Technically Speaking

I am guessing you haven’t heard enough about the iPhone this week. I’m also being sarcastic.

Here are a few funny items I saw:

First iPhone line

At 5:00 a.m. on Monday, the two iPhone enthusiasts stationed themselves outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship shop in New York City’s Manhattan borough, assuring their first and second places in line. Yes — they plan to remain there till Friday evening and are seeking food and MetroCards as donations.

Flaunting iPhone

At the other end of the spectrum lies the doofus in the skull t-shirt above. A friend of mine caught him at a party. Check his texts about it:

I’m at this party with a bunch of [company name deleted] people, and this dude from apple is conspicuously busting out his iphone.

* In the right hand corner after you hit start - you will see “1/12″ - click the right arrow to get to Episode 12!

Episode 12 notes:

Local.com has the patent

IRVINE, CA–(Marketwire - June 25, 2007) - Local.com Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM), a leading local search engine, today announced that the company has been awarded patent number 7,231,405 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location.

The patent covers local search technology related to identifying location information from web documents, indexing that information and making it searchable geographically. In Local.com’s commercial implementation of the technology, the search results are ranked by search term, LocalRank score, location prominence, among other factors. The system then extracts, matches and indexes web pages from the Internet and generates web references where applicable on more than 16 million local businesses listed nationwide on Local.com.

iPhone under armed guard

The first retail-bound volume shipments of Apple Inc.’s hotly anticipated iPhone device arrived successfully in the United States this past weekend, touching down quietly at a handful of drop locations just six days before the device is due to go on sale at nearly 2000 Apple and AT&T retail locations.

Click here to find out more!

People familiar with the matter say the intrinsically valuable freight was carried inbound by a certain Hong Kong-based air courier, which services Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. The early arrival is to assure the cargo can clear customs with enough time to handle unexpected delays, those people said.

Awaiting the freight at each location on Sunday were armed personnel, who were reportedly hired by Apple through its courier’s ground handling agent and then cleared by the Transportation Security Administration. Armed guards are extremely unusual for freight coming out of the Asian sector, those familiar with the matter explained, and are typically reserved for shipments containing riches such as gold and diamonds.

iPhone and Sprint - and more games!

Also preparing for Friday’s “iDay” is Sprint, which last week issued a series of guides designed to help retail employees counteract customers who are looking to cancel their service contracts in favor of rival AT&T and iPhone.

The document, title “iPhone Talking Points Guide for Sales and Customer Care,” comes by way of MDN, which notes that Sprint staffers “are being told to expect an initial drop of up to 6 percent of their current ’smart phone’ customers” beginning with Friday’s iPhone launch.

Bebo and bullies

Today a story out of the U.K. shows Bebo being used in part to coordinate a fight at a school in the town of Tiverton. Over 80 students it appears were involved.

“Police said the arrangements appear to have been made on the social networking website Bebo and by emails, mobile phones and text messages. Bebo said it had not been contacted by the police about the matter.

Nimbit-OMT - What record company?

With OMT, you can sell not only your songs, but your merchandise as well (t-shirts, hats, posters, etc.). There’s a concert tour calendar with the ability to purchase tickets through the OMT widget, a bio page for fans to find out more about you, a connect feature allowing fans to sign up for your newsletters, and a “cart” function so users can see what they’ve added, how much it costs, and purchase their items.

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* In the right hand corner after you hit start - you will see “1/11″ - click the right arrow to get to Episode 11!

Episode 11 notes:

Mugglenet

Emerson Spartz, the 20-year-old creator of the popular Harry Potter fan site Mugglenet (mugglenet.com), experienced a similar run-of-the-mill adolescence. “I wasn’t an entrepreneur when I started,” says Spartz, who now tallies more than 1 million hits per day at Mugglenet. “I became one after I realized the Web site’s potential.”

Although worried that his image as a businessman could tarnish his Potterhead status, Spartz tells BusinessWeek he pulls in “a six-figure income.” To angry fans who accuse him of financially exploiting their Potter passions, he simply cites server costs: Once a minor fiscal drain, they now run $125,000 annually. “If I can meet Harry Potter fans’ needs and make money at the same time, why shouldn’t I?” he asks.

Business and web 2.0

We’re now at the busy crossroads where globalization meets Web 2.0. This presents both a challenge to the old ways of doing business and an opportunity to gain tremendous leverage via the right goods and services. To thrive in this era, companies will have to figure out how to engage young people from all over the world when they conceive of products and services. Businesses need their help in turning concepts into finished products and, especially, in marketing them. Another angle: Companies can follow the trail of blogs and social networking sites to find and recruit young employees all over the world.

