. To be sure, the current privacy settings are made up of many unnecessary layers. As part of the test, Facebook will be asking a small group of users to “revisit and reaffirm” their privacy setting using a s...

Globalstar today closed on $738 million in financing, while rival satellite operator TerreStar launched its new bird, TerreStar-1. Globalstar plans to use its money to fund operations and launch a new generation of satellites in 2010 that will deliver all IP-based voice and data to its customers through 2025. Before celebrating, know that Globalstar’s new constellation of satellites will  provide speeds of up to 256kbps down. Like the slow data speeds, the financing is less exciting than...

Using Skype Using Skype for Pain Management and Treatment of Chronic Pain. A hands-off therapy works just fine via Skype webcam. Alternative Health Journal. 50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom. It’s an awesome list by/for teachers. Teaching Degree.org blog. Soldiers head to war, Skype their mothers. "I’ll Skype as much as I can. But Mom would like me to call every day, all day long, Skype every day, all day long. It doesn’t exactly work that way," joked ...

If you use self-described “web site traffic and promotion company” uSocial.net to buy votes on Digg and StumbleUpon, you’ll be thrilled to know it’s expanded its service to Twitter. For just $87, uSocial will generate an additional 1,000 Twitter followers to the account of your choosing. Sweet! Ratchet up your order to more than 5,000 new Twitter followers and you’ll even get a discount. The press release announcing the service kind of says it all. Though you have ...

eReader now matching Amazon’s e-book pricing (jkOnTheRun) How to beat the remote working blues (WebWorkerDaily) Video: Apple’s HTTP adaptive video steaming in action (NewTeeVee) Cheat sheet: Google’s PowerMeter vs. Microsoft’s Hohm (Eath2Tech) Question: What do you do with “retired” Macs? (TheAppleBlog) Report: Open-source smartphone shipments to double by 2014 (OStatic) Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure...

Download Skype for Windows 4.1.0.136. File size 22 MB. Official release. Release date: June 30, 2009. File name: SkypeSetup.exe. No features added from the 4.1 beta, launched a month ago, but it fixes bugs. Dan York takes aim at Skype’s product staging: Skype’s continued belief in a fragmented, fractured, siloed platform-specific product strategy is still a path of monumental stupidity, in my opinion. I’ve ranted about this before. It’s still the same. In contrast, Moz...

Ok, so the just launched Skype 1.1 for iPhone doesn’t support push notifications, but eBuddy, a brand new app for the iPhone or iPod touch does support push notifications. What does this mean? It means you can close eBuddy and still receive instant messages (IMs) from your buddies. Further, eBuddy is an IM aggregator supporting MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Gtalk, and Facebook. Too bad they don’t support Skype though like fring does. eBuddy also supports Google Android phones. Check out the ...

CenturyTel and Embarq today announced the completion of their $11.6 billion merger, which results in a phone company that will serve 7.5 million customers in 33 states. The combined company will now be known as CenturyLink — and the aging copper-based DSL lines it offers to most of its subscribers will certainly act as a link to the previous century for customers of the new entity. As part of the FCC approval for the merger, the agency imposed several conditions on the combined company, p...

Are spinning disks on their way out? As Mike Speiser discussed recently, flash solid-state drives (SSD) will enable a once-in-a-decade improvement in storage price-performance. Crucially, flash SSDs enable storage to keep up with the rapid advances in CPU speeds driven by Moore’s Law. This may enable customers to dramatically scale back purchases of expensive Fibre Channel (FC) disks and, potentially, high-end FC arrays.  However, some early flash SSDs implementations come with a set of li...

Earlier today I had an opportunity to visit and speak at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) on the day that members of the graduating class presented their senior projects. I first visited BGU on their 2007 Senior Projects Day and was looking forward to once again catching up with some of the future leaders of the Israeli Hi-Tech industry. Being on campus at BGU was an amazing experience and I was totally blown away by the people I met and senior projects presented, including a number of r...

Only 2 percent of the world lives in a country where broadband penetration has exceeded 80 percent, according to a report out today from TeleGeography. The report noted that worries over broadband saturation are really only appropriate in 10 countries out of the 127 the firm tracks, and the U.S. isn’t even one of those saturated markets. There are 36 countries where broadband providers serve less than 5 percent of the population. So while there’s concern in the U.S. cable and teleco...

Mobile phone sales are going to decline sharply over the next five years, to the tune of 1.04 billion devices, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. In its new report, “The Financial Crisis: Analyzing the impact on global mobile markets,” the research firm has revised its forecast for device sales over the next five years down by 14 percent. Some 6.39 billion devices are forecast to purchased between now and 2013, Informa said, vs. its previous expectation that 7.43 billion dev...

Chris Brogan is a smart and insight blogger and social media guru but his recent post on establishing an online presence and building relationships should be taken with a grain of salt. The problem - at least the way I see it - is his prescription for social media success comes across as far too structured, methodical and contrived as opposed to be sincere, transparent and well-intentioned. Brogan goes through some daily rituals for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs, which he describes as &#...

Late last night I saw an update notifications on my iPhone 3GS for Skype. New version? Sweet! I updated it and checked out the release notes for Skype 1.1 for the iPhone and iPod touch. It sports some new languages and now includes Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish and Traditional Chinese and of course English. The bigest new feature is the ability to send...

