Enter the newly launched application, aptly named FBFriendFinder that will let you log in to all your services (securely), and it will help you find the people on you follow on other services, on Facebook.

For me, it found some 150 or so people (out of the 190 that I follow on Twitter) on Facebook. But, it said, give us $2.35 before you can add them all. The app called it “beer money,” and said that I could use the app forever. Liking the low price, and the request for money to buy a drink, I complied.

The service integrates with PayPal for secure transactions.

Then things went a little odd. It said that it had added the first twenty people, and that I could get started with the next 20 if I clicked on a button. I had assumed that it would be 100% automated.

I clicked the “next 20″ button, and was presented with a neat little sideshow of friends. I saw the first one, clicked add friend, and then moved to the next slide. This part of the application is snappily coded.

But this slide had the same name, and a different picture! Confused, I skipped ahead. The application, instead of finding the person that you actually follow on Facebook, presents you with all the people on Facebook with that name. Not good, I am not sure who I actually added in the first attempt.

It’s hard to find the right Hiten Shah, or whomever, when not everyone uses a profile picture that is of their face, if you know what that person looks like. Perhaps there is a way to improve this.

But, the application is cheap, does bring all your contacts quickly, and does search well. If you have the time to sift, it will make it easier to connect with those people on Facebook. And for a dollar or two, how can you lose?

Mark loves it, claiming  (a few of his lines put together):

“The calendar is about to turn to 2010.  What worked and made sense 3,5 and 10 years ago, no longer does… TWITTER IS SURPASSING  GOOGLE as a destination for finding information on breaking and recent news  of all types…..TWITTER POSSES NO THREAT to any destination news site. 140 characters does not a story make….TWITTER AND FACEBOOK are platforms that allow the news sources, like newscorp to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not…News sites blocking Google ain’t what it used to be.  Rupert is right. Deal with it.”

That covers his points well, but I recommend reading his whole article before you finish reading this.

Mr. Cuban is right in a number of places, and in a number of ways, just not where and how he wanted to be. Mark is right that Twitter and Facebook are surpassing Google among some crowds as the best place to get real-time information, often news related.

Mark is also correct that Twitter does pose no threat to news organizations, whatsoever. There is very little potential downside to use Twitter, for the news corporation.

Google is not what it used to be for finding information, this is true. It can be up to a whole ten minutes behind.

All that, Cuban, and you still have it backwards. You are simply missing a scale problem. Google said it well themselves, to the Telegraph: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.”

Do you understand what that means? That is bigger than Digg, Reddit, and Twitter combined. In terms of sending people to news websites, I would guess that even if you tossed in Facebook, that Google firehose of traffic is bigger than them all combined.

100,000 hits a minute is a total of 144,000,000 million people a day. Do you think that Twitter is going to replace that? Even more, for it to make sense, Twitter would have to grow to fill the whole, so whatever Twitter brings in now would have to grow by 144 million hits daily to have it make sense for news organizations to pull out from Google.

My guess? They want money. Steven Brill has been talking about charging search engines for the longest time, and I would bet all that I could that if they thought that they could get away with it, news organizations would love to be able to do so. Rupert could just be bluffing, trying to get Google to the table to talk.

If that is the case, it is not working. In the same article on the Telegraph, Google said: “Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.” Read: bring it on.

So, sure, Twitter and Facebook are becoming more and more useful. But the 144 million people a day that Google sends to news organizations, or 52.5 billion visits are year, are going to be damned hard to replace.

Is Twitter up to the task? Facebook might be in a year or so, maybe. Perhaps, some day. Soon, maybe. Now, no. The numbers just do not add up.

ArabCrunch.Net is the first social network focused at fostering entrepreneurship in the region by connecting our local entrepreneurs with mentors from around the world. The site has the blessing of Bassel Yassine Ojjeh, of D1g fame and a former senior executive at Yahoo! who invested in ArabCrunch.

The launch came at a conference held at the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship, which may explain why only last week the good folk from ArabCrunch tweeted from Her Majesty’s office.

