Unusual and weird stories are always viral because it is simply the nature of human behavior to seek the unusual and odd in life. Many people have searched this morning for a town called “Argleton” on Google Maps and got a match to a small village just off the A59 near Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom. However, Argleton doesn’t actually exist.
A very interesting presentation on Internet and the economy presented by Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday.
BusinessInsider summarizes the presentation as follows
Mobile internet is bigger than you think.
iPhone is becoming THE mobile platform.
Social media, mobile devices are changing communications and commerce.
Mobile internet trends in Japan show how the future will be. (Hint: Not much mobile advertising)
Carriers will be crushed by demand.
The Walled Gardens collapse.
Apple wins, Google maybe wins, Research In Motion withers
The number of mobile subscriptions is actually expected to reach 50 billion subscription in 2020 (even bigger than what Mary thinks, 10+ billions is mentioned in her slides). Apple is no doubt a major driver, but Google services are not to be forgotten. Also the android platform is being pushed and adopted by many manufacturers. Despite the iPhone’s popularity, I think it is still possible for other handsets to make a breakthrough. To a large extent, I seem to agree with Meeker about mobile internet trends, except for mobile advertising.
Take a deeper look into Mary’s presentation here and let me know what you think Read more…
It is confirmed that Microsoft reached a deal with Twitter and Facebook to add real-time updates into their search engine Bing. However, it only took few hours for Google to announce that they also got a similar deal with Twitter. No clear information is yet available regarding Facebook.
You can try the beta version of Bing Twitter implementation here, but don’t be surprised when you get the following message if your locale is not set united states.
TWITTER BETA
Sorry!
Bing Twitter Search is not available in this locale.If you wish to access Bing Twitter Search, change your locale to United States.
Note: Changing your locale will affect all Bing pages. To change your locale in the future, click the United States link at the top right corner of any Bing page.
The feed from Facebook is said to work pretty much in the same way as with Twitter, however this is not available yet since Facebook has not opened its feed to public and they “need to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed.”, said Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.
The weird thing in the story that Sandberg doesn’t mention any money involved in this deal, which of course I don’t really believe.
Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gives an interesting presentation about “High performance at massive scale – lessons learned at Facebook” held at the center of networked systems at UC San Diego.
Some impressive facts presented
Facebook have 300M active users (no big secret)
They now have 30,000 server, adding new capacity daily.
They store 80 billion images (20 billion images in 4 sizes).
They serve 600,000 photos/second.
They generate more than 25 terabytes logging data per day
They have 230 engineers on staff, which means a ratio of more than 1 million active users per engineer…
Watch the webcast below Read more…
Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. The developers of Google Maps started working on the Wave project in 2007, in Sydney, Australia and they presented a live demo of Google Wave earlier this year at Google I/O Event, the developer conference that was held in 27-28 May, in San Fransisco.
Last week, Google sent out 100,000 invites to Google Wave – I didn’t get one yet 
But if you are interesting to learn more about Google Wave and I suggest you take a look at least at the 10 minutes overview video because this will be the next thing on the web. As Google Wave developers said it, the product answers a simple question
What email would look like if it was invented today?
Check out this video by Stephanie and Greg, product managers of Google Wave
Did you get excited by the overview video? Are you ready for some more actions? Here’s the 80 minutes demonstration from Google I/O Read more…
Watch Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, talking about the future of web TV. The points of success of the next generation web TV according to Hastings
Pretty interesting talk, watch the video Read more…
From the first day, Facebook came to public it faced rumors and complaints. One of the most serious complaints was actually filed November 19, 2008 by Leader Technologies, Inc in the United States district court for the district of Delaware for infringement of U.S Patent No. 7,139,761 in this district. This patent relates to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.
According to the latest public Court Order document dated 4th September 2009 (embedded below), Facebook objections were denied and the company will still need to produce its entire source code for Leader’s review no later than September 15, 2009
Read more…