According to the German Financial Times Apple made it’s decision for the partners of the European rollout of the iPhone:

• Germany: T-Mobile
• United Kingdom: O2
• France: Orange

There is no official announcement for the partnership until now. We probably have to wait for the IFA in Berlin. There may be "one more thing" on the worldwide consumer electronics trade show starting on August 31st

Source: ftd.de

The new Flash Player beta version is ready to download on the Adobe Lab web pages: Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2. Most important: The support of the video codec H.264 and the audio codec AAC. Both belong to the best codecs in quality and efficiency on the market. And both belong to the MPEG-4 standard. Jon Dahl on Rail Spikes provides more background information on codecs and their advantages. The Adobe developer Tinic Uro gives more details on the codec implementation.
Attention should be paid to the Adobe announcement especially against the background, that there is still no confirmation on a Flash Player for the Apple iPhone. Youtube, which encoded their videos only in a Flash-video format, now started to encode new videos also with H.264 to serve the attractive target group of iPhone (and Apple-TV) users.
Maybe the pleasant step of Adobe is also a first sign that the wish of a Flash Player for the iPhone is eventually coming true. This would be great news - especially for innovative GUI- and interaction concepts.

We can be anxious what the future will serve us

Skype kept shtum about the cause of the massive breakdown of the Service infrastructure within the last days. They only emphesized that it was not a hacker attack. Now the company Skype sheds light on the reason: A patch of the Microsoft Windows operating system caused the breadown of the entire Skype system serving over 200 million registered customers worldwide. The Windows monoculture has some perfidies … also for us Mac and Linux users … but luckily everything is runnning back again.

In autumn 2007, the new e-ticketing - or more precise mobile ticketing - solution called "Touch&Travel" will be tested in a first pilot. The system, created by the German railway company Die Bahn and Vodafone is taking mobile ticketing in Germany to a next level. Mobile ticketing projects in the past always tried to reproduce the old fashioned process: Read the rest of this entry »

Three years ago, David Heinemeier Hansson published the first release of Ruby on Rails to the public. The paradigmatic shift of programming web applications in an elegant, pragmatic way is a present to all of us. It’s fun to draft and scaffold an application, to do rapid application prototyping. It’s even a pleasure to read RoR code. Enough puff piece for today … thank you, David, for starting the revolution … and thanks to the whole RoR-community for making it a web development revolution