Sometime back, Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul created a lot of buzz for his comment when he said in an interview that News Corporation is planning to block Google from crawling their content and also they are moving their content behind a paywall. He blamed search engines and news aggregators for making money by linking to their content. At that time I thought this is just a warning to search engines in order to fetch some money from them or to get some breakthrough deals. And indeed, Microsoft got himself in the trap as there were rumors that they would sign a deal with News Corp to get exclusive permission to index the content from News Corp in Bing search results. But now it seems like, Rupert Murdoch’s is planning to abide by his words. They have started their mission with a minnow- News Now by blocking content of their UK based site Times Online from it.

The 2009 Crunchies Award has been voiced with few surprises and few let downs. The objective of the Crunchies is to determine and acknowledge the best startup company in the web industry. Its a way to celebrate new ideas that are getting big. Crunchies  is being co-hosted by three prominent tech blogs (the best minds) TechCrunch, Venturebeat and GigaOm. Who select the winners? Well it is based purely on voting which can be casted by anyone having a valid mail-id. It will take a separate blog post for me to discuss the pros and cons of selecting a startup based entirely on voting by common people. But I am skipping this debate for now (this is not the right time) and directly telling you the winners for some interesting categories. You can find the finalists for various categories here.

In one of my previous post I talked about how Bing and Yahoo have censured (banned is the right word) the search results for sex (and related keywords like erotic etc.) in India. So, if your country is selected as India (or any other Middle East Nations) in Bing, you can no longer get search results for the keywords like SEX. You can anyways change the settings in Bing to Western nations and the search results for the keywords like SEX would be served to you without any interruption (It doesn’t matter from where you are searching). But if you are too lazy to change the settings to some other country and still you want to search results for keyword like SEX we got a hack for you - Just type S E X (i.e. S followed by space then E followed by space and then X) in the Bing search box; the results will be shown to you (Pic below) without any legitimate message. As simple as that, try out here with SEX and then finally find out the hack with S E X . Wow! Meaningful hack for all the lazy and dirty guys out there.

Internet thrives because of its openness but the Indian government is still trying to censor the internet by framing laws for internet based on 150-year-old statute. India, the land of Kamasutra where SEX is still considered a taboo and at the same times it is one of the most sort after keyword in Google search. Keeping in view of the dynamics in India, Bing and Yahoo have yielded in front of Indian government by censoring certain results having sexual explicit content. This means that you can no longer search for sex and other related keywords in Bing if you are in India (I have done it for you here). What it says when you have search for it (pic below)

Yahoo as of now only censors images that have sexual content (give it a try) and you can still search for sex in web search. Also we can’t switch off the Safe Search option in Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo. But Google is still not bowing in front of Indian government and you can still search for sex and for both web as well as image search (here and here).

Twitter might still be struggling to find their revenue stream but celeb Kim Kardashian is cashing out big on her own tweet streams. Will you actually buy a product if Kim recommends it ? Advertisers think that some of you will and thats why they are shelling out real hard money for sponsored tweets of Kim.  Hold it guys…. she is making $10,000 per sponsored tweet and she has around 2.7 million followers.

If you watch Kardashian tweet stream, it is difficult to figure out (pics below) which one is a sponsored tweet and which one is not. But it might just be difficult for Kardashian to keep on promoting products with her tweets and not declaring it publicly that how much she charges for such tweets. New rules from Federal Trade Commission (FTC) makes it mandatory for every one to disclose the material connections (payment or free products) they share with their seller of the product or service.

Google’s projects are not always full of praises; it has also seen its own set of criticisms and legal barriers. Recently News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch had blamed Google for stealing content from them and now Google’s Book project has received a major setback in a legal battle. A Paris court has found Google Inc guilty of breaking copyright laws of France by digitizing thousands of French books. The largest publishing house of France, La Martiniere had accused Google of scanning around 4,000 of its books without due permission. The court has asked Google to pay 300,000 euro in damages to the publishing house and also to pay euro 10,000 per day until it removes the extracts of books from its database.

Google has also been banned for further scanning of French books without the consent of publishers. French publishers hail the court victory by saying

World’s first 4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile broadband services went live not in US and not by Verizon. But for a change, the Scandinavian operator TeliaSonera has launched it in Sweden and Norway. For now, TeliaSonera launched these services in just two cities Stockholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway. They also have license for Finland, so it is also on the cards. It is only available for USB equipped devices via Samsung modem hence it can only be used with Laptops as of now (phone users have to wait for some time).
The maximum speed will be around 100 Mbps, which is 10 times faster than 3G but real operating speed is expected to be between 20 Mpbs to 80 Mbps.  According to new definition of International Telecommunication Union (ITU),  4G (which they call IMT-Advanced) should have a minimum speed of 100 Mpbs (mobile) and 1 Gbps (fixed) in order to qualify for true “4G”. So, maybe they are still lagging behind what should be called a true 4G. Anyways, the people of both cities will be able to watch online HDTV movies and would also be able to play multitasking games on the move.

Pay attention all the Hindi writers who just scribble in their diaries, this is the time you should publish those writings on the web for others to read and also get recognition from it.  Google in association with LiveHindustan.com just rolled out a contest Hai Baaton Mein Dum (When translated in English it means “Do your words have power”) which is an online essay contest for all of those who can write meaningful content in Hindi. Basically it is an initiative to crowd source the web with high quality Hindi content. Finally Google is doing some bit for creation of  Hindi content. You can submit your entries under five categories. I am going to list down five categories and also I have selected a great post published so far in that particular category (You are going to love these posts).

The wait is almost over. Premiering, midnight PST Friday 11th, December 2009. These magical words can be found on theJooJoo.com. What’s so magical about it? JooJoo is an African term, which means magical or paranormal. Why is it paranormal? As it has been pronounced dead last week but see the magic it is getting reborn on 11th December with a new disgusting name. JooJoo is not the name of my neighbor’s dog but it’s the name of a resurrected tablet computer. The name is beyond my imagination.

Enough of JooJoo, let’s hit back to some serious story. Last week Arrington declared that CrunchPad is dead before its arrival. But the CEO of Fusion Garage and former business partner of Arrington Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan had fired back at Arrington with the launch of JooJoo, the new nasty name of CrunchPad.  In a videoconference Chandra lambasted Arrington and said that they are launching JooJoo (name changed) on their own without TechCrunch’s involvement. It’s going to cost you $499 (out of budget).  Few of the important points from his side of the story that may have shaked Arrington upside down.

TechCrunch don’t own any IP of this product they just own the trademark of CrunchPad. That’s the reason why they have changed it to JooJoo (heck)

TechCrunch has not written even a single line of code. Had he expected Arrington to write code for him? But yeah point taken, what was the CrunchPad of Arrington doing?