http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=_6PpLA2tH7w The Rapping Windows Phone 7 Fangirls were just a pack of ad women in search of some attention? Not surprising, I suppose. Though hearing the main, um, emcee’s side of the story as the focal point of commenter rage is interesting, to say the least. More »

Gizmodo

Reuniting with former pals and kinfolks is the uppermost concern for most people nowadays. Former girlfriends, schoolmates and relations that have gone missing amongst the most searched individuals. The big question is how the heck do we try to trace them.

What you encounter when trying to find a friend

One of the big problems we face when trying to do a search for a person is the fact that they may have got married or just changed their name. Changing life status makes people even decide to assume new names. It becomes a hassle to trace people when this has happened.For more searches you can make use of links like learning to find someone for free with name and birthday.

Do try to spend a few moments thinking about the person you’re trying to find and try to recall any details you can about their personality, like nicknames, favourite songs, maybe even try to remember a middle name or where they were born and date of birth. If you know this it will also help you with your search.

Where to carry your search

The obvious place to start searching is probably Google. In the Google search bar, key in the names and relevant nickname, you can imagine could help. The big problem here though is that unless they have a particularly high-profile on the internet then they are not going to show up in Google’s results. To see what I mean by this, just try typing your own name into Google. If you are active, you will be displayed with a huge list of similar names, if you aren’t then you wont appear. simply ways to find a friend free.

Anyway back to finding our old friends, if you are not having much success with the name then try adding the name of the town where you think they may live or have worked, and see if this works.

Sites to consider

MySpace and Facebook is one of the social sites you will likely discover that she an account in. It is particularly helpful to search by a person’s nickname at these sites because people do tend to hang on to these for most of their lives. People search services are one of the places to resort to if the above networking sites doesn’t yield the desired outcomes. The majority of these sites charges a fee for a search, and they are capable of finding the name even if they are the same. Check Street Addresses.

A couple of years ago, developer and designer Tom Armitage set up a Twitter account for one of London’s most famous inanimate objects, Tower Bridge. The idea was to give this famous piece of architecture a little personality, through a mashup that broadcast a message every time the iconic bridge raised or lowered to let ships pass into the city. That was pretty much it: a Twitter bot. But it was a gentle reminder of the world working around us that made the account beloved among a certain group of users. In a way, it’s as if @towerbridge was the city’s heartbeat.

Over the weekend, however, Armitage discovered that ownership of the account had been unceremoniously stripped from him and handed over to Tower Bridge Exhibition, a company that runs events inside the bridge buildings. In a post on his blog, he briefly outlined what had happened.

The account has just been gazumped, and a little, talking part of the city has been killed… I’m more than a little furious; after all, all the URLs that link to it are now incorrect, all the lifts, all the (puppet-mastered) banter is gone. Cool URLs don’t change, and these have just gone. And in their place: marketing.

In truth, it turns out that miscommunication was to blame, at least in part. Armitage later discovered that he had received a message from Twitter telling him that he faced losing the account — he just didn’t see it. Without a response from him, and facing a request from somebody who claimed to be the rightful, trademarked owner of “Tower Bridge”, Twitter apparently decided to wipe the account clean and hand over ownership. Was it the right thing to do?

Twitter’s policy is fairly standard, and is used to protect individuals and businesses from having their identities hijacked — after all, there have been plenty of fake Twitter feeds, impersonations and unofficial accounts over the years, some of them libelous. In fact, a couple of years ago one enterprising developer even sold @cnnbrk to CNN, despite the fact that CNN could have simply lodged a trademark claim against him. There’s little suggestion that Twitter should do anything different when it comes to squatting or deliberately trying to pass off an unofficial account as the real thing.

But @towerbridge’s supporters argue that’s not what was going on here. There was no attempt to pretend that it was official, and they say the account could easily have tweaked the account to make it even more obvious.

Some of them focus on the idea of Twitter as a representative of The Man. British designer Andy Budd argues that a presumption of guilt marks a bad day for Twitter. Meanwhile, comics writer Warren Ellis says it’s a great example of conflict between the owners of a city and those who inhabit it. Others question the appropriateness of the original application. The BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones, for example, wonders whether the new owners of the account wiped Armitage’s work, and whether they realize they have removed something interesting and much-liked.

