Glasgow, UK
Covent Garden, London
Ontario, Canada
Paris, France
Berlin, Germany (!)
Manchester, England
Milan, Italy
Sweden
Zurich
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Montreal, Canada
Dublin, Ireland
Leeds, England
Hamburg, Germany
Bristol, England
A couple days ago, Readability was pissed off. In an open letter to Apple, they noted that the new subscription policy “smacks of greed”. And they threatened to abandon Apple’s platform in favor of the open web. This message resonated with many, as there’s a huge amount of unease about Apple’s new policy in the developer community. But now, just two days later, Readability has re-submitted their app to Apple for review. And apparently, a “love letter” to the company is forthcoming.
So why the change from war to peace? Has Apple’s policy already changed? Well, no — not yet, anyway. Readability’s Richard Ziade said his tweet was a “joke” and had this to say:
We did re-submit to Apple with an explanation of why we think they should approve Readability. We did not speak to anyone at Apple. We have no idea if they’ll approve it. We just explained ourselves as best we could through the appeal process.
So no good news yet, but there may be hope.
The reason for Readability initial outburst was because Apple rejected their app on the grounds that it didn’t use their in-app purchase system — the one that would require them to give 30 percent of their revenue to Apple. The company thought this was unfair and didn’t make a lot of sense because they think of themselves as a software as a service (SaaS) company that doesn’t actually sell content, but a service.
This matters because an email supposedly sent by Steve Jobs shortly after this incident claimed that the subscription rules were meant for “publishing apps, not SaaS apps”.
This is a bit of a gray area because Readability does sort of serve up content, but it’s not their content, it’s re-purposed content. Still, Apple taking 30 percent of their revenues would drastically alter their business model, and could have forced them to shut down, or simply not do an iPhone app.
How Apple approaches the app now post-Jobs comment will say a lot about their intentions for the policy going forward. As Ziade says, “stay tuned!”
In addition to the acquisition, PostUp has another piece of news: it’s changing its name to UberMedia. This is the third name for the company, which was originally called TweetUp, but changed its name last summer to PostUp as it added support for Facebook and LinkedIn.
So what is UberMedia’s strategy here? The company now has a new homepage, which includes the following description:
UberMedia is the leading independent developer of applications and web-based services that make it easier for users to find, follow and communicate with others on Twitter and other social media platforms. The company is focused on driving innovation in user experiences across a range of online and mobile platforms. UberMedia also provides advertisers and brands with new ways to engage and communicate with consumers via Twitter through its family of apps.
In other words, it wants to offer a variety of third party services that are complimentary — and in some cases, directly competitive — with what Twitter offers.
In addition to the acquisition, PostUp has another piece of news: it’s changing its name to UberMedia. This is the third name for the company, which was originally called TweetUp, but changed its name last summer to PostUp as it added support for Facebook and LinkedIn.
So what is UberMedia’s strategy here? The company now has a new homepage, which includes the following description:
UberMedia is the leading independent developer of applications and web-based services that make it easier for users to find, follow and communicate with others on Twitter and other social media platforms. The company is focused on driving innovation in user experiences across a range of online and mobile platforms. UberMedia also provides advertisers and brands with new ways to engage and communicate with consumers via Twitter through its family of apps.
In other words, it wants to offer a variety of third party services that are complimentary — and in some cases, directly competitive — with what Twitter offers.
posted Jan 14th 2011 12:57PM 
RIM's mythical BlackBerry Storm 3 is one of those products that shows up every few months with just enough new information to have you believing that it's real and it's eventually coming before slithering back into the night, going totally radio-silent for another month or two. We've no doubt that the phone is real at this point, but considering the lukewarm reception the Storm 2 got, we're surprised RIM hasn't pushed harder to get the updated device to market -- only thing we can figure is that the carrier partners keep sending it back for tweaks. Speaking of tweaks, BGR says that we can expect a phone with a 1.2GHz processor (same as the alleged Torch 2) along with a 3.7-inch WVGA display, 5 megapixel camera, dual-band WiFi with UMA support, mobile hotspot capability, and BlackBerry OS 6.1. Word has it there will be at least two versions released around the globe -- codenamed Monaca and Monza -- and it's on track for a September release. That's all well and good, though these specs aren't going to blow anyone away as we approach Q4 '11. 
This has been the perennial question online ever since Yahoo’s human-organized directory of web links lost the battle to Google’s automated crawlers. And yet now, in some circles at least, the pendulum appears to be swinging back: Google is broken, say some technologists, and people-power is the best fix.
That’s the topic of my CNN column this week.
posted Dec 31st 2010 1:45PM 
Kodachrome film is iconic enough that there have now been several 'goodbye, Kodachrome' news stories, and we just couldn't resist one more. This time, our tale is of Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas (which we've had occasion to reference once before), a film processing store which has the distinction of being the final place to accept Kodachrome for development. The problem? The store has been flooded with packages of undeveloped film from all over the world as the window for its processing comes to an end. It turns out that having that distinction will get you hundreds of rolls of film a day, and Dwayne's Photo said that it would not process any films that arrived after Thursday. Yes, that was yesterday, though the mail is undoubtedly still arriving. 
I’ve been using Google Voice on a daily basis for around a year now, and the last month has been by far the worst in terms of connectivity issues. Right now, it looks like the service is having yet another outage — both Michael Arrington and I are having problems, and other users on Twitter are having them as well. Outbound calls ring endlessly (and sometimes get a “This Call Cannot Be Completed” error message); inbound calls don’t get through.
Update: As of 4:10 PM PST Google says the problems have been resolved. Looks like there were at least 90 minutes of downtime.
We’ve reached out to Google to find out how many people are being affected and when we can expect a fix. Update: Google has given us this statement for now: “We’re aware of a problem that’s affecting some users, and we’re working to resolve it quickly.” “
As I said, this is only the latest in a string of recent problems. There was downtime on November 2 and again on November 5. It’s really getting to a point that’s beyond acceptable, and I may soon have to start handing out my ‘real’ phone number for mission-critical tasks. People rely on their phones for their most urgent business and personal matters — if you want to be a phone company you can’t go down.
