designShrine

Speaking at a conference in New York, Microsoft’s chief architect, Ray Ozzie, said open source is a bigger threat to the software juggernaut than Google is. He says open source developers are not restricted by the best interests of shareholders and potentially are, therefore, a stronger market force.
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Glastonbury revelers will be happy to know that a dead phone battery mid-festival doesn’t necessarily mean making no more calls until you get home. This is because Orange will be setting up their giant mobile phone charger again, powered by wind and solar power, to provide much-needed juice for low-powered festival goers.

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Link to the [...]

This is a provision with huge reach, and was slipped into the bill this week. Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay’s PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout, that are used by many online businesses.
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"The web is the force behind the most important innovation in recent history. We should be empowering individuals and small businesses to succeed in this new medium to the greatest possible extent, not taxing innovation. Introducing taxes now will severely cripple the web’s growth at this critical stage of early development." As a [...]

Tencent Inc, a company purportedly responsible for the largest IM service in China, has launched QQ Xiaoyou, a network currently allowing invited QQ users for testing ahead of a broader public launch, according to Tangos of China Web 2.0 Review. Amit Chowdry of Pulse 2.0 translates the network’s meaning as equatable to “Alumni.”
Founded in 1998, [...]

Last.FM marked a company milestone many months ago when it signed a number of music industry giants to its multi-million-strong audio track list. The now CBS-owned service counted Warner Music Group as one of the first participants. No more. This week, Warner retracted its catalogue, as was reported first by Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley [...]

Only several days have passed since Starbucks and AT&T officially made available free Wi-Fi to US customers (upon purchase, registration, and use of a Starbucks Card with corresponding rewards program), and already T-Mobile, the coffee chain’s pre-existing wireless Internet service partner, has presented a lawsuit in New York state court.
Reuters reported on T-Mobile’s filing Friday [...]

Revision3 has been in the news more than usual the past two week, mostly due to its falling victim to a denial-of-service attack on its servers by the RIAA and MPAA associate MediaDefender, a subset of ARTISTSdirect, Inc. Yesterday the independent video producer’s CEO announced another loss - though this time one quite a bit [...]

The tournament for the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship, or Euro 2008 for short, commenced this weekend, and will carry through to June 29. Fans of the games will of course been keeping a close eye on their television sets, whether watching competing teams square off in Austria or Switzerland, the two host countries this [...]

Sometimes small changes can grow into big issues. Especially if those changes are made by an online corporation with global spread and hundreds of millions of regular consumers or users. Enter, the Google favicon.

Surely you’ve noticed the company’s shift from a big, brawny capital ‘G’ to a more reserved, accentuated and scripted lowercase ‘g’. How [...]

If you have more than one Gmail account you regularly use (I have five), one of the most annoying aspects of dealing with it is the fact that you cannot have more than one opened (opening two instances of a web browser doesn’t help either, because the cookie is shared between them) at the same [...]

Developing Web applications to be used within social networks and numerous other cloud-based structures is becoming more and more de rigueur for the entrepreneurial set. Both on the desktop and on the go, Web users in droves seek simple, unique software gadgets through which to access and manipulate data with easy while able to transfer [...]

But apparently CNet has acquired Loren Feldman, the creative force behind the 1938Media productions. In case the names Loren Feldman and 1938Media don’t ring a bell to you, perhaps you’ll have your memory jogged if I mention the TechRooster and the Shel Israel puppet at ShelIsrael.com (both creations of Loren Feldman).
Loren Feldman put out a [...]

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.
STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name: TenantWIZ
20-word Description: TenantWIZ enables vacation homeowners to streamline the management of their property online using TenantWIZ Vacation Rental Software.

CEO’s 100-word Pitch: TenantWIZ enables vacation homeowners, property managers, agents [...]

Adobe’s popular AIR runtime is gaining more and more fans, and with that, far more applications than ever that cover a broad spectrum of tools. From fun applications that let you order pizza from your desktop to applications that let you track your investments online and off , the entire spectrum is out there, [...]

It’s official! Obama Girl is attending tonight’s Mashable Exhibit Hall Party in New York City!

For those of you who don’t know Amber Lee Ettinger, a.k.a Obama Girl, she is an Internet celebrity that gained widespread fame in 2007 after starring in the viral YouTube video, “I Got A Crush On Obama.” The video was produced [...]

So Gmail just enabled the new Labs tab under your Settings, in an effort to get some users to try out the experimental features Google is playing around with. One of the biggest benefits, at least for testing purposes, is that you can enable multiple Gmail Labs features at once, whereas Google Search Labs [...]

