All posts from The Next Web Blog

For people around the world who already have access to the iPhone4 it might be hard to understand how people are still so fanatical about lining up for the device – but they are, and the launch in Sydney, Australia, is a perfect example
At the main Optus Mobile store in Sydney, the line extended around the block then half way around again as people braved the cold for the midnight launch.
The star of the show, other than the iPhone, was international superstar Kelly Rowland who, earlier in the night, treated the first 50 people who lined up with a private show.
Around the city, other Telcos had reality TV stars, sporting personalities and other celebrities. It really  was one of the biggest product launches the city has ever seen.
Below is a video showing the magical store opening  moment (the countdown starts about 15 secs in) that Aussie iphone fans have been waiting for, including a cameo by a couple of particularly happy fellows. Love it!

Original title and link for this post: Sydney goes crazy as iPhone4 launches in 17 new countries [with video]

TNW Quick Hit
Feature Creature – Funny Shoppers is the free iPhone app version of PeopleofWalmart.com.
Love it: One of the greatest and most hilarious internet time kills is now available on the iPhone.
Hate it: Inability to post favorites and personal discoveries to social networks.  Having a constant reminder that those featured on the site and now, app, inhabit the same earth as I do.
Overall: 4/5
The Details:
PeopleOfWalmart.com, one of the great websites for viewing odd humans and in the process making oneself feel normal, has launched an iPhone app which brings the best of its website straight to your phone.
The app, called “Feature Creature – Funny Shoppers,” has removed Walmart  from its name (probably to avoid a potentially filthy lawsuit) but has kept all the fun.
According to the developers, ALA Design, LLC, the app can be described in the following way, “You know that person you spot every time you go shopping at certain chain department store? That’s Feature Creature. It’s like spotting the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, only this creature is shopping for Doritos and wearing a camouflage moo-moo at your local store. Snap a picture, tell us about your spotting and we’ll share it with the world.”
The Feature Creature iPhone app allows one to browse all of the hilarious archived photos, share a picture of your own by choosing a photo of an existing person from your iPhone’s photos, or snap a picture while in the app, and then sending the photo to Feature Creature with the built-in photo submission capabilities.
Feature Creature – Funny Shoppers is a good, not great, app at this point.  Their are occasional crashes, and it would be nice to email images and post great finds to social networks.  The developers will no doubt add these features in the future, with, “future updates and features will be dependent upon the feedback we receive and the users we reach.”
Original title and link for this post: PeopleofWalmart.com slums up the iPhone with Feature Creature – Funny Shoppers app.

Today the sales training release for Motorola’s upcoming Droid 2 leaked, and with it came a very interesting marketing point: agents are to compare the Droid 2’s Android 2.2 OS with other phones which are still stuck on 2.1.
Complaints of fragmentation across versions of Android are nothing new. 2.2 is the newest version of the OS, and yet due development cycles, we’re still seeing 2.1 devices just coming to market (I’m looking at you, Samsung). The G1, which was only killed off a few days ago, never made it past version 1.6. One of my less knowledgeable friends recently made the mistake of buying a Motorola Backflip, and that thing still has 1.5.
The question is this: is Android fragmentation a problem? The short answer to that is yes. As with most things, the long answer is far more convoluted than that.
In the short term, Android is making a whole lot of people a whole lot of money. Take HTC, which in a short period of time has become a company we all know by name. This past quarter, their earnings were up by a jaw-dropping 58%. Motorola was on the brink of obsolescence until it teamed up with Google and Verizon to get the Droid to market, and suddenly it’s making bank again.
The real problem is that customers are not going to come back to Android if the handset makers use different versions of the OS as a marketing tool. Android 2.2 is rocking better Exchange support and portable hotspot capabilities. Both are big deals for perspective buyers, particularly the former as Exchange integration means business customers can use their handsets for work. But when handsets come to market running Android 2.3, you can bet the people stuck on 2.2 are going to feel shafted. When their contracts are up, a lot of those people are going to jump to the iPhone or something else where they always know that they’re going to at least be capable of running the latest software.
The handset makers could fix this problem. The solution is to hire more coders to get the software running. Instead you have companies like Samsung which are waiting until September to push 2.2 to their phones. Before you say that updating software that quickly isn’t possible, consider the Android ROM community. If you’re so inclined, you can root your phone and install the newest version of Android within a week or two of Google’s release.
The problem is that ROM tinkerers make up a small percentage of the market. By and large, people don’t want to think about what they can do to get their phones to run optimally. And the problem isn’t hardware – even the G1 was bumped up to Android 2.2 by ROM hackers. No one wants to see that their cool new gadget is suddenly unable to do all the things that the new stuff can do. So if Android handset makers don’t work as hard to update older handsets as they do to make new ones, they may not enjoy good sales for too much longer.
Original title and link for this post: If Android remains this fragmented, consumers won’t stick around

