I read and heard various opinions in the past few days since the “iPhone dev-team” released the updated tools for doing the things above. (Granted, unlocking the 3G iPhone isn’t yet possible.) Most of the people obviously think these things don’t matter anymore.

But they still do, maybe even more than before. It’s not about the new phone, but the old. Apple sold millions of these and they won’t go away soon. Especially the people exchanging their old for the new will want to sell their phones, for example on eBay. Are the buyers of these old phones going to use a new official plan by AT&T, T-Mobile, etc? They’ll probably want to stick to their current provider.

If they want to do this, there needs to be at least the activation and unlock, which now exists. Jailbreaking? Not so much. The App Store still has its problems, but once everything is working smoothly the jailbreak apps will only be a small niche market for apps that Apple doesn’t allow. But how long do you think Apple will keep the route of, for example, not allowing a video recording app? My guess is as good as yours, but with a growing user base the pressure for obvious applications like that will increase. The same goes for true navigation solutions like TomTom.

Unlocking will also stay important because of the growing number of business users who stay in various countries and have different SIM cards to avoid the crazy roaming charges. Or think about how many people you know who already have two phones. Why not use the 3G phone for surfing while you can save battery life on the old phone you use just for calls?

So, activation hacks and unlocks are here to stay. The phones will change owners who might want to change providers.

This post was written entirely on the phone using the WordPress app. It works but it’s not a great experience.

I just read an interesting column by Dvorak over at PC Magazine about the increasing size of crap on our drives. One of the things I’m missing in his article is the size of todays operating systems. I manage to remember the times of Windows 3.1 and Dos which came on a bunch of floppy disks. Today we need DVDs to install our OS and applications.

Also look at games, years ago a CD was enough to ship an awesome timekiller. Today they arrive in the form of dual-layer DVDs or a Blu-ray Disc. We just don’t really care about the size of an application (or game) anymore. Just insert a new drive and install away. Drives are getting larger and at the same time the cost per gigabyte is coming down. (more…)

All I have to say is: Facebook finally noticed it. I already wrote about StudiVZ and Facebook a couple of times. It was just a matter of time until this had to happen. What leaves me wondering is why it took Facebook so long.

I guess this is what most people are experiencing at the moment. The way from .Mac to MobileMe has been a rocky road since yesterday morning. Some of people aren’t even able to access their email, if they’re lucky they can at least read it.

I tried to sign up about twelve hours, now I got it almost working. Web access only works by clicking on IsMobileMeUp.com and then waiting for a few seconds for the redirect. Directly accessing me.com still doesn’t work for me.

This calendar might be a great idea and it’s looking awesome too, but, problem is, I couldn’t stop popping the bubbles. Or can you? Everyone I’ve seen using bubblewrap felt the urge to pop the bubbles and not just one or two; every single air-filled chamber. Either by jumping on it, twisting it - which by the way destroys the fun of it - or rolling over it with the chair.

See, one would need lots of calendars to even get through a single week. Thinking about this “problem”, this might be a really good business idea.

(BubbleCalendar via Gizmodo)

The short version:
This had to happen and thank god it did!

The long version:
When I (and several other people) had the chance to review the first gen Drobo we all came to the conclusion that USB on a device like the Drobo was just a bad idea since USB is too slow for this. The people at Drobo just said that they are listening to the customers (and reviewers). Today they kept their promise and released the second gen Drobo with Firewire 800.
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So, meinVZ now made it to 1 million registered users. It still is a totally closed system which is almost identical to StudiVZ. Maybe at some point they’ll notice that openess isn’t such a bad thing. At least they allow their users to have friends between the otherwise closed VZ networks.

From kress.de:

Four months after the launch the most recent network now has one million users, monthly page impressions are at 840 million. Less than 50 percent moved over from StudiVZ. StudiVZ, meinVZ and SchülerVZ now have 10 million users. [..] The company will generate “healthy double-digit millions” in ad-revenue this year, CEO Marcus Riecke told the FTD.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: changing your stylesheet from time to time won’t keep the users coming to your site - suing people for using two letters (”VZ”) of your domain name won’t either.

On another note the CEO stated he thinks the “market for social networks is saturated”.

For all of you wondering how iPhone 2.0 will look on the PC/Mac and the iPhone itself including the App Store, wonder no more. Paul Thurrott got his hands on “near-final versions” of iPhone 2.0 and iTunes 7.7 and gave us a short preview of the things to come on July, 11th. Watch out for upcoming (p)reviews of MobileMe and the iPhone 3G itself!

Anyone want to place bets on how long it takes until the new software/baseband is unlocked and everyone will be able to do it again. For the old iPhone that is, doesn’t really make sense for the 3G since you now have to activate in the store rather than taking it home and “activating it there”.

Following some dear friends, I hereby also declare my resignation from not working at Yahoo. It was a great time with the other, mostly clever people around here. Some people working in positions, in which they had and still have no idea what they had to do. What a week. Other people having had great ideas and also not working here any longer. Let’s hope the best for the reorganization.

It was a great time, not working for Yahoo.

There hasn’t been a post about Yahoo on TechCrunch for the past 5 minutes. Let’s see if we can change that.

Edit: For those who are too lazy to create their own resignations from not working with Yahoo can use YahooRezinr.

Ich hatte letztens das Problem, dass ich für ein besonderes Ereignis schnell ein passendes Objektiv brauchte und dazu noch einen Blitz. Kaufen war nicht, weil das Geld dann doch etwas knapp war für das gesuchte. Was bei Autos funktioniert muss es doch auch bei Kamera-Equipment geben? Naja, ganz so einfach war es dann leider nicht. Viele Foto-Geschäfte vermieten zwar auch Kameras, Objektive und Zubehör, wollen aber meist neben teuren Tagespreisen den vollen Preis als Kaution, am besten noch in Bar.
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