Daily Tidbits: Comcast rolls out more DOCSIS 3.0

Comcast announced Thursday that it has rolled out its DOCSIS 3.0 service to four more markets: Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The company now offers wideband services in 10 cities. Comcast claims it now reaches 20 percent of its customer base with the addition of those four markets and by the end of December, 10 million homes and businesses in each of the cities will be able to sign up for the service.

MapQuest was busy Thursday announcing the launch of two new widgets for Twitter and CareerBuilder users. According to the company, its Twitter widget on MapQuest Local will allow users to see what Twitter users are talking about in their city or town. For any city a user displays on the MapQuest site, a Twitter link will be displayed showing Twitter entries made by people in that area and a link to reply to or follow that person's stream. MapQuest's new Careers widget will store up to five different sets of search keywords and pull in job matches in an area the person is mapping. Both widgets are available now on MapQuest Local.

Online casual gaming service Outspark announced Thursday that it has officially launched a portal on its page that will allow its community of users to interact with each other by creating profiles and become friends to share user-generated videos. The company also announced that it's now using the open application programming interface from YouTube to host and embed user-generated videos directly on its own site.

Domain squatters acquired the domain name GeorgeWBushLibrary.com recently and sold it back to Yuma Solutions, the Web development company that forgot to renew it, for a profit of $34,990. Yuma originally purchased the domain name in 2007 for $3,000.

Blog publishing service Tumblr announced Thursday that it raised $4.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. The company's executives said they will use the funding to bolster cash reserves over the next few years and deploy paid features to increase revenue.

[Zimm2]

Be aware that Comcast has really limited upload speeds. What used to be marketed as an 8 Mbps download/2 Mbps upload package now has its upload speed capped at 768 kbps -- noticeably slower than the typical DSL 896 kbps upload speed.

I have no idea why the change (perhaps they are using the speed caps as a way to shift people to more expensive packages?), but in the Denver Metro area, DSL is offered at a fraction of the cost ($47/mo for a 12 Mbps download/896 kbps upload service)

[Dalkorian]

Hint: after getting caught singling out all bit torrent traffic and forging packets to forcibly terminate it without cause, they had to find some other way to stop people from doing "nefarious" activities on their network, like access a competitors offerings or find other solutions to their craptastic scams. Caps are their new scam and if allowed to continue like this it won't be the last.

Run. Run for your life. Run away from everything with a craptastic name on it. Run from it like it's the plague (because it basically is!) Or hang your head and accept the life of a slave.