TechWay

What you see above is the Earth Hour style of Bing…which is today’s pictures only with lights off. Quoting ourselves from two posts ago, “it’s nice that Microsoft wants to spread the cause of saving the environment, but for those who did their research will know that it will use more energy to show black on flat panel screen that it does for other colors.”

Click the jump to see how it looked like a few hours ago (or simply scroll down). Read the rest of this entry →

Not too long ago, we made fun at ourselves and Bing for going dark during Earth Hour. Foursquare had their moment yesterday, but it wasn’t for Earth Hour – they forgot to renew their domain name, causing the entire service to plummet into darkness until they did renew their domain name.

Foursquare was lucky in this case since some domain registrars tend to give no notice before they terminate your domain name. In their case, their registar, GoDaddy, did. On March 25, when their domain name expired, GoDaddy pulled their site down and placed parked ads on the site, users were all about on Twitter wondering.

Worth noting is that Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley wanted to name his first startup Foursquare, but the domain name was taken, and he settled on Dodgeball. He neglected a domain name he wanted in the first place. Or he just forgot.

Source: TechCrunch

Just a quick reminder, we’ll have our first downtime  for celebration of Earth Day 2010. Any visitor coming to the site will be told that it’s down for Earth Hour and it’ll be back in a hour. We made fun of Bing’s plan to make their website darker several minutes ago – but we overlooked one thing: our down page had a black background…

Hopefully it’ll only be a few moments that you’ll be on the page, if any, on Earth Hour. Our server will still be humming along smoothly, being shared with 146 other great sites*. Additonally, keep in mind that we will blogging right up onto Earth Hour.

The plugin that allows us to do this is BraveNewCode’s Earth Hour plugin.

*We don’t know if any of those 146 sites are any good, or even malicious. We just said great because they share a server with us – that’s all.

Bing has announced yesterday that it will turn off the lights on their search site by making it darker, similar to what Google did 2008. It’s nice that Microsoft wants to spread the cause of saving the environment, but for those who did their research will know that it will use more energy to show black on flat panel screen that it does for other colors. Microsoft does note this by saying that “While a darker version of our page doesn’t save any energy over the regular version, we wanted to do our part to help spread the word“, but they add insult to injury by not removing the black until 9:30am Pacific tomorrow. This goes great for their company image, but why do the opposite of what you actually want represent?

The image above is Bing’s image for the day, but not what they will use for Earth Hour. The Earth Hour site will be shown at 8:30pm Eastern time.

The Senior VP of Spotify, the popular online music streaming app in Europe, recently announced that Spotify has plans to come to the United States in Q3 2010. Last reports said that Spotify would launch stateside in late 2009, but that promise was broken quite sometime ago. Spotify has over seven million users all across Europe, with over 300,000 of them paying for the $15 premium service that features mobile support and no ads. Spotify’s move means is that anyone can listen to any song from any artist for free, on desktop or mobile phone – a sure way to upset any record label.

If you’re too impatient to wait for Spotify to come to the United States, you can use a clever method of applying for use with a UK proxy that TechCrunch pointed out last year:

Invite yourself from anywhere:
1) go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
2) enter the following URL: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
3) Create your account, for UK postcode – check http://www.postcodesearch.org.uk/

It’s also worth noting that Spotify has passed Apple’s App Store limbo and is available to EU countries that already support Spotify.

We’re fixing, optimizing, enhancing, making better, and improving some stuff on our sever. That’s why we haven’t posted anything yet…

Don’t worry this won’t take long!

(Image from: It’s Furious Balancing)

Taking a step forward, probably in response to CTIA 2010, Apple has now begun selling contract-free iPhones in the United States at list price. List price means $499 for 8GB, $599 for 16GB and $699 for 32GB. The iPhones would still be tied to AT&T and require their SIM cards, but you don’t need to show proof that you have AT&T as your current wireless provider to get them this way. Original report speculated that the phones would be sold unlocked, and proved to be inaccurate minutes before us posting this. Let down, yes, but now you don’t need to lock yourself into AT&T clutches, since “everyone knowns it takes 2 minutes to unlock them”.

At the time of writing, Apple’s online store still requires a two year contract. Customers can pick up one iPhone a day only. Sorry for your multiple impulse buys.

Source: 9to5Mac

Early adopters, get ready – Walmart has begun to sell the HTC HD2 on T-Mobile a couple days early. The phone is scheduled to officially launch in the United States on Wednesday for $199 with a two year contract. People not dismayed about Microsoft confirming that there will not be an Windows Phone 7 Series upgrade have already posted unboxing videos on YouTube detailing the phone in all its goodness.

Update: More videos! Check them out after break. Read the rest of this entry →

Google has just finished up the heat situation in China by choosing to abandon the entire market come April 10, but that doesn’t mean they have more “enemies” to worry about. This little seagull in the UK was a little too fond of the Google Street View truck and decided to hang out with the little camera. Camera not pleased.

At the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, said that the company was ready to completely pull out of China if tensions between the country and the company remained tight. Things have not changed between the two, and word comes from a Chinese Google employee that Google is preparing to leave China on April 10 and potentially announce its exit strategy in four days. Google has not confirmed the validity of the report and declines to comment on anything related to pulling out of China. The Mountain View company has had conflicts with the Chinese government after it decided to unfilter its search results, against the dictation of the government.

With Google preparing to pulling out of the Chinese search engine market, the surface of the market has changed completely. Since the January 12 announcement, Badiu’s shares have climbed 46% while Google’s fell 4%. Baidu is Google’s major competition in Asian countries such as China.

Via Bloomberg