Alex Reid

Nike and New Balance have plans on making 3D-printed shoes, according to this article.

This kind of stuff excites me. It reminds me of the replicator in Star Trek. In fact, you can get your own replicator for a cool two grand. Next up, finding designs on Pirate Bay!

Microsoft has a cute advert acknowledging the hate-on for its Internet Explorer web browser. The company has recently won praise for its attempts to have Internet Explorer version 9 (IE9) adhere to newer web standards. The company wants to badly kill off the memories of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).

No surprise comments have been disabled on the youtube video page, and people are trolling to dislike the video.

Many popular web services went down last night due to a massive thunderstorm that knocked out power to most of the East Coast, including Amazon Web Services, which hosts much of the data for some of the big social media heavyweights.

Instagram, the photo-sharing service recently bought by Facebook, said on Twitter, “Due to severe electrical storms, our host had a power outage, no data is lost – we’ve been working through the night to restore service.”

Netflix and Pinterest, which were both completely offline for most of the evening, also took to Twitter to tell users the status of the failure. Foursquare was partly affected and updated its own status blog to tell customers.

Amazon was tight-lipped about the situation, beyond admitting that the failure had happened at a server facility in Virginia and it was because of the lighting storm in the area. It wasn’t until this morning, before lunch, that the company said it had managed to get some services back online.

Things happen, most people agree, however the question remains why didn’t Amazon have a backup plan or have a better redundant network setup. Despite the company being quiet on their data centre setup, this electrical engineer says that over 70% of their servers are housed in the Virginia data centre, where the storm hit.

~ Source and notes from NY Times Blog

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) developed the New generic Top-Level Domain Program, offering companies the chance to apply for their own domain name extension.

Right now there are 22 common domain extensions like dot-com, dot-net and dot-org, and 280 country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, like dot-ca for Canada or dot-fr for France.

The new program expects to see companies like Pepsi to apply for the right to manage the domain name extension dot-pepsi (Pepsi didn’t apply). Companies that applied would be allowed exclusive use of the domain along with the ability to sell the rights to the domain name extension. If a domain name extension was popular with new website owners, like dot-tv, it could garner a lot of money for the domain name extension applicant.

ICANN started the application process in January 2012, ending it on May 30th, 2012, in hopes of “increasing competition and choice.”

Today, ICANN revealed the 1,409 applications made, showing insight to the companies behind the applications.

There were redundant applications for common words. For example, Symantec, Amazon and Google were among the seven organizations that applied for the .cloud domain name extension. OpenSRS (Tucows) applied for four domain name extensions: .group, .marketing, .media and .online; all of which were also applied for by other domain name registrars.

Donuts.co in partnership with Demand Media – a content media company behind eHow, Livestrong.com and Cracked.com – applied for a whopping 307 domain name extensions, using $100 million in venture capital funds via separate corporations. The domain names they applied for are common words and variations like dot-photography, dot-photo and dot-photos.

The top five most common domain name extension applications were: dot-app (11); dot-home (11); dot-inc (11); dot-art (10); and dot-blog (9).

Full ICANN Reveal Day List of Domain name extensions applications.

It’s been a busy season for Facebook.

They bought Instagram, they introduced their own app store (for both Android and iPhone), they went public, and last week, they introduced their own camera app. Now Facebook says they may be ready to take on Google and Apple in the mobile phone market.

For the past few months, they have been quietly preparing to enter the mobile phone market. Facebook has already hired former Apple software and hardware engineers, and one engineer who worked on the iPad, the New York Times reported yesterday. They have an open working alliance with HTC and it is expected the phone operating system will be a customized version of Android. The project name is Buffy, named after the vampire slayer TV series.

The rumour is that Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg believes that they need to enter the mobile phone market to ensure they aren’t left behind as just a web site that makes money from ad revenues. Owning the hardware to show the software is a key step to their survival.

Apple has never been welcoming to alliances, so they will be a natural competitor, while Google has been making their own moves to not only create their own phone set, but are pinning hopes on being an ISP operator in years ahead.

Meanwhile, Microsoft – which owns a tiny share of Facebook – has already integrated many features of Facebook. Motorola and HTC have already made phones with a Facebook button built in. There’s also a chance that Facebook could purchase struggling handset RIM down the road.

I believe photography sharing will be at the core of this media challenge.