Apple Makes Changes To ...

Apple has quietly made a change to its repair policy regarding the liquid contact indicators , or LCI. You may remember last years lawsuit surrounding the issue. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

Bump Now Lets You Swap ...

You can tell a lot about a person from their mobile app library. Are they avid Doodle Jumpers, or do they prefer to challenge their wits with a few rounds of Civilization? Do they stretch their vocal chords to the beats of T-Pain or Glee’s background choir? You get the idea. Given how much time people spend building out their app libraries, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that they love to share their collections with friends. In fact, Bump — an app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices — says that users have been asking for an easy way to share lists of their favorite apps for ages, and that it’s the second most popular request overall (behind music sharing, which has already been implemented). Today, all of those users are getting their wish granted. Bump has just launched a new version of its iPhone application that makes it easy to share apps with your friends. Fire up the new feature, and you’ll be shown a list of apps that have been installed on your phone (more on that in a moment). Tap the ones you want to recommend to your friend, Bump your phone with theirs, and they’ll immediately receive a list of your recommendations along with links to the App Store for each. Now, Bump isn’t the first application that lets you get a list of your iPhone applications. We’ve seen others like Chomp and Appolicious , which let you share app recommendations with friends and can also suggest applications based on your previous ratings. The difference, says Bump co-founder David Lieb, is that the app exchange using Bump is more personal. You aren’t posting your recommendations to followers on Facebook, or through the application’s internal social network — you’re tapping your phone together with a friend and swapping recommendations immediately (assuming they have Bump too). Now, Apple doesn’t actually let developers do this through a native API — every service that generates a list of your installed apps has to find a workaround. Lieb believes that Bump’s is generally better than the competition’s, and while he wouldn’t get into details on how it works, he says it involves looking at the list of applications that are currently running on the phone. The only catch: apps that you don’t run frequently won’t show up. Of course, if you’re recommending an application to your friend, then it probably isn’t sitting dormant on your phone. Bump isn’t just available for the iPhone — it has a strong Android presence as well. Lieb says that the Android version already supports basic app sharing, and it’s currently working on an overhaul due out later this month. This new version is going to allow users on iPhone to recommend apps for Android and vice versa (assuming, of course, that the same application is available for both operating systems). CrunchBase Information Bump Technologies Information provided by CrunchBase

Google Teams Up With Tw...

It was only last week that Google acquired SayNow, a voice messaging startup, They’re already putting them to good use. I mean really good use. As they’ve just announced on the Google Blog, the search giant has teamed up with the incoming SayNow team and Twitter to create a simple speak-to-tweet service for people currently engulfed in the turmoil in Egypt. Says Google: It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet . We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there. Very, very cool. And important. Especially since reports have the last operating ISP in the country, Noor, being shut down as well . Some of these are amazing already. CrunchBase Information Google Twitter SayNow Information provided by CrunchBase

Egypt Shuts Down Noor, ...

We’re hearing reports on Twitter that the coverage of Noor Group’s DSL service, Egypt’s  last standing ISP which powers the Egyptian Stock Exchange as well as sites of major brands like Coca Cola and Exxon Mobile is being shut down, meaning the nation will lose nearly all the remaining high-speed links to the outside world. According to Jacob Applebaum the shut down is occurring in stages and certain sites are still online, “noor.net shut all except NTG, the National Technology Group providing IT processing to the aviation, banking and financial sectors.” The ISP’s website itself is offline. @ioerror Jacob Appelbaum It looks like our last terrestrial hope has been shut down; my connections to systems on Noor are all down. #egypt #jan25 about 3 hours ago via web Retweet Reply Effective Measure CEO Scott Julian confirms that the traffic from Noor has trickled to a halt and the last two ISPs are offline, “Effective Measure was recording active traffic from Noor coming in the hour of 11pm last night up until midnight Egypt time but from 12am onwards, we have no active sessions from Noor IP addresses and no data has appeared in the logs.” Julian also points out these connectivity blackouts happened around same time as the last batch and posits that this is a well organized effort. Dial-up is presumably still working as Google and Twitter have just launched a speak-to-tweet service at  http://twitter.com/speak2tweet . Update: Internet Monitoring service Rensys is confirming the Noor shut down. Applebaum has tweeted out  this graph of the current set of IPv6 addresses online in Egypt. Noor is not one of them.

Facebook Ads Get Half t...

Webtrends' report shows paid promotions on lagged in 2010 compared to the previous year.