Thanks to everyone who entered our BlackBerry competition and completed the survey to win a BlackBerry Bold. We’ve chucked all the completed surveys in a hat, jiggled it around a little and come up with the winner (just kidding TPL guys; we have a highly automated lottery system, as promised). So congratulations Tiani! Your smartphone is on its way.
While its merger process with Vodafone rumbles along, 3 is still pushing ahead with plans to allow roaming onto Telstra’s Next G network. If a leaked price list is to be believed, that change will also make its data services somewhat more affordable.
Well, that sucks. First announced last October, BlackBerry has finally rolled out its App World application — but Australia isn’t getting to play.
Vodafone and 3′s merger plans still have to overcome one fairly big stumbling block — getting approval from the ACCC, which is worried that the two phone companies merging might reduce competition and force up prices.
Microsoft has announced that it plans to shut down its Encarta encyclopedia web sites by October and dump its CD-based versions as well, effectively conceding the online reference market to community-driven sites like Wikipedia. In traffic terms, that battle would seem to have been won a long time ago. Case in point: my visiting the Encarta AU site to check if it was still there must be the first time I’ve visited the site in five years or more, while it would be a rare day I didn’t use Wikipedia. (The local site hasn’t yet reflected the planned closure, but I’d expect that to happen in the next few days.)
Encarta ShutdownTwitter has made a slight adjustment to its web interface, replacing the previous @Replies button with an @username link which shows any message which features your username preceded by an @, rather than just those where it’s at the beginning. It’s potentially a useful change, though I can’t help thinking making this feature less buggy (in my usage, it tends not to work at least half the time) might not have been a better priority.
Twitter BlogThere’s just a few hours to go until we give away a Blackberry Bold to one lucky Lifehacker. So remember, for your chance to win the smartphone, valued at $985, complete this small survey and be sure to leave your email address on the last question.
Telstra-owned BigPond is Australia’s largest ISP, which means that its glitches tend to affect more people than anyone else. Suzanne Tindal at ZDNet reports that a number of NSW and Victorian customers were left without access to email and other services over the weekend, though Telstra claims those services were due to be restored by Monday evening. Have you been hit by the outage? Is it still a problem? Share your experience in the comments.
Telstra fights with BigPond glitch [ZDNet]Ever wanted to share your email address with someone in a public forum, but don’t want every spambot in the world adding your email address to their database? Scr.im can help. Scr.im is a very simple service that creates small, custom URLs for sharing your email with real people. It works like this: You add your email address to Scr.im, it gives you a small URL—like this one—that requires you to pass a captcha to view the email address. That’s all Scr.im does—which means you can file this one into the handy, single-use category for webapps—a category we love dearly.
Scr.im [via Emily Chang]When he’s not blowing things up, making models, or otherwise holding the job you wish you had, Adam Savage is serious about personal projects. We chatted with him about MythBusters, managing time, and other geeky stuff. Photo by ensceptico.
