Horatio Toure rode his bicycle up to a woman Monday afternoon in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco to steal her iPhone. The woman was carrying the iPhone as part of Apple’s demonstration of a real-time GPS tracking program. The man did not look at the phone, otherwise he would have noticed a map that was tracking his location in real-time.
Toure ended up being taken into custody ten minutes later at 4:01PM according to police Sgt. Troy Dangerfield. Toure was booked into jail on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property. “This reminds me of the bank robber who arrives during the security test,” said the owner of the phone David Kahn.
Kahn is the CEO of Covia Labs in Mountain View. Kahn was in San Francisco to showcase a product called Alert & Respond to their public relations team. Kahn asked his assistant Jordan Strum to take the phone out to the sidewalk so he could track her location on his laptop. But a few seconds later it appeared she was “running at high speed down the street.”
Strum ran back to the office and called the police to get the phone back. “What are the odds,” Kahn asked, “that you would grab someone’s cell phone during a demonstration of the ability to track the phone’s location in real time? That’s what this unfortunate thief did.”
[SFGate]
written by Duy Phong
\\ tags: App, Apple, Iphone, OS
As Twitter is growing in popularity, the struggle to keep the website online is increasing. This was especially a challenge during the World Cup. About 300,000 new accounts are being created per day. In order to scale their website demand, Twitter plans to open a custom built server warehouse in Salt Lake City, Utah.
“Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter,” stated Jean-Paul Cozzatti on the Twitter Engineering Blog.
“Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications,” added Cozzatti.
As of right now Twitter is using data centers built by NTT America in the Bay Area of California. Twitter will continue to work with NTT. Facebook, Amazon.com, and Google have massive data centers in Oregon and Apple recently announced a new data center being built in North Carolina.
written by Duy Phong
\\ tags: App, Apple, Application, Google, OS
This past May, Skype upgraded their iPhone application to support 3G data calling. Now Skype has made another update that allows you to make calls with high quality sound and also supports multitasking. This means you can receive Skype calls while other applications are running and even if your iPhone is locked. Skype’s application graphics also now support iPhone 4’s Retina Display. You can download the new app from here [iTunes link]. [Skype Blog]
written by Duy Phong
\\ tags: 3G, App, Apple, Application, Download, Iphone, ITunes, Skype
Paul Ceglia claims he had a contract with Mark Zuckerberg that entitles him to 84% ownership in Facebook. Paul Ceglia has a signed contract with Mark Zuckerberg. Ceglia hired Mark Zuckerberg when he was a college freshman to create a website that is a reference for street intersections to be used by insurance companies and other related companies. Ceglia claimed that Zuckerberg took $1,000 of his money and signed a contract giving him 50% of a project Zuckerberg was working on called “The Face Book.” But due to contractual provisions, Ceglia said the stake is 84% now.
Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick asked Zuckerberg whether it was true. Zuckerberg said “Of course not.” Zuckerberg added: “It was all about his website. I hadn’t even thought of Facebook yet. How could I have given him an ownership interest in it?” A group of three computer science friends spent the summer talking about creating a social sort of software on the Internet in 2003. Zuckerberg went back to Harvard his sophomore year and created thefacebook.com in 2004. Zuckerberg said he did not get the idea of thefacebook until the fall semester of 2003 and did most of the programming for it in January 2004.
However Zuckerberg admitted that he did a few software programming jobs for Ceglia. The two met through Craigslist after Zuckerberg posted he does software programming for hire. Ceglia’s lawyer claims he has a document that says Zuckerberg signed over a 50% stake in TheFaceBook to Ceglia. The case is pending trial in a federal court in Buffalo. Facebook’s lawyers are asking to see the document and a reproduced copy was filed with the court [PDF].
“Plaintiff’s counsel approached us and offered to discuss ways to make this go away,” stated Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt. “We declined.”
[Fortune]
written by Duy Phong
\\ tags: App, OS
In 2001, Google launched a revolutionary addition to its search engine: Google Images. At the time, a collection of 250 million images with a single search engine was ground breaking. Google now has an index of over 10 billion images.
Due in part to the growing number of images in Google’s index, the company is planning on changing Google Images. Some of these changes include:
-Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. This allows for more images and less text.
-Instant scrolling between pages which allows for more images to be seen with only scrolling. Up to 1,000 images will be added per scrolling page, with individual pages being numbered.
-Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
-A hover pane that appears when you put your mouse over a thumbnail image, giving a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”
These updates will be added to Google soon and it shows that the search engine company is continuing to evolve. Google’s Product Manager Nate Smith said “We hope they not only make it easier to search for images, but also contribute to a better aesthetic experience. We see images as a major source of inspiration, a way of connecting the world—aand their growth is showing no signs of slowing down.”
[Google Blog]
written by Duy Phong
\\ tags: App, Google
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