Here we are again. Another week of lovely technology banter and…wisdom? OK, maybe not wisdom, but we do share some thoughts on the week’s happenings and then some. Join us, won’t you?
Subscribe to The Next Web Podcast on iTunes!
If you prefer the good-old XML feed, we’re at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TNW
On this week’s show: Brad McCarty (Nashville), Matt Brian (Essex), Alex Wilhelm (Palo Alto), Chad Catacchio (Los Angeles)Martin Bryant (Manchester)Michael Backes (Hamburg)
Download / Listen:

In this week’s episode:
Apple launches Multi-touch Trackpad, 12-core Mac Pro and 27″ Cinema Display
Twitter in real time. Mind. Blown.
Facebook Testing “Delete Account” Option.
Amazon Expects eBooks To Outsell Paperbacks By Next Year
And the headline that we all wish we had written:
Magic Trackpad or tragic Mac pad?
Original title and link for this post: The Next Web Podcast – Episode 21: Update the Image Immediately

Although Google’s Mainland China service availablility chart clearly says that Google is blocked in Mainland China – and at least one major news outlet has reported that Google is blocked in China – BUT at least two sources on Twitter (source one in Beijing and two in Shanghai) and on the ground in China say that they have full, normal access (for China at least) to Google through regular DSL connections (i.e. not through VPN or similar).
In fact, we are not hearing of any complaints from anyone on the ground so far. As a rule of thumb, unless multiple people in multiple cities on the ground in China report a service is blocked, and then others start verifying that, the service is available.
One possibility is that there were a server crash/error somewhere and that the chart is reflecting that.
Here’s the chart and we’ll keep updating. Also, h/t  @rmack as always.
Anyone on the ground in China that reads this please let us know if you can access Google, thanks!

Original title and link for this post: Google’s Mainland China service availability chart says Google is blocked – but apparently it’s not

If you thought that Microsoft viewed the iPad as a quaint little device that was no threat to its future, think again. Not only is Microsoft irked at its success, it wants to break its market leadership.
Today Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the iPad has sold “certainly more [units] than I’d like them to have sold.” To combat that, Microsoft is working at top speed to get a rival device out of the door.
What will it look like, and what will it run? Ballmer was deliberately unspecific, but he did have this to say: “The operating system is called Windows.” In short, Microsoft is hoping to translate the great success of Windows 7 on the desktop, and move it to tablets.
Microsoft is “tuning” the operating system for slate use, and will then farm the hardware work to the many companies that focus on Windows devices. Of course, now that HP and Palm are one, expect no HP Windows mobile devices. Concerning the project, Ballmer went on to say that “It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch.”
The first devices are to be expected late this year, hopefully in time to make a splash in the holiday sales blitz. By then Apple will have sold more than 4 million iPads. Sound off, do you want a Windows 7 slate?
Original title and link for this post: Microsoft Is Coming “Full Guns” After The iPad

Here’s one from the “maybe-it’s-news-but-maybe-we-already-knew-it” department. According to an article on TechCrunch, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated “you can expect a partnership with Zynga”. But wait, didn’t we already know that from the $100 million investment?
Well, kind of.
Arrington from TechCrunch pulls his information from a missive in the Wall Street Journal that talks about Google entering the social network realm. However, even the WSJ seems to be behind the curve here, as we talked about Google’s possible social network plans quite some time ago.
But here’s the problem: neither side has actually confirmed the partnership rumors. Saying “can expect” doesn’t mean “it has happened”. We can expect a lot of things but can’t be certain until they’re sure.
For now, we’ll continue to say that Google Games is in the near future, and Google Me won’t be far behind.
Original title and link for this post: Google sort of announces Zynga partnership. Maybe.

