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LATEST ARTICLES

Here is an interview of me by Brad Wright of social media meet-up Tuttle Portmouth. Brad put me on the spot for this interview, but I think it went well :)

Tuttle Portsmouth is a great meet-up of friendly people interested in social media, marketing, business, and technology. If your in the area it’s well worth taking the time out to attend.

Enjoy!

Prince52 year old legend Prince has claimed that “The internet’s completely over”.

During Prince’s first British newspaper interview for 10 years, he said:

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

He later went on to comment:

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

The comments made in the interview with Peter Willis for the Mirror comes on the eve of the debut of Prince’s album 20TEN, and most likely a bid to gain media coverage. And it has worked.

Amongst my daily emails, I noticed that Business Insider are leading with the story “The Doomed Internet” and how maybe Prince is right. They highlight in the article the recent plight of Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and MySpace. …click here to read more

So the new iOS 4 is out, and I was keen to get that downloaded and installed asap, so at 8pm GMT on the 21st I did.

Easy and faultless upgrade using my Windows 7 64bit system. So having installed it on my 32GB 3GS what’s the verdict? Well Safari seems much quicker now especially in page loads, as well as improvements to the spell checker, folders are cool but long overdue, backgrounds and new transitions look smart, and multi-tasking is good and quick.

One thing on the multi-tasking though, every time you hit the home button to exit an app it goes into multi tasking. That is a bit of a pain, I don’t want every app I use running in the background. I also haven’t seen the “iBooks” yet. No icon on the dashboard for it, so maybe that’s a US thing for now.

Apart from that it’s nice to see that the fetch email is still buggy. I told it NOT to fetch my emails automaticly, but it still does! All in all 4 out of 5.

Hi peeps. I’ve recently started receiving errors when sending emails to hotmail accounts, they are being bounced with the following error:

“SC-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail”

It appears, at least in my tests, that Hotmail doesn’t like receiving emails from smtp servers that are different to the senders email address/domain. In other words if the senders domain is ge3k.co.uk but the email is received from relay.o2broadband.co.uk it will be flag as spam and bounced back.

For me it hasn’t been happening until recently, so I’ve now been forced to start using my domains smtp servers instead, but this brings up another issue. O2 actively blocks port 25 used for outgoing mail, and instead provides the above mail relay server address for people to use. They claim this is to prevent mail spammers using their broadband service to spam people, but this is a poor excuse at best.

This problem is more of an issue for O2 customers who don’t have a static I.P Address, this is because these customers are lumpt with using O2′s replay server only, whereas customers who have a static I.P Address can send using their own domains smtp server. Strange, yes, although I have had sending issues before, even though I do have a static I.P and I’m a business customers, hence the reason why I switch to using O2′s mail replay server in the first place.

I hope this helps to explain this issue a bit more for those having the same problem.

Oh dear, Business Insider is at it again. They’ve just published a post entitled: “Zuckerberg Resign?” in which they talk about what they call the “on-stage meltdown” of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the recent All Things D conference.

They attempt to outline way Mark Zuckerberg should resign as head of Facebook, something which I personally think would be a massive mistake.

It seems to me that Business Insider has it in for Mark, period. It seems that not a week goes past without some kind of Zuckerberg or Facebook bashing article from Business Insider.

The fact of the matter is Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook what it is today, and I very much doubt any other Management-esc CEO drafted in by some suits would do half as good a job, or even reach half the amount of users that Facebook currently has.

Sure he’s made mistakes, just about every businessman on or off the net has, it’s all part of the learning process, but the fact of the matter is Mark is Facebook, and Facebook is Mark. Without his guidance it wouldn’t be the success it is, and if the VC’s had their way it would be yet another MySpace chugging along, devoid of the passion and edge that web start-ups have.

So hey, cut him some slack. And if you want to see someone torn apart in an interview, try watching the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman. From MP’s to Prime Ministers, he doesn’t hold back.