There are quite a few successful Arab entrepreneurs. Google yesterday announced their acquisition of AdMob, a company headed by a serial Arab entrepreneur Omar Hamoui, and closer to home you have the likes of Samih Touqan and Rabea Ataya, all with much to offer young entrepreneurs…

The site is currently in private beta (do you think I guys think I can get an invite? Please. Pretty please!)

So, what do you think? Is this it? Is this our dotcom boom?

Leave your comments below, we’d love to hear from you.

There doesn’t appear to be any mention of the downtime on Google’s App dashboard but for many the web app has been unavailable for some hours.

There’s no doubting the effectiveness of Google’s tools when available, but with frequent downtime and errors (mainly when attempting to visit their services online), you can understand why some larger businesses who live and die by their calendar are hesitant to commit.

With this particular issue, it appears to not be domain specific. There are users all using Google Apps under the same domain, many with access to their calendar and others without.

We’ve contacted Google for a response, will keep you updated – in the mean time, you can join users in the same boat here.

Update:

Everything now appears to be fixed according to this Tweet from the official Google Calendar account.

The company has launched a new beta version of its Android app that is optimised for the new Motorola Droid handset’s 720×480 pixel camera resolution.

We were impressed by Qik’s Android app when it first launched in August. Just like its Symbian and Windows Mobile counterparts, it allows live streaming of video from your handset but it throws the option of editing it before uploading if you prefer.

The editing function is eerily similar to that of the iPhone 3GS. Qik’s own iPhone app is crippled by Apple’s restrictions on live video streaming, meaning the app is ‘record and upload’ only.

The new DVD-quality option will only work with the Motorola Droid and its European counterpart the Milestone for now although there’s no reason why Qik won’t be able to support other phones with high resolution cameras in the future.

Qik is the first mobile streaming service to offer the increase in resolution. Competitors such as Bambuser and Flixwagon will most likely follow suit in due course. UPDATE: It appears Bambuser has been testing HD streaming too – see the comments below.

The new app also makes sharing videos easier using an improved Speed Sharing Ribbon. This allows easy selection of the contacts and social media accounts you want to send your video to.

If you’re a Droid/Milestone owner and want to be a beta tester for the new app, email droidbeta@qik.com and ask them nicely.

Meanwhile, many people outside the few territories that currently have the Droid/Milestone are wondering when they will be able to get their hands on the in-demand handset.

As we reported on The Next Web Europe last week, a SIM-free version you can use on any GSM network is on its way according to UK retailer Expansys. They don’t have a confirmed date for release as yet although rumours we’ve heard suggest 1st December.

47 airports in total will offer the gift including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte. Additionally, as a result of this project, Burbank and Seattle airports will begin offering airport-wide free Wi-Fi indefinitely.

With some travelers spending more time on the ground in airports than on planes during the busy flying season, this is Google’s way of  giving you something to do – namely asking you to set Google as your homepage and/or to try the Google Chrome browser.

The company is also running a charity campaign to raise money for three nonprofit groups: Engineers without Borders, One Economy Corporation and Climate Savers Computing Initiative. When Google WiFi users first log on, the landing page will offer them the option of donating to the organizations. Google will match donations of up to $250,000 per airport.

Credit to Google, they definitely know how to balance the good with some weighty marketing.

Yep, you read right.

The 700,000 follower account created on August 3 by 28 year old Justin Halpern to share some of the classic lines his father spits out has been snapped up by CBS as a television show.

Will & Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick are on board to executive produce and supervise the writing for the multicamera family comedy, which Halpern a Maxim.com editor will co-write.

This isn’t the only agreement Halpern has made, last month he partnered with Harper Collins to turn the account into a book.

The comedy’s title will change if it gets on the air.

Some of his fathers absolute classics:

“Why the fuck would I want to live to 100? I’m 73 and shit’s starting to get boring. By the way, there’s no money left when I go, just fyi”;

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out.”

“Oh please. You practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.”

“Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”

Via The Live Feed

Madeleine Albright once remarked that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. She didn’t make that up but was quoting Abba Eban, a former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, but I heard it from her first. I’m starting to think the same quote applies to women. Seriously. The longer I work in our industry the more I’m starting to think that most women never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong. I love women and think they are smarter, faster and more organized than men. Unfortunately I don’t see too many women taking advantage of their skills and the opportunities presented to them. No, this is not just an observation by a male macho geek. I have some pretty impressive data to back this up. Of course, with lies, damn lies and statistics as the basis of my assumptions, I could be wrong. So consider this a RFC.

First of all I want to get started with women in technology. Why aren’t you dominant in our space? No really, why not? On the web, nobody knows whether you’re are a pony, a geek or a women. The reason why so many web entrepreneurs are geeks with pimples is that they can be. Nobody judges them on their body odor, pimples, glasses or stutter. All they are judged on is their work. Or as Jessica Livingston explains:

By nature, startups are very non-discriminatory. As a founder, your success is directly tied to the success of your product. You must please the market, not your boss or other executives. The market doesn’t care how old, what race, religion or what gender you are. It cares if the product is actually good.

Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay from March 1998 to March 2008

More women than ever are starting companies these days. But hardly any of them are in technology (I know the exceptions, so spare me those) and I just don’t understand why. What is holding you back?

Ah, it might be our geeky attitude that keeps you out? Blog posts with titles such as “What is keeping women out of technology?” make you feel ‘not at home’ in our industry? Well excuse me sister. Want an invitation? Want me to hold the door open for you? Want me to make it easy for you? Get the hell outta here. Women unfriendly environment? I just don’t buy that as the reason you are not in this space. What kind of lame excuse is that? “yes I would like to build the next Google but I just don’t feel welcome in this space”.

Take this blog as an example. 44% of our readers are female. Impressive right? But somehow you don’t notice it. I’d say one in 20 comments here is from a women. Maybe even less. Unless I violate your rights by posting an image that is “sexualizing women in a business context“. Then you are all here commenting about the rights I supposedly violated. The fact that you haven’t exactly been taking advantage of those same rights before doesn’t seem to bother anyone. It bothers me.

When I’m at a conference, any conference really, and there is time for questions, 9 times out of 10 the person asking a question will be a male. It seems part of being a women. Is it really?

More data: Nokia did a study recently and found out that of women miss a lot more phonecalls than man. You can’t seem to find your damn phones in your damn purses! I have been asking women about that the last few months and asking their opinion on it. They all agree with and confirm the study. And they are fine with it. The reply I get is “You know how hard it is to find anything in a purse?”. That might be a reason but isn’t an excuse. How can anyone function in a business context if they miss important phonecalls?

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at the search engine company Google

Every year we organize The Next Web Conference and every year we get shit about not putting enough women on stage. The reality is that we invite as many women as men to our events. Most men we invite are happy to be invited and thrilled at the prospect of speaking to 1000 of their peers. Most women don’t reply at all, say they are too busy or ask me to explain to them what they would get out of talking to a 1000 of their peers. They don’t seem to consider it work. In the end, we end up with maybe one or two women on stage.

Two women might not seem a lot next to 18 guys but that is actually more than the industry average. As Jessica Livingston writes there seem to be less than 10% women (she funded 7 women out of 102 start-ups) in the start-ups she funded at YCombinator.

The reason I started this post is something that happened at a networking event last week. Just before the break a female comedian entered the stage to entertain the room and get us in the mood for networking. She asked everybody to stand up and then started to ask us the first of 10 questions. The goal was to filter out the people who were REALLY interested in networking. Her third question was “Who didn’t bring their businesscards with them today”. I was in the front row and saw her jaw drop, so I looked around. All the women in the room (it was a 50/50 male/female audience) were sitting down. None of them had brought businesscards to a networking event. The comedian said “I guess you all thought that if you show your breasts he will remember you?”.

I don’t think that was it, but I do wonder what was going through these women’s minds.

After the meeting I went up to the comedian and asked her if she knew that all those women would forget their cards. She said she had no idea and it was just a lucky guess. I told her I thought it was shocking and that I wanted to write something about it on our blog and if I could have her card so I could mention her name.

