Sunday, July 17, 2011

Sina Weibo Announces to Launch Its English Version Worldwide, Directly Competing With Twitter Inc.

It is hard to believe that there are still other microblogging services in this world other than Twitter. But one of these unheard of microblogging companies, Sina Weibo from China, is planning to soon make its English version and be as popular in the English-speaking world as it is in the Chinese-speaking world. It was quoted in the The Next Web blog, which had sourced a Chinese-language site TechWeb, that Sina Weibo (pronounced ‘way-bore’) is “actively preparing” to soon release its platform with the support of English language. This English-version of the service will put it in direct and fierce competition with the Twitter, the world-leading microblogging service of United States. It was stated in the article that this English version will be available online as soon as two to three months.
Twitter logo initialImage via WikipediaMany analysts are measuring as to how much potential damage the English version of Sina Weibo can do to Twitter. It is a tough call and the prediction is not so easy to make, though according to the statistics Twitter may need to start worrying about the rising problem. Sina Weibo, seen by the analysts to be an amalgam of both Twitter and Facebook, currently houses almost 140 million users, whereas as the company hopes to reach around 200 million by the end of this year. Comparing that number to Twitter’s global audience of more than 300 million users, only around 20 million of which are actually from the United States, marks the uncertainty.

Official Biography of Steve Jobs Available for Pre-Order

Cover of "iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest S...Cover via Amazon
A biography of Steve Jobs, which has been officially authorized by Mr. Jobs personally, has just been made available on Amazon.com for pre-ordering. This book, entitled ‘iSteve: The Book of Jobs’ is available to pre-order for any Apple user from iBookstore as well. Both the retailing sources have coined the date of 6th March 6, 2012 to be the official release date, which is almost around nine months from now. The author of this biography, Walter Isaacson, has a very impressionable portfolio of biographies of many famous personalities in the past. He has penned the biography of public figures like Benjamin Franklin: An American LifeEinstein: His Life and Universe and Kissinger: A Biography.
Amazon.com and iBookStore both described the book, at the product description section, to be accredited by one of the well-experienced authors of our times, Walter Isaacson. It is exclusively mentioned that ‘iSteve: The Book of Jobs,’ has given an extraordinary story of both the professional and personal lives of Jobs, by the hand of Isaacson. It is stated that the information has been “drawn from his three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson” along with his family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors too.
The price of the book, for pre-orders only, has been set to $16.50 for the physical copy, and $14.99 for the Kindle or iBooks edition. Steve Jobs has always been admired for his successfulness in protecting his private and personal life from his professional and public life. This is a key factor, that an official biography of such a person would be even more interesting. Many aspects of Steve Jobs’s biography have already been made public due to previously written books including Fire in the Valley and The Little Kingdom. But previously just one book, iCon: Steve Jobs, was an authorized and official copy and this will be the second.

Recently Grown Flickr Alternative, 500px, Raises $525K in Series A

Owing to the towering complaints by the Flickr users, its Toronto-based rival company, 500px, has gotten the opportunity to grow its consumer base substituting the Flickr’s consumer base. The number of users of 500px has risen from 1000 in 2009 to almost up to 85 thousand users today. Even more indicatively, around 45 thousand of these users just signed up for the service in last three months only. So after almost a rough rising since two years, now that the company is on its feet, and even startup has announced that it will be making a $525K Series A round in investment from High Line Venture Capital, Deep Creek Capital and ff Venture Capital.
Wordmark of FlickrImage via Wikipedia
According to one of the founders of the company, Oleg Gutsol, “The idea of making 500px arose from Evgeny [Tchebotarev] and I having difficulties with the current available platforms — there wasn’t a good service that would allow us to display our photos is a visually pleasing way and be easy to use. I think we tried every somewhat popular service online and still were not quite satisfied. So we decided to build one ourselves.” While along with the second co-founder, Ian Sobolev, Gutsol translated his Livejournal-based photo sharing community to their freshly created current site on Halloween 2009. It had very little following, if any, and today after attracting the frustrated consumers of Flickr, the website is gathering optimistic praises from everywhere.
Even the big names of the Flickr community, including Thomas Hawk, Troy Holden and Ivan Makarov have transformed their photo-sharing service. While the flocks of Flickr users make the change as the website gew 60% in just the past 30 days only. Consequently the website boasts its huge 2.5 million page views in just the last month. Even after being expanded such largely, 500px is determined to stay loyal to its initial aims, which was to allow the photographers to have larger audiences. ”We encourage young talent,” stated Gutsol Tchebotarev. He added that “It is not uncommon to see someone new joining our site and have their photo appear in our popular feed in a matter of hours.”

US Officials state 'deep concerned' regarding Syria's Internet cut

Bashar al-Assad, President of the Syrian Arab ...Image by james.gordon6108 via Flickr
It was officially declared on Saturday, by the officials of the United States government, that it is highly concerned and keeping a sharp eye on the Internet shutdown activates in Syria. The secretary of State, Hillary Clinton passed a threatening statement against the government trying to hush the protesters; she stated that the government "cannot prevent the transition currently taking place." She declared that "we are deeply concerned by reports that Internet service has been shut down across much of Syria, as have some mobile communication networks." The U.S. has been always debating for freedom of speech, hence indirectly supporting all the deadly anti-government protests rage across the Middle Eastern nations, Hillary added that "we condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people's exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association."
According to the collected information from local sources, the Internet lines were non-functional in Damascus and the coastal city of Latakia on Friday. Whereas it was estimated by a US-based Internet monitoring firm that almost around two-third of the whole country did not had access to internet due to the outage of network. Clinton pointed out that the government of Syria, under the command of President Bashar al-Assad, "has a history of restricting the Internet in an attempt to prevent the Syrian people from accessing and sharing information.” One of the elite U.S. diplomat claimed that “The Syrian government must understand that attempting to silence its population cannot prevent the transition currently taking place. We believe that even in the face of significant obstacles, the Syrian people will, and should, find a way to make their voices heard.”

Syrian President Also Suspends Internet Access In The Country To Suppress The Risen Protesters

Billboard with portrait of Assad and the text ...Image via WikipediaThe internet traffic in Syria was suspended unannounced and abruptly by the orders of the Syrian government, just in attempt to suppress the fast-growing revolt in the Middle Eastern nation. According to an internet traffic monitory firm, Renesys, the blockage “starting at 3:35 UTC today, lead to approximately two thirds of all Syrian networks being unreachable from the global Internet.” It was published on the official website of Renesys that “over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.”
Almost every mobile phone operator and Internet service provider (ISP) was largely affected by this unreasonable act. It was stated in today’s issue of The Wall Street Journal, that all the government-run websites of Syria, like the Oil Ministry’s website, were still operational even at the time of the suspension. Syria has kept a sporadically spread ban on the major online social networking services, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, for the last several months. But this time the internet was not blocked for only these handfuls of websites, but the full time internet access was suspended in the most of the country.
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