Sherbango soup

Views of the trailer for the documentary about the physical computer known as Arduino spiked radically yesterday, suggesting that anticipation is high for the movie, said to be coming this summer.

Arduino refers to the open source hardware and software intended for artists, designers, and tinkerers of all kinds to build objects or interactive machines. The Arduino microcontroller was designed to be inexpensive and easily programmed - boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled for as little as $20, and the software can be downloaded for free.

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Arduino was designed to be accessible to everyone, and it seems to be working. The device has captivated a growing number of minds in the tech world and the mainstream since its release in 2005. It's been used to make everything from art to robots to breathalyzers to guitars. Recently, Microsoft Research announced it had figured out how to eliminate blurry photos by compensating for unintentional movement of the camera using sensor information gathered by an Arduino board.

Laboral Centro de Arte, Spain, commissioned the documentary about Arduino, set to be released this summer. The filmmakers announced they are almost done and released the trailer a few days ago, which hit BoingBoing and other aggregators yesterday. Arduino says the traffic bump was due to being featured on one of "the main tech blogs" but didn't say which one.

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IBM invited a group of bloggers for a day to talk with executives and a visit to the labs. This morning the discussion centered on analytics. This afternoon the conversation still focused on analytics with more emphasis on IBM's larger theme about the "smarter planet."

12- 1 p.m EST: Long discussion about IBM investment. Major focus is on smarter cities and water supplies. IBM is working with non-profits on the Hudson River Sensors have ben deployed to monitor the water supply. The stream computing system examines different sources to understand the dynamics of the river. Temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and pollution are all analyzed in real-time. Fish populations are monitored through acoustical data and tracked with radio tagging.

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IBM is using the Hudson River test as a model for monitoring other river systems. Conversation turned to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Federal government received 80,000 bids from contractors. IBM did not get the contract to use radar to monitor the spill.
Tenor of conversation: governments are lacking innovation in efforts to keep water clean.

Why? We see it more due to a lack of resources and a brain trust that is more attracted to the corporate world. The private sector is innovating but local governments are just trying to keep the water flowing. Technology may help us solve our water quality issues but it will most likely be with the help of companies like IBM.

1-2 p.m.: Traveled to the IBM Hawthorne campus to meet with researchers. Driver left us at the wrong building. Lost bloggers. How many bloggers does it take to find the right entrance to a building?

2 pm -2:30 p.m.: Provided presentation about IBM's research. Focus in the 1990s centered on software and services. Today it's about the smarter planet. For example, IBM is working with Washington, D.C. to analyze the data from customer service records, billing and additional paper-based records. By comparing historical data, the city can better anticipate what pipes need fixing.

IBM research is focused on smarter planet efforts. Analytics plays directly into the effort. IBM is working with venture capitalists to find analytics start-ups that it can fund. It is holding a series of camps all over the world to find qualifying start-ups.

2:30-3 p.m: Jeopardy presentation. IBM is developing Watson, a project similar to Deep Blue, which culminated in the famous chess match between the IBM Deep Blue computer and Gary Kasparov. DeepBlue won. DeepBlueQA is being built to see if the computer can beat human counterpart. The project is a combination of natural language processing, analytics and probability. DeepBlueQA will compete this Fall with

3 p.m. - 4 p.m.: Learned about some of the research projects underway, including what IBM calls the "desktop cloud," that has direct applications to healthcare. We saw how a thin client is connected to the cloud and can be used to pull up a patient's records at their bed side. Thin client can only read, not write information. Cloud is encrypted to provide required security.

Summary

Found the day at IBM helpful but these topics could all be discussed for hours. Unconference format would work well. Discussions had to be cut off at some points as there were so many people who were there to meet with us. It would allow for more in-depth conversations with executives and researchers in an informal environment. People could come and go. Discussion at the end of the day would wrap up what was learned and discussed.

Bu in summary, it's a smart move to bring bloggers in to meet and learn more about a company and what it does.

IBM paid the airfare and hotel for Alex Williams to attend its blogger event.

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As of tonight, every one of Microsoft Hotmail's 350 million users now has access to the newest version of the webmail service. And you know what? It looks great. Early adopter snobs have long mocked anyone still using Hotmail, but the service has three times as many people using it as Twitter does (100m+). Why does that matter? Because Hotmail deserves some more respect when it innovates and does things well.

