Apple’s latest move to ban Google voice has not gone well with FCC and users. While users are hot happy with this ban, FCC sees this as an anti competitive move “conspired” by Apple and AT&T. The conspiracy theory doing rounds in the web community elaborates on how Google VOIP and telephony product collides with interest of Apple and AT&T, its mobile carrier.  Apple, who has long guarded the application business notified Google of application’s duplicating features, AT&T doesn’t perceived it positively either as it offers free SMS and cheap international calls.

FCC fears that these actions might act as trigger for increased competition between mobile career and device makers despite its attempts to keep mobile web open and consumer friendly like internet. FCC has notified Apple, AT&T and Google seeking information about why this application has been rejected that lets people make free calls.

Apple who has consistently guarded its business has been charges with similar moves against other players as well. Earlier VoiceCentral and GV mobile applications which offered similar features were banned for their “duplicating” features. On July 23rd Google launched its iPhone version of Google latitude. But later after complains from Apple, it had to rewrite it as a web application as against an independent application.

In past, Apple has also been charged with other anti competitive moves like banning other browsers on iPhone. Its application store is notoriously insulting for application builders, and its iTune ecosystem has stubbornly rejected all other MP3 formats at one point of time and thus killing innovation in MP3 players. Application developers are so annoyed with Apple app store that they now have an unauthorized iPhone application store called Cydia from where you can download free application that were banned by Apple. For using these application, iPhone users need to jailbreak their iPhone by using a hack which help them bypass the imposed restriction.

Today photos of  HP iPAQ K3 “Obsidian” phone surfaced on internet with somewhat similar specs what came through leaked information earlier this year. It will be coming up with AT&T as its mobile carrier and is loaded with full QWERTY keyboard and 2.43-inch OLED touchscreen. Obsidian will have 3.2-megapixel camera, tri-band 3G UMTS/HSDPA network support, a Wi-Fi connection, GPS and preloaded with new Windows mobile 6.5 operating system.

It will have 528MHz Qualcomm chip processor with 256MB of RAM.  In-built storage capacity would be 512 MB with provision for external microSD card. It has got HP pocket PC’s nostalgic appearance with Stylus and scroll-wheel for shuffling across the menu. If we go by the leaked document the phone will be launched November this year with  AT&T. The expected price is likely to be under $200 after rebate.

In the midst of claims and counterclaims, TechCrunch today claimed that they contacted twitter before publishing the controversial documents. Reportedly TechCrunch published excerpts from “leaked”  confidential documents which claimed to be of a twitter employee. The document is said to be hacked to Google doc account and sent to TechCrunch is a zip file. The report which was said to be more than 300 pages has many document for twitter “internal” consumption  as it include twitter expansion plans, interview schedules, financial forecast and  many other sensitive documents.

TechCrunch claims that before publishing these excerpts, it contact twitter, which was later denied by twitter CEO Evan Williams in his blog post that no such permission has been given to TechCrunch for publishing this document. The post which was unusually big, detailed twitter plans to counter the threat by likes of Google and Facebook. It also gave a glimpse of way twitter team works.

TechCrunch which is widely read blog, has been accused of using unfair means in collecting information. And after this incident question has been rained about journalistic ethics.

Now you can publish your YouTube insight stats to public. As per the latest announcement on Wednesday, YouTube would now allow the uploader to publish there ” insight” stats to public. Insight which is a free in-built analytical tool for analysis of the traffic and various other data like popularity, geographic audience, and viewer demographics. But this information was only accessible to the uploader till date.

But now these information can be viewed by all viewers by clicking a simple toggle button at the right hand side of screen. YouTube intends to generate more page views by engaging its users in these data. It also foresees increased advertisement revenue by allowing the advertisers to focus on targeted audience. Following is a snapshot of a typical YouTube Insight stats

about their popularity, geographic audience, and viewer demograp

Following to my all time favorite list of application for iPod touch, here are the new must have applications for your iPhone 3GS. These applications include new breed of tools which is coming up fast as business grows around building applications for iPhone. Right now there are more than 65000 applications available for download on iPhone. Popularity of these application can be easily sensed with sheer number of downloads which apple has facilitated. Over last one year more than 1.5 billion applications has been downloaded from apple store.

Before you start reading i want yo caution you that these are my top 5, and yours could be entirely different.

Tweetie: Call it twitter mania, now it has creeped into iPhone as well. Out of all the free twitter application i liked it the most because of its look which appears blended with iPhone interface. Also it is the most comprehensive twitter application with almost all the features of web based twitter.

