Aggregating 100′s of sites into a  single app with a gorgeous design, making it simple to consume content.

Watch the video for Google Currents here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The unbundling of these two products will be a huge saving to those who already have ADSL, but don’t use their landlines and also make ADSL more accessible to those who can not afford the combined cost of both the Telkom phone line and the ADSL line rentals.

This video by MWEB explains the entire issue:

Pledge your support for the movement by joining their Facebook campaign.

DISCLAIMER: I am an EX-employee of MWEB and currently have no relationship with them. This post is purely as a result of the fact that I completely support unbundling of ADSL line rentals and can not wait for Naked ADSL.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m most excited about the custom search changes and the ability to edit screen real-estate assignment to chat (which I don’t use within GMail) and labels, which I use a lot of.

Check out the video explaining how Human Computer Interaction has just evolved using motion detection technology and has now been integrated into Gmail:

Here is just a few of the popular commands and the motion gestures required to use them.

I must admit, that for the life of me, I don’t see how I will use this service as it just seems ridiculous to be standing infront of my computer at work doing things like this. I know that the Wii, XBOX Kinect and Playstation Move have made it ok to acting like a fool infront of a computer screen, but this is just a bit too far now.

I think that this service will be destined for the waste paper bin and join teh mound of useless technology that seemed revolutionary at the time, but is actually just not usable, like Google Buzz!

Here is an infographic that highlights some of the achievements that the Mozilla team can be proud of:

What are your thoughts on it?

The new(ish) CEO, Stephen Elop, has sent out a fairly brutal, yet frank memo to his staff in prep for the announcements expected this week. This too just days before the 3GSM conference kicks off in Barcelona.

The full memo is below the break:

Hello there,

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times – his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour.

We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe.

I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.

And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.

For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.

In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.

Let’s not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally – taking share from us in emerging markets.

While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.

At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.

At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.

And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.

On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody’s took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.

Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It’s also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.

How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?

This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.

Nokia, our platform is burning.

We are working on a path forward — a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.

The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.

Stephen.

If you would like a full copy of all released Wikileak content to be downloaded using a torrent follow this step by step guide:

• Download and install a Torrent Manager. I recommend uTorrent.
• Download the Wikileak Torrent file
• Open the Wikileak Torrent file by double-clicking on it once it has downloaded.
• uTorrent will open and follow the onscreen prompts to get the download going.

I can not guarantee how long it will be available though.

If you want to pledge your support and join the activist movement to attack company web properties that stood against Wikileaks exposing the truth, you can read my article,  ”How to join Operation Payback“.

Remember, that you do so at your own risk.

This is Nokia’s big boy phone. Its not for the faint hearted and packs some serious hardware & serious software. Running its newest (and greatest OS) Symbian^3, which is designed specifically for touch devices with high definition multimedia and not the old Symbian S60 v5 which Nokia tried VERY hard to take v3 of S60, retrofit it for touch devices and hope that it worked. It did work, but it worked as well as it deserved given the effort that Nokia put it into it. It wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t even close to great either.

Symbian^3 is different. You can feel it. Nokia has taken all the lessons learnt with the N97 and N97 mini and correct them. Its very clear that this is Nokia’s “once bitten, twice shy” device. It manages multi-tasking like a dream, so running multiple apps simultaneously is not going to slow the phone down. Its no longer impractical to listen to music, browse the web on the phone and have the sudden need to take a quick photo and email or MMS it. This phone does all of this, all while geo-tagging your photos, editing them and uploading them to a social network.

The phone is the best device that I’ve used so far, except for 2 issues that I have with it.
The first:
is that it crashes, A LOT. This is a firmware issue and I’m told by folk at Nokia that it will be solved with the first firmware release, so I’m not going to hold this one against them.

The second:
This issue is quite a dof problem, but to me, its a big problem.
The speaker is at the back of the phone, so when its laying on its back with the screen up, like most people would, things sounds muffled. It becomes a real problem, when you rely on your phone to wake you up in the morning, but you can’t hear it, because it gets muffled. Its pretty obvious that the hardware designers screwed up on that, but otherwise, everything else is awesome.

Things that I hate:

• It crashes a lot.
• Speaker is on the back.
• Spell check sucks and not half as good as its competitors.
• Landscape typing is slightly slower than portrait typing.
• QWERTY keyboard layout of special characters have been reorganised again (This is now different on every Nokia device and has no standard)
• HDMI plastic cover flap feels cheap and seems to have been an afterthought.
• SIM removal is not easy.

Things that I love:

• 12 Megapixel photo camera
• HD Video Camera
• HDMI out (i.e. plug it straight into your HD tv)
• USB in (Play video from USB dongles, ext HDDs, etc.)
• Large bright screen with multiple home screens
• Great widget collection
• HTML mail support with multiple mail services accessible via widgets
• Calendar management.
• Mail & Calendar syncing with Mail for Exchange is VERY simple to set up
• Message preview widget gives you a summary of missed events, like meetings, missed calls, SMSes, etc.
• Social Network app integrates Facebook & Twitter natively into the phone.
• Angry Birds!

Conclusion:
Would I buy it?
Yes! As soon as the firmware update is out, this phone is undoubtedly the best piece of mobile hardware available today.