It looks really good these days, too. It's fast, it's really clean looking, it has cool features that Gmail doesn't have. It's worth a look. Your friends might make fun of you if they find out you're using Hotmail, but who really needs friends like that, anyway?

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What does the new Hotmail offer? According to an announcement tonight by Mike Schackwitz on the Inside Windows Live blog, the biggest changes in the new version are speed, performance, one-click filtering and "active views" (inline display of multimedia like photos and videos).

I'm impressed by the inbox links to view emails that contain documents or links to documents, a filter for just messages from your trusted content and a filter that automatically pulls aside maintenance messages from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The integration of Microsoft's online document creation and collaboration tools are really nice too. It's more tightly integrated that Gmail and Google Docs are.

Ads? There are more ads per page in Gmail than in Hotmail, though it's text ads vs graphic ads. You know what else looks quite good? Hotmail on an iPhone. I'm not kidding. It looks really nice. There's a drop down button next to every email in your mobile web inbox that lets you preview the first 3 lines of an email.

I just thought I'd let you know. 350 million people, that's 70% as many as use Facebook you'll note, now have access to a newer, faster, more powerful version of their webmail service.

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Apple’s iPhone 4 is a smash hit and the latest Android handsets are getting rave reviews. Apple and Google are snapping at RIM’s heels, still the smartphone market leader. To counter the attacks, RIM has just released a new OS, Blackberry 6, and a new handset, the Blackberry Torch. But early reviews of aren’t looking [...]

Apple is facing yet another anti-competition complaint today after the Attorney General for the State of Connecticut launched an investigation into the state of the ebook market. Asked to defend itself along with Amazon over the deals the two biggest ebook sellers in the country have been striking with publishers to guarantee favorable pricing and [...]

I am at IBM's blogger day at the corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York. Officially it's called the "Smarter Planet Blogger Day." Hoping to get some insight into a company with more software than any technology company out there. IBM has made $11 billion in software acquisitions over the past five years and $2 billion in organic investment.

8 a.m EST. Looked at the schedule that Erica xxxx put on a Tumblr page. Nice touch.

8:15 a.m. Bloggers are waiting in the blogger bus. Chatted with Mike Loukides of O'Reilly Radar about Strata, the conference they have planned for February. Topic: big data!

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8:45 a.m. Arrived at IBM headquarters. It's like an estate. Rolling fields and forest. Beautiful blue stone from the Catskills at the entrance to the steel and glass building. It feels like I am in a scifi film.

9 a.m.I am sitting next to Larry Digan from ZDnet. Here's his post from this morning. Other bloggers here include Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch; Derrick Harris of GigaOm and Mike Vizard of CTO Edge.

9:30 a.m. Tour of IBM museum pieces. Check out the Batman machine. It's called a Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator.

10:15 a.m First round table: Fred Balboni, Global Business Lead, Business Analytics and Optimization

Notes from Balboni discussion:

IBM Analytics has five layers:

Data Warehouse: Look at transactions as they are moving.
Content management: Integrating information into the business process.
Presentation Layer: Business intelligence - presenting information to the world, either internally or externally.
Predictive Analytics: Take a predictive component.
Strategic: Helping with the strategic aspect of analytics.

Balboni says companies are starting to say legacy IT s a part of business but it will not differentiate it. Analytics will differentiate the business.

A few years ago these companies could hide a bad decision. Profits seemingly fell from the sky. Now companies are trying to "maneuver through the small passage ways." Balbonis asked rhetorically: "What's so hard about getting as product through a channel? The problem is that the channel is constantly changing. Information companies face far more regulations, the market is dynamic.

Best quote: "Industries based on atoms ship things on trucks," Balboni said. "Information companies ship bits."

Summary: Balboni highlighted how early the market is for analytics. Companies are moving data from the bottom to the top of the value chain. Little data experiments are turning into major efforts. There is a bank that pooled data to see correlations between bank loans and defaults. Effort helped reduce the number of defaults. Now they require 26,000 cores of processing power to do analytics, mostly focused on blocking and tackling on basic transactions. Cloud services will be sold as part of a service package. Private cloud is gaining interest but not as much the publlc cloud. Pharmaceutical, insurance and healthcare industries will work with third party services to use the cloud for analytics.

