As I was putting together my Weekly Recap this week, I noticed a lot of the updates were about phone upgrades. Every generation has their technological advances that totally creep out the generation before theirs. I think right now we are watching not only the internet drastically changing how we work, but one of our most trusted and valued modes of communication is morphing, too – the phone. The phone was pretty stable for a long run and since the launch of cell phones, there are big new advances happening rapidly; texting, picture messages, voice over IP, video phones, etc. That is enough deep thoughts for me. Here are the biggest news stories I ran across this week in web:
iPhone “deals” with their reception issue – As we mentioned last week, Apple held a press conference last Friday. The boiled down version is there is an antenna problem and they are going to refund anyone who buys an iPhone bumper to help with the reception issues. The iPhone bumper is essentially a fancy rubber band you put around your phone so that you don’t lose a signal when you touch the metal band around the phone. There have been a few other fun alternatives to the bumper like the iPhone bandaid and, my favorite, the new End Call button.
Don’t be alarmed, but we are running out of internet – We are not running out of space, or website addresses but apparently we are running out of IP addresses, according to experts. Your IP addresses essentially tells the internet who and where you are and it is a series of numbers. They just are coming to a point where they are going to run out of numbers. So much like when phone numbers got maxed out we had to add area codes to make the numbers longer, they may have to make IP addresses longer too. Why is it important? I’m not sure but it is interesting that we have so many people accessing the internet now, that we are running out of IP addresses. With other news this week like Facebook announcing that they are up to 5 million users and Foursquare counts it’s 100 million checkins A DAY Microsoft sells 175 million copies of Windows 7 in nine months, I am beginning to think this whole internet thing isn’t a fad.
Skype is changing the game – Skype, the internet calling service, announced that you can not only now use Skype to make calls on your iPhone but you run it in the ‘background’ so you can use other applications at the same time. What does that mean? It means you have more control using Skype to make a call than you do using your cell phone service; you can check the internet, play a game, write a note while you make a call. Skype lets you make free calls to other Skype users and you can make calls to landlines and cell phone with a minimal fee (often less than a cell phone contract). What would cell phones be like without cell phone carriers like AT&T, Sprint etc.? That is where this has the possibility of going.
Yahoo tests out displaying Bing results – In a move we have all known about for awhile, Yahoo has made an agreement with Microsoft to have their search engine, Bing, power Yahoo searches. They started testing it out in organic and paid search by letting Bing power 25% of Yahoo’s search traffic.
Google gives image search a makeover – From the other search corner, Google launched a new Google image search. We like it better. It displays more images and doesn’t take up too much space giving you too much information. To see where the image is from or the context, you just click on the image or hover over it. You can also see results for similar images which I could see being very useful.
Subscribe via RSS