Unfortunately she forgot her cards…

Cookies are small text files many websites automatically store on your computer that do things like remember your preferences on a website, let you log in on a next visit without having to enter your details again, etc – useful activities such as these.

So according to the Out-Law.com post, what’s about to happen across the 27 member states in the EU is a law that requires any website owner to get a visitor’s permission for a cookie to be be stored on that visitor’s computer, or accessed from that computer, only if the visitor “has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information.”

I guess this would includes bloggers like me, too, as you’ll have a cookie on your PC after a visit here if you’ve done things like left a comment and asked the site to remember you.

Robertson has some suggestions on how a consent process could work:

[…] You could seek consent with pop-ups, if you’re happy to ignore accessibility guidelines that discourage pop-ups – though users’ browsers may block pop-ups by default, which risks confusion. Or you could do it with a landing page that contains a load of information and some choices. The choices for users could be:

• Give me a load of cookies, now and in future visits, and let me get where I wanted to go in the first place – and please don’t interrupt me like this again.
• Cookies sound evil. I’m going to use American sites instead, because they don’t scare me with this cookie nonsense.
• I don’t want cookies from your advertising partners, but I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free version of your site. What’s that you say? I need cookies for that too? OK, but just a few please.

You need to ask each new visitor just once, of course – until the visitor deletes his ‘consent’ cookie. Like a blow to the head, that action will cause your site to forget that you’ve actually met before and you’ll welcome the visitor like a stranger.

I’m all for addressing privacy concerns as well as technical issues such as cookie hijacking. Yet this new law seems to be about restricting the functionality of a technology – can a law actually do that? – rather than addressing concerns like privacy or criminal behaviours and enable something of greater benefit to everyone using the internet.

Robertson’s post goes into some detail on specific implications in the UK and suggests how our government could “take a bullet for Digital Britain.”

I think Robertson’s view that this is breathtakingly stupid is about right. Indeed, the law is an ass.

Read the complete story: Consent will be required for cookies in Europe.

Photo by anomalous4, used under Creative Commons license. Post originally published at NevilleHobson.com.

I guess my idea of the world is slightly skewed because I’m surrounded by people with MacBooks and iPods. In reality (look out the window: that is reality out there) 64% of music sales is still “physical”.

Sing along now:

Let’s get physical, physical,
I wanna get physical, let’s get into physical
Let me hear your body talk,
Your body talk, let me hear your body talk

Clkick image for the original high res version. It is worth it:

This is a big win/win for both companies. For LinkedIn, it will perhaps revive their status update feature which in my experience was rarely used. More importantly, it is likely to drive traffic and new users to the site. For Twitter, it continues to support the business relevance of the service as both a networking and professional branding tool.

How the LinkedIn – Twitter integration works:

1. To update your Twitter status from LinkedIn, simply check off the Twitter box before you share your LinkedIn status.

2. In order to update your LinkedIn status from Twitter, include the hashtag #in or #li in your tweet. In addition, LinkedIn users will have the option of sending all of their tweets into LinkedIn. If users opt for this option, the use of the #in or #li hashtag is not needed.

Keep in mind that connecting your Twitter account to your LinkedIn account must be done ahead of time using LinkedIn’s to be released Twitter settings panel. Keep an eye out for the feature roll-out in the next couple days.

The team has now decided to tackle one of the toughest questions in the realm of digital content at the moment – Is there a sustainable business model for news in an era when people don’t want to pay for content the way they used to and supporting industries like advertising and classifieds have been dominated by new, more efficient players?

Their new project, TeamStream, is a new service developed to try and answer that question,

I managed to catch up with TeamStream Founder and Lead Programmer, Stephen Phillips, for his first official interview on the service and to speak about the current state of the news industry, the challenges his team faced and how they plan on changing the way that value can be created around news.

So Stephen, thanks for taking the time to talk to TheNextWeb. Can you talk me through TeamStream ?

Hi Kim, well put simply, TeamStream is a better way for companies to read the news.