That's where IBM fits into the game. Selling services and the tools that service providers can use to serve their customers.

More to come!

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Can a startup transform media relations? That's the question being asked by NewsBasis, a new site launched this week which aims to connect journalists with sources, or rather, PR agencies, companies, non-profits and consultants, to be specific.

However, the focus is primarily on connecting the PR industry with journalists who want to hear about their clients' products and services. This relationship, as it stands today, is strained. PR companies often adopt the "spray-and-pray" approach to getting their messages out - that is, mass emails to large distribution lists of which only a handful of recipients may be genuinely interested in the news.

Wouldn't it be better to connect those PR folks directly to the writers receptive to the news without annoying hundreds of others in the process?

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NewsBasis: A Startup for Journos, PR and Companies

NewsBasis is the brainchild of Darryl Siry, a freelance writer for Wired and, formerly, a marketing and sales exec at Tesla Motors.

With NewsBasis, his goal is to create an online marketplace where media organizations are matched up with other businesses that could help provide not just raw news, but could also serve as authoritative sources for more in-depth articles. More importantly, perhaps, is that it aims to connect the two in relevant ways.

"I think its easy for journalists to oversimplify the problem and just complain about 'PR flacks,' but I see the problem as a design issue," Siry explains via blog post. "Companies very much want to get their message out, and they spend a lot to do this. It is just that the mechanisms that exist today are still relatively clumsy in that they don't align the interests or business processes of both sides very effectively."

New Twist on an Old Idea

The idea of linking up PR to journos more effectively isn't entirely new. Peter Shankman's competing service Help a Reporter Out (aka HARO) does much of the same thing today.

But what is new is the way the different parties connect. While on HARO, a journalist submits a question and receives email responses, NewsBasis offers a far more robust platform. At launch time, it will include a "request a response" feature similar to HARO's, but will also offer a tool called "embedded point of views."

In NewsBasis, journalists can search for articles on a particular subject from a real-time news stream of over 10,000 credible sources and create alerts on topics of interest. After selecting an article to read in NewsBasis, a sidebar appears to the right of the screen featuring these "embedded point of views" offered by other NewsBasis members. It's like Google SideWiki just for journos or blog comments without the trolls.

Here, the point of views may offer additional information or clarify misleading information found in the article, all from sources whose credentials can help back up their statements.

Of course, some PR agencies will probably figure out how to spam these "point of views" sidebars, too, but at least then the comments will be obvious, unlike the shady missives appearing on blog posts where PR staff members pretend to be end users who really really like that new service a journalist just wrote about.

From this "point of views" sidebar, journalists can then reach out to those adding their insight and request a direct follow-up.

Sources Search Engine

NewsBasis also offers a "sources" search engine. Here, journalists can search the profiles and points of views for those who may have answers and information relating to a story a journalist is working on.

These features go far beyond what HARO or any other competing service offers today. And it makes it easier and faster for journalists to research and produce a news story for today's 24/7 news cycle on the real-time Web.

It's a smart idea and it's free, at least for journalists. PR firms and companies will have to pay, although not at launch time.

NewsBasis raised $545,000 from Zelkova Ventures and individuals investors and is raising more capital now, according to the New York Times. Interested parties can sign up for a beta invite today.

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StatusNet Inc announced today that it has closed another round of funding from First Mark Capital, BOLDstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up, bringing its total funding to date to $2.3 million. StatusNet, formerly Laconica, develops the open-source microblogging server that powers identi.ca and offers both hosted and on-premise enterprise microblogging solutions. The company also announced an addition to the StatusNet board: Scott Switzer - founder of open source ad platform, OpenX, angel investor and FirstMark Capital venture partner.

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StatusNet CEO Evan Prodromou stated in a press release the company is building an enterprise sales and support team. "Our investors and partners have deep experience in enterprise and open source software that will help us during our next phase of growth," he said.

Status updates and microblogging are the new must-have app for enterprises, and StatusNet has been a leader in the market. The company says it has several Fortune 1,000 customers, including Motorola impressed with StatusNet's technology.

Although $2.3 million is small compared to the $30 million recently raised by Jive and the $60 million recently raised by Atlassian, it's part of the larger trend of investors taking social enterprise seriously.