It’s Friday, and we’re not far away from the arrival of happy hour. What are your plans for the evening? Visiting some bars? If you’re in or around New York City, you may want to direct your mobile phone browser to Meet Now Live. It’ll help you find bars, parties, and the people that make [...]

When a service as big as Amazon is unavailable, you expect at least a message along the lines of “something is technically wrong.” However, currently Amazon is as dead as it can be, with Amazon.com producing a mere “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error message.
We’re usually cautious about writing reports on sites being down because they have [...]

Platform-A has announced its European expansion today, aligning with the AOL advertising operations that are already in existence in Europe, including Advertising.com, Adtech and buy.at. Having been built on the success of AOL’s existing advertising programs, as well as a way to incorporate the recently acquired Tacoda and Third Screen Media, Platform-A was created [...]

Only several hours have passed since Carl Icahn delivered his latest set of stipulations to Yahoo in an effort to facilitate a Microsoft takeover, and already Yahoo has sent back a response. The company said quite succinctly:
“Leaving aside Mr. Icahn’s inaccurate interpretation of our retention plan, we again note that he has no credible plan [...]

For a long time YouTube has managed to feel the love from a wide variety of people. From musicians to political theorists and comedians, the site has grown to be a large meeting place for voices around the globe.
More and more, YouTubers have been using the site as a means for reporting events, debating about [...]

Updated: What’s a week without Carl Icahn making more noise on the Microshoo front? Yet another letter has been sent the way of Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock by the activist investor. This time Icahn is talking share price.
The number Icahn is now officially willing to see Microsoft give Yahoo to finally force control of the [...]

In the world of Internet social news there are hundreds of sites that attempt to aggregate all of the most popular stories into one place. Ever since breaking news of important events or natural disasters began pouring out of micro-blogging services, people have jumped on the aggregation bandwagon.
From the creators of ULiken — the nifty [...]

Kluster, a startup built on the premise that it can in fact be productive, and perhaps even lucrative, to crowd-source tasks recently introduced to the world a project called Knewsroom, which I subsequently wrote a brief review of, calling it an intriguing effort that would surely be interesting to watch as it built itself a [...]

It ain’t easy being Opera. On one hand, you have Internet Explorer, which is the default web browser in the world’s most used operating system. On the other, you have Firefox, media and open source community darling. So, you have to keep up the pace with both at all times, while still maintaining an [...]

…but I’m not sure you want to, given the fact that most YouTube videos are barely watchable even on a 17” LCD screen. However, you have to start somewhere, and Sony decided it’s time to add YouTube support to their Internet Video Link service.
The Link is a $300 module that can be plugged into certain [...]

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Oh my, I think I’ve been too hard on Firefox lately, and now I’m suffering the consequences. Forgive me for this slightly personal (and yet touching) story, but the circumstances under which Firefox refused to comply to my wishes are too weird to be mere coincidence.
Yesterday, exactly as I hit publish on this piece, [...]

For all you FriendFeed junkies out there that simply don’t have enough hours in the day to get the most out of the service, Bret Taylor has your best interests in mind, and has come up with a solution for you. He just emailed me a few minutes ago announcing that they’ve rolled out a [...]

Somewhere along the lines during the evolution of the modern perception of the First Amendment rights, we’ve collectively lost sight of what that means, and what differences between Freedom of Speech and the idea that all free speech should exist in a vacuum from their consequences.
A US Citizen and former Singaporan lawyer named Gopolan Nair [...]

You love using Twitter, but would prefer a way to better catalogue and segregate that out of control set of boxes they call a followers list? You might be interested in something in the works over at Twitter, then. According to an exclusive InformationWeek interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, they’re adding contact grouping [...]

Steven Hodson is the cranky old fart as well as respected Web 2.0 and social media pundit behind WinExtra.com. His guest post today kicks off a short series of articles that examine alternatives for the very advertising-dependent world of Web 2.0 and social networks.
It doesn’t matter where you turn within the blogosphere at some point [...]

Grocery shopping can be tedious, but as with almost everything else under the sun, the web offers solutions to help alleviate that. Online grocery shopping got a shaky start during the first web bubble, but now it seems to be getting bigger and far more specialized.
Here are 50+ online grocers specializing in everything from [...]

If you’re wondering how you can make a difference, this list might help. If the organization you support isn’t on the list, add it in the comments section and it will be added to the list. “If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally [...]