BeeJive: This is again beautifully designed Instant Messaging application which integrates almost all the popular IMs like MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ  and others. It also includes myspace and facebook IM. It includes many features like showing online contacts, chat initiation by a tap and others. Although it a bit costly at $12.99, its worth with its host of features.

WifFiTrack: It a very useful application which can track WiFi network at a particular location. It can locate many signal which cannot be tracked by its in-built tracker. I was wondering why its not part of iPhone itself. It is adequately powered with security features and it refreshes itself after every 30 seconds.

Skype: This is the latest introduction by Skype which has been overwhelmingly accepted by users with more than one million downloads within its first week of launch.  However there are some limitation with iPhone version of skype. This only allows to skype to skype and not to landlines and mobile phones. You cannot run any background application while using skype. But overall nice welcomed introduction to iPhone.

Flight Control: It is a fun game which put you at Flight traffic controller seat where you have guide the planes to land safely. Its path can be controlled by fingers. And what more, it can played in multi-player mode.

Thanks to price cuts across notebook range, apple’s margin has been under pressure for a while. Come iPhone 3G/3GS, it has substantially helped improved  overall margin of the company which has been reflected in increased stock prices. Stock prices has going up consistently from march and now stands double of what it was then. The stock price shoot to $156 yesterday where it was almost double of its price in march which was around $83.

Right now the profit margin apple commands is source of envy from many others in the industry. In the market where experts are convinced that people are spending less in consumer electronics, apple’s continued growth in profit is nothing but a feat. This season has turned the table for many. Our traditional cell phone makers like Nokia, Motorola and others has not been able to keep pace with customer’s expectation where as new “off the street players” like Apple and RIM has taken a bigger chunk of profit.

Apple and RIM which caters to 3% in terms of volume commands 35% of profits, which tells the story in nutshell.

Today twitterfeed server went down for a while, coincidentally just after i posted my post about twitterfeed’s new “robust” and “reliable” system. And before the speculation starts, i just want to clarify that, it not because of this post. But it actually reminds the need for twitterfeed to ramp up its infrastructure quickly to meet the growing usage of its services.

Infact till i checked last time, it was still not accessible. We have been trying to contact twitterfeed but till now no official reason has been given by them as they still trying to figure out the possible reasons. We are also trying to talk to google if there is any sudden increase in traffic to the site if that could be reason for the problem.

Twitterfeed was one of the twitter application which has caught investor’s attention in recent weeks. After new round of funding by Betaworks and TAG, twitterfeed has improved on its backend making it faster and reliable. It has gone beyond just a project to a full fledged company of itself. And as per compete, in last three month the number of pageviews has gone up by 10%.

Besides improving on the reliability, twitterfeed has worked to create simpler login process for the users. Initially it was accepting only open ID whereas now it accepts login from Google, Yahoo and AOL accounts. Similarly they have  improved analytics which is now simpler and easy to use, although it lags behind its competitors like feedburner when it comes to analyzing the subscribers. It has also improved on its communication with its stakeholders with a wordpress blog which lists all the latest development in the company.

As per latest report published by latest U.S. Census Bureau, number of internet users in china has crossed 338 millions users, which is more than entire US population. This was 13.4% jump from last year and the growth is likely to continue  as internet penetration in Chinese is still only 25.5%.

Despite the control and information and business overall which i talked about in my previous post about internet activism, business around the world cannot ignore the potential of hugh number of Chinese internet users. In fact it also gives the direction in which internet is moving. Surprisingly majority of this growth is due to growth in mobile internet users. It grew more than 30% with internet users in mobile phones reaching 115 million.

Following is one of presentations which i found at slideshare and which gives an idea about the size of internet market we are dealing with, which makes even big companies like Google to accept occasional snubs from Chinese government.

As professed by many, Google is moving closer to building a operating system based on web browser as platform. Many already have started talking about Google stack as it builds a series of application like Operating system, browser, google applications called Google apps, android and others.

In the process Google has also proved that it is moving closer to Microsoft in building a hype around its product launch. It is yet to be seen if Google as going Microsoft way in over committing early and under-deliver later and yet making billions in the process. With media gone frenzy behind, skeptics has started asking about what new about Chrome OS is offering. Has  not been Ubuntu claiming similar product for years now? And for that matter we also have jolicloud claiming similar “internet based operating system” for quite a while.  The difference is that jolicloud has already in alpha version and Chrome is just announced. And it is not surprising at all that Google announced it just after jolicloud received the next round of funding.

Expert see this move noting but next step of Google domination on web. With attaining near monopoly position in advertising, search and general Web services, Chrome OS is aimed at taking Microsoft out in open. How the industry would react to this move would be interesting to watch in future.