According to Box.net CEO Aaron Levie "enterprise software is sexy again." Levie points out that enterprise information technology spending dwarfs online advertising spending. The US government alone is expected to spend $80 billion on IT in 2011, while online advertising is expected to do only $24.2 billion in business next year.

This is a big deal for IT managers, who will have far more enterprise collaboration choices to choose from as pressure to adopt new technologies increases from all areas of the enterprise.

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The parent company of Ultimate Fighting Championship announced subpoenas for the live streaming websites Ustream.tv and Justin.tv just over a week ago, alleging that users were broadcasting the pay-per-view events for free and demanding their IP addresses be revealed.

Ustream put out a statement today saying that the subpoena actually came earlier this year, and that Ustream has fully complied with its demands.

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Ustream also said it has made it easier for copyright holders to monitor and removed illegal content by implementing content fingerprinting technology from Vobile across the platform last month. It also touted quicker submission times for copyright holders, keyword detection and improved user interface for copyright owners.

The mixed martial arts championship alleged that one user from a single IP address uploaded two events that drew 36,000 and 78,000 non-paying viewers, respectively, representing a "significant loss of revenue" to UFC and their mobile, online, cable and satellite distribution partners. The events cost $44.95 each or $55.95 for the HD version via cable and satellite providers and official online outlets.

"I can't wait to go after the thieves that are stealing our content," UFC President Dana White said in the statement. "This is a fight we will not lose."

Zuffa LLC, the UFC's parent company, cites a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows copyright owners to order service providers to disclose the identity of subscribers who allegedly engage in copyright infringement. The company has aggressively pursued pirates in the past, settling over 500 lawsuits last month and testifying before Congress.

Ustream seems prepared to full comply with Zuffa's demands - the UFC actually has an official channel on Ustream, where it broadcasts footage from behind the scenes as well as some live events.

Justin.tv, which also received subpoenas, has remained silent on the subpoenas so far but has moved to protect copyright owners in the past.

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20 billion Tweets later, here we are, people. A Japanese graphic designer who likes baseball and The Doors published the 20 billionth message on Twitter this weekend, according to the number that appeared in the URL for his message.

The Guardian's David Batty caught sight of the landmark message, which read, translated into English: "So that means the barrage might come back later all at once." That message was posted on Saturday. More than 160 million more messages have already been Tweeted since then.

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The author of the Tweet with the magical number was quickly told by others that his message was the 20 billionth. "It looks like I posted the 20 billionth tweet," he subsequently Tweeted. "I'm getting replies from people all over the world. It's scary. What are the chances? Maybe I'm going to die. Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke."

Batty writes that it took Twitter four years to see its first 10 billion Tweets but just the past five months to see the next 10 billion. (Facebook, for context, says it sees 100 billion "hits" every single day.)

It would be nice to know what percentage of those Tweets were sent by humans, and what percentage by robots, RSS feeds, Tweeting houseplants in need of watering and marketing sleazebags who re-Tweet reputable blogs' feeds automatically to give credence and cover to their occasionally original in-stream advertisements.

Too little is known, in fact, about those 20 billion messages - other than that they were written in 2 trillion 800 billion characters or less.

Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner aptly pointed out in response to our inquiry about the landmark, "If only I had a nickel for every Tweet. I'd be a billionaire." That is now literally true.

None the less, it makes me feel a little proud about my own 17,000+ Tweets. Just trying to do my little part to build the giant tower of Tweeted junk, wisdom, jokes, ephemera and poignancy. You can join the large and growing, but far from billion-Tweeting, ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here.

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If you use Gmail for business and haven't tried out browser plug-in Rapportive, your work life online is not yet complete. The small company behind the must-have software said this weekend that it has raised $1 million from a group of All Star, but unnamed, angel investors. This morning serial entrepreneur and email newsletter barron Jason Calacanis announced on Twitter that he was among that group.

Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail side bar with a picture of the person who sent you an email, their job title from LinkedIn, recent Twitter messages they've sent and more. Once you install it, you may have a hard time imagining life without it. I know I don't want to think about this little company not being around anymore. So it's good news that Rapportive just put some money in the bank.

