Following on from my last piece about Twitter, I also spoke with Craig Cmehil, another Irregular and SAPper. For some weeks, Craig has been running a side project to develop a Twitteresque alternative for use inside the firewall. Wordpress’s Prologue might make a decent alternative but Craig’s work started before that came along. As a SAPper, Craig knows that security and scalability matter. He also knows that while Twitter has great utility, it could be so much more. The project is still at the ’small pilot’ phase which means that small numbers of people are trying it out to see where it has application. So what does it do other than provide a river of instant messages: People can create…

Also: What color is your cell phone, and why? See what people are saying on News.com Extra.

Right now, Twitter is a mess. Most of today, European users have experienced outages of varying length and even hard core Twitter fans are saying they’ve had enough. Some have talked of jumping ship to Pownce or Jaiku. Louis van Proosdij, in answer to TechCrunch France’s Ouriel Ohayon offered: @OurielOhayon This is where Twitter may fail fast, and Wordpress new Prologue become THE solution with an effective distributed twitter like No-one seems to know what’s going on yet if you read DataCenter Knowledge, you’d think everything in the garden is rosy. That’s not the case. The Twitter blog told us they’d had a rough night and elicited an as expected amount of sympathy from the mostly US based commenters. All…

Both Lenovo and Fujitsu have designs coming soon that will use the same chip Apple asked Intel to build for the MacBook Air, according to sources familiar with their plans.

Federal court upholds lower court award of $89.6 million in damages for violation of TiVo’s patent on digital video recorders. Dish plans to appeal.

The U.K.-based Financial Post reports that BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion is planning an accessory known as the BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway. The device is said to connect to a stereo while, at the same time, Bluetooth technology is employed to play music files from a multimedia-capable BlackBerry. The relevant section of the User Manual, as newly posted on the FCC Web site, tells us that: The BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway is designed to enable wireless transmission of music or other audio files from your BlackBerry device to your home or portable stereo. The BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway uses Bluetooth technology to establish a wireless connection with your BlackBerry device. After you pair the BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway with your BlackBerry…

I have been playing with a very interesting AIR application recently called uvLayer. It’s essentially a rich media dashboard that lets you manage video assets while sending them to friends or seeing what your friends are watching so you can check it out. They’ve wrapped a very engaging user interface around it and added some subtle UI tweaks that encourage interacting directly with the content as opposed to using menus or keyboard shortcuts. uvLayer allows you to build collections of videos based on a search term. I’ve got one on mountaineering and one on Adobe. It goes out to YouTube and Truveo (with more on the way) and brings back all the video related to your search term. Once you…

Of course there is no way yet to say if Google is the current high bidder, but we do know for sure that Google has won. The auction has now surpassed the reserve price of $4.6bn (sitting at $4.7bn) according to the New York Times. This is significant because now the winner of this auction, even if it’s not Google, has to “follow the rules” that Google proposed. What are the rules? the FCC will force the winning bidder to allow any device from other carriers to run any applications on their network — perfect for the Open Handset Alliance. If there is only one bidder left in the auction, there will likely be no more bids, but according to…

Apple recently dropped the price of its Apple TV device by $70.00. The folks at Gizmodo then went to iSuppli for a teardown analysis to determine if it was the result of reduced costs. As it turns out, it isn’t. Apple isn’t exactly taking a bath the way Sony does pushing out PS3 game consoles (a device it loses money on with every sale), but it is earning far less than the 50% margins that are typical for Apple products. I think its obvious why Apple is doing this. The company that finally bridges the gap between the Internet and the television stands to make a bazillion dollars, while lighting the fire under a revolution that would change completely the…

The Verizon Wireless SMT5800 is a sleek and powerful Windows Mobile smartphone for mobile professionals who want to mange their e-mail on the go.