Better get used to it. Flying blind is the unavoidable consequence of coming to terms with today’s most important demographic group: the tens of millions of digital elite who are in the vanguard of a fast-emerging global youth culture. Because of smartphones, blogs, instant messaging, Flickr, MySpace, Skype, YouTube, digg, and de.lic.ious, young people scattered all over are instantly aware of what’s happening to others like them everywhere else. This highly influential group, many of whom are also well-heeled, is sharing ideas and information across borders and driving demand for consumer electronics, entertainment, autos, food, and fashion. Think of it as a virtual melting pot. As the population of the young and Web-savvy grows into the hundreds of millions, the pot is going to boil.

Plaxo re-launch

Plaxo, the contacts updating service, was popular briefly a few years ago but then started irritating people — it would constantly ping you with update requests from friends and solicitations to join Plaxo.

In short, it got a reputation of being “evil,” and then turned quiet, and we wondered if we’d ever hear from it again.

But tomorrow, the company launches with a promising new release. It’s a complete overhaul, and extremely ambitious. In some ways, it looks like it wants to target Facebook.

GigaOm spin on Plaxo

Now you can sync your Google Calendar and Address Book with your corporate calendar and address book Exchange/Outlook, Apple Apps, LinkedIn, and any other web service or software you prefer to use. (I say almost because there are still some platforms that are not supported, and the beta release isn’t quite bug free.) The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up has just executed a reboot as a web-based service, and is now focusing on syncing. The company is also making all the information available via its mobile page: m.plaxo.com.

Google-Grand Central

Big rumor of the day: Google is buying GrandCentral. We checked with GrandCentral and they declined to comment. If it indeed does happen, it would be delicious irony: Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet were with DialPad, which got sold to Yahoo. So this would even the score. GrandCentral has raised about $4 million from Minor Ventures and has been looking to raise more cash. Google dollars might be an easier option.

Via - TechCrunch post - Google-GrandCentral

Spotplex

The web offers more than a few sites with variations on the Digg theme, but Spotplex, which has designed a potentially more democratic ranking system, is different.

Instead of the submit-and-vote system used by Digg and its clones, Spotplex ranks articles based on the number of impressions they get. Bloggers insert a line of code into their blogs, and Spotplex works in the background, tallying each time someone lands on an article’s page.

Mashable spin on Spotplex

The good thing about this service is that it’s rather hands off for bloggers; no need to go back to the site to re-distribute content or bookmark it. Of course the downfall of this model is that only items submitted by bloggers can be searched. In order for it to become an ideally useful tool for both bloggers and readers alike,

Google Reader down

Michael Arrington

MySpace vs Facebook

Over the last six months, i’ve noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That’s only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

More on Yahoo management shuffle

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo Inc. said Sunday that its chief domestic sales officer had resigned and that the company would merge its search and display advertising departments in the U.S. as the Internet powerhouse fights to catch up with online search leader Google Inc.

Yahoo said it hoped the latest shake-up would streamline the way it sold advertising to customers who increasingly want to buy ads across a variety of formats, including being linked to search terms, popping up as a graphical display and being shown as video.

The reshuffling comes after a major executive overhaul announced last week, with co-founder Jerry Yang replacing Terry Semel as chief executive. In the latest organizational change, Yahoo said Wenda Millard, chief sales officer in the U.S., was leaving the company effective immediately.

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I’m also located on social networks such as - Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ojeez, Vertagio, and the new Mashable one.

I alluded it to it in the last post, but you are going to be sick of the iPhone by Wednesday. Friday is the big release, and Hollywood wants to leverage their way onto the device. I think that is a smart move as the Video iPod is a great way to deliver media.

And in Hollywood, where Mr. Jobs’s convention-defying tactics are all too familiar, media executives are eagerly preparing for a new era as they hope to position more content where consumers want it: in their hands.

Technically Speaking, these last three posts would have been Episode 11, but I figured just as my readers like to read or can’t watch a video all the time, I’m not able to record a quick one at this moment.

Looks like Rupert Murdoch is not going to give up. It appears according to the latest from the WSJ that News Corp and Dow Jones are in negotiations once again.

Representatives of Dow Jones & Co. and News Corp. were in intense negotiations yesterday following a near breakdown in discussions over a proposal to safeguard the editorial independence of The Wall Street Journal, according to people familiar with the matter.

After a couple of weeks of relative inactivity, takeover talks heated up over the weekend and were moving quickly. The talks were characterized as constructive, but not before generating high emotions and brinksmanship on both sides. News Corp. threatened to back out of the negotiations and told Dow Jones at one point it was about to send a letter pulling out.

Technically Speaking, will the deal be done before the 4th of July? I wonder if someone is paying for expensive cruises? Doubtful, as we all know what this week is all about. iPhone.