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We first wrote about Rapportive four months ago. How many browser plug-ins have you used for four months and still been thankful for every day? The context that Rapportive has provided to the emails in my inbox has proven invaluable. My communication has been substantially more informed by seeing the present and past job titles of people I'm emailing with next to their message.

The company has said that it intends to build additional functionality on top of email beyond what it currently offers, and it was a featured launch partner of the Google Apps email apps platform in May.

Competitor etacts offers a similar service, but is more complex and hasn't caught my eye in the same way.

Social network user data is a rich resource just waiting to have software built on top of it. Rapportive is a great example of the kinds of things that become possible when such data is accessible to developers.

Update: Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch has published the full list of investors: "Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, and Roy Rodenstein. Also participating are Dave McClure's new fund 500Startups, Nivi & Naval Ravikant's VentureHacks, Charles River Ventures, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, and BOLDstart Ventures."

That's a very high profile group.

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Although the number of iPhone owners currently dwarfs the iPad, a new study reveals Apple’s tablet has a promising future. The tablet device is both more involving for users, as well as potentially more lucrative for developers. Like the iPhone, games are the largest category of applications downloaded by iPad users, according to a study [...]

Could Intel be inside your next iPhone? That’s a possibility as the chipmaking giant is reportedly on the verge of acquiring Infineon, Apple’s sole baseband supplier for the iPhone. According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel is “close to a deal” to buy Infineon for $2 billion. The possible acquisition is a reminder of the [...]

If the iPad is considered a mobile PC (as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer views the Apple tablet), the Cupertino, Calif. consumer electronics company jumps from a seventh-place mobile PC maker to No. 3, according to Deutsche Bank. Adding tablet devices to the portable PC mix means Apple passes several more traditional notebook makers, the analyst [...]

Unfortunately, we couldn't be at Black Hat and Defcon in Las Vegas this week, but here's our round-up of highlights from the two security events from around the web. Of course, if you look through the schedules for both events, there were dozens more paranoia inducing talks than the ones listed below - these are merely the ones that got the most press coverage.

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Black Hat's Live Video Stream Hacked

Michael Coates, a web security expert at Mozilla, discovered he could access the live stream of the conference, which Black Hat was charging $395, free. Coates notified the third-party company providing the video stream and it was fixed within hours. Coates notes the irony and uses it as teaching point: even the most security aware organizations will still have faults, and enterprises much vet third-party providers.

Spoofing Cell Phone Base Stations

Do employees in your enterprise use cell phones to discuss sensitive matters? Worrying about hackers intercepting your cell phone calls may seem passé, but a demonstration at Defcon by Chris Paget may make you think otherwise: Paget has devised a fake cell phone tower that can intercept even encrypted outgoing calls.

Google Fraught with Malware Risks

At Black Hat, security vendor Barracuda Networks released its Mid-Year Security Report showing that Google links to twice as much malware as Bing, Yahoo! and Twitter combined.

Symantec announced similar findings this week, and released a free tool called Norton Safe Web Lite designed for detecting malicious search results. (See also: Symantec's mid-year prediction check in.)

Barracuda and Symantec's findings are consistent with NSS Labs' study comparing the malware detection rates of Internet Explorer, which uses Microsoft's database of malicious web sites, with Chrome and Firefox, which use Google's database.

At DefCon, Robert Hansen, CEO of secTheory ,examined a number of ways iGoogle and Gmail can be compromised using third-party add-ons.

More Bad News for Google: Android Insecurities

Google got some more bad news this week, in the form of increased scrutiny of known security issues in its Android mobile operating system.

At DefCon, a pair of security experts released a rootkit, something that they had promised previously (and others had said was possible earlier). The good news, based on discussions on Slashdot, it appears the phone's user would have to have already rooted the phone in order for it to be vulnerable.

And, as we reported, the security firm Lookout revealed at Black Hat that it had found a series of wallpaper apps in the Android Marketplace that were transmitting users' phone numbers, SIM card info and, potentially, voice mail passwords to the developer. The developer denied malicious intent, but the incident raises questions about Android's security disclosures.

It's OK Google, the Rest of the Internet is Broken Too

Google wasn't the only company in hackers' cross-hairs this week.

At Black Hat, Robert Hansen and Josh Sokol presented on how traffic in non-encrypted browser tabs can be used to learn about SSL encrypted traffic open in other tabs.

