| What To Do if the Windows 7 Update Bricked Your Samsung Phone Yesterday, Microsoft publicly addressed the reports that its first Windows Phone 7 update was "bricking" users' handsets - that is, effectively turning them into non-functional paperweights after the update was downloaded to the device. According to Microsoft's official statement on the matter, only 10% of users experienced problems with the update, and of those, only half (5%) had a problem that was unrelated to an issue on their end - like low disk space or a bad Internet connection. As had been reported, the only devices affected by this issue were Samsung phones, Microsoft said, although it didn't confirm which models specifically. But what of those 5% whose phones are now dead? Here, Microsoft was less clear, simply pointing users to various online resources like FAQs and forums. What are these users supposed to do? We may have some suggestions for you.
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Finally, Sweet Sleep for MyBlogLog; Another Yahoo Service That Could Have Changed the World Blog community and data widget service MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago last month, will finally be put to rest by its parent company on May 24th, according to an email announcement sent this morning. ReadWriteWeb first reported that the service was on the chopping block in December 2009. MyBlogLog was a service with incredible potential that was ahead of its time. It was like Facebook Connect, years before Facebook Connect. It was squandered by Yahoo. It's tragic. Below, an excerpt of our coverage of the service's pending demise a year ago, trying to capture the value it could have delivered.
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Study Finds the Internet Makes Youth More Engaged Citizens Arguably, the upheaval, activism, and revolutions in of the last two months may serve to counter what has been a longstanding stereotype: youth are largely apolitical. Moreover, those that do participate in politics and activism online do so in shallow ways, the so-called "slacktivism." But recent findings from a longitudinal study of high school age students challenge these notions, suggesting that youth who pursue their Interests online are more likely to be engaged in civic issues.
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FaceTime for Mac Arrives in Mac App Store...and It's Not Free Apple has released FaceTime for Mac in its Mac App Store today, allowing any Mac OS X user to chat with friends and family on their iPhone 4 or iPod Touch. The app, which has been in beta testing since October, is now available as a $0.99 download. The price, although affordable, is somewhat surprising considering that FaceTime's mobile counterpart - a built-in feature in Apple's mobile handhelds (iPhone 4, and yes, even the iPod Touch) is free. Is it greedy or is it genius for Apple to sell FaceTime for Mac instead of give it away as a free download? And what does this mean for Apple's iChat?
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British Court Orders WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Extradited to Sweden A British court has agreed to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden to face rape charges. His attorneys have said they will appeal the decision. Assange is being sought in Sweden for questioning on allegations of rape and coercion stemming from sexual relations he had with two women last year. Assange disputes these claims, and he and his attorneys have argued that the charges are politically motivated. They have fought the extradition, arguing Assange would not get a fair trial in Sweden and suggesting that they fear that Assange could end up being sent to the United States to face charges stemming from WikiLeaks' release of government documents.
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Sponsor Post: The Cost of Slow Sites: Visitors, Revenue & Google Rankings Editor's note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. In 2009, Akamai and Forrester found that visitors expected Web pages to load in under two seconds. As the penetration and speed of broadband connections have increased, visitors in 2011 want a Web page to load in under one second; millisecond increases in load time significantly reduce page views, revenue and even detrimentally affect the site's Google ranking.
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Green Goose Wows the Crowd & Raises $100K On Launch Conference Stage Imagine getting points in an online game each time you drink more water, floss your teeth or take a step toward some other healthy lifestyle goal. That's the promise of Green Goose, a company that uses tiny sensors and accelerometers on stickers or credit cards to track everyday behavior and record it online. The company demonstrated today how its technology, which is currently in pre-production in China, lets a user put a sticker containing a tiny sensor and a year's worth of battery power, on the handle of a toothbrush, for example. The motion of the toothbrush sends a message to the Green Goose base station which then publishes a record of the activity online. A wide range of everyday activities can be tracked and the whole system was a big crowd pleaser at Jason Calacanis's Launch conference. Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. "It's amazing and there's so much more you haven't even heard," he said about the company.
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Chute: Get All Your Photos Off Your Phone, to Someplace Safe, Fast If you've ever taken a bunch of pictures on your phone and not immediately uploaded them then you're well aware of the problem - now they're essentially stuck on your phone. If you want to upload them to Facebook, you'll have to send them one at a time. Or you'll have to take the time to get all those photos off of your phone and onto your home computer. Chute handles this by letting you quickly choose a number of photos and either share them with your friends or archive them online, making sure you never lose your photos again.
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Backyard: A Personalized Yelp for Taco Tuesdays and Happy Hours Recently, I've answered the question "What do you write about?" with "Not coupons." It's not that I don't like a deal (who doesn't?), but that coupons are coupons and aren't technologically interesting. Backyard, a self-described "scrappy young startup" showed today at the Launch conference and gives their users "relevant & valuable information about deals in their area." Normally, this is the sort of thing that would fall into the realm of what I don't write about, but CEO Steve Espinosa showed me that Backyard has something different to offer. By working with Facebook Connect, the site immediately works to use demographic data to cater not only the look of the site, but also determine what sort of results you see. Consider it a personalized sort of Yelp search engine.
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A Sneak Peek Into the Future of Beluga: Going Beyond Group Messaging The SXSW conference in Austin, Texas is just around the corner and this year's battle, it seems, is group messaging. The blogosphere is abuzz with talk of apps like GroupMe and Beluga, two forerunners in the field, and yesterday we got to sit down with Beluga's three founders and talk a little bit about what makes their group messaging app different from the others, their immediate plans for the future and where they see it going in the long run. For Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport and John Perlow (Beluga's trifecta of founding), group messaging is just the beginning. It's a core that can only be enriched with features like rich locations, social network integration and multimedia capabilities.
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