TWiT - A room for TWiTs

When you record your message, it is quickly transmitted to Nuance servers where a speech recognition algorithm is run against your data. The resulting text is returned to your iPhone very quickly; my informal benchmarks showed that it took about a second for text to be processed on a Wi-Fi network, and less than 5 seconds over 3G. You'll need a data connection for the app to work, but having this speech-to-text capability is going to be very important to a lot of people, who will find all sorts of uses for it.

Not only does Ford rank number one on J.D. Power and Associate's 2009 navigation system survey, it ranks number two as well. The top ranking system, according to Power's study, is the one found in the Lincoln MKS, followed by a nearly identical system (if not 100% identical) in the Ford Flex. And get this, Ford took down five of the top ten spots with the F-150 coming in fourth and the Escape and Edge taking seventh and eighth place, respectively. To anyone that's driven a modern Sync-equipped Ford with navigation, these survey results probably won't come as any sort of shock, as FoMoCo has been making some of the best systems in the business ever since they released Sync with Sirius Travel Link. Here's what Ford user interface design engineer Jason Johnson had to tell us about why Ford got ranked tops:

MIT's team took first place by finding all of the balloons within nine hours. Their victory was made possible by crowdsourcing, leveraging the involvement of the general public to complete the task. Although crowdsourcing is an obvious approach to distributed problem-solving, the real challenge is getting people to participate. MIT found a very effective way to mobilize a large crowd: they provided a financial incentive.

Prompted by Verizon's recent increase in early termination fees for some users, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) has, along with three colleagues, introduced a bill in the Senate to specifically address "budget-busting" early termination fees. The bill would limit ETFs to no more than the subsidy offered on a particular handset, and require that the fee be prorated equally every month until the end of a service contract (typically two years).

Yesterday Google announced that they will providing DNS (Domain Name System) servers. They claim that it is an attempt to make the web faster, as they believe that they can make faster calls than any other provider. While this technically does go up against ISPs, who provide DNS, the main person it is competing against, for the moment anyway, is OpenDNS, another company that provides DNS, plus a few snazzy web tracking and filtering features.

House Car http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Dave T from IM

A Saskatoon musician looking to promote an upcoming album has succeeded in getting his picture on the new Street View feature of Google Maps.

Roughly a week ago, Mininova was still the largest torrent site on the Internet, but this quickly changed after the site’s founders removed of millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In the days that followed, traffic to the site dropped 66%, while the number of daily downloads are less than 4% of what they used to be.

Who was that someone shouting loud that only Jailbreaking makes iPhone insecure? We now have a new App that makes even an UnModified/Virgin iPhone leak personal data like you have never seen before. A Swiss iPhone developer has unveiled a new application that is capable of harvesting huge amounts of personal data from iPhones, including geolocation data, passwords, address book entries and email accounts information, images, Safari Browsing history, youtube, keyboard logger, etc. all this using just the public API exposed by Apple’s SDK.

Yesterday we got new stats from Facebook, including the passing of the 350 million user milestone. Another interesting tidbit came out in a UK press event on Tuesday, where a Facebook exec pointed out that there are apparently more active users in the Facebook app FarmVille than on all of Twitter.

Nat Friedman: Bad journalism: http://nat.org/blog... - Chris

Many of you were not super thrilled with the transition plan we announced in our last blog post, which I guess is really quite flattering. We have worked with Google and the Google Wave team to make the following changes to the plan, which I think you will appreciate: * We have re-enabled pad creation from the EtherPad home page. * We have begun planning how to open source the code to EtherPad and the underlying AppJet Web Framework. We will continue maintaining new pad creation from the EtherPad home page at least until we have open sourced the code, and work hard to make sure there will be no or minimal service disruption in the future. * We are working with the Google Wave team to get all EtherPad users a chance to try out the Google Wave preview within the next couple of weeks. We do realize (as does the Google Wave team) that Wave doesn't yet have all the functionality you rely on, and isn't yet as mature as EtherPad. We are confident that in the long term you will be

The Genachowski-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seems to delight in dropping bombshells on a weekly basis, but we didn't see this one coming: the FCC admits that its CableCARD mandate has been an abysmal failure. That doesn't mean it's giving up the fight to encourage set-box box innovation; instead, the FCC wants ideas for a new set of rules that will bust open access to video streams from cable and IPTV operators.