Joost, a much-vaunted online video startup, today announced that it will offer a white-label video hosting platform, thus entering a crowded market littered with the carcasses of other failed video hosts. The company is also losing its famous chief executive, Mike Volpi, whom it’s replacing with Matt Zelesko, the current vice president of engineering. And it plans to cut a portion of its workforce – between 70 to 90 according to Advertising Age.It also shut down its office in the Ne...

LogMeIn, a Woburn, Mass.-based company that is going public has priced at $16 a share, according to The Wall Street Journal. LogMeIn will start trading tomorrow under the ticker, LOGM. With 6.7 million shares on sale, LogMeIn raised a total of $107.2 million. That’s on the the higher end of the range, showing that there is a significant market interest in this company, as I pointed out in my previous post. LogMeIn is tapping into two major trends — rise of the distributed and mobil...

Skype today announced Skype 4.1 for Windows. As Raul Liive outlined in a post about the 4.1 beta (see also Jim Courtney’s take), this version brings to Windows users the “screen sharing” feature that we’ve had in the Mac version of Skype for a bit. It also restores several of the features that were in the previous Skype 3.8 for Windows but that got left behind when Skype rushed 4.0 for Windows out the door. And it adds the SILK codec and some other odds and ends. Per Rau...

When Heyzap, the San Francisco-based startup that offers up casual, Flash-based games for publishers to embed to their sites, launched back in January, revenue was being generated by the short ads shown before its games. But as the economic downturn tightened its grip and the online advertising market continued to flounder, Heyzap founders Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila saw the need for a different revenue model. So last week they rolled out Heyzap Payments. Before, developers that uploaded game...

They say it takes money to make money, but it you want to be in the top 100 apps in the Apple App Store, it’s gonna take you $1,875 per day to buy enough ads, according to a report out today from AdWhirl. The company, which operates an advertising platform for the iPhone (and would love to sell more ads, presumably), looked at how to propel iPhone apps into the upper echelon of popularity without spending too much on advertising. Instead of spending almost $2,000 a day, the study found th...

Update. Skype for iPhone 1.1.0.91. Adds voicemail, sending SMS, and localization for Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish and Traditional Chinese as well as English. Skype displays the language in your iPhone-wide settings. Download from the iTunes Store. tags: skype, iphone, download, release, 1.1.0.91, sms, voicemail, mobile, apple Call me at +1-510-455...

Download Skype 3.0 for Windows Phones. Current version: 3.0.0.256 (gold). Release date: June 29, 2009 (beta started in March 2009). New features: Send files Skype-to-Skype, Send texts (SMS). WindowsForDevices summary. tags: skype, windows, windows mobile, download, release Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats. ...

The New York Times had an article last Sunday on how personal recommendation services are becoming more popular - driven by the belief that the best advice comes from people you know and those in your digital and personal networks as opposed to a service such as Yahoo Answers. For anyone using Twitter or Facebook, the power and effectiveness of tapping into your networks is clear. To me, one of Twitter’s “killer apps” is being able to use the collective knowledge of the crowd....

Cisco today outlined its plans for delivering IT services over the web (aka cloud services), and as part of a conference call, showed off a great slide that illustrates exactly how many companies this former networking gear maker wants to take on. If I were to boil it all down, I’d say the company’s cloud strategy relies heavily on its hardware to make its WebEx-branded collaboration software run economically. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO, said the company sees the cloud as ...

5 ways to catch the Tour de France away from the TV (jkOnTheRun) BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay is being acquired (NewTeeVee) Google inks first European utility partnership for PowerMeter (Earth2Tech) Are you playing “Hot Potato” with your iPhone 3GS? (TheAppleBlog) Acquia Search now out of beta (OStatic) Embracing information overload (WebWorkerDaily) Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more » ...

Mozilla has just released the final version of Firefox 3.5. The JavaScript performance — critical for many web apps — is massively improved thanks to the new TraceMonkey engine, making 3.5 feel very fast indeed. In addition to improved performance and standards compliance, Firefox 3.5 features new privacy controls, location-aware browsing, and the ability to play video and audio content without using plugins. A quick video tour of the updated version is available here. Firefox 3.5...

Sense Networks, a location-based services company headquartered in New York, said today it’s raised an undisclosed amount of money from investors led by Intel Capital. Citing a gag order from Intel, CEO Greg Skibiski not only wouldn’t say how much the round was for, he wouldn’t disclose who the other investors were. Such an attempt to control what is just basic information is straight-up bad behavior on the part of the venture arm as far as I’m concerned. VentureBeat rep...

“Sense of Fashion is an Israeli startup that aims to be a marketplace for both Indie fashion designers to sell their designs and for consumers to be able to access clothes made by aspiring designers. The site also serves a social purpose—it lets any user create a fashion homepage of sorts where you can add photos of what you wear your favorite clothes and designs. Designers can create storefronts on this platform as well.” Click here to read the entire story. Nice to see Sense of Fa...

Unisys, the IT services company, today became the latest with a set of products aimed at helping customers create their own internal clouds. And in a month it will offer a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that will deliver computing and storage on demand and on a per-instance basis. Like many of the traditional IT vendors, Unisys is investing in a hybrid cloud strategy, which will involve customers revamping their own data centers through heavy virtualization to create an on-demand envi...