It provides a collaborative, team-based approach to news reading combining a proprietary semantic search platform with the latest in social technologies. To do that, TeamStream filters thousands of news sources in near real-time, letting users create custom channels ensuring they receive the news they need. The TeamStream platform then allows users to put the news to work within their organisation and seamlessly share, annotate, discuss and save it as they go. This process unlocks the collective intelligence within enterprise providing the social and technological tools to maximise its relevance, timeliness and value.

In all we use 3 different ways to create value around providing news:

• Aggregation (Distillation) – Using Wotnews’ proprietary aggregation platform, 1000s of news sources are aggregated into a single clean feed.
• Channels (Filtration) – Users can create channels in relevant interest areas.
• Human Analysis (Insight) – Users can share, annotate, discuss and save the news as it happens meaning others within the organisation can stay on top of the most important daily events.

How did you guys make the progression from WotNews to TeamStream?

Wotnews is a single user experience. Users can search and track topics in the news from a large variety of Australian news sources. The site has done extraordinarily well for us winning two Australian Web Awards this year for best news site and growing steadily to around 700k visitors per month and thousands of registered members.

At the start of the year we launched US and UK versions of the site to provide the same experience but with localised content. While the sites share the same functionality, they have distinct content sources.

During the year we also launched a music news site called We Are Hunted (WAH) and a celebrity news site called Celebrity Hunted based on the same Wotnews architecture. WAH has enjoyed amazing success and really opened up our tech to a global audience.

All of these sites are free to use and we plan to keep it that way.

A few months ago we commenced a development project to bring the content from these disparate sites together into a single service that we could monetize effectively.

What we noticed looking at the member activity across the sites is how many users from the same organisation were using our sites to track topics in the news. We could see a lot of duplicate activity and sensed that a lot of collaboration was happening, quite ineffectively via email, outside our system. We could see that there was an opportunity to provide tools to allow people from the same organisation to read and share news much more effectively. This would both save time and better capture the knowledge being expressed in a form that could be saved, searched and shared with others across the organisation.

So that outlined our goals for TeamStream.

And what are those goals?

• Bring all the news content together, searchable and trackable inside a single service. We are processing about an article per second each and every day.
• Allow users to create private teams so they can share and collaborate in privacy during the news discovery and analysis process.
• Expose a lot more of the analytics we have that have not been surfaced before. Give users the hard news metrics they need to benchmark and measure news activity. We think a lot of the media monitoring products are slow and over priced for what they do. We believe that TeamStream is a much cheaper, more effective media monitoring tool for small to medium sized organisations.

So in summary, the goal of TeamStream is to make your staff more effective news consumers. Simply, it provides a better way for companies to read the news. While it builds on the Wotnews architecture, it’s focus on community and collaboration make it quite distinct in it’s purpose.

The first task of bringing the content together was primarily a technical challenge given the volume of news to be aggregated and the requirement to deliver the news as fast as possible. We need to visit 10,000+ news publishers worldwide and retrieve and process their news articles within minutes of them being published. We have invested a lot of energy into this feature and we are told by independent sources that our delivery is faster than anyone else, even the big guys like Reuters.

The second task of building a closed network for users is less technical and more of a user experience challenge. Luckily several sites have established proven models for doing this effectively. We borrowed a lot of ideas from Twitter, LinkedIn and Spotify. The key idea is to make it as easy as possible for users to find other news readers inside their organisation and share and comment on what they are reading. So we adopted the Twitter ‘follow’ model to make this happen. Users can follow each other and read what their colleagues recommend and comment. Users can follow individual publishers to receive all the news they publish. And finally users can follow and create custom news channels to track specific topics, people or organisations in the news. These custom news channels are very powerful. You can setup a custom boolean search expression combined with a bunch of filters to get exactly the type of news you are looking for.

The custom channels provide the basis for the third key TeamStream feature, rich News Analytics. Once you create a channel, TeamStream collates rich analytics similar to a media monitoring service. You can use these numbers to benchmark news activity across time and export the data for internal anlaysis alongside internal metrics such as media spend.

For most users the collaboration features will provide the most value. For marketers and PR users, the analytics will provide the most value.

And what about Google and it’s renewed efforts in the News space. Are you worried about that?