Hackers would already need access to a users network to accomplish anything with these SSL vulnerabilities. But it just so happens, other researchers at Black Hat found a DNS-rebinding technique that would allow black hats to take over wireless routers if they could trick users into visiting malicious web sites (of course, they could also use WPA Cracker, but that's another story).

At Defcon, Russ McRee of HolisticInfoSec.org and Mike Bailey of Skeptikal.org revealed they could pull-off a similar trick on certain Linksys and Netgear routers using cross-site request forgery.

They also discovered they could use the same trick to gain access to CPANEL - a popular web hosting management tool.

Speaking of web site vulnerabilities, at Black Hat Dasient released its report on three biggest enterprise website malware vulnerabilities.

At both conferences, Chris Gates and Mario Ceballos gave away tools for breaking into Oracle databases.

The FBI was reportedly a bit rattled by DefCon's social engineering contest (in the end, every contestant was able to get someone at the targeted companies to hand over sensitive information.

There was at least some good news. Representatives from Mozilla detailed plans to make the browser more secure, and it turns out Twitter is more secure than it appears.

National Insecurity

Those of us living the US may have bigger problems than hackers stealing our credit card numbers and passwords from our wireless networks, though: according to the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyberattack. (We've covered issues surrounding national cybersecurity before.) At DefCong, security expert Charlie Miller described how North Korea could launch an effective botnet attack on the US.

According to another presentation at Black Hat, malware tools are sold openly in China, giving hackers easy access to problematic software.

Given the concerns about cybersecurity in the US, it's no surprise the federal government was actively recruiting at Defcon - but we think the anti-authoritarian nature of many Defcon attendees might make that a tough sell.

The most explosive revelation at the event might not have even been a security vulnerability at all: Chet Uber, director of the secretive private cyber-intelligence organization Project Vigilant, claimed to have personally convinced Adrian Lamo (himself a "Adversary Characterization" analyst for Project Vigilant) to inform the federal government of Bradley Manning's claims regarding the Wikileaks video.

Jacob Appelbaum, a programmer working closely with the TOR project and WikiLeaks was detained at the US border while returning to the US from the Netherlands. And while at DefCon, he was reportedly approached by FBI agents.

Bank Hacking

Perhaps of less immediate concern to the enterprise IT managers, a presentation at Black Hat on ATM vulnerabilities probably got the most media coverage. SecureWorks also reported on a massive check fraud operation.

Conclusion

You can't trust your phone, your search engine points you at malware, the Internet is broken, your country is in danger and so is your bank - and not even the conference designed to tell you about it can keep from getting hacked. One might be tempted to believe that things may have been better back before we had all this digital technology. Then again, there was a time when bandits, pirates and marauders posed serious physical threats to well being of both individuals and institutions. Perhaps it's a more civilized world in which banditry is more likely to take place over the Web than on the way to the market.

Very real, very physical wars still rage around the world (as the release of Afghanistan war logs this week reminds us), but at least the violent crime rate in the United States has been declining. It can't be attributed to technology, but we should be thankful that while we're engaged in the thankless job of security patch management that at least we're not handing our companies' fortunes over at saber-point.

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One of the lingering questions surrounding iPhone 4 and the whole “antennagate” saga is just how much, if any, of the problem could be blamed on the traditional network whipping boy, AT&T. Sure, you could reduce or kill iPhone 4 data and voice reception by gripping it firmly around the base to attenuate the signal or touching it at the bottom left corner to de-tune the antenna, but would that be a problem on carriers with stronger networks?

So, the moment I got my iPhone 4 up and running on Rogers Canada yesterday, I aimed to find out and the answer — is as complicated and confusing as always.

First test was right outside the Apple Store, inside the mall. I had 4 bars on both iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.0.1. Holding either one in a death-grip, even lightly, dropped them a bar. Covering the lower-left spot of iPhone 4 also dropped it a bar. Neither had any real-world problems. 3 bars is fine.

Next test was to go out and find low signal areas. Interestingly, driving through areas where iPhone 3GS briefly drops to EDGE, iPhone 4 stayed on 3G longer and came back to it faster. When I stopped and stayed in an area with 1 to 2 bars of 3G signal, that’s where the fun began. And by fun I mean crazy.

