HTC Hero - Android Coming Of Age?

The Telegraph.co.uk asks if the time is now for Android enabled devices. It seems as though Europe is getting on board...

Microsoft Given Stay On Word Injunction - Can Sell Product During Busy Back To School Season

On August 12th a court in Texas ruled that Microsoft had infringed upon the patent of I4i, a small Toronto company, and ordered the software giant to pay $290m in damages and to stop sales of the relevant versions of Word. Microsoft then quickly filed a request to stay the injunction and asked that the courts put the appeal on a fast track so it could be heard quickly. The US court has agreed that Microsoft had met the conditions needed to grant the stay.

"We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23," said Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman, in a statement.

Source: BBC

NASA Tracks Bungalow Sized Space Junk Approaching ISS

NASA does not believe that a 19 square metre piece of a European Ariane 5 rocket, debris from a three year old mission, will not cause the International Space Station and space shuttle Discovery to make evasive maneuvers.

The shuttle is docked with the space station and together are currently circling the Earth at a height of 354 kilometres. The debris is easily tracked because of its size and is expected to get within three kilometres from the station, 8 kilometres closer than previously estimated. If a maneuver is required, a decision will be made during the last hour of a space walk planned for today.

Source: CBC

Gmail Outage Caused By Miscalculation

For several hours yesterday many of Gmail's 150 million users were unable to send or receive email via the service and the online community was all a twitter (couldn't resist).

"We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service," said the firm's Ben Treynor in a blog post.

"Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologise to all of you - today's outage was a big deal, and we're treating it as such."

Treynor blamed the outage on a miscalculation by system engineers who had taken some of the services servers offline for maintenance, routing the traffic to other servers which caved under the increased flow of traffic.

If you were like me, the first sign of trouble arrived in the flood of tweets about the incident on Twitter. It was bigger news than a celebrity death! At least amongst those of whom I follow.

Looking For Work? 10 Twitter Users You Should Follow

Looking for work or dealing with issues at work, Anthony Balderrama a CareerBuilder.com writer provides some guidance regarding who you should be following on Twitter and why. Balderrama's list of 10 career changing tweeters is perhaps a little self serving but what the heck... if it provides you with advice, the interview skills, or the confidence you are lacking to find that job you've been seeking, and it only costs you a 140 characters, it's a steal! Find the list here.

User Generated Hyper Local News Ala Fwix

One year old startup Fwix is releasing an iPhone app later this week to assist would be reporters in capturing the news. “We believe we are the real-time local newswire,” said Darian Shirazi, Fwix’s 22-year-old founder. With local news no longer covering local stories like they once did, Fwix hopes to fill the void with user generated content about car accidents, fires, and grand openings provided by an army of unpaid locals armed with iPhones. According to the New York Times "Mr. Shirazi said Fwix would offer more relevant updates. Its software ranks items based on whether other users submit articles that mention similar events and locations and if the person was at the scene, information it gleans from the iPhone’s GPS location data."