We love that Google continues to innovate the news experience. Their new Fast Flip product and their new news customization features are great examples of continuous innovation. While the publishers are focused on charging for content, it is the aggregators who are trying to innovate, experiment and actually improve the news experience. Trying to take it to a new level that people will actually pay for.

A lot of people comment to us that we must be crazy to be in the same space as Google. Everyone knows they have more money and smarter techs than nearly anyone else, but we don’t think that matters. The great thing about the web is that it is a battle of ideas and execution, not money. If it was, the big companies would always win, but they don’t. A solid idea and a small group of talented developers prepared to innovate aggressively can compete with any company in the world.

Google News is a great single user news experience. Wotnews is our competitor in this space. And we think our Australian site, in Australia at least, is a superior product mainly due to our local knowledge. They are much stronger in the USA but we are growing fast.

TeamStream’s competitors are companies like NewsGator. They have been going great guns recently with their Microsoft SharePoint integration. That is the market we are going for. We think our product is faster, simpler and more web-like in its execution. We also have the advantage of essentially free marketing to the near 1 million business news readers who visit our network of news sites each month.

It seems that the idea of paywalls or some other sort of paid service is becoming popular again in the eyes of large news organisations . How will that affect TeamStream?

We really hope that the publishers will start charging for news content soon. They should be rewarded for the value they create just like everyone else. It makes it difficult for news aggregators like us to charge for something that is essentially free. Once the publishers start charging, aggregators will be able to develop new payment models to share in the value. With We Are Hunted we have been fortunate to work with the guys from Spotify and have seen how they are transforming the music space. After a decade of mostly failed monetization efforts, the Spotify model of flat monthly subscription for all you can eat music may save the industry.

We think that news publishers, instead of calling aggregators names, should be working together to develop an open model for syndicating content and thereby creating a new marketplace for the next generation of news apps to emerge.

If the big publishers start doing what the record labels are doing right now, and start licencing news aggregators to resell their premium content for flat monthly fees, I believe we will see an explosion of new models for enhancing the news experience. This will save and grow the industry into the future. The lesson from the music industry is for publishers to not try and solve the problem themselves, but create a marketplace for the web entrepreneurs to innovate and solve the problem organically for them.

We are talking to publishers now trying to get them to let us sell premium versions of their content. We will continue to move in this direction aggressively. Once the paywalls go up, we want to be in a position where we have some of the world’s largest companies paying us a monthly subscription to consume news. We will then be in a strong position to charge extra to sell premium content.

And what are you guys are planning on charging for the service?

In December 2009 TeamStream will come out of its Beta phase and launch as a monthly subscription based service.

Pricing will depend on team size though the overall cost will be less than $1/user /day with additional discounts for larger networks.

Cool, well thanks for your time, I appreciate it, and all the best with TeamStream

No problem. Hopefully we’ll have lots of good news for you in the near future

Currently in testing with a small number of users, Rdio features on demand streaming for a monthly fee, and eventually music by the song, and album.

This sounds like a mixture of the excellent Zune and Grooveshark applications. Zune offers the most comprehensive music subscription service, via an application, and Grooveshark features great (albeit illegal) streaming online.

Rdio will have to sway users from a plethora of other options, including competing indie-music startups AmieStreet and eMusic.

Rdio, according to ReadWriteWeb will offer both desktop and online interfaces, and will provide both Blackberry and iPhone applications. Rdio seems to be putting together a compelling pile of pieces. Images and more after the jump.

However, it might find is greatest competition from the Zune subscription system, called the “Zune Pass.” For $15 monthly, you can download and stream as much music as you like. Zune pass also features a “keep 10″ system, where as a part of your subscription pass, you get to buy ten songs monthly, as part of the fee. So, when you consider the ten song purchases, the Zune pass costs $5 monthly, a very strong price point.

Take a look at the screenshots, a hat tip to Marshall Kirkpatrick for getting them.

In a new 473 megabyte update, Apple has fixed a wide number of things in its popular operating system. If you are running OS X 10.6, we recommend that you download the patch right away. You can find the file here.

