Did Idol get 900 SMSes per second?
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Indian Idol has Sony TV laughing all the way to the bank.
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Dan Farber: "It's not hard to imagine a contextual ad showing up every time you Twitter something. Twitter 'I am drinking beer with friends' and a Budweiser ad shows up. Now imagine the Twitter revolt." Oh yes there would be quite a revolt, a powerless one, unless there was an alternate service we could all switch to and then assuming we could get off our asses and actually switch. Yeah, we're good at screaming, but not too great at acting, here. I'm a bit of a Twit, myself, and I'd find it revolt-worthy if they tried to interrupt or punctuate discourse with product placements, but then Twitter's destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another. Not as a way for advertisers to hitch their "messages" on our discourse. We've seen how well that has (not) worked with advertising on email. Not likely to work much better on Twits. Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) -- "Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?"  Don't you think the kids would go for that? (Maybe they can already do it, it's likely that I'm that cluelss.)
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ONE Christmas ritual should be a lot cheaper this year for anybody with broadband. Calling friends and relatives just about anywhere in the world now costs nothing, or just over 1p a minute (0.02 to be exact
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Paul Jones has run some benchmarking on four different frameworks - CakePHP, Solar, Symfony, and the Zend Framework - to check for overall speed and has come up with some interesting results.   Anger-inducing broad-brush overview: Solar is 4x faster than Zend, and almost 2x faster than Symfony. Read on for all the nuances and caveats.   Throughout the rest of the post he talks about the methods that he took for testing the frameworks and that his goal was the fastest response time only, nothing about the actual functionality. The test was as simple of a "hello world" that he could get in each one.   He's provided the benchmarking results, as provided by Apache's ab testing script for the base (just PHP manually) and then for each of the frameworks, providing the code used as well. There's also a helpful bit on which classes get loaded for each of the frameworks to see what the overhead is. Symfony tops off this list with 43 total libraries for what ends up as a simple echo statement.
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If you are in Sudan it is a &#39;missed call&#39;. In Ethiopia it is a &#39;miskin&#39; or a &#39;pitiful&#39; call. In other parts of Africa it is a case of &#39;flashing&#39;, &#39;beeping&#39; or in French-speaking areas &#39;bipage&#39;.
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A new service from BlogTalkRadio... Call their special phone number: 646-200-0000. It records the call. When you're done it creates an RSS 2.0 feed with an enclosure that's an MP3 of the call.  The address of the feed is a function of the phone number you called from. I just called in a podcast from my Nokia N95, which they added to this feed: http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/8583429663  That's all there is to it! No registration. They have a web page for it, but it's completely unnecessary.  It's the new application of RSS that I wrote about on Saturday. It's brilliant because of it's so simple. Some people think innovation in technology is about how hard it was to implement, or how long it took, or how complex it is, or convoluted. They see innovation as wizardry. I see it differently. I'm impressed by the ratio of functionality to complexity. I like that number to be as big as possible, because the less complex it is, the fewer moving parts, the less likely it is to break, and the easier it will be for others to build on the idea. Hats off to the BTR guys, they've come up with something truly useful that's also very simple.  Could it be simpler? I don't see how.
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European customers can now download an unlimited amount of music to their phones thanks to a new service called MusicStation. The service debuted in Sweden on Thursday, and will launch in markets across the rest of Europe, Asia, and Africa over the next several months.
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With 36 rounds of bidding concluded Wednesday morning, the Federal Communications Commission auction of the highly coveted 700-megahertz band of the wireless spectrum has shifted to a faster-paced stage 2. Under rules designed to promote more competition, the number of new bids rose from 87 in Round 35 to 203 in Round 36.
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Mini-Opera Hands on Opera says it's served up 2 billion web pages through its Mini service, bringing the web to phones previously incapable of running an http browser.â¦
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Yes, American Idol will air three times this week. But is that really enough?
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TOKYO - The total number of mobile telephone subscriptions in Japan topped 100 million for the first time in January, a telecommunications association said. Mobile phone service subscriptions rose to 100.22 million as of Jan.
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By Finn Bullers, The Kansas City Star, Mo.  Sep. 5--The best way to reach April Newby is on her cell phone.   In July, the Shawnee resident sent more than 800 text messages from her phone -- on average, more than one an hour.
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The race for higher-speed wireless devices got another contestant Monday, when Sprint announced the availability of the Mogul smartphone from HTC. It is the first Sprint handset to support the higher transmission speeds of EVDO, as well as the first CDMA device in the U.S. to sport Windows Mobile 6 Professional.
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Radio advertisers, frustrated by station-hopping listeners, are trying something new: the two-second commercial. More than 1,200 US radio stations run by Clear Channel Communications Inc. , including four in Boston, have been selling super-short ads the company calls "blinks" and "adlets" that are tucked between music or disc jockey's chatter. Blinks, in about two seconds, may spit out three or ...
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bizpile writes &quot;Ireland has decided to take some extreme measures to crack down on one type of online scam. They have decided to suspend direct dialing to 13 countries (mostly South Pacific Islands) in order to halt the use of auto-dialers.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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The Storm Worm botnet network may be shrinking in size, but it has managed to send out 15 million of those annoying audio spam messages in October, according to anti-spam vendor MessageLabs.It&#39;s hard to believe that the Storm messages were effective. Recipients had to first click on an attachment -- usually given a misleading name&#160;such as&#160;beatles.mp3 or Britney.mp3 -- to hear the stock pitch, which featured a warbly robotic woman advising people to invest in online car seller, Exit Only.This kind of scam, called &quot;pump and dump,&quot; tries to nudge up the price of penny stocks by a cent or two, giving the spammers a way to make a quick buck by selling the stock before it crashes. Spammers have been delivering their messages in different formats, including&#160;PDF and Excel files, over the past few years as part of a cat-and-mouse game with spam blockers. This&#160;move to MP3 spam&#160;is the latest development in this battle, observers say.Spam watchers say that pump-and-dump schemes are the hottest and most lucrative area for spammers today.The spam run began on Oct. 17, and lasted about 36 hours, using infected computers in the Storm Worm network to send out the mails, MessageLabs said in a statement released Tuesday. The spam sounded strange and warbly because the voice in the message was &quot;synthesized using a very low compression rate of 16KHz to keep the overall file size small, at around 50KB, to avoid detection,&quot; the company said.Storm is thought to have landed on as many as 15 million PCs over the past year, but recently&#160;its network of infected PCs has been shrinking. University of California, San Diego, researchers recently pegged it at about 160,000 computers, only 20,000 of which are accessible at any one time.Exit Only said it was not involved in sending the spam. Its stock was trading around $0.41 on Oct. 18, the day after the Storm spam started. On Tuesday it closed at $0.20.