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U.K. prisoners doing time on Facebook?

I thought prison was supposed to be a miserable place.

But an increasing number of Facebook profiles are proving that it's really rather an entertaining spot to hang out in a recession.

It seems that prisoners in the United Kingdom are able to upload images and touching messages to their loved ones on the pages of Facebook. And their jailers either don't know it's happening or are too busy checking to see if Donkey's Dream won the 3.30 race at Royal Ascot.

Here is an example from the Facebook page of Ross Ajilo, a 19-year-old … Read more

Live Nation can't keep up with Phish demand

Music forums were abuzz all weekend about Live Nation's inability to handle the millions of simultaneous online requests for Phish tickets. The fabled jam band is reuniting for a summer tour after several years off, and is playing some Live Nation-owned venues, which means that tickets for those shows were available only through Live Nation. Unfortunately, Live Nation (a spin-off of Clear Channel) is relatively new at ticketing and its Web ticketing service couldn't handle the strain. The worst: apparently some would-be purchasers were offered seats, only to have the system break down when they tried to complete … Read more

Chip gear industry's funk is a red flag

The chip equipment business is "on hold," said an analyst at a major industry association, and that bodes ill for the electronics industry in 2009.

Chip equipment makers signal how the electronics industry will fare in the future. They take orders from chipmakers which, in turn, take orders from electronic gadget makers.

Lara Chamness, a senior market analyst in industry research and statistics at Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International, talked about prospects for the industry in an interview. SEMI is an industry watchdog that covers the manufacturing supply chains for the microelectronic, display, and photovoltaic industries.

"We … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 747: Get Firefox (if you can)

It's Firefox Download Day! In bummer news, Mozilla's site was down by at least 10:12 a.m. (about the time we started our show). So, that's a bad start, then. In other news, AT&T customers using phones other than iPhone will, indeed, have to pay full price for a new iPhone. That's just how the cell phone world works. And the blogosphere takes a legitimately outrageous situation and wildly exaggerates the outrageousness by repeating old information over and over. Sigh. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 747

Firefox Download Day To Start … Read more

Laura Cantrell, 'Love Vigilantes': Free MP3 of the Day

Though she resides in New York, Laura Cantrell has genuine Nashville roots and a classic country heritage, which comes across clearly through her warm, rootsy recordings. On her travel-themed '08 covers collection "Trains and Boats and Planes," she blends her penchant for purebred honky-tonk with new takes on pop, folk, and country forget-me-nots, including New Order's "Love Vigilantes."

Download free MP3 now!

Poll: Do you ever listen to music, without also doing something else?

The iPhone commercial parody on YouTube with genius filmmaker David Lynch hit the mark for me. His insight about people watching movies on iPhones, I'm paraphrasing--"You think you've seen the movie after watching it on your iPhone, but you'll be cheated. You haven't seen the movie."--could also be applied to music.

Just because you were listening to music while text messaging your boy/girlfriend doesn't mean you've actually heard the music. Exposure to music, art, film, what have you, is not the same as active engagement. It's kind of … Read more

Cold water on Apple's 'piping hot innovation'

Forbes is reporting on a patent filed by Apple this month that would save customers the hassle of waiting in line to order coffee at Starbucks or a burger at the nearest fast food joint. It's described as "a wireless system that would allow customers to place an order at a store using a wireless device such as a media player, a wireless personal digital assistant or a cell phone."

Cool, but you can already do that via simple text message.

Read full story at Forbes: "Apple's piping hot innovation."

Medison Celebrity laptop: From MIA to KIA

You were right. I was wrong.

You--various Crave readers, Dan Ackerman, assorted acquaintances--said I was a fool to think I'd actually get the $150 Swedish laptop I ordered back in July. When the six-week delivery window came and went, I decided to give it one more month before pulling the plug. (While I may be a fool, I would like to point out that I was never out any cash; 2Checkout.com assured me that I wouldn't be charged until it had proof from Medison that my order had shipped.) After waiting another month on the hope that … Read more

Marketcetera, one of the coolest open-source companies I've seen in a long time

It is fascinating to see how people are using open source. I'm part of the "old guard" of open source, I suppose, delivering an open-source alternative to a tired market ripe for commoditization and innovation. But other companies, like OpenAds (open-source advertising server), Path Intelligence (tracking shopper flow based on the open-source GNU radio), Chumby (open-source consumer electronics/hardware), etc. are taking open source into new markets.

Today, I was fortunate to meet one of the most interesting open-source companies I've seen in a long, long time: Marketcetera. Marketcetera provides an open-source trading platform that hedge funds and others use to process and deliver trades through a brokerage to an exchange (like NASDAQ). It's like proprietary, expensive FlexTrade, only not proprietary...or expensive.

The market for this kind of platform is not huge today, as the founders, Toli Kuznets and Graham Miller, told me today (roughly $500 million for custom development, but probably not including packaged software like FlexTrade). But with more and more trading moving from people to algorithmic processes (30-40% in the US today, jumping to 50-60% by the end of the decade), the market will grow accordingly.

Besides, I can think of a range of other uses for this sort of technology beyond hedge funds.… Read more

Buy turkeys with your cell phone, for charity

You can use your cell phone to send funny pictures to your friends, watch preview clips of your favorite TV shows, and vote for "American Idol" contestants. And now, you can buy turkeys with your phone too.

It's actually much deeper than that; I just thought that saying "buy a turkey with your cell phone" sounded funny. In actuality, this is part of Text-a-Turkey, a collaboration between mobile food ordering company Mobo and New York anti-hunger activist organization City Harvest to provide Thanksgiving dinners to New York City's neediest families. If you're a … Read more