Here’s a quick hit for you, from the WordPress camp. 11 million downloads into WordPress 3.0, it’s time for an incremental update. 3.0.1 addresses 50 different of bugs, including a privacy issue with trashed posts.
So get downloading, and make sure to grab the theme of your choice while you’re at it.
Hat tip goes to Laughing Squid. Thanks!
Original title and link for this post: It’s WordPress update time. 3.0.1 is now live.

Facebook has told Search Engine Land that it has no immediate plans to expose Facebook Questions (or answers for that matter) to public search results, with a Facebook spokesperson saying:
“Currently, search engines cannot access questions and answers through our Questions product. That may be something we consider for the future but have no current plans to allow it.”
Matt McGee of Search Engine Land seems surprised that Facebook isn’t going to open the service to search engines right away, saying that this is bucking Facebook’s trend of opening everything up that it possibly can – which, to be fair, it is. That said, we’re not too surprised at this decision by Facebook. Here’s why…
Facebook wants people to get comfortable with the idea, and they’re right to do so, especially as the questions and answers will be very public inside of Facebook already. Exposing these questions and answers to search engines now would most likely lead to quite a bit of backlash from Facebook users, many of whom are going to be asking themselves, at least in the short term, how much they want to get involved with the new feature. Putting questions and answers out there on the big, bad, open WWW would most likely turn a lot of those people not only against Facebook Questions, but hurt the Facebook brand as a whole.
We expect Facebook to keep Questions wholly inside of Facebook for awhile, and agree that it is the best strategy, at least short term.
Original title and link for this post: Facebook Questions won’t show up in search results – yet. That’s a good thing.

Just a quick update note for those of you subscribed to the Chrome Dev Channel. If you were a Mac or Linux user frustrated by the broken PDF viewer extension, you get to be happy today.
The Chromium team has pushed a new update to the Dev Channel that will fix the errors that were displaying. Mac and Linux users on Chrome should now be able to view PDF’s natively, without having to use Adobe Reader or other software.
H/T to TechRaga
Original title and link for this post: Chrome Dev Channel subscriber? There’s a PDF viewer fix waiting for you.

The X prizes are some of the most prestigious, and difficult, awards in the world. First private space flight? That was good for a cool $10 million. Now there is a new X Prize on the loose, and it highlights the massive holes in our energy infrastructure.
Called the Oil Cleanup X Challenge, it is a 1.4 million dollar prize to the team that from August 1st and going for a year can demonstrate “the ability to recover oil on the sea surface at the highest oil recovery rate and the highest recovery efficiency.”
Think it can be you? If so, you are going to meet some serious people. Google CEO Schmidt’s wife is backing the deal, meaning that if you win, you will become a household name to the world’s elite.
During the recent oil catastrophe in the United States, many people stepped forward with ideas on how to clean up the mess. Some ideas were good, some were terrible, and some involved straw. With this new money on the line, expect more of the same, and on the double.
A hat tip to the X Prize team for using money in effective ways to make big changes to our planet. You can read more about the challenge on its website.
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Original title and link for this post: There Is A New X Prize To Be Won – Can You Clean Up Oil?

A first-of-its-kind mobile apps contest done by and for the US Army has announced 25 winners out of 53 apps submitted in 75 days
The winners were broken down into five categories, with five winners in each category, with the top winner in each getting $3000. The five winning apps were all built on either iOS and/or Android and have very militaristic/spartan names:

Physical Training Program (iOS)
Telehealth Mood Tracker (Android/iOS)
Disaster Relief (Android)
Movement Protection (Android)
New Recruit (Android)

Our two favorites are the Movement Protection and New Recruit apps. Here’s how they’re described:
Movement Projection (Android) is a map-routing app for road navigation that allows Soldiers to input obstacles and threats — in addition to stops, start and end points — and calculates the best and fastest route.
New Recruit (Android) provides information for potential recruits. Features include military rank and insignia, Army news feeds, an Army physical fitness test calculator, and a Body Mass Index calculator.
Lt. Gen. Jeff Sorenson, the Army’s Chief Information Officer was quoted as saying,
“These 25 apps represent more than two times the number of certifiable apps we were hoping for and expecting from the program. Each application will help overcome mission-related challenges through the power of mobile and web devices. This pilot program is helping define the business processes needed to make it easier to develop applications and certify software for the Army enterprise.”
The apps will be recognized at the LandWarNet Conference in Tampa, FL in August.
Original title and link for this post: US Army app contest winners include “Movement Protection” and “New Recruit” Android apps