Business Insider published the following post entitled: “Here’s What You Need To Know About The Mysterious iPhone Leaks Around The World

The article covers the leaks of the soon to be announced iPhone 4G, including the now infamous Gizmodo first look which brought the raft of Apple down upon them. Then the Vietnamese bloggers video coverage of the device, and now Czech and Portuguese bloggers joining in.

Comments over at Business Insider drifted into the fact that the iPhone has always been behind on spec, mainly in the realms of camera and screen pixel density. Someone quite righty pointed out that the high end HTC devices use OLED. They went on to comment:

“There are rumors saying that the next generation iPad will use OLED, which would be awesome because it is much better to use outdoors.”

Whilst I agree that OLED is the way forward, until the cost of manufacturing an OLED device drops, namely the panel itself, it won’t make an appearance on the iPad.

Apple really needs to pull it socks up on spec. The last 3 versions of the iPhone have been poorly spec’ed compared to rival devices. Poor camera, no flash/light source for the camera, and limited storage are just some of the gripes. True there design is nice, and yes the software and app store have pretty much saved the device, but it won’t be its safety net for long. Other app stores will pop-up, as they already are, and Apple may get left behind or at the very least knocked into second place.

As for these videos and pictures popping up everywhere, I just can’t help but think it’s all part of the greater hype for the announcement later this month. Apple ploy maybe, possibly, not that Apple wouldn’t ever admit they are engineering the hype.

Just been reading though an article on Google TV over at SAI (click here), and want to share my thoughts on it.

It looks ok, but I’m not as convinced as others. Not to mention Windows Media Centre (I’ve built a few for clients, friends and myself) which has been a flavour of Windows since XP, and then there’s Apples stab at this market with Apply T.V, plus Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii all including T.V and IP T.V functions.

Sure it maybe big in the U.S, but that’s it. This is mainly due to services like Hulu and Netflix, who restrict their content to the U.S. Google would have to enter into the fun game that is international T.V and movie licensing. Many have tried, and many have failed.

Assuming they get the content, the next question is, do we need yet another box? Also who is building this box? Won’t be Google, that’s not there thing.

Final thoughts, well Boxee is already in this market, they also have a hardware partner and prototypes built, and the release is coming. Sure Google has the might to crush all those in its path, but honestly….nah, just leave it Google.

This was exciting 2 maybe 3 years ago, but not now. I got my iPhone to surf on in front of the T.V, or even the iPad and other flavours of portable net tech. But it all boils down to this, sometimes you just want to unplug from the net and watch the telly, that’s all.

GE3k PodcastIn this first show I introduce myself and my web start-up, and cover the latest news that has caught my eye this month.

Remember, you can subscribe via iTunes or RSS today using the links on the right >>>

Show 1 – Its always me me me me me

GE3k PodcastIn my great wisdom, no really, I’ve decided to record a montly podcast. The podcast will cover latest in tech and web, and will cover my journey as a web start up. From early stages to final public release, I will bring you my views, opinions, experience, tips, and links to interesting stuff I find on the web.

I’m always looking for feedback, interviews and guests for the show. So if you want to get invovled then please email me on matt [at] ge3k [dot] co [dot] uk or @ reply me on Twitter at twitter.com/mattauckland

In the mean time you can check out the trailer for my podcast via iTunes now: iTunes - GE3k Podcast

Bulletin Board System“Wow, there’s a blast from the past” I thought as I came across a twitter post today, “Happy Birthday BBS”.

Going to sound like an old man now, but…..that takes me back to the early-mid 90′s. A time of US Robotics external modems and the sounds of one computer talking to another. I used quite a few BBSes back then before I eventually ran one myself for a short while. Yep back in the day of file upload/download ratios and beautifully designed ASCII screens. P2P file sharing (Napster and bit torrent) was still a pipe dream (no pun intended), and the largest hard drive you could hope for was around 500MB to 1.28GB. Happy days!

If you want to take a trip down memory lane check out this post on Crunch Gear: http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/02/17/happy-birthday-bbs/ and also this great article on Wired: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/02/0216cbbs-first-bbs-bulletin-board

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