Advocacy groups urge FTC to bar Google-AdMob deal (Reuters)

When Apple Fanboys Rap

Unless you’ve been living offline for the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard and/or seen “I’m On A Boat,” Lonely Island’s mock hip hop song/video. Today brings a response to it in the form of a group of Apple fanbois rapping about their love of using Apple products. They even have one character autotuned up, just like T-Pain in the “I’m On A Boat” version. No word on if they used the I Am T-Pain iPhone app to get the effect, but a major plus if so.

It’s pretty standard stuff: Love Macs, love iPods, love iPhones — hate PCs, hate Zunes, hate drivers and viruses, etc. Fairly well made, this isn’t nearly as bad as the Bing Jingle, but it’s still a little cringe-inducing. Sample line: “I’m pluggin girls, you at work pluggin in devices.”

These guys clearly have an agenda as they run the site Switch to Mac — you can probably guess what that’s about. This video is technically the follow-up to their “Mac or PC” rap video.

[thanks Banyan]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

NYC iPhone Fraud Epidemic Solved! AT&T Web Site Selling iPhones to New Yorkers Again … [Digital Daily]

Looks like AT&T (T) has gone and “modified its promotion and distribution channels” again. Either that or it’s gotten a better handle on the “online fraudulent activity” that prevented it from selling Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone online to customers with New York City zip codes. The carrier’s Web site is once again accepting iPhone orders from potential customers living in Manhattan. I was just able to initiate two orders for the iPhone 3GS using New York city zip codes (click on image below to enlarge) — one in mid-town (10016), another in East Harlem (10029).

This, not 24 hours after company representatives claimed that AT&T wasn’t selling iPhones online to New Yorkers because of “online fraudulent activity” or because AT&T “periodically chooses to modify [its] promotions and distribution channels” or some combination of the two.

That AT&T reversed course on this matter so quickly and without comment suggests that this entire incident may have been one of those middle-of-the-org-chart missteps that went unnoticed by upper management until it blew up in the media.

What’s perhaps most astonishing about this entire episode is how willing people were to buy into the idea, put forth by Consumerist, that AT&T had actually stopped selling the iPhone online in Manhattan because of data congestion issues.

Amazon: E-book sales surpass paper on Christmas day - Macworld

The Guardian

Amazon: E-book sales surpass paper on Christmas day Macworld In a press release on its site, Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos mentions that the Kindle was the “most-gifted product”in the company's history; although the release makes no mention of actual sales numbers, ... E-Books Beat Regular Books On XmasInformationWeek Amazon shares up after Kindle boosts e-book salesReuters Amazon.com Deliversmsnbc.com InternetRetailer.com -Consumer Affairs -The Guardian all 263 news articles »

TenYears: Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade

It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present the first installment of our “Of the Decade” lists.

Winner: The Trek Thumbdrive

In 2000, something strange happened. Overnight, we changed the way we carried data. Those of us coming up in the 1990s first used floppy disks then CDs and then Zip drives and generally the transfer of large amounts of data was a Sisyphean task. I personally still remember sending our entire university newspaper paper to the printers on a Zip disk.

That year marked the launch of the Trek ThumbDrive, the world’s first usable USB storage device. You could slip it into a computer, drag over a few files, and pop it back out. You could drop it into a bag or pocket and it was cheap enough to lose – at least in theory. Thumbdrives would max out at about 256MB in 2000, but that soon changed. Now we can carry 32GB in our pockets – more than the entire computer system running that selfsame student newspaper back in 1997.

If you’re asking why this made our gadget of the decade, think about it: the same flash technology in these drives is now ubiquitous. We have MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail. We have MP3 players as thin as a few business cards. Flash memory is so popular that’s it’s become scarce, with manufacturers buying up huge stocks prior to launching new product. It has removed delicate moving parts from the design of almost all electronics.

Few devices in our purview have changed the way we work, play, and communicate in the way flash memory and thumbdrives have. They made massive amounts of storage available and disposable. They, in a real sense, changed the world.

Runners Up

The Danger Sidekick Before 2002 you either had a feature phone – essentially a phone that you could make calls and maybe play some Java games – or a smartphone – a phone that could run applications. Danger introduced the T-Mobile Sidekick on October 1, 2002 and changed all that. The phone let you send email and instant message, all in a package far more accessible – feature-wise and price-wise – than any smartphone. It was, in a sense, the first mainstream smartphone for the masses and it became a longtime fan favorite for years. Even after some high-profile problems the Sidekick is still going strong.

Gmail Free email was nothing new. Odd ways of organizing your email was nothing new. What was new was all of the storage space Google offered to the average Joe, forcing others to follow suit. Gone were the days of “premium” webmail accounts – you got 1GB. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it: With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. 2MB? What did we do before Google?

Sony Reader Before the Kindle, before the Nook, the Sony Reader was the only ereader in town. It didn’t do much of note nor was it particularly popular, but it paved the way for competitors and it showed Sony that they’d have to step up their game if they wanted to even be on the field. They were the first movers but they didn’t get the advantage, an parable for any and all manufacturers out there with something amazingly new.

Our take

Matt: Let’s not forget the Harmony Remote either. Before these Internet-connected remotes came along, you would have to spend hours programming a universal remote with codes printed in size 4 font. The innovative little company was eventually bought out by Logitech, but thankfully not much as changed.

Doug: I have to agree with the T-Mobile Sidekick here. I can’t remember the last time I had a bigger tech boner about a particular product. The thing that made it so unbelievable was that it wasn’t priced outrageously at the time. If memory serves, the hardware was $250 and my monthly service was $30 for voice and $20 for unlimited data. I did a lot of web development back then and I still remember the first time I used my Sidekick to add a new user to one of my client’s e-mail systems while waiting for my luggage halfway across the country. Unreal. And never, ever, ever have regular people ogled a phone as much as they did the first Sidekick. There was nothing like it — that swiveling screen, especially.

Devin: I just want to throw my weight behind Gmail and cloud apps here. I may not even use them, but I see them as being fuel for the next generation of computing. Flash memory has for sure enabled a huge amount of devices in the last decade, but cloud apps will power the next decade.

Greg: As the resident mobile nut, it’s only appropriate for me to consider something from the mobile space to be the most innovative. I could cheat and default to the iPhone purely for the sake of stoking a flamewar in the comments below, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll go with SMS – otherwise known as text messaging; while technically a product of the 80s, SMS truly came to fruition in the naughts. In the past 9 years, we’ve gone from sending less than half a billion texts a year to over 80 billion – and that’s in the US alone. It paved the way for Facebook updates, tweets, and microblogs, killed the long form letter, and has completely overhauled how we, as a populace, communicate.

Nicholas: I sincerely believe the word “innovative” has lost all meaning and should be eliminated from the English language. I have no time for it, and it seeing it instantly causes my renal glands to secrete exotic poisons. Call me when someone invents a simple water purifier that can treat water on the spot. That’d be helpful. Oh, and innovative.

Time-lapse video of the Northern Lights

I've seen the northern lights once, at a cabin weekend in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. It's a strange thing to experience, especially at that latitude, where the lights aren't as in-your-face as this photo. For the first minute or so, you kind of wonder whether you're hallucinating. Then you realize that everybody else is standing perfectly still and silent, staring at the exact same point in the sky.

This time-lapse video (you'll have to follow the link to watch) shows a far more spectacular display over the Ringebu Fjell in southern Norway, captured by photographer Bernd Proschold. The moment when the clouds clear away, and the lights burst into view is absolutely breathtaking.

The World At Night: A Glimpse of the Far North

(Thanks, Chris Combs!)