Texting Growing Up
Americans sent nearly 65 billion SMS messages — 160-character "short message service" notes transmitted across mobile phone networks — in the first six months of 2006, nearly double the number sent during the same period last year, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, voice of the industry. The first text message was sent Dec. 3, 1992, when British engineer Neil Papworth sent an early "MERRY CHRISTMAS" from his computer to a colleague's mobile phone. Text started as a message service, a way for companies to efficiently inform customers about things such as problems with the network. A recent survey found that 80% of Americans aged 18 to 29 own cellphones, and 65% of those text message on a regular basis. The practice has become so ubiquitous that the NCAA, which has restricted phone communications with sports recruits in the past, recently announced it is considering imposing text-message limits, too.

Moe Legal Actions Against P2P Users
More than 8,000 alleged file sharers are facing legal action, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. This latest crackdown targets uploaders - people who allegedly put their music files onto peer-to-peer networks. It forms part of the ongoing battle by the recording industry to put an end to illegal downloading. In July, file sharing site Kazaa handed over more than $100m to the music industry in settlements. It followed other sites such as Napster in changing its service to offer legal downloads. The new cases cover file sharers in 17 different countries who have been allegedly using sites including BitTorrent, eDonkey, SoulSeek and WinMX. For the first time legal action is being taken in Brazil, Mexico and Poland The recording industry says it has been heavily hit by illegal downloading and that it has affected producers, writers and performers. Critics of the IFPI's policy argue that the music industry is targeting its natural audience and that the real causes of CD sales declining are DVD sales, computer games sales and pricing.

US surfers drive web traffic surge
A number of major events helped to boost website visits in the US during September, new figures show. Statistics released by comScore show that American consumers flocked to television, sports and news websites during the month. The rise was attributed to the start of the new TV and football seasons, in addition to Americans visiting sites remembering the atrocities of 11 September 2001. Gambling sites also experienced huge gains prior to the move by Congress to outlaw online gambling. Online gambling was the top gaining category in September, recording a 17% gain over August. Leading this category was embattled PartyGaming with 10.9 million US visitors, a 75% increase, followed by SportingBet, the second biggest gaining website during the month with 5.4 million US visitors, up 194%.

Two Apple iPhones Coming
Apple expected to pull a big one out in January: The highly secretive iPhone is supposed to finally take a bow at the show, according to an analyst. “Based upon our early checks, we expect Apple to unveil two models of its widely anticipated cell phones,” Prudential Equity Group analyst Jesse Tortora said in a research note Monday. “We believe the company could introduce the phones at its MacWorld Conference in January.” Mr. Tortora had more details. The analyst said that one of the phones would be a smart phone featuring an integrated keyboard, video, and music capabilities. The other will be a slimmer phone with music capabilities. Also, at least one of them will feature Wi-Fi, he wrote. The analyst noted that concern remains over potential market acceptance and battery life to power all the features. Analysts have so far pointed to a number of signs that Apple’s iPhone is on the way. The latest example was clues found in an update to Apple’s iTunes software.


Interesting Video from GreenPeace using the Apple Commercial format - this is how the site discribes the commercial "Apple knows more about "clean" design than anybody, right? So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product line contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned?"

Here Comes 118 - Ununoctium

American and Russian scientists announced that they had discovered a superheavy element, known as 118, one that has only existed in three different atoms lasting a fraction of a second over months of experiments. Scientists discovered the last naturally occurring element on the periodic table in 1925 but have since sought to create new heavier elements. In the latest experiments, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, bombarded californium with calcium ions to create 118 — the heaviest ever created in such experiments. Scientists said they found their first superheavy element 118 atom in 2002, then found another two atoms in 2005 in a second round of experiments in which they fired 10 to the power of 19 calcium ions at the californium. In the end the atoms of element 118 — also known as ununoctium — lasted 0.9 milliseconds, researchers said. The Livermore-Dubna team says they are now looking to discover element 120, so high school and college science labs may still have to replace their periodic table posters again in the future.

Fun Video from Brainiac, that will show happens when alkali metals come into contact with water.

New Hosting Service
Media Temple launched a major new hosting service this morning called Grid Server. It matches low end shared hosting services in pricing ($20/month) but promises to grow along with the site, manage huge short term traffic spikes without a disruption in service or performance and avoid the “bad neighbor” problem common with shared hosting services. The basic $20 package includes 100 GB of storage, 1 TB of bandwidth and up to 100 individual sites. Customer sites are not hosted on a single (dedicated, shared or virtual) machine. Instead, they are managed by hundreds of clustered servers, and Media Temple monitors the health of the entire grid as well as individual sites. If a site spikes in traffic, performance is unaffected and the site owner will simple be charged for overage on bandwidth and CPU usage. If the grid begins to get stressed, Media Temple simply adds more machines.

Today's Site To Peek At:
TailRank tracks what blogs are writing about, and who’s linking to what, to determine what the major discussions of the day are about. A quick glance at the site will show the reader major breaking news as soon as a few blogs start to write about it. The undisputed leader in this space is TechMeme, which most bloggers check multiple times per day for news. One thing I like about TailRank is that it has a simple search function, which TechMeme inexplicably ignores. That means if you are looking for yesterday’s, or last week’s, major blog news, TailRank is the place to search. Tailrank indexes 150,000 “major” blogs, whereas TechMeme only tracks the largest few thousand blogs.

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