My results, on both iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS were all over the place. Again, I could drop a bar, sometimes both bars, by death-gripping either phone or death-touching iPhone 4. Every so often, however, death-touching iPhone 4 got it to jump up to 3 bars. It happened enough that it wasn’t a fluke, but I couldn’t do it every time. Once I managed to cover enough antenna to get iPhone 4 to search for the network. I couldn’t get iPhone 3GS to do that — it stayed on 0 bars but on network — but unless I was trying to crush the phone with both hands I’d never hold it that way in real life.

In terms of data speeds, again the results were crazy. I could drop speeds by half with death-grip on both iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, and death-touch on iPhone 4. Starting from 1 or 2 bars, I could even stop network connectivity completely, again with death-grip on both or death-touch on iPhone 4.

But sometimes only HSDPA (download) would drop while HSUPA (upload) would go up or stay steady. Sometimes the opposite. The results were so crazy, so varied, I’m considering calling the whole thing black magic and just forgetting about it.

So, on Rogers in Canada, death-grip is real but certainly not limited to iPhone 4, while death-touch is also real and limited to iPhone 4 but presents much the same way. Areas of poor signal can be problematic in theory but in a way that’s utterly impossible to predict. In practice, dropping calls didn’t happen, dropping data was easy to work around, and dropping network had to be forced.

If you’ve done similar tests, or have similar real-world experience to share on other networks, let us know in comments below!

So does your international iPhone 4 have death-grip or death-touch? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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This Spring at Twitter's first developer conference Chirp the big splash was a forthcoming feature called Annotations. The feature will allow publishing software to annotate Tweets with a wide open variety of metadata, which could then be read and analyzed by other software. Annotations are going to be big, if and when they launch.

At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the 2nd or 3rd quarter of this year. Now the company's Developer Advocate, Taylor Singletary, said today on the Twitter developers list that it's not going to work out that way. "We haven't yet announced a release date," he said in response to an inquiry, "and it's still a ways in the future while we tackle some other projects."

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We've got an inquiry in with Twitter asking what that means, but it seems clear that the company is slammed with technical challenges, has other priorities and wrongly estimated the roadmap for this very important part of the platform. (Update: see below.)

Here's how Annotations will work. It will allow publishing software to mark-up Tweets with any kind of characteristic or namespace (local weather when and where a Twit did Tweet, for example) and any kind of value - cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example. Twitter messages are fairly rich with metadata already and incredibly easy to analyze and build on top of, but Annotations would open that up so far the sky's the limit.

It's worth mentioning that Twitter's unveiling of Annotations at Chirp happened around the same time as, and was widely compared with, Facebook's launching of personalized content widgets and tentacles expanding all over the web, among other things. Facebook shipped its announced project, for better or for worse.

Twitter is Busy

In another email on the same list today, Singletary said that the processing of white-listing applications to ping Twitter's servers with a production-level frequency was clogged with backlog, growing more critical in its evaluations and being re-evaluated.

Meanwhile, Twitter launched an official recommendation feature today that's frankly, not nearly as exciting as the kinds of recommendation capabilities that independent developers have built (see Mr.Tweet or Twellow, for example). Hopefully the API for this feature will be turned into more fabulous things. A whole world of independent developers, empowered with the ability to read and write data, will inevitably build cooler things than even the smartest company in the world. It's one of those laws like a room full of monkeys and typewriters. And it's the core value proposition of Annotations, too.

Numerous advertising technologies have been rolled out since Chirp as well. Annotations is a hugely ambitious strategy, and the squabbling over namespaces and standards was one that Twitter said it was going to let the market work out on its own. That made some people quite unhappy.

We've asked Twitter for clarification on the revised Annotations roadmap and will update this post with the company's response.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to our inquiry and said that yes, Annotations will launch. "We'll still launch Annotations. The team that was working on Annotations is currently focused on our number one priority, which is site stability." No doubt Annotations could themselves pose scalability challenges. They could at least blow our minds, if not a series of related servers.

Below is an image of what each Tweet looks like under the hood right now, before annotations. (Click for full size view.) Each of those fields is powerful, but inflexible and defined by the company. Imagine a new one that's open to being defined however a publishing tool sees fit. That's the vision behind Annotations.

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