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Social Matchbox DC is Tonight Posted: 14 Aug 2008 12:27 PM CDT If you are looking to network tonight in D.C., there is a great opportunity being provided by the team over at JobMatchbox. Social Matchbox “brings in members from around the DC creative, startup, social media and tech community for what some like to call an open mic night for hiring teams and entrepreneurs and others call speed dating for geeks. The open format is a fusion of startup job fair and networking event.” “Attendees include hiring teams representing top startup companies from around the DC area, job seekers, founders with entrepreneurial ideas looking for others to join them, and people interested in getting into the mix.” There is typically a pretty solid turnout and based on the numerous emails I’ve been receiving from attendees, it sounds like this one will be no exception. The event is out in Tysons Corner from 5pm to 8pm. If you are interested in going, you can find out the location via the event registration page. Registration appears to be closed currently but you can still walk in to the event so no need to register. Hope to see you there!

Alert! Alert! Twitter Kills SMS Abroad! Posted: 14 Aug 2008 09:59 AM CDT Last night Twitter announced that they had turned off SMS notifications in countries outside of India, Canada and the United States. This means that when you update your Twitter status, not everybody will receive notifications via text. Personally, I turned of SMS notifications all together long ago. I learned my lesson after I ended up following someone who tweeted religiously resulting in hundreds of text messages a day. ln other news, Russia appears to be expanding their presence in Georgia even though they called for a cease-fire. Now back to Twitter news. So why has Twitter shut down SMS abroad? Simple: it was getting too expensive. As Biz Stone explains: When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price. Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective. We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States. We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries. We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach. What does this mean? Well you simply won’t get text message alerts. While this was one of the core features of Twitter, if you actually began using the service regularly, I would guess that you ended up turning this off do to it being so annoying. Did you turn of SMS notifications? Have you been significantly impacted by this change?

Umm … I Need to Hack My iPhone to Use Video? Posted: 14 Aug 2008 08:00 AM CDT The big news last night was that the live streaming video solution Qik.com released their iPhone 3G compatible application. The only problem? You need to hack your phone to make it work. Talk about a crappy solution. The reason that you need to hack your iPhone is that the iPhone 3G currently doesn’t provide video support. This is a huge problem with the phone. When I first heard that the iPhone was 3G, I was excited to be able to begin streaming video. Soon enough I found out that this wasn’t possible. Then again, given the current battery life, I’d imagine the video streaming time to be exceptionally short. Soon enough video streaming from mobile will be ubiquitous in the United States. We are still at the early stages but my hopes were high when I saw that Qik was now offering video streaming on the iPhone 3G. Unfortunately those hopes were dashed when I went to view how to install it. It could be months before this application is accessible without jail-breaking the iPhone. I don’t have experience in cracking the iPhone or installing “Cydia”, the application that’s necessary to install this app. Check out how the Qik application works below. Have you experimented with jail-breaking your iPhone?

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