Author: Toby Leftly

Apple is a company under siege right now. They’re backed into a corner, and they’re coming out fighting. Software updates, press conferences, and no doubt soon a letter from Steve Jobs himself titled “Thoughts On Innovative But Ultimately Flawed Smart Phone Antenna Designs”. One aspect of Apple’s carefully assembled defense wasn’t fully appreciated by the other company involved though. Blackberry maker RIM apparently wasn’t too thrilled that Apple demonstrated to the world that their phones are just as susceptible to antenna issues as the iPhone 4. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-CEOs…

For the less trendy (and the less British) among us, I’ll come right out and say it: The Ministry of Sound is not an official government body, it’s just a UK music label. As such, they don’t have the kind of sway that say, the ministry of defense has, or even the ministry of agriculture. They certainly don’t have the authority to make up their own laws and rules regarding copyright infringement. That’s exactly what they’re trying to do though. 2000 Brits received letters from Gallant Macmillan, hot shot lawyers hired by the Ministry of Sound, demanding payment to the tune of around $500. Presumably,…

Apple’s big press conference is on now, and apparently Apple’s plan is to rag on other phone manufacturers and prove beyond a doubt that the hysterics surrounding the iPhone 4 antenna issue are being overblown. According to Apple, only 0.55% of all iPhone 4 buyers called to talk to tech support about an antenna issue. The return rate for the iPhone 4 is lower than for the 3GS, which had zero known hardware issues. According to AT&T, the iPhone 4 drops only 1 more call per 100 calls than the 3GS. Apple also took the opportunity to explain how every phone suffers from this issue, and demonstrated with…

Remember when the social media war wasn’t just between Facebook and Twitter, with Google nipping at both their heels with weird and mostly ineffectual efforts? Us neither. But apparently a long time ago there was this thing called ‘MySpace’ that a couple of people used. It was ugly, and never worked particularly well, and allowed people to do awful things like have music play when you visit their profile. MySpace found some success among musicians looking to throw together a simple fan site to upload music to, but socially they couldn’t compete with Facebook. Now they’re fighting back. MySpace…

Straight up awesome. The video says it all, so I won’t spell it out, but if you’ve ever played Super Mario then you’ll get a kick out of this. Plus, the fact that the guy is wearing a full on white tuxedo? High-larious….

Wordpress, the indomitable blogging platform has a surprising new enemy – the developer of a theme for Wordpress. Matt Mullenweg, the primary developer of Wordpress is unhappy because theme developer Chris Pearson refuses to honor the GPL license Wordpress is covered by. The GPL, or General Public License is designed to ensure that any derivative work is distributed under the same terms. Pearson sells his themes with a license that protects his work completely, but ignores Wordpress’ license requirements. The debate because extremely public a couple of days ago, when Mullenweg began advising…

If you’re an avid Firefox user, it probably pains you at least a little to be forced to use Safari on your iPhone. Well, now you can enjoy Firefox while you’re out and about too. Sort of. Firefox Home was approved for the App Store and is available now. As reported back in May, this isn’t actually Firefox for iPhone, merely a launcher app that syncs your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and open tabs. Mozilla maintains that “due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution, we cannot provide users Firefox for the iPhone”. At least this provides some basic functionality for those who prefer…

Canada is great. The meds are cheap, we’re easy on pot and we love beer. what’s not to like? But the Canadian Tourism Commission wants to really push this message in the US, and they’ve come up with a pretty innovative and cool way to do it. As the video shows, The CTC setup giant live action murals around New York, Los Angeles and Chicago showing a stream of tweets about Canada and tourist’s wonderful experiences in Canada. Staff show passersby how to interact with the giant screens showing hundreds of images and messages containing Canadian propaganda. This is certainly a better approach than TV…

If you use a Mac your keyboard is most likely aluminum or white. If you use a PC, your keyboard most likely cost around $8 and is either black or beige. Aren’t you fed up with staring at the exact same keyboard as everyone else, tapping away on the same boring plain lettered keys day in, day out? Keyscaper is aiming to spice up your typing time. These aren’t decals or stickers, these are actual keyboards and mice with crazy cool graphics printed directly onto them. These are probably only of interest to those who are capable of touch typing – if you had trouble picking out an apostrophe on your old beige keyboard,…

Pygmies in the Amazonian rain forest are all well aware of the addictive and widespread Facebook game Farmville, so I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining what it is. However, if you thought you were Farmville’s biggest fan, think again. Google has been been quietly investing in Zynga, the developers behind Farmville, to the tune of around $150m. Zynga has also been building venture capital from a number of other firms, including $150m from Softbank Capital and $180m from Digital Sky Technologies. What does Zynga plan to do with all this capital? How could they possibly become more pervasive…