In fact, there’s also the question of whether the initial trademark claim itself was valid. According to the U.K. Intellectual Property Office, there are actually dozens of companies that have trademarked the name “Tower Bridge” in Britain across a number of different fields. They include an IT business, a scientific instrument company, a leather goods manufacturer, a spirits and wine company and a brand of tobacco. The company that took over the @towerbridge account hasn’t actually trademarked “Tower Bridge” at all, but “Tower Bridge Events” and “Tower Bridge Exhibition” and “Tower Bridge, the Venue.” That name has only been secured for particular activities, none of which seem to relate to the information the old @towerbridge used to provide.

From the outside, this is a storm in a thimble-sized teacup. But whether or not it was right to kick Armitage off, the whole episode points to several bigger questions that are worth considering. Does Twitter’s trademark policy work? Should it improve verification? And, above all, how much is it prepared to invest in protecting users of all stripes?

One major stumbling block here, as I see it, is that Twitter’s size and popularity is not yet commensurate with its income. The business has around 200 million users, huge media exposure, a staff of around 500 and substantial funding. Yet the company’s revenues are still small. Faced with an onslaught of legal challenges from trademark owners, it’s always going to be tempting to keep costs down and err on the side of the litigious business owner rather than the individual user.

Tower Bridge is just a tiny example of that — there are dozens of cases happening at any given time, whether it’s adulterous sportsmen trying to block Twitter users from talking about him, or local governments chasing their critics, or national administrations trying to discover details about controversial users. Giving more room to trademark owners might be selling out, but it’s also a sensible business decision — the trouble is, users don’t always see why they should be the ones losing out.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Flickr user Slideshow Bob

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising
• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends

The eye-catching P220 ultraportable isn’t the only system LG is showcasing at Computex — the Korean manufacturer is also gracing Intel’s booth with the W300, an all-in-one with a few tricks up its sleeve. Not only is that 23-inch display using a beautiful IPS panel (full HD), but it’s even 3D-capable and includes a touchscreen in some versions. Yes, this isn’t your father’s PC. A variety of processors are available including Intel’s Core i7 with room for up to 8 GB of DDR3 RAM. Some models are paired with AMD’s Radeon HD 6650M video card. Blu-ray is an option, and storage maxes out at 750GB. The computer takes some visual cues from Apple’s iMac (the stand), but still manages to have its own personality. The display is quite thin, and while the model we played with didn’t appear to offer the touchscreen option, it did feature a Core i5 CPU. Take a look at the gallery below, and hit the break for our hands-on video and LG’s press release.

Continue reading LG W300 all-in-one hands-on at Computex 2011 (video)

LG W300 all-in-one hands-on at Computex 2011 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments
Engadget

Continue reading Olympus’ LS-20M boasts dual mics and 1080p recording, split personality

Olympus’ LS-20M boasts dual mics and 1080p recording, split personality originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 May 2011 18:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Pocketlint  |  Olympus  | Email this | Comments
Engadget

The world has long held something of an obsession with roulette because it is such an exciting casino game. Because of that land casino popularity, it is easy to see that this would be such a popular online game and it has become so. For those who love to play the web based version of roulette, it is natural to wonder if there might be some sort of way by which they could influence the odds of the game in their favor.

Before you decide on using a roulette strategy, though, you really do need to make sure you have your priorities straight and are honest with yourself. If you simply want a thrilling time and do not care about profiting from play then an online roulette strategy is not going to be for you. If you think that the strategy is going to be your best road then you will really need to be more of a person who cares about the money they win rather than the luck they might experience.

If you have sincerely decided that winning the money is what you enjoy the most then you will get a great deal more out of your experience using a winning strategy. That is due to the fact that the actual strategy has much more to do with managing your reactions to the roulette wheel than it does to deciding anything about whether or not the time is right to place a large bet. This is about your bankroll and not advice regarding your personality because if you want roulette success then you have to build your bankroll over time, not in short bursts.

Keeping your moves tight is a real key to finding profits by playing roulette on the web. What is meant by tight is that you must keep your risks to the minimum possible level so that you are never splurging with a bet based on a hunch that you will strike it rich. The way people think leads them to believe that they can make some sort of guess at which result the roulette is about to show, but math proves that there is absolutely no way to be able to do this.

That’s right, pure mathematics shows us that there is no correlation between previous roulette spins and future results, not even a powerful computer can predict the right answer. So place your bets without ever even thinking of which number and colour just came up. Keep those bets very small and spread them out so that your bankroll will last as long as possible.

This is the way to keep your losses low and your wins actually effective towards building your bankroll. Playing the odds in this manner is the correct strategy to win at online roulette. Build that bankroll of yours this way and you will definitely wind up succeeding.