General operating system fixes provided for:

• an issue that caused data to be deleted when using a guest account [TNW: They listed it first, how kind.]
• an issue that might cause your system to logout unexpectedly
• Spotlight search results not showing Exchange contacts
• the reliability of menu extras
• an issue in Dictionary when using Hebrew as the primary language
• shutter-click sound effect when taking a screenshot
• an issue with the four-finger swipe gesture
  
• an issue adding images to contacts in Address Book
• an issue in Front Row that could cause sluggish or slow frame rates while watching videos
• creation of mobile accounts for Active Directory users
• reliability and duration of VPN connections
• general reliability improvements for iWork, iLife, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, MobileMe, and iDisk
• overall improvements to VoiceOver performance
• this update addresses video playback and performance issues for iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2009) and iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) computers that may occur in some situations while AirPort is turned on

Fonts fixes provided for:

• an issue with font spacing
• an issue in which some Fonts are missing
• font duplication issues
• an issue with some PostScript Type 1 fonts not working properly

Graphics fixes provided for:

• an issue when connecting monitors to DVI and Mini DisplayPort adapters
• an issue in which the brightness setting may not be remembered on restart
• addresses functionality with specific display models
• general reliability and performance improvements when using some applications

Mail fixes provided for:

• a situation in which Mail’s unread count may not update properly as messages are read on another computer
• an issue in which deleted RSS feeds may return
• an issue in which Mail cannot preview or Quick Look attachments when composing a new message
• an issue that can cause Address Book and/or Mail to stop responding when opened
• an issue in which email messages received from an Exchange Server are not formatted correctly
• an issue in which Mail reports “Account exceeded bandwidth limits” for some Gmail accounts

MobileMe fixes provided for:

• performance when accessing files from iDisk via the Finder and syncing iDisk files
• an issue in which syncing iDisk files does not proceed beyond “checking items”
• reliability and performance when syncing contacts, calendars, and bookmarks with MobileMe (syncing with iTunes and iSync are also improved)
• an issue that prevents some users from logging into MobileMe via the MobileMe System Preference pane

Network file systems fixes provided for:

• compatibility with third-party AFP servers
• file synchronization for portable home directories

Printing and faxing fixes provided for:

• automatic printer updates improvements
• Print dialog allowing you to enter and send to more than one fax recipient

Safari fixes provided for:

• a graphics distortion issue in Safari Top Sites
• Safari plug-in reliability

That leaves short time to fire a fair percent of the Sprint workforce. These cuts come amid a longer effort to save the company some $350 million dollars on an annual basis.

Sprint sums it well: “The labor cost reductions are the latest action in the company’s efforts to make its cost structure more competitive in the industry and to remain financially secure in a challenging economic environment.”

You can read that like this: “We are losing subscribers so fast that we no longer need the same number of people to service them! Therefore, you are all let go. Oh, and we wish that we carried the iPhone. Not this Pre thing.”

TheNextWeb would like to extend its condolences to the employees leaving the company in the next month and a half.

On a more positive note, Sprint will be providing “severance benefits and outplacement services for impacted employees,” that will cost “approximately $60 million to $80 million.” That works out to around 3,000 per released employee.

Sprint stock (S) was up 20% on the day.

The chart tracks the most retweeted news sources across the web.

As the page notes:

“The TweetMeme Leaderboard lists the sources most freqently appearing on TweetMeme.

Each source is ranked by Presence, the percentage of time each story is shown on TweetMeme. We factor in time spent on our frontpage, categories and also sub-categories.

The Retweets lists the total number of retweets for that domain over the course of a week.”

Looking at the chart right now, it’s interesting to note the variety of sources. In addition to the tech blogs you may expect to dominate the top ten, the importance of visual content to support Twitter’s text is reflected by the presence of YouTube at number 2 and Twitpic at number 3.

UK newspaper The Guardian is perhaps surprisingly at number 4 with The Boston Globe’s Boston.com the next ‘traditional media’ source at number 11. The first technology company to appear is Microsoft, in at 18.

With Twitter an important source of traffic for blogs, Tweetmeme’s leaderboard is likely to become an imporant measure of blogging success. Let’s just hope it doesn’t lead to tactless pleas for retweets from blog authors trying to ‘game the system’.

