Yet another widespread Blackberry outage. Yet another software glitch to blame. It started around 10 am eastern yesterday (September 7) and appeared to resolve by bedtime. Unlike the outage that made headlines last April, this time it only affected BIS (Blackberry Internet Service) subscribers, not BES (Enterprise) users. TGIF indeed. In the meantime, RIM shows folks that Apples aren’t the only fruit that can be fun, with a new consumer-focused application portal. Blackberrys are good for more than email? Who knew?
The Office 2.0 Conference has come and gone. Among the announcements coming out of the conference is Zoho Business. Designed to take on Google Apps, Zoho Business packages Zoho apps with centralized sign-in and other SMB-friendly features. Click here for blog posts tagged for the conference in Google Reader, and on Technorati.
Speak of Google Reader, at long last the web-based aggregator FINALLY has search! They’ve also increased the unread indicator from 100+ to 1000+ (they’ll have to add another zero for this to be useful for me) and some other slight tweaks. Read all about it on the official Google Reader blog.
Years after del.icio.us rolled into Yahoo, there’s an overhaul of the popular social bookmark application in the works. Goodbye del.icio.us hello delicious.com. If you’re interested in playing with it, add your name to the list and maybe you’ll get an invite (will show up on your “links for you” page). TechCrunch and Read/Write Web have sneak peeks with screen shots.
To kick of the holiday shopping season, Apple introduced brand new versions of every iPod. The Shuffle got RED, the Nano got squashed, the iPod got “Classic” and “Touch” (aka iPhone without the phone). Unfortunately for Apple, all that was overshadowed by a $200 price drop on the 8GB version of the iPhone that got their most loyal fan base upset. Folks who live on the tech bleeding edge are used to seeing their first-on-their-block purchases depreciate before they’re out of the store. Apple learned the hard way that a certain amount of time must elapse before an announced price drop, and 9 weeks isn’t it. A lesson for any company: folks care about the health of the companies that make products they care about, but they care about their own interests and wallet more. In a rare mea culpa, Apple is offering a $100 store gift certifcate to iPhone early adopters. GigaOM contributor Kevin Kelleher doesn’t think this was a spur-of-the-oops move. What do you think?
Speak of mea culpa, Rapleaf, with their tagline of “It is more profitable to be ethical” got themselves into trouble with the blogosphere after a critical post on ZDnet brought to light some practices that could be construed as being on the shady side. If you were one of the many who received an email that began with, “Someone researched your reputation on Rapleaf…” then you may want to read Rapleaf’s exhaustive explanation and apology.
Rapleaf collects already “public” information from social networking profiles. Is this more reason for a social web bill of rights? Whose information is it, anyway? While the pundits fight it out, apophenia has some outstanding tips for controlling your public appearance on the web. Should be required reading for anyone who sets up a profile anywhere.
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