links for 2009-06-22

"Colabolo is an Adobe Air app that soft-launched a few days ago and wants to simplify the way tasks in a team are assigned, managed and resolved." It looks like an interesting project.

"When you rollover one item of your menu, the font-size expand to 225%, the color fade to yellow and the other items are giving more space to the hovered item, when you roll out it will take its place back in the menu."

"President Barack Obama says the US is "fully prepared" for a possible missile test by North Korea over the Pacific."

"New approaches, mostly on the Internet, are what increasingly matter. Marcel Fenez, head of the media practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that during the current economic downturn, a lot of paid advertising would be lost for good, separating this downturn from previous ones, when ad spending recovered relatively quickly. After a 12 percent plunge this year, global ad spending will not climb back to 2007 levels for five years, Mr. Fenez said." Servicing the Internet is also cheaper.

"An Italian prosecutor has laid criminal charges against the four, who include David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, and Peter Fleischer, its top privacy executive, after footage of a disabled boy being bullied by other boys was broadcast on Google Video. The prosecutor, Francesco Cajani, argued that Google should have acted to prevent the broadcast of the footage and that by failing to do so it breached the disabled boy’s privacy. Google maintained that it removed the video as soon as the company became aware of it, and that the group had co-operated with investigators in identifying the four boys involved." And how is Google supposed to prevent videos like that from ever being uploaded? How are you supposed to find out the difference between a skit and an actual violent act, beyond checking manually.

"Iranian authorities have deployed thousands of security officers on the streets of Tehran, after a week of mass protests over a disputed election. Witnesses said there were no rallies in the capital on Sunday, a day after 10 people were reported killed in clashes between police and protesters. A number of alleged protest leaders are reported to have been arrested." Looks like the Iranian authorities might be gaining the upper hand, this next week or so is if possible more crucial than before.

"And while some people hate that, I think it’s great, because the service is providing a very, very valuable service for spreading information about what is going on in Iran right now. But none of that matters if CNN cannot use its Twitter account correctly to disseminate that news." Oh mass media.

"Here's a question: If you're building a video-capable successor to the wildly successful iPhone 3G and you choose new hardware that supports 720p-resolution video recording, then why do you cripple it to just VGA resolution? The answer is a mystery, but we can guess one probable cause. It's the same reason why the 3G S's new processor, which is capable of 833MHz speeds, is choked down to just 600MHz: Battery life. Apple's aware that the iPhone's battery is a bit small, and protects the battery performance as much as possible–its quoted as the chief reason there's no background app capability on the phone. 720p video recording and a faster processor would just eat into the battery a whole lot more"