With technology news sources dominating the chart, it provides an interesting counterpoint to the Techmeme Leaderboard. Despite its similar name, this chart shows the sources that dominate the editor-driven Techmeme directory of tech news. Tweetmeme’s new leaderboard can be seen as a “people’s choice” alternative.

10 November is the day that sees O2’s two-year exclusivity deal with Apple come to an end. Rival network Orange is starting to sell iPhones from tomorrow and O2 obviously sees no reason to force customers to use their handset only on its own network any more.

On a dedicated Unlock My iPhone page O2 explains that pay monthly customers can unlock their handset at any point in their contract. They will, of course, have to honour the rest of the contract commitment. This can either be by paying it off monthly or by paying the entire remaining sum in one go.

Pay-as-you-go customers need to have had their phone for at least one year and will have to pay a £15 charge. The process will be free for Pay Monthly customers. Either way, there will be a delay of up to 14 days for the network to unlock the handset.

It seems a little odd that O2 is penalising Pay-as-you-go customers in this way. After all, they have already paid a much higher price for their handset in the first place. The move increases the resale value of a customer’s handset if they’re think of moving to another device. It also allows those near the end of their contract to move to another, cheaper, network if they’re happy to pay the existing one.

The move may well be a precursor to similar arrangements in other countries where carriers have exclusive deals with Apple. The USA, for example, still has AT&T as its sole iPhone carrier, an arrangement likely to continue until the third anniversary of the deal in June 2010. It’s unlikely that AT&T will allow unlocking before then.

At the moment the terms of the deal are unknown. Gizmo5 was reported to have been in play with Skype when the IP behind Skype’s P2P technology was in legal quandary.

Gizmo5 was founded in 2003, and has raised a total of 6 million dollars to date. The rumored price was around $30 million.

Michael Arrington points out that: “Gizmo5 is a good fit with a number of Google products. Google Talk allows voice calls between users but has no PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones. Gizmo5 does this well already… This looks to me like Gizmo5 will be the glue that puts Google Voice and Google Talk together into a single product. And that product looks a lot like a Skype competitor.”

If that is true or not, it does seem that Google is pushing to expand its voice operations in one way or another. This combined with the AdMob news, and you begin to wonder if Google could build an ad-supported calling network, or any other combination of voice and advertisement.

It seems doubtful that we will see a strategic announcement from Google explaining their plans for Gizmo5, indeed what is more likely that the company will disappear into its new parent for a seeming eternity, before it reappears under new guise.

For now what Google is up to is anyone’s guess.

AdMob is a mobile advertising marketplace that connects advertisers with mobile publishers. They allow advertisers to create ads, choose landing pages and target their ads with plenty of detail. Ads can be targeted to locations, carriers, phone platforms and phone manufacturers.

Google’s Susan Wojcicki says: ““Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time. AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup — generating impressive year on year revenue growth — and we’re excited to welcome this talented team to Google.”

AdMob CEO weighed in: “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made towards accomplishing this goal, and joining Google will only accelerate this process, ultimately leading to very real benefits for end users around the world. As publishers and developers generate more revenue from their mobile products, they will invest more, and their mobile offerings will become richer, more creative and more robust.”

At this moment, both Google and AdMob have agreed to the terms and conditions of the deal, and only “customary closing conditions” remain to be finished.

This deal will greatly add to Google’s reach into the mobile sphere, one of the last digital areas where Google does not have a dominant prescense. AdMob was founded in the last month of 2006, meaning that the company is nigh three years old, a very impressive run for the startup.

According to the Google press release on the subject, “The deal will help Google in its efforts to develop more effective tools for creating, serving and analyzing emerging mobile ads formats. As this ecosystem continues to grow, the company expects these new marketing media to offer significant benefits.”

AdMob had raised a total of 47.2 million dollars, including three rounds from Sequoia Capital.

Quotes via the Google press release.

Google has supplied an image that well summarizes why Google wanted to expand with AdMob. It seems that the two companies focuses were indeed quite distinct. Take a look: