Fingertips v Netvibes: which personalised news site is better?

New site Fingertips creates free bespoke news services for its users. The site can combine story feeds from different news sites according to your particular taste and need for certain kinds of news. Fingertips.net claims that it "lets you create your own personalised newspaper from the publications you want." The personalised newspaper approach has the…

Orange lets you send pictures to Twitter over text message

Orange today announced a partnership with Twitter, which will enable customers to send photos to Twitter via MMS (multimedia text messages). The service is called snapshot and is only available to UK Orange users. Orange also say that they will let their customers send and receive Twitter updates directly from their mobile phones using text…

Sonic Fabric ties play music and actually look good

Ties that make music are usually tinny, cheap novelty affairs, they probably play Jingle Bells and have LEDs on them as well. So it's a pleasant surprise to find a musical tie that's actually quite a classy and haute proposition. It's the musical tie from Sonic Fabric made with 50% polyester threads and 50% the…

Play the Climate Challenge with Dr Who

Everybody's favourite TV geek crush, David Tennant of Dr Who fame, has joined up with Oxfam to offer an online climate challenge. You must guide David to answer questions about climate change, and pick the correct option out of three or four answers. Watch David Tennant screw his face up as he tries to figure…

Get translation advice BEFORE naming your baby, think of its google rankings

If you're thinking of calling your child anything more exotic than John or Mary, then maybe you should check out this pricey but unusual service which offers a "name translation check" pre-christening. TodayTranslations go through pretty well most languages in the world and checks that the name you mean to give your sprog doesn't mean…

Twitter 140conference 7 – Twitter as an information service & how it saved the hamster

This talk by JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT investigated Twitter as an information service. It could also have been called: amazing things that happend on Twitter. It contains the heart-warming tale of the lost hamster. 14:50 Interested to hear someone describe Twitter as an information service. It's not a news service.. though of course,…

Twitter 140conference 6 – Twitter and the music industry

So much more than just a discussion of what Britney Spears says on Twitter, this was good look at how Twitter helps artists, labels and fans, and cast a glance at how the hell the music industry is going to cope with the internet. Albums, you might be interested to hear, will be dead in…

Twitter 140conference 5 – what is digital presence?

In the first-after lunch talk Dean Landsman and Dean Meyers (@deanland and @deanmeistr) explored digital presence and what it is to have a presence online. 14.15 Everybody has a digital presence. What is presence online? Presence has always been important. Little historical tour: early examples of branding from the Roman Empire, then mass media via…

Twitter 140conference 4 – the 18 year old film-makers from buyacredit

Toby Ben and Adrian were billed as three 18 year-olds taking on the film industry. They want to make a film adaptation of a Jules Verne book and failing to get conventional funding, they decided to use the internet to source the one million pounds they reckoned they'd need